Poor sod.
Lucy hissed out a long gravelly breath.
‘Frenzied attack’ barely began to cover what Benedict Strachan and his unnamed accomplice had done to Liam Hay. The next photo was even worse — a close-up of the stab wounds. Eighty-nine of them in total, most of them so deep that the knife’s hilt had left its outline indented on the skin.
She turned the photo over, hiding the brutality. ‘Not that anyone should take what Benedict says as gospel.’
The Dunk grunted. Stopped at the junction with North Moncuir Road, waiting for a couple of hatchbacks to growl past on oversized exhausts. ‘To be honest, it’s kinda surprising no one chibbed him in prison. Normally, you end someone famous like that? You get yourself a whole heap of respect from your fellow inmates and lauded in the right-wing press. If you’re in for life anyway it’s win-win.’
She got to the last page and frowned. ‘Where’s the rest of it? Witness statements, interview transcripts, productions, door-to-doors?’
‘Dunno, Sarge. That was all Manson had. You know what Records are like, it’d take four years and a search party to find anything in there.’ They pulled out onto the road, Moncuir Wood looming large on the other side. Reaching off into the distance as they followed the wee boys in their not-so-hot hatchbacks.
Lucy shut the Benedict Strachan file and slipped it into the rear footwell. ‘You would’ve been quicker taking the turning by Fife Street.’
‘Don’t like crossing a dual carriageway, you know that.’
‘Such a baby.’ She pulled out the other file the Dunk had signed for. ‘OPERATION MAYPOLE — VICTIMOLOGY REPORTS’.
He glanced at the manila folder in her lap. ‘You know what I think? I think we’ve had seventeen months of getting nowhere, because they lumbered us with “Operation Maypole”.’
‘Uh-huh.’ Lucy dipped into the file and came out with the Bloodsmith’s first victim.
‘Everyone knows you don’t reuse operation names, it’s bad luck.’
‘Uh-huh.’
Abby Geddes, twenty-four. Graduated with a BSc in Molecular Biology, ended up working in that big call centre in Logansferry Industrial Estate, opposite Homebase and Lidl. Way to go, post-Covid economy.
‘Honestly, a quick google would’ve shown HMRC used it already. By the time we got the name, they’d sooked out all its mojo. Phuttttt: this operation name is mojo-less.’
‘I said, “Uh-huh.” That’s code for, “You can stop talking now.”’
Abby was still living at home with her mother and stepfather, because the call centre didn’t pay enough for a flat of her own. No boyfriend or girlfriend that anyone could think of. No best friend or group of mates to hang out with. And no one at work had much to say about her, other than that she kept herself to herself. Liked reading romance novels and watching Strictly. So not exactly the life and soul of the party.
‘That’s why you should never reuse operation names. “Maypole” got wrung dry on a fifty-four-million-quid VAT fraud — and that was in 2007, back when fifty-four million quid was a lot of—’
‘Dunk!’ Lucy glowered up from Abby’s file. ‘Don’t make me break out your rank and surname.’
‘We’re jinxed, that’s all I’m saying. It’s—’
‘Detective Constable Duncan Fraser: hud yer wheisht!’
He made a dying-frog face. ‘All right, all right.’ Then pulled into a small lay-by at the side of the road, opposite Moncuir Park. ‘We’re here.’
Should think so too.
Lucy slipped the paperwork back in its folder and stuck the thing under her arm. ‘Better grab a torch from the boot.’
‘Ah...’
‘You did remember to bring torches, didn’t you?’
‘Erm...’ A sickly smile slithered its way onto that frog face. ‘Define “remember”.’
‘Oh yes, I’m so glad I took you with me.’ She climbed out of the pool car and into the sunshine. Turned her back on the park, with its duck pond and its trees and bushes and playground, marched across the road, and waded into the long, damp, yellowing, September grass. Seed heads sticking to her jeans, standing out against the darkening denim as last night’s rain seeped through the material.
Making for the woods.
The Dunk huffed and puffed to catch up, struggling to light a cigarette as he jogged after her. The grass might’ve been thigh-high on Lucy, but it was way up over his waist. He took his first puff, then held his elbows out at shoulder-height, hands curled inwards in front of his chest, as if he was doing a crap velociraptor impersonation, voice mumbled around his fag. ‘Well, how was I supposed to know we’d need a torch?’
‘You’re right, I’m sorry, Dunk, I’m being unfair.’
He smiled at that. ‘It’s OK, Sarge, we—’
‘After all, it’s not as if Abby Geddes’s remains were found in an abandoned building, buried way, way deep in the woods, is it? How could you possibly have guessed we’d need some way of actually seeing things when we get there? I mean, what are you, psychic?’
The chunk of waste ground ended in a riot of jagged brambles and bracken — glistening and dark green. Lucy stopped just in front of it.
Peching and heeching like a broken bellows, his black outfit clarted in grass seed and bits of leaves, the Dunk drooped to a halt at her side. ‘Sorry about the torch, Sarge.’
She patted him on the back. ‘Don’t worry, you can make it up to me by forging a path through that lot.’ Pointing at the soggy bracken.
‘Oh’ — he drooped even more — ‘arse...’ Then groaned and stomped into the undergrowth.
Gnarled grey tree trunks as far as the eye could see. Which probably wasn’t all that far, given how closely packed everything seemed to be, here in the depths of Moncuir Wood.
The sun was a distant memory, shut off by a serrated canopy of pine and greasy oak, leaving everything shrouded in a gloom that cut visibility to twenty, maybe thirty feet? That dark-brown scent of mouldering vegetation tainting everything as the leaf litter broke down. Cold, too. It might’ve been a brisk September day, out there in the real world, but in here every breath turned into thin wisps of white as Lucy and the Dunk lumbered their way through the never-ending ranks of trees.
‘Urgh...’ His face had a shiny pink quality to it that suggested an imminent heart attack or aneurism. ‘God, how... how much... further?’ He slumped against an old Scots pine and dug the cigarettes out of his leather jacket again. Sparking up. Sagging as a cloud of smoke headed for the canopy of leaves. ‘You know this is a complete waste of time, right?’
Probably been going round and round in circles for the last half-hour. Be lucky if they weren’t discovered in six months’ time, wearing nothing but squirrel fur and mud. Assuming, of course, she hadn’t eaten the Dunk by then. Not that he looked particularly appetizing, with his sweaty-beetroot face sooking on a fag as if it was the only thing keeping him upright.
‘Would it kill you to at least pretend to give a toss?’
‘Oh come on, Sarge, you know and I know this whole thing’s a disaster. We’re back to square one, because we haven’t got a clue how to catch the Bloodsmith.’ He howched up a gobbet of something brown and spat it out. ‘Seventeen months, chasing our tails, going over the same ground, getting nowhere’ — waving his cigarette at the woods — ‘I’m bored with it. Aren’t you bored?’
‘He’s killed five people, Dunk.’
‘I know, but... Pffff.’ A wee shifty squirm as he looked the other way, not meeting her eyes. ‘Been thinking: maybe we should jump ship before this whole thing collapses? Cos that’s why they dumped the whole thing on DI Tudor, isn’t it? The High Heidyins want a scapegoat for when they declare Operation Maypole a useless farce, and it’ll be on our permanent records too. Failure, failure, failure.’