They passed another room, a second bar by the look of it, that defied walking through as the floor was swamped by plaster, breeze blocks and strip lighting. Titch led the way down to the cellar, singing ‘My Way’ in a Donald Duck voice as he went.
They were aware of a difference as soon as they entered the room. The chill was instant and obvious. The cellar smelled too, big time. Sinky wasn’t sure if it was either or both of those that made him suddenly uneasy or the fact that they were tripping into the bowels of this hellhole.
The ceiling was lower, the floor no less of an obstacle course. The torch from Titch’s phone picked out five beer barrels dotted round the floor.
‘Don’t suppose there’s actually gonna be beer in those? I could go another drink right now.’
‘Nae chance, Sinky. They’d have disappeared long ago if there was. Okay, ghosties. Come out, ya bams, wherever you are.’
Sinky didn’t appreciate the daring of unknown demons as he ducked low to avoid a strip of something hanging loose from the low ceiling. They were venturing further into the corner, the walls whitewashed and exposed under torchlight. As he lowered his head, he saw something pass through the sweep of his own phone’s beam – his brain immediately told him it shouldn’t be there. A brief flash of limb and flesh that made his sphincter twitch and his heart hit the concrete floor.
‘Holy fuck!’
‘Calm down, Sinky. There’s no such . . .’
Titch saw it too and dropped his phone in shock. He fell to his knees and scrambled around to pick it up. Together they shone their lights into the corner.
There, on the cellar floor, next to a beer barrel, lay a body.
Naked. Discoloured. Female. Dark hair falling onto purpled shoulders.
Titch took two steps backwards and fell on his arse. Sinky moved back and offered a hand to help him up, never taking his eyes off the body even though he desperately wanted to.
‘Ghosts, you said, Titch.’
‘No, no. I said no ghosts. And that’s no a ghost.’
‘Too right it’s not. Although if it starts to fucking move and wail, I’m running right through that wall.’
Titch was back on his feet and they edged closer. It wasn’t courage, or even alcohol that took them forward, it was something neither could quite explain. They just wanted to see.
Whatever they’d expected, whatever they’d feared seeing the body from the other side of the cellar, the close-up reality was worse. The two men stopped and stared, not believing what they saw.
The body had been cut in half just above the waist. Like a magic trick. Like a horror movie. Like a nightmare.
‘Holy fuck.’
‘Aye.’
‘We phone the cops, Titch?’
‘Oh fuck aye. But let’s get the fuck out of here first.’
CHAPTER 9
When the phone rang, Narey sat straight up in bed and grabbed it before it could ring again. The clock said it was 4.07. She’d done this long enough to know that good news never rang in the middle of the night.
Tony stirred next to her but he just pulled the cover over his head rather than ask what was going on. His own experience told him it was something he didn’t need to know about.
‘Yes?’
‘DI Narey? Sergeant Iain Finnie at Barloch Street.’
‘Yes, Sergeant?’
‘I’m told you’re the person to talk to about the Eloise Gray case.’
If she’d still been half asleep, that had changed in those two words. ‘Yes. What’s happened?’
‘Two men had been crawling about in the old Highland Fling pub in Springburn earlier this morning. We took the call. They were exploring the place for some daft reason. Anyway, they found a body in the cellar.’
‘Eloise?’
‘Certainly looks that way. One of our boys, Kevin Waddle, he made the connection and pulled up her mispers sheet. Everything fits. Height, build, hair colour. Clothes and shoes that she was last seen in.’
‘Any jewellery?’
‘Yes. Silver ring on her right index finger. Moon necklace.’
‘It’s her.’
‘We think so, ma’am. SOCO is there now and they will take DNA. But we’re sure it’s her.’
‘I’ll be right there. Where’s the pub?’
‘Cowlairs Road. But, DI Narey . . . there’s something you need to know about the body.’
*
The corner of Cowlairs Road was cordoned off. An abandoned pub in an abandoned corner of the city, looking even smaller and more desolate under the early morning streetlight. Despite the hour, a few shadowy figures kept watch from the underpass a hundred yards away. Going out or going home, or having no home at all, they’d been drawn by the cop cars and the ambulance. But for that activity, the entrance to the pub would be completely overlooked and easy to enter unnoticed.
Narey showed her warrant card to the uniform on the door, standing tall in the falling rain like an unlikely bouncer on a long-shut pub. He moved aside to let her in and she saw the interior of the old bar in all its vandalised glory under the temporary spotlights.
A call like this always made for mixed emotions. She’d wanted to find Eloise from the first day of the investigation and that had become a desire to find her come what may. When you know you can’t do anything to change what’s happened, it becomes easier to accept, even hope for, the unwanted option of finding her dead. That at least offers the chance of going after the bastard who did it. Still, for all that, this wasn’t what she wanted. Not here, not now.
A constable led her through the ruins of the pub to the cellar. As soon as she stepped inside, she saw the white-washed walls bathed in light and a huddle of blue-suited SOCOs near the corner of the room. As they moved, she caught glimpses of purple-hued flesh. Eloise. Oh Jesus, Eloise.
The forensics became aware of her arrival and parted to make way for her. For a brief moment, she wished they hadn’t. The disfigurement, the decomposition, was awful, but it was clearly Eloise. She forced herself to look longer than she wanted, making sure, taking what she could from it.
The body had been posed. Her arms were positioned above her head, the elbows bent at right angles. Her legs spread apart.
‘Was she killed here?’
‘No.’ The crime scene manager was Campbell ‘Two Soups’ Baxter, his bearded jowls evident behind his mask. He was abrasive at the best of times, and this wasn’t one of those. ‘She has been moved here post-mortem, possibly quite considerably so. You will have been appraised of the dissection. It’s a technique called a hemicorporectomy. In this case, done somewhat inexpertly. Her body has been drained of blood but there’s no evidence of it within the cellar.’
‘Cause of death?’
He sighed and wobbled his head from side to side. ‘Let’s wait and see, but the cuts you can see at her wrists, relatively small as they are, may have been designed to have her bleed out. There are contusions above her wrists consistent with tie marks, so I’d suggest she was restrained and left to die slowly.’
It was unlike Baxter to make any kind of speculative offering, particularly without being asked. Narey knew this kind of savagery, particularly against a young woman, was the weak spot that allowed his humanity to show.