Page 4 of Watching You

Jupiter Artland was an idyll. Its architectural landscaping, with grand swirling features and stretches of water, offered a haven both for city dwellers and tourists sick of the sight of plastic and tartan trophies.

The acres of parkland closed from October to well into spring, giving the land time to breathe through the rain and frosts, untrampled by human feet.

In the hours that Lively had been at the hospital, the parkland had been transformed.

Vast areas had been cordoned off, tents constructed, equipment had been laboriously brought in on foot to minimally disturb the evidence and avoid damaging the grounds.

Outdoor body recovery took time. It wasn’t just the corpse that needed moving and preserving but quantities of earth around it, and a huge area would be minutely combed for a weapon, clothing and anything else that might have been discarded as the killer fled the scene.

Lively was pleased he’d been on hospital duty indoors.

He took his time traversing the pathways to the leafy bowers that were home to the Weeping Girls.

They stood, the five of them, hair cascading over their faces, against trees or free-standing, in the throes of emotions so strong you could hear them crying and screeching in spite of their cold stone hearts.

He stared at the girls in horror. They were somehow so much more affecting than the human remains to whose decay they had presumably borne witness as the winter had given birth to spring.

Christie Salter stood watching Dr Nate Carlisle, Edinburgh’s new pathologist, as he worked.

Lively had to admit that Carlisle was a striking figure in the midst of the crime scene investigation crew who were preserving the evidence and immortalising the gruesome discovery into Scottish crime history.

‘So do you fancy him too, then?’ Lively whispered from behind her.

Salter’s hand flew to her chest. ‘God in heaven, sarge, a man’s been brutally murdered here. This isn’t the place to be taking people by surprise. And for the record, I’m happily loved-up.’

‘Ach, you can still look, girl. You’re married, not dead.’

‘Distasteful in the circumstances,’ Salter murmured.

‘Oh come on, this is what we do. Have you never thought that without people getting knocked off in unfortunate circumstances, we’d be out of a bloody job?’ Lively mused.

‘I can’t believe you just reframed murder as our employment currency.’

‘Just telling it like it is. Admit it, you missed me, Salter.’ He gave her a nudge with his elbow.

Nate Carlisle – well over six feet tall, lithe and sinewy, and sporting a hairless skull that looked better on a black man than it ever would on a Caucasian – took a few steps back from the body and glanced across at them, motioning for them to join him. ‘Stay on the steps please,’ he instructed.

They approached slowly and carefully. The spectre of a defence barrister making hay with a misplaced foot or a dropped mobile phone was always lurking.

‘Just how dead is this one then, doc?’ Lively asked.

Nate Carlisle sighed and raised his eyebrows at Lively, which made Salter smile. It was refreshing that Carlisle wasn’t amused by Lively, given the boys’ club nature of so many aspects of policing.

‘I’m DS Christie Salter,’ she introduced herself. ‘What can you tell us?’

‘The remains were discovered by an employee preparing to reopen the site to the public. It’s a male, I’d say around five feet ten inches tall.

I’m sure you’re both experienced enough to know that a body in this state of decomposition has been outside for several months.

It’ll be difficult to be precise without reference to some factual information that tells us when he went missing.

I’ll be calling in a forensic entomologist to help as there’s a lot of insect life infesting the remains.

Given that we’re largely down to skeletal parts, death occurred a minimum of four months ago. ’

‘Can you rule out natural causes or suicide?’ Salter asked.

‘Lean over, mind your balance and try not to breathe in,’ Carlisle said.

As one, Salter and Lively filled their lungs and bent for the best view they could get. Carlisle used a gloved finger to pull back a clump of hair from the blackening skull and directed their gazes to a crack along the bone.

‘A fracture?’ Lively asked.

Carlisle nodded. ‘Temporal bone, and the fracture is clear enough that the impact would have caused an acute intracerebral haemorrhage followed shortly by unconsciousness. He couldn’t have done it to himself.’

‘Could he have fallen and hit his head on a rock or a tree trunk?’ Salter asked.

‘He could, and the mechanics of that sort of death would have resembled a skiing accident. He might even have been rendered comatose by the blow, possibly with a brain bleed that would have stopped all meaningful neurological functioning,’ Carlisle said.

‘But that wouldn’t explain what happened next.

’ He motioned behind them to a technician who was moving individual leaves with metal pincers and infinite patience.

Beneath the leaves, furrows in the damp earth provided a pathway into dense bushes beneath a heavily canopied tree. A photographer on a stepladder was capturing the image of the drag marks that resembled the tracks of a sleigh in snow.

‘There’s a pair of walking boots deep in the undergrowth, wedged under a branch, partially buried.

I’m assuming that an animal dragged the corpse out into the open, but only when it was so rotten that the ankle joints gave way.

The feet stayed where they were in the boots and the remainder is in front of you.

We’re missing an arm, and it’s possible we just haven’t found that in the vicinity yet, or potentially a predator took that back to its lair. ’

‘Filling up the freezer for a late-night snack,’ Lively chimed in.

‘Christ, would you stop it, man? I’m sorry about him,’ Salter muttered.

‘No apology necessary. DS Lively and I have worked together before,’ Carlisle said. ‘It’s a good job he’s such an impressive detective.’

‘All right you two, point taken,’ Lively groaned. ‘Did your lot find any other clothing?’

‘No jacket, and the rest of it was lightweight cotton. Looks to me like shorts and a T-shirt, largely rotted but we’ve checked everything we found for identification. We’ve no phone, wallet or keys as yet,’ Carlisle said.

‘Is the skull in good enough condition that we’ve got a shot at facial reconstruction?’ Lively asked.

‘Give me a second and I should be able to answer that. We’re about to lift the remains.’

Carlisle disappeared to where a specialist stretcher and body cover were being positioned to take the remains to a van and from there to the city mortuary. Lively turned around on the step, getting his bearings within the wider geography.

‘This place has been closed for months. It’s a fair bet he was killed late summer, early autumn. Strange place for a robbery, don’t you think?’ He stuck his hands in his pockets and frowned.

‘I agree,’ Salter said. ‘It’s not a robbery, or if it was then they weren’t after anything as simple as money or a phone. Normally I’d be wondering if this was drugs related, but hiking isn’t a known pastime of our local drug lords. What are you thinking?’

‘Feels like an argument,’ Lively said. ‘Two mates, husband and wife, business partners. Maybe a money dispute. Hey, doc!’ he called out to Carlisle. ‘You said the feet were partially buried. How deep?’

‘Just a few inches,’ Carlisle replied.

‘Impromptu then,’ Lively said. ‘Not a professional job. If it was a hit they’d have brought a spade and tidied up. No self-respecting Scottish assassin is this sloppy.’

‘Nice,’ Salter commented. ‘Look, they’re moving him. Let’s follow.’

Out in the open, a tent had been erected to give some shelter and allow for dry storage of the necessary equipment. The stretcher was moved inside and Carlisle gave them both gloves and face masks before they got close.

As bodies went, it wasn’t the worst type to have discovered. Lively knew from bitter experience that a newer corpse was by far the more upsetting. Once the liquefaction process was done, everything began to dry out. After that, the resemblance to a person faded remarkably quickly.

Whoever the dead man was, he was unrecognisable now. There would be no identification by family members or friends. There was enough left to get reliable DNA and possibly dental records, but naming the victim was still not a certainty.

The bones were folded and mangled, with leathered flaps of skin and brown sinew connecting them. The skull, though, was intact, in spite of the crack in it.

‘Do you think the head was buried more carefully than the rest of him?’ Salter asked.

‘No, the skull’s in better shape than the other bones because our native wild animals don’t have sufficiently wide jaws to get their mouths around it and bite down. Every other part has been subjected to predator or carrion-feeder approaches.’

‘All right,’ Lively said. ‘Give us a call when you’re done with the postmortem. We’ll get started looking at missing persons. Cause of death was the blow to the head, right?’

‘I wouldn’t jump to that conclusion,’ Carlisle said, stripping off his gloves and pulling the body cover back over the victim. ‘There’s every chance the blow didn’t kill him immediately.’

‘Fuck it,’ Lively murmured.

‘So you think he might have been buried while he was still alive?’ Salter asked quietly.

‘I’m afraid so,’ Carlisle said. ‘With so little lung tissue left it’ll probably be impossible for me to reach a definitive conclusion.’

‘You think he was hit on the side of his head, dragged to an improvised, shallow grave, covered in earth and leaves, then left to suffocate or choke to death while unable to move,’ Lively said. ‘Probably didn’t expect that when he was eating his cornflakes, did he, poor bastard?’