ELEVEN

By eleven o’clock, after he had been fleeced for the Koffee Klub and the Hobnob Honchos, Anderson was settled in his office with Costello; they had a hot mug each and a huge pile of paperwork between them.

‘So, Altmore Road, what do you think?’ She stuffed a Hobnob into her mouth and banged her feet up on the desk, letting them rest there. She had taken off her wet boots and socks; the skin on the soles of her feet was white and crinkled, like dead flesh. She had wound a few pieces of toilet paper round her foot to absorb the blood from the blister from hell.

‘Do you know, the Doon, where they were found, is where the Devil lost a claw? God chased him out of the Pulpit. It all happens in Altmore Wood, eh?’

‘It was too wet to go in. It’s very overgrown now. But O’Hare was still there; get the feeling he has something to tell me.’

‘Us,’ corrected Anderson.

‘Indeed. What are those two doing?’

‘Wyngate is doing whatever you tell him, seemingly, then having a quick look through McMutrie Junior associations. It’s minor stuff. A posh car fell down a sinkhole, that’s all. Andy Levern was in charge of the Gyle case in ’92. He would have done a good job, so why are we doing this?’

‘Because we did so well on the Shadowman case? Because we have to be seen to explore the bones and discount them once we know what they are. Because these murders,’ she tapped the file, ‘are beyond the belief of most mortal men. And we are being forced into this investigation because it will be all over social media and, if we don’t, there will be claims of a cover-up. We are governed by tweets.’ Costello took a sip of her tea, slowly. ‘Or twits. Or twonks.’

‘It was a horrific crime; it’s deep in our psyche. The kids were three and one. Andrew Gyle murdered them all. He nearly decapitated the dog. Another reason for the horror to cut so deep.’

‘But Andrew Gyle has always protested his innocence. To the point of refusing counselling, therapy, because they all had the proviso that he should show remorse. And he won’t do that. And nobody really knows why he did it.’

Anderson looked uncomfortable. ‘Maybe he does not know himself.’

‘There was huge ill-feeling between the families; they lived in close proximity,’ Costello reminded him, giving him some wriggle room. ‘Rossi has already been on to the fiscal’s office, by the way.’

‘So we leave this until we hear from O’Hare, officially.’ Anderson was not for moving. ‘Do you think those two wee kids at number eight are at risk? Is there anything we can do to get that husband to stand up to his responsibility?’

Costello was glad she was looking at her foot. This disconnected logic was a new Anderson. She kept to her own chain of thought. ‘I asked Wyngate to trace Lorna Gyle and Stuart Melrose. What about David Griffin?’

‘Who’s David Griffin? Remind me.’

‘The one who found the bodies, the young constable. He lost the plot after that, went a bit loopy,’ Costello said pointedly.

‘Nothing wrong with that, Costello,’ Anderson flashed her a wry smile. ‘But we are here as a public service, Jennifer needs help with those two wee kids. Her husband should be held accountable.’

‘But he didn’t attack anybody with an axe, Colin, you need to get some focus here. When we find Griffin, why don’t you have a chat with him? From the case files, he was involved in the case, up close and personal. He knew the families. It might give you a better view. Will I find out how Wyngate is doing?’ She lifted the phone.

‘We don’t need focus, Costello. We have a twenty-three-year-old case that was solved and the perpetrator is serving life without parole. And we have a hole in a road. At one end of that road, up a hill, is a five hundred-year-old cemetery. And we have bones after heavy rainfall. It is not a case. Unless there is a case for having a chat with that property developer? The one who is working on the other side of the hill. Some heavy plant machinery might have disrupted something that caused the sinkhole. The phone log is full of nutters suggesting that. Other nutters are going on about the movement of rainwater.’

‘It goes downwards,’ said Costello, helpfully.

‘We could be reporting in a lawsuit later on if someone is accountable. Somebody could have been hurt.’

‘The property value is a common theme between them, the Lawsons and the Broadfoots. It’s why most of the folk living in those cottages are at each other’s throats. No bugger wants to be there. So if you are thinking of preventing further crime and acting as a police service, then maybe that is an area you might want to look at.’

‘Why?’

‘By their nature, property developers are opportunists. They will be ready to pounce if that McMutrie house comes up for sale. There is already huge tension between the Broadfoots and the Dirk-Dastardlys next door.’

‘What are you suggesting?’

‘That they might be predatory. How could they develop that land by the back of the hill, by the old church? I wonder if there is something cooking in the council, something underhand and nasty.’

‘I think you are sneaking around looking for a reason to keep an investigation going. And I am not having it, Costello. I want you to go round and finish the house-to-house on Altmore Road, type up a few words, conclude nothing, keep the boys upstairs happy and then we can all get on with something that has not been solved. I want these files off my desk now, until we have real evidence of criminality and foul play to act on. Real evidence.’

To make his point he lifted the file and popped it on top of the stack of others. ‘You can take your feet off my desk and put all these outside in the office. I’m only having active cases in here.’

Costello opened her mouth to argue.

‘If I am back at work, I think I should have something better to do than this non-event. And I have spoken to DI Levern; he recalls the case well. There was no doubt about Gyle’s guilt. No doubt at all.’

Costello took the offered files, got up and limped out the office. She was still sitting, picking at her blister, when she heard the phone ring in Anderson’s office. She refused to appear interested, rolling up her sock again, teasing out the wet laces of her shoes, ready to put them back on, ignoring Anderson, until she realized that he was gesturing for her to rejoin him in the office.

She walked back, ungainly. One shoe on, one shoe off.

Anderson was leaning forward at the desk, one finger on the phone; he didn’t look happy. ‘Just hang on a minute, Prof, I am going to put you on speakerphone.’

The educated tones of the forensic pathologist floated round the small room. ‘Oh, hello, just to let you know I’m soaked through and pissed off. How are you?’

‘I’m fine, Jack. Please tell me you want to talk bones. Old bones. Very old bones that mean we have nothing more to do with Altmore Road.’

‘Yes, I can do that.’

Anderson shot a look of victory at Costello.

She sighed, ‘Oh, I thought you were getting excited about something that was floating down that hole.’

‘Yes, I was.’

Costello shot a look back at Anderson, and then folded her arms for effect.

‘Bones,’ said the disconnected voice. ‘Other bones that have not been submerged for long, neither have they been exposed to fresh air.’

‘Meaning?’ snapped Anderson.

There was a reproachful pause before the pathologist spoke. ‘Well, most of the bones are a hundred years plus, and that is fitting with the graves up at Altmore Cemetery. It’s an old place, so there is no point in talking to the parks and rec, but if you do I think you will find there is some movement in the land and that can—’

‘The bones, Jack,’ pressed Anderson.

‘We have nine bones of a foot. We are missing cuneiform and a cuboid. And they are recent. Much younger than any of the others. We will go back down the hole once the rain has stopped; it keeps filling up so we are looking for small pebbles at the bottom of a large pond. But that was how they caught Haigh, by finding a gallstone on a gravel path. So it is not all in vain. But in the meantime we will press on with processing what we have. The bones have been photographed and the lab have them now. Interesting points for you are: One, it has not degenerated so it has been protected in some way and in a dry environment. Two, we have a lower end of the fibula fragment and the upper surface of that is clean-cut and striated. The periosteal bone has not yet had time to fracture. Three. The cut is straight, so it was chopped off. It has not yet had time to flake so—’

‘Chopped? As in an axe?’ asked Costello, her eyes burning into her boss’s.

‘Don’t jump to conclusions, Costello. That would be very dangerous in a case like this.’

‘That’s what I have been trying to tell her,’ said Anderson.

‘Is it a female foot?’ asked Costello, not to be put off her track.

‘It would appear so. And there are stress lines in the bones, which suggests that it was a young, hardworking foot. Like a dancer, and by that I mean a young woman who danced a lot. If you look at this foot under a microscope, there should be no periosteum left. Bones that are old, hundreds of years old, have lost their periosteal covering. It fractures slightly, then flakes off. We can age the bone roughly by the degree of flaking of the periosteum that is still present. And this bone has minor flaking of the periosteum, so it is not that old and then—’

‘What do you mean by “not that old”? Not how old?’ asked Anderson.

‘Well, not hundreds of years.’

‘About twenty-three years?’ Costello’s voice was insistent.

There was a silence; a faint burr came down the line.

‘It’s an opinion, an educated opinion, but I’d doubt twenty years. I think that this young dancer died within the last ten years. I am telling you two, and I am telling Archie Walker and ACC Mitchum. What you tell the press is up to you. The bones need to be broken down and tests done to extract any DNA present and that is going to take time. Matilda needs to drill a section, boil it, treat it, powder it and soak it in solution to get the DNA out and then—’

‘How long?’

‘Days.’

‘If the bloody rain lets the hole drain, we may find other bones to strengthen or weaken the theory.’ There was silence in the room again.

‘Can you tell us anything?’ Costello picked up a note pad, scribbled ‘Andrew Gyle’ and double underlined it.

‘Unofficially? Female. Slight build. Five foot five or thereabouts. Narrow foot. Size five. No gross malformations so she wore good shoes. In the sense that she didn’t spend a lot of her time in four-inch heels. But her feet worked hard.’

‘On her feet all day, you mean?’

‘Like I said, more like a dancer or an athlete, something like that. Where the muscles are attached there are little rough bits. In a normal person who walks about and then sits at a desk, that would be completely smooth, so the muscles in her foot were used a lot. And the foot bones were protected, above ground.’ He paused; they could hear Mulholland and Wyngate chatting outside the glass. ‘But you need to be ready for the media storm. You are investigating another suspicious death on Altmore Road.’

‘Another murder by an axe? So Gyle did another one. That is another rope we can hang him with,’ Anderson put his hands behind his head.

Costello looked at the phone. ‘If I understood you right, Jack, you said less than twenty years.’

‘More like ten. At the time of the Melrose murders, this lady was still growing, walking around and breathing, probably still dancing. So he was incarcerated when this happened.’

‘So it is unconnected, Gyle was in jail,’ said Anderson.

‘Or it is connected and Gyle is innocent,’ countered Costello. ‘Gyle’s lawyers will have a field day with this.’

‘Not enough to grant leave to appeal. I’m going to the loo.’ Anderson stood up and left the office, leaving her sitting on the desk where she had been all the way through the conversation.

She felt vaguely sick. Gyle sharply divided public opinion. It was the duty of Walker and the fiscal’s office to decide when to tell Gyle’s defence team, the laws of disclosure being what they were.

Anderson’s desktop phone went again, and as she reached over she saw the sweat marks on the arm of Anderson’s chair. He was really stressing over this. She answered the phone; it was McColl downstairs looking for Anderson. She took a brief message, smiled to herself and sat back up on the desk, amusing herself by picking at her sore foot again.

‘You know that cop I was asking Wyngate to trace? David Griffin?’ she asked him as he opened the door.

‘The first on the scene?’

‘Well, there is no point in Wyngate going any further. He’s found us. He wants you to call him.’

Anderson had indicated he wanted Costello to lead, so she took her place at the whiteboard, a black marker in her hand. Mulholland and Wyngate ignored her, too engaged in a debate about independence. It looked as if it was about to get nasty. Mulholland was fired up with self-governing righteousness, Wyngate was sarcastically showing Mulholland what a calculator was as he obviously couldn’t add up. He was embarking on a diatribe of Norwegian oil revenues when Anderson coughed pointedly.

‘And as for that fat …’ Wyngate continued his debate.

‘Shut the f up, you two,’ said Costello, her left forefinger tapping the board. ‘We have work to do once you are finished sorting out the problems of the nation.’

‘Nations,’ corrected Mulholland.

They both murmured apologies while looking at each other in a way that promised it was not over.

‘This has just come through.’ She pointed to a photograph on the wall, a small collection of pebbles and chess pieces.

‘What are they?’ asked Mulholland, putting his glasses on to see well.

‘A navicular, a calcaneus, a few metatarsals … two cuneiforms. Is that the distal end of a fibula?’ asked Wyngate.

Costello was impressed. ‘Yes foot bones. How do you know that?’

‘He’s had the benefit of a wonderful education under a Scottish Government. But doesn’t appreciate it,’ said Mulholland.

‘I read the report that came with the photograph. We unionists do our homework properly.’

‘So you think—’

‘Shut it,’ said Costello with deadly mildness. The room was immediately quiet. ‘Bones found at the sinkhole. They have been washed there probably out from a culvert further up the street. It’s too dangerous to go down until Health and Safety can make the rain stop. We are waiting for a precise date on the bones, but the sheer edge suggests unnatural death. To simplify, if these bones are older than twenty-three years then we must consider that Sue, Bobby and George were not the first victims of Andrew Gyle. The owner of the bones might be. If the bones are less than twenty-three years, then they died while Gyle was incarcerated and have nothing to do with him. The third theory is that Gyle …’

‘Is innocent,’ added Batten, who had slipped in the door unseen. ‘And the body count is four against an unidentified subject. The “unsubs”, as the FBI calls them.’

‘I think a fourth theory, that somebody killed Foot Woman in a copycat style so, at a later date, they could argue that all four victims were killed by the same person and as Gyle was incarcerated at the time, then he is wrongly incarcerated, can be excluded, as the body has been hidden too well,’ said Costello. ‘Walker wants an open book on this.’

Costello looked at Batten, who was standing in the corner stirring coffee. Black coffee with no sugar in it, which made the act of stirring it a bit pointless. Costello wondered at what point a shrink needed a shrink.

‘There is a problem of guilt here. And a bigger problem of innocence,’ said Batten.

‘How many years in university did it take you to work that one out?’ snapped Costello.

‘Friday’s Child, the book Lorna Gyle wrote,’ said Batten as Wyngate held up a well-read hardback copy. ‘The ghostwriter was very good. She wrote it in 2009 when Lorna was twenty-one. I am sure it was commissioned as a story of growing up with a monster and all the horror and the abuse but, famously, it’s not like that at all. It’s the story of a normal family who went on picnics and to the supermarket and built castles on the beach. The sheer mundanity of the text is charming, very Anne Frank. Little story after little story,’ said Batten.

‘And then the dad slaughtered a woman and her wee boys. One barely more than a baby. He nearly took its head off. So no, not so normal,’ Anderson said.

‘I’m not reading it. Batten and I are going to visit him tomorrow. I don’t want any kind of prep. I need to take him as I find him with no preconceived ideas.’ Costello made a pantomime of covering her ears as Wyngate dug out a photograph of the young Lorna, sitting on a deckchair, all blonde curls and toothless smiles, a small lace shawl round her shoulders.

‘Lorna believes he is guilty because the jury found him guilty. She thinks the evidence against him was overwhelming; there was no other explanation for what went on in the woods that day. So she accepted it but finds it hard to believe. Then, as the book goes on, she works it through, seeing it through an adult’s eyes. Gyle was stressed out of his box when he killed the Melroses, and it was the Melroses who were causing him all the stress. It’s bad enough being stressed, but much worse to have the triggers of that stress shoved under your nose every two minutes – every time he opened the front door, every time he went out into his back garden.’

Costello looked at the picture of Gyle, slightly balding, crinkly hair round the side of his head. He looked like the wee guy from the Carry On team, the one with the sniggery laugh whose name she could never remember. ‘I’m sure his daughter would try to rationalize it somehow. It is difficult to see your parents in any light other than as your parents. Even though you know the most awful things about them. I know that more than most.’

Batten waited until somebody went past the door outside, hesitating until the footsteps had halted and a door slammed. ‘But, Costello, imagine Gyle is innocent. His daughter believes that he is guilty. Imagine that as a barrier between them. Notwithstanding the fact that he is incarcerated for something that he didn’t do, imagine the impact of him knowing that she believes that he did it. She is the only person he has in the world. And she believes that he is capable of that. Imagine that for a moment all of you, your own kid believing you are a murderer.’ He stopped, sipping his coffee for dramatic effect. For a moment the room was silent, just the never-ending patter of the rain.

‘But he is guilty. He did it,’ said Anderson.

‘You don’t know that for certain. You weren’t there. He has not admitted it or let something slip in any of his interviews that pointed to the guilt being his,’ pointed out Wyngate.

‘He was found guilty by his peers. And only his DNA was on the axe, so that kind of confirms he did it.’ Mulholland sat down, swung his feet up on the desk, put his hands around the back of his head.

‘I agree that he was caught up in some psychological rage. In another time, another place, it would never have happened,’ said Anderson. ‘But he did do it.’

‘Let’s have a look at the evidence and see where it goes. Let’s see his reaction when I confront him with the reality of his situation, his incarceration and the fact that his daughter does not want to know him,’ suggested Costello.

‘I think he knows what his daughter thinks about him. She doesn’t visit him; she has disowned him, even as a wee kid. I know our social services believe that even murderers have a right to see their own children, but I hope they would draw a line at letting a five-year-old back into the life of a man who had killed a three-year-old and his wee brother.’

‘She hasn’t visited her dad since she was sixteen. Her adoptive mother’s details are in the file. I’ve had a good look at the visiting log and Andrew Gyle only has one regular visitor, a chap called Jock Aird,’ Wyngate read out from his notebook.

‘Who lives in Altmore House at the top of Altmore Road? He gave him his alibi, his false alibi. I am starting to have my own thoughts about Mr Aird. I’d like to sit down and talk to you about how power corrupts,’ said Costello.

‘The love of power corrupts but not power itself.’ Batten looked back at Costello over the top of his coffee, but she was looking at the ceiling, already thinking about something else. ‘But his daughter has stayed clear since, until she could legally say, I don’t want anything more to do with him. That must hurt.’

‘So she saw sense and realized that her dad was a total psycho and broke all contact.’

Batten said, ‘Lorna was taken into foster care, then adopted, changed her name legally then got married. She got away from him and made a new life for herself. She’d be in her late twenties now.’

‘I am finding it difficult to trace her,’ admitted Wyngate. ‘Oh, Costello, better luck with Sue’s husband, last seen at the Findhorn Community.’

‘Good, so he ran away as well,’ Costello nodded.

‘Lorna might take some persuasion to make herself known. She is behind an invisible wall. She believes he did what he did because of the stress he was under. It was very out of character for him. Both sides at the trial agreed for him to have brain scans because they thought the rage might be organic, some growth or something that made him snap. And that’s why Costello is to do the talking to Gyle, see how he responds to a female.’

‘Christ, he put an axe through the last one,’ said Mulholland.

‘Typical violent reaction of the nationalist,’ muttered Wyngate.

‘Seriously though,’ Batten turned to address Costello directly. ‘He has waived his right to have his solicitor present, so keep it light, make out that you are on his side. That you are pressing for the new evidence to be analysed as it might have some bearing on his conviction. Enough to go in front of the review board. He will have seen the sinkhole on the news this morning and he is not stupid enough to think that forensic pathologists turn out because a sinkhole appears with some swirly water in it. We are better taking it to him, rather than his legal team bringing it to us. Just play the “in the interest of justice” card, like you are just doing your job.’

‘And forget that he is a wee slime bag who killed three people, and a dog with an axe,’ said Mulholland.

‘Yeah. It would be good if you could push that to the back of your mind a little,’ Batten said.

‘Well, once we turn up, he’s bound to know something is afoot,’ Costello smiled at her joke and Batten threw a crumpled piece of paper at her. It missed.