Chapter 30
FIFE
Wednesday morning, Ruth thought. Halfway through the week.
It was all downhill from today to Friday.
The older she became, the more she appreciated the weekends.
She loved being with Brodie, doing fun things with him.
They would go over to Burntisland in July when the carnival was there, and take Eric and his girlfriend, Chrissie.
Eric couldn’t do any of the rides, but he would still enjoy himself.
She looked at her watch. Plenty of time. She stood looking out of the window, over to Fife, drinking her coffee.
Brodie came in, fresh out of the shower, playing with his tie as usual.
‘We should get a dog, then you could put your tie on him then transfer it,’ she said, putting her mug down. She walked over to him and adjusted it for him.
‘Thanks, honey.’
‘You having a coffee?’ she asked.
‘I’ll take one in my Stanley.’
She made it for him, thinking about her first patient of the day. Normally, she didn’t get emotional about them, but she couldn’t help feeling sorry for this one.
‘Right, I’m off. I’ll speak to you later.’ He gave her a kiss, and left her alone with her thoughts.
The drive to Glenrothes took over an hour, over the Queensferry Crossing and up the M80, connecting with the A92.
Brodie got there just after 10 a.m. He was shown into the incident room by a young female uniformed officer. There was a small group of people sitting in front of computers when he walked in.
The oldest-looking of the bunch, a man, stood up and walked over to him. ‘DI Art McKenzie. I’m assuming you’re DCI Brodie.’
‘It’s wrong to assume anything, DI McKenzie,’ Brodie said. ‘I might have been some nutcase walking in to murder you all.’
Art smiled but there was no humour in it. ‘They called up. Told me you were coming. Gave me your description. Otherwise, we would have all been over you like a rash.’
‘Good to know you’re keeping on your toes.’ He looked at the others. ‘Introduce me to your team.’
Art turned round to see the others watching them, like they were in the front row of the big top.
‘DS Freya Munro. DS Cameron Reid. DC Morven Fraser. This is our temporary DCI. From Edinburgh.’
He said the city’s name like he was informing everybody that one of them had dog shite on their shoe.
‘Det Supt Cross from my division filled me in on what’s been going on. You can fill in any blanks on the way to the crime scene. I want to see that first before we go to the mortuary. Somebody call and give them a heads-up that we’ll be coming later this morning.’
‘I’ll get on it,’ Morven said.
‘Thank you. DI McKenzie, you and Reid can drive me to the scene. No point in taking two cars.’
Art nodded sideways to Cameron and the younger man stood up, grabbing his jacket from the back of his seat.
‘You drive, son. I’ll sit in the back. That way, I’ll not see it coming when you shove us in front of a bus.’
Cameron looked at Brodie. ‘He’s kidding, of course, sir. I’m a very proficient driver.’
‘I’m about to find out, I suppose.’ Brodie watched as Art tossed Cameron the car keys and they left the incident room. ‘Fill me in,’ Brodie said as Cameron roared out of the car park.
Art was thrown back in his seat. ‘There’s an old cottage about to be put up for sale, apparently.
The owner wanted it fixed up before selling.
Two contractors dropped a chimney through the roof, and it went right through the floorboards, revealing a mummified corpse of a child in the crawl space.
The pathologist is calling it murder. The boy has a hole in his skull. Blunt force trauma, he reckons.’
‘Near St Monans?’ Brodie asked.
‘Aye. Not that far as the crow flies. Or the way Cameron drives either.’
Cameron looked over to Brodie. ‘DI McKenzie said you’ve worked here before, sir?’
‘I have. Years ago. I was seconded over here after we became a unified force. I was a DI at the time.’
Art snapped his fingers. ‘I thought I recognised the name! We worked on the case where a guy was killing women and draining their blood and replacing it with bleach. The Embalmer, the press called him.’
‘Did you catch him?’ Cameron asked.
‘Did we fu… er, no, we didn’t,’ Art said. ‘He stopped. He’s maybe in prison, or died.’
‘Or maybe he just decided to have a rest,’ Brodie said.
‘It’s been seven years, I think. Something like that.
I still have a photo of his last victim on my desk.
I promised her mother I’d catch the bastard.
I know I shouldn’t have, but I couldn’t look her in the face and tell her I couldn’t.
Her mother died last year. The girl’s name is Emily Blair.
Don’t ever let that name leave your brain. Or the others.’
‘He might have moved out of the area,’ Art said.
‘That too. We had thought about that; what job could he have taken that would have made him move? There are endless possibilities.’
‘Maybe he joined the military,’ Cameron said.
‘No,’ Brodie said. ‘I mean, he’s clever enough to have passed a psych evaluation, but he doesn’t have the personality to fit into the military. From the profile we had made up.’
Brodie didn’t tell them that Dr Gabriel Kane had talked to Brodie about The Embalmer. At Kane’s request. One nutjob talking about another. The blind leading the blind.
Cameron drove through Windygates, casting a glance in the rear-view mirror at Art, as if silently asking, Should we tell him about Pat? He then looked out of the windscreen and spotted the A915 before driving north-east.
‘What’s happening in Edinburgh?’ Art asked. ‘Anything exciting?’
Brodie shook his head, not wanting to go into it.
‘Nothing right now. Just looking into old cases. Like the Fife side, I imagine. When there’s nothing new.
Like the bones you just found.’ Brodie looked out of the window for a moment before looking round at Art.
‘What’s the story with the missing DCI?’
Art was silent for a moment, staring at the back of Cameron’s head, before making eye contact with the temporary boss. ‘He went on holiday to Tenerife, then arrived back in Scotland, but didn’t go home and didn’t show up for work.’
‘Is he ill? Or had some sort of a breakdown or something?’
‘Not that we know of. He lives with his sister and hasn’t returned there or come back to work, and nobody’s heard from him. It’s been over a week now.’
‘You should have been acting DCI until he came back,’ Brodie said.
‘I’m not going to take Alan’s place,’ Art said, his tone sharp.
‘You obviously need somebody at the helm. That’s why they asked me to step in.’
‘No disrespect, sir, but I’m sure Alan will be back before you know it.’
Brodie looked at him. ‘You always call senior ranks by their first name?’
Art shook his head. ‘No. We were friends out of work, too. I’ve known Alan for a long time. We moved up together. He’s a few years older, but we were friends.’
Brodie sensed that he had rubbed the man the wrong way and didn’t speak again. Cameron took some minor B-roads until they came to a T-junction that had two signs pointing right, one for a castle and gardens, the other for Arncrouch.
He turned right and slowed at the 20 mph sign.
The cottage was on the left as they entered the village. A quiet, unassuming place, but where a young boy’s life had ended. Now it wasn’t quite unassuming.