‘No, sir.’
Was that significant? He couldn’t say. But at least it explained the open curtains.
From the hallway, Jessie asked, ‘Where’s the master bedroom? Is that it?’
Gilchrist felt the floorboards shift as Jessie moved towards the door. He heard the click of its lock, then a sudden stillness and an ominous silence before a voice said, ‘Jesus fuck.’
Gilchrist left Siobhan’s bedroom and crossed the hallway in three strides. Taggart was standing with his back to the master bedroom, his lips clamped tight, his throat and jaw working hard to keep down the bile.
Even before Gilchrist entered the room, his mind was analysing the scene before him, telling him that it must be bad for Jessie to be standing with her hand to her mouth. But when he walked through the door, turned to face the bed, and saw what he thought must be the body of Mrs McCulloch, he realised nothing could have prepared him for just how horrific it was.
His breath left him with a gasp, and he struggled to suck air back into his lungs.
Jessie recovered first, and said, ‘I need to open the window.’
‘Leave it,’ he snapped.
She stopped, but frowned at him.
‘Just leave it. Don’t disturb the scene. Don’t touch anything.’ He glanced out the bedroom door, but Taggart was no longer there. A hard retching cough came from the bathroom off the half-landing, and Gilchrist felt his own throat constrict. Christ, he thought, we could all be queuing at the door in a minute or two.
He clenched both fists, closed his eyes, took two deep breaths, tried to ignore the bitter tang of blood and the sweet stench of raw meat that was pervading his senses. It struck him that he had not smelled anything from the upper hallway. The door must have been closed to keep the morbid guff inside. A chill ran through him, but then he heard a fan running and scanned the room. His gaze settled on the door to the en-suite bathroom.
He knew he should go and check it out, but his feet were rooted to the spot as his eyes assessed the mess before him. If no one had told him it was Mrs McCulloch, he would have been hard pressed to tell if the skinned meat was male or female. He was conscious of movement at his side, of Jessie easing away from him, edging closer to the bed, as if to study what lay upon it.
Although the bedclothes – the duvet cover, the folded blanket, the stacked pillows – were sodden with blackened blood, they seemed not to have been disturbed, other than the fact that a body lay on the bed, head missing, skin stripped to reveal bloodied musculature. And the body looked oddly slim around the waist, the stomach slack, which told Gilchrist she had been gutted. He also knew that the missing head was sure to be in the bathroom, along with the guts, the window open and the fan on full blast – he could hear it clearly now. The skin might be in there, too, laid out to dry in some kind of perverse, symbolic message.
‘You think it was him?’ Jessie asked.
‘Who?’
‘Brian McCulloch.’
Gilchrist let out another rush of air. His mind was spinning, firing away at a subconscious level, telling him that some piece or other did not fit, that it maybe even belonged in a different puzzle. He could not say what was niggling at him, only that something was not right.
His mind continued to churn, desperate to figure out what he was missing.
The children were at peace, while their mother had been decapitated, disembowelled and peeled back to the bone in the adjacent room. Surely they would have heard something? Unless they had been killed first?
But then what mother could let that happen?
Jessie walked around the end of the bed, heading towards the bathroom.
‘Don’t go in,’ he barked.
She stopped and glared at him.
‘Don’t disturb the scene,’ he repeated. Jesus Christ. Don’t disturb the scene. What were they supposed to do? Dance around on tiptoes to keep any clue intact?
Then a thought struck him. ‘Blood,’ he said.
‘There is that,’ Jessie agreed. ‘Lots of it.’
‘Exactly.’
She looked at him, puzzled, as if his ears had sprouted feathers.
‘Did you see any blood on McCulloch?’ he said. ‘Or in his car?’
She narrowed her eyes. ‘No.’
He did not need to say that whoever had killed Mrs McCulloch, and ripped her stomach open, and pulled out her guts, and hacked off her head, and skinned her, must have been splattered in the stuff. The realisation dawned behind Jessie’s eyes.
On automatic now, his mind crackling with possibilities, he walked around the end of the bed. Clotted blood formed black trails from the bed to the bathroom, marking the path of the head, the skin and the entrails. Together, he and Jessie stood at the door, facing a scene from a slaughterhouse in hell. Only then did Gilchrist understand that he had the trail of blood the wrong way round, that the skinned and headless and disembowelled corpse had been carried from the bathroom to the bed. Which was why the bedclothes were undisturbed.
He edged closer to the bathroom threshold, taking care not to stand on any blood spots or bloodied footprints, although it did strike him as odd that the footprints were noticeable by their absence. By the door frame, he noted one of the switches on the wall was in the ON position. Which would be the fan. None of the downlighters was switched on, so he made a mental note to ask the SOCOs to dust the fan switch for fingerprints.
He leaned forward and peered inside.
The bathroom was as big as Fisherman’s Cottage kitchen and dining room combined. The floor and walls were fully tiled, the ceiling covered with pre-fabricated panels as glossy as marble, and riddled with downlighters. A wet room, large enough for a party of six, filled one corner. Even from where he stood, Gilchrist could see that was where the slaughter had taken place. Its glass panels were streaked with blood. Scraps of skin, hair, and lengths of gut as thick as rope were scattered across the tiled floor, although some effort had been made to sweep them to one side. Other areas looked as if a bucket-load of blood had been spilled over them, and the walls – from floor to head height – could be a blood-spatter analyst’s training room.
‘Any thoughts?’ he asked Jessie.
‘Bring back the death penalty?’
‘Do you see her head?’
‘We should check the boot of the Jag.’
Gilchrist grimaced. ‘I don’t think he would do that.’
‘Why not? He’s not left much to chance here.’
‘The SOCOs will let us know soon enough.’
Gilchrist continued to scan the scene, trying to imagine how the events unfolded – from a killing to a disembowelling to a beheading to a skinning to a ritual placement of the body on the bed. And, as he studied the bloodied mess, he came to see some order, some logic, in the massacre. The shower had been turned on to full power in the wet room, no doubt to clear most of the victim’s blood from the assailant. Skin and guts had been swept to one side as if in an effort to clean up the mess, and the tiled floor was streaked and smeared as if someone had tried to rub it clean.
He froze for a moment as he took it all in, then said, ‘Where are the towels?’
‘In a cupboard?’
‘No. The towel rails are empty. There’s none in here.’
He waited while Jessie eyed the full-length heated towel rail on the wall next to the wet room, those on either side of the double sink, the rim of the claw-footed bathtub.
‘Which means what, exactly?’ she said at length.
‘Check the laundry basket, the washing machine, the kitchen. I’d like to see-’
‘What, you’re thinking he washed up after doing-’
‘Just do it.’ The words came out louder than intended. ‘Bloody hell, Jessie, for once in your life do something straightforward without challenging it.’
Her lips tightened and she said, ‘Yes, sir,’ before walking to the wicker laundry basket at the side of a wardrobe. She flipped back the lid, let it drop, then left the bedroom without another word.