30
A cooling breeze ran along the Cowgate, and the tall buildings gave much welcome shade. Perhaps that was why McLean had walked down the cobbles of Niddry Street rather than heading over South Bridge and on towards Newington as he’d intended. Either that or the unexpected call from Jack Parfitt had planted a thought in his mind that he couldn’t easily ignore. He’d been looking for Sammy to gain information about Eric Forrester, but what if it was the drug dealer himself lying in the mortuary chill store? It was a long shot, sure, but no one had seen either man since the day of the crash, and both had some reason to have been in that part of town. He had to admit that the thought of the dead man being a drug dealer was a lot more appealing than him being the chief superintendent’s only son, too.
Angus Cadwallader’s assistant, Doctor Sharp, looked up from her lonely desk when McLean knocked on the open office doorframe. Her face given an unhealthy pallor by the light of her computer monitor, she pulled her spectacles down so she could peer over the top of them and see him properly.
‘Tony. What brings you here today?’ Her initial frown turned to a smile of recognition. ‘Angus is away getting changed. It’s been a busy morning and he’s lecturing this afternoon.’
McLean glanced at his watch, not quite sure what had happened to the day. Except that he’d spent a chunk of it wasting his time talking to Alan Lewis.
‘It’s not a problem. Wouldn’t want to keep him from his students anyway. I had a question about the three bodies we’re still trying to identify. You’d probably be able to answer it better than Angus anyway.’
‘What’s that, young man? Impugning my good name?’
McLean turned in the doorway to see Cadwallader approaching from the other side of the examination theatre. He had changed out of his habitual scrubs and now wore a well-tailored tweed suit, shirt open at the collar where he’d not yet tied his tie. McLean had a suspicion that Doctor Sharp would be doing that in a few moments. Quite why the two of them had kept their relationship secret for as long as they had, he’d never understood. Neither had a significant other to cheat on, and the only thing even of passing note was the disparity in their ages.
‘I was just asking Tracy about those three bodies. Wondered if any of them might have been a habitual drug user. Cannabis, most likely, but possibly heroin as well.’
Cadwallader stopped before he reached the door to the office. ‘Drugs? Hmmm. Come with me.’
McLean saw Doctor Sharp open her mouth, raise a hand to make some comment. Probably along the lines of ‘You’re wearing your best suit, Angus’, then give up and sit back down at her computer with a shake of her head. He gave her a wry smile, then followed the pathologist across to the banks of chiller cabinets.
‘We’ve got them all here.’ Cadwallader pulled some latex gloves out of a box sitting on a shelf nearby. He snapped them on swiftly, then opened three doors, pulled out three trays. All the bodies were in bags, and as he unzipped them, so the chemical reek rose to greet them. McLean felt the headache rising, and the memory of that horrible day hit him like a gut punch. The battered remains had been cleaned up and laid out in a semblance of how they might have looked before forty tons of truck and a bath of corrosive chemicals had done their worst. Even so the mess was shocking, adding to the nausea that the smell had brought on.
‘Do we really need to look at them, Angus?’
‘What?’ Cadwallader had reached in and drawn out an arm, perhaps the least damaged part of this particular cadaver and mercifully still attached to the torso. The hand was a mess of bones and flesh, though, taped up in a bag to stop it all falling apart.
‘I was only wondering if one of them could have been a drug addict. Thought you might have noticed something in your first examination. I didn’t think you’d need to do …’ He waved at the bodybag. ‘… all this.’
‘Well, if you’d just look, I was going to explain.’ Cadwallader beckoned him closer with a wave of his free hand. McLean stepped up reluctantly, both because the damage to the body sickened him and because the chemical smell was making him sick. How the pathologist could bear it, he had no idea.
‘What am I looking at then, Angus? Apart from an almost severed arm, that is.’
‘Well, it’s scrawny for one thing. This cadaver’s male, a little under six feet tall. The solvent didn’t leave much of his hair or skin. This arm was tucked under his body, though, which is how it survived fairly unscathed.’
‘Not as simple as “he was a drug addict”, I’m afraid, Tony. Blood and tissue analysis haven’t come up with any of the usual markers anyway, so he’d not taken anything for a couple of days before he died at least. Maybe longer.’ Cadwallader twisted the ruined arm to the light a little. ‘There’s wee scars here that could be track marks, but there’s not enough skin left on him to be certain. Now you’ve brought it up, I’ll have a closer look. Would have been easier if we had his other arm, too, but we never did find that.’
‘Any other way of telling?’
‘It’s all a bit vague, I’m afraid. The lack of muscle definition suggests someone who doesn’t exercise much and probably doesn’t eat a lot either. So yes, he could be a drug addict. Could just be lazy, except that you’d expect more body fat then.’
‘Sammy Saunders.’ McLean stared down at the mangled torso, not quite convinced. ‘How about DNA? I take it you’ve not had the results back yet.’
‘Oh, right. No. Bloody lab’s taking longer and longer these days. Sometimes I think they do it on purpose. Especially if you mark the sample urgent.’
‘What about the swab I gave you?’
Cadwallader frowned, then seemed to remember. ‘Oh, that. Did I not tell you? Sorry. I had one of my students run the sequence, but until we get the results back from the body we can’t actually compare them. Probably should have got the student to do them all, now I think about it. He’s much quicker than the labs.’
‘But inadmissible in court. Not that it applies here. You’ll let me know as soon as the lab results come in?’
‘Of course.’ The pathologist pushed the drawer back into the chilled store, closing the door with a solid clunk. ‘I take it this Sammy fellow wasn’t who you were thinking of when you brought me that swab, though.’
‘No. His name just came up this morning. He’s got quite a record, though, so he’ll be on the DNA database. If it’s him we’ll know soon enough.’
Cadwallader turned his attention to the other two drawers, the body bags still zipped closed. ‘Good. If that’s one more down, then it’s just this pair to go. Two women. One young, one old.’ He slid first one, then the other back into their dark, frigid homes, pulled off his latex gloves and deposited them in a nearby bin.
‘If it’s him. We don’t know that yet,’ McLean said.
‘Have a little faith, Tony.’ He smiled at the joke. ‘And if it’s not him, well, we’ve had their skulls scanned, all three of them. Friend of mine at the university’s going to run them through some facial reconstruction program they developed for forensic archaeology. Should be able to put a face to them in a day or two.’
‘You can do that?’ McLean asked. ‘I thought you needed to glue on little blocks of wood and build up the muscles with clay or something.’
‘Ah, Tony, you can be delightfully old-fashioned sometimes.’ Cadwallader patted him on the arm as they walked back towards the office. ‘Now, where’s Tracy gone. I need someone to help me with my tie.’
‘I wonder if you could spare a moment, Tony. In my office.’
McLean had only just stepped into the cool of the station, barely had time for his eyes to adjust from the sun’s glare outside. Either Chief Superintendent Forrester had been waiting for him or the man was psychic.
‘Right now?’ he asked, then saw the look on Forrester’s face. ‘Of course. Is it about –?’
‘My office.’
McLean nodded, saying nothing more as he followed the chief superintendent up the stairs and along the corridor. Only once they were both inside the office, the door firmly closed, did he speak again.
‘I take it this is about Eric, sir.’
Forrester slumped into his chair. ‘You’ve still no news?’
‘If I had, I’d not have kept it from you. I’m just this moment back from the mortuary, but Angus still hasn’t got the DNA results for the three remaining bodies. One of them is male, as you know, sir, and we can’t be sure it isn’t him. But we can’t be sure it is. There’s another possibility that’s come up just this morning.’
‘Oh aye?’ Forrester’s face lightened a little. Strange how a man could cling to the tiniest scrap of hope.
‘We know your son was an occasional drug user. I think I’ve tracked down his supplier here and it’s just possible it’s his body we’ve got down in the mortuary, not Eric’s.’
‘He had a regular supplier? A dealer?’
‘Bloke by the name of Sammy Saunders. Pothead Sammy to his friends. He’s known to operate in the area around the crash site and nobody’s seen him since it happened. I know it’s tenuous, but …’ McLean tailed off, seeing the expression on Forrester’s face turn from hope to something else he couldn’t quite identify. Anger, perhaps? Fear?
‘How long until the DNA results come in?’ he asked after a while.
‘Not sure, sir. They were prioritized, of course, and your swab’s been sequenced off the books so we can make the comparison as soon as the results come in. Angus was going to chase them up. Shouldn’t be long now.’
Forrester stared into the distance for a while, emotions playing across his face like an actor hamming in front of a mirror. McLean was happy enough to let him work through whatever it was. Nothing he could say would make things any easier for the man.
‘You’re still looking for him? Eric?’ he asked eventually.
‘Of course, sir. The drugs angle was only one line of investigation.’ McLean wasn’t sure what other lines Duguid was pursuing, but he could be certain the ex-detective superintendent would be thorough.
‘Good.’ Forrester looked like he was going to say something else, then he stopped himself with the tiniest shake of the head. ‘Thank you, Tony. This won’t be forgotten.’
McLean knew a dismissal when he saw one. He nodded once, then left, closing the door firmly behind him. Only once he was out in the corridor did he let out the long sigh he’d been keeping inside. It was all too clear that Forrester knew the name Sammy Saunders, equally clear that he wasn’t about to tell McLean how or why, even if his own son’s life depended on it.