Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
Shona was bloody starving.
She hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, and it was now not a kick in the arse off ten o’clock. That Chicken and Mushroom Pot Noodle was now just a distant memory. If she were to burp now, she reckoned, she wouldn’t even still be able to taste it.
There was a Bombay Bad Boy in the bottom drawer of her desk, of course. She’d stashed it there several months ago, after a double post-mortem that had taken most of the day. It was in a little container on which she’d written, “In case of emergency, break glass.”
OK, the container was plastic, but she’d been bored at the time, and had liked the joke.
But a Bombay Bad Boy at this time of night would be a bold play.
That wasn’t the sort of thing you got into lightly.
The potential for repercussions was high.
The last time she’d done anything similar—a Doner Kebab flavour just before bed—she’d found herself banished to the spare room at three a.m. while Jack opened all the windows.
She was ravenous, though. And, with the best intentions in the world, this might be a long night.
She had just clicked the kettle on and pulled open the drawer when there was a knock on the double swing doors of the mortuary office. Through the dappled glass, she saw the hi-vis jackets of a couple of paramedics.
Her stomach grumbled in complaint—or possibly with relief—as she slid the drawer closed again.
The handover took a few minutes. Boxes were ticked, forms were signed, reference numbers were swapped, and small talk was engaged in, while the kettle rumbled to the boil in the background.
The body was taken through to the mortuary proper, and transferred from one gurney to another, still nestled in its zip-up wrapper.
She checked the tag. Noted the name, weight, time. The computer was booted up through in the office, ready for her to log the new arrival in the system.
But first, given the nature of the injury, and some of the road conditions between Aviemore and Inverness, she wanted to take a peek inside the bag. Just to be safe. Just to make sure nothing was sloshing around in there that shouldn’t be.
She set up her camera to record the process, pulled down the zip just enough to reveal the dead man’s face and his open throat.
‘Nice,’ she said, her voice slightly muffled by her protective mask. She winced and turned to the camera. ‘I meant… because there’s no serious fluid leakage. I wasn’t saying, you know, this was nice, or…’
She stopped wittering.
Stopped explaining.
She’d seen something.
Something on the body. Something unexpected. Something that hadn’t registered yet. Not fully.
But, she’d seen something.
Her blue vinyl gloves creaked as she opened the bag a little wider.
Her gaze went first to the throat, to the dried blood, to the raw red line drawn through a cluster of tattoos, like it was scoring them out.
It went to his chest, still firm and muscular beneath his blood-soaked T-shirt.
It went to his open eyes. To his face. To the expression of horror now permanently etched upon it.
And then…
‘Oh!’
Shona saw it again. Consciously, this time. She leaned in closer. Even through the mask, she could smell the musk of death.
She clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth.
‘Oh, now that is interesting.’
Nobody had moved. Nobody had sat. Not Eleanor, not the two arseholes with the matching cigars and sunglasses, and definitely not the young lad, Jack, who continued to scream his way up and down the hallway, making fighter jet noises.
Logan had broken the news of Victor’s death with his back to the dead man’s brothers, facing Eleanor directly, watching her reaction.
Or lack of one, as it turned out.
She continued to bounce the baby on her hip, blinking slowly, her expression barely shifting at all.
When Logan had arrived, she’d been speaking like she believed her husband was still alive. Had that been an act? Had she known the truth? Or was this just a brave face for the benefit of him and her in-laws?
‘What do you mean, he’s dead?’
It was the older of the brothers who asked the question. His accent, which had been faint a moment ago, reared its head a little further. Eastern Europe somewhere. Somewhere formerly Soviet, at a guess.
Eleanor looked past Logan to the brothers, her expression still not changing. Hardening in place, even. Blank. Controlled. Giving nothing away.
Jack was getting nothing there, so he turned to face the two men. Four tiny versions of himself looked back at him from the mirrored lenses of their sunglasses.
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch your names,’ he said.
‘Because we didn’t tell you,’ the older brother said, tightening the leash on the accent again.
Eleanor sighed. ‘He’s Sergei, he’s Mikhail,’ she said, pointing to the older brother, then his near-identical younger counterpart.
Both men glowered at her from behind their lenses, but she didn’t appear to care. Logan couldn’t quite get a handle on the relationship dynamics between the three of them. Not yet. At first, she’d seemed intimidated by them, but he was less convinced of that now.
‘You got astigmatism or something?’ Jack asked. ‘You know, with the glasses indoors, and everything. Awful condition, you have my sympathies.’
He stared long and hard at his twin reflections in the older brother’s lenses, before turning his attention to the younger man looming behind him.
‘You might want to stop cracking your knuckles like that, son. I hear it can lead to arthritis.’
Logan let all that hang there in the air between them. He wanted them to be very clear on the fact that he was not remotely intimidated by either of them.
Only then, once he felt that the message had been given time to sink in, did he answer Sergei’s question.
‘Victor’s body was discovered in his car on the A95 earlier this evening. I’m sorry to say, we have reason to believe that he may have been murdered.’
‘Unalived.’
Logan looked back over his shoulder at Eleanor. ‘Sorry?’
‘I prefer unalived. Not… not that other word.’
Her expression was still completely neutral, so the statement felt like the deadpan delivery of a joke. Nobody was laughing, though.
‘Right,’ Jack said after some consideration. ‘Fair enough.’
He took a step to the side, angling himself so he could address all three of them at once.
‘I realise this is all a shock to you,’ he said, though he didn’t know if he actually believed that.
‘Rest assured, we are already investigating this to the absolute best of our ability. We will leave no stone unturned when it comes to getting to the bottom of what happened to Victor. We will find out the truth. We’ll find the person’—he lingered on the brothers for a moment—‘or persons responsible. And we will make sure they are punished to the full extent of the law.’
‘No need,’ Sergei said.
Logan raised an eyebrow. ‘Sorry?’
‘We will handle it. We will find who did this.’
‘Aye. No. That’s not how it works, pal,’ Logan told him.
‘Ignore him. It’s macho posturing bullshit,’ Eleanor said, and the venom behind it wiped away any of Logan’s lingering doubts about her being afraid of the men.
She shifted the baby from one hip to the other, and looked up at the detective towering over her.
‘We’ll do anything you need us to do. Any questions you need us to answer, any information we can give. Anything to find out who did this.’
Logan nodded slowly. The speech sounded sincere. But it was still a speech, not the gut reaction of a grieving young widow. It sounded more like the prepared statement of an employer. Either she was keeping her emotions tightly bottled up, or she was lacking in them entirely.
‘Good. Thanks. Aye.’ Jack looked around at them. ‘Do you know where—?’
‘But not tonight,’ Eleanor said, cutting him off.
Logan opened his mouth to reply, but she jumped in before he had a chance.
‘We’re upset. We’re in shock,’ she told him, though nothing in her voice or her body language backed up either statement.
‘We’ll come in for interviews and answer everything you ask of us.
But not tonight. Tonight’s about family.
Tonight’s about processing all this.’ She smiled.
It was a politician’s smile. A serpent’s smile. ‘I’m sure you understand.’
Out in the hallway, the mini fighter jet went on another noisy bombing run. From behind his older brother, Mikhail’s knuckles cracked.
‘Fair enough,’ Logan said. He had no reason yet to haul any of them in. Nothing but a gut feeling, anyway, and Detective Superintendent Mitchell wouldn’t accept that as just cause. ‘I’m sorry again for your loss. I’ll be in touch.’ He glanced at them all in turn. ‘Soon.’
He started to head for the door, then stopped and looked at his watch. ‘No sign of your guest?’
‘Guest?’ Eleanor asked.
Logan watched her. Watched all of them. ‘Whoever it was you thought I was.’
‘Oh. No. He must’ve got held up.’
‘Aye, must’ve done,’ Logan agreed. ‘Friend?’
‘No. A… business associate,’ Eleanor said.
‘Right.’ Logan looked around the room. At the extravagant couch. At the awful wall art. At the TV the size of a cinema screen. ‘And what business is that, exactly?’
‘Our business,’ Sergei said, before Eleanor could speak. ‘Not yours.’
Logan shoved his hands into his coat pockets. ‘Fair enough,’ he said.
He turned again towards the door.
Then he turned back again.
‘One last thing.’
A look of irritation broke through Eleanor’s otherwise impassive defences. There one moment, gone the next. ‘Yes?’
‘Where’s your dog?’ Logan asked.
The question caught her off guard. She frowned, though her Botoxed forehead still didn’t register it.
‘What dog? We don’t have a dog?’
‘You don’t have a Golden Retriever, or something similar?’
Eleanor gestured around at the pristinely clean room. ‘Does it look like we have a dog?’
‘No,’ Logan conceded. Then again, it didn’t look like she had kids, either. Not a thing was out of place. Not a toy lay abandoned anywhere. ‘No, it doesn’t.’
He glanced around again, taking it all in, then bid her farewell with a nod.
‘Goodnight, Mrs Belov,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk very soon.’