There was no body in sight.
‘Bathroom,’ O’Neill said firmly. ‘That’s where the Dahlia was supposed to be cut up.’
She caught the look that passed between Kuhlmeyer and Bryant, wondering what the hell they were now in the middle of, and ignored it.
Salgado moved first, striding towards the white bathroom door and edging it open. He knew before it swung fully back but his eyes and his flashlight confirmed what his nose and his cop sense was telling him.
‘Oh fuck.’
The body was propped up against the far wall, half sitting, half toppled towards the floor, its dark silhouette in stark contrast to the flash-lit, white-tiled wall and floor. The head was slumped forward, concealing the face. But dead, unmistakeably dead.
O’Neill was by his side, staring, trying to make sense of it. Kuhlmeyer and Bryant looked over the detectives’ shoulders but then edged back, leaving them to it, not needing another stiff to fill up their week with paperwork.
The 7060s picked out the dirty, rusty spatter of old blood marking the floor and walls, as if framing the portrait. The hands were on the floor, palms upturned, as if pleading for help that never came.
The urgency had seeped suddenly from Salgado and O’Neill. No point in rushing for the dead. Instead, it demanded the care and attention of sombre, dispassionate consideration. They both knew the first thing that was obvious about the body in front of them, but she said it aloud anyway.
‘Whoever it is, it’s not our guy. Different clothes, not as tall. And this has been here for months. Dead for months.’
The corpse was decomposed in shades of purple and grey, held together by the clothes the man died in. They’d both seen more than enough bodies to be able to gauge it without needing CSI to do it for them.
‘Not our missing guy,’ Salgado agreed. ‘But it’s Garland’s doing. Has to be.’
They both looked around the bathroom, looking for where they should step and where they shouldn’t, looking for anything that might help them.
‘Camera!’
O’Neill saw it first, or got the word out first, neither of them were sure. But there it was: a small wall-mounted video camera behind them, pointing directly at the man on the floor. Salgado stepped back and examined it. Cheap, mass produced, easily rigged up, and doubtless once relaying its feed straight to Ethan Garland’s computer and to his partner in the UK.
She walked over and crouched by the body, professionalism overcoming anything else. The corpse was restrained by chains tying it to the radiator that it was propped up against. The set-up so similar, the end so predictable.
She began to dip her head to see if she might recognise the corpse’s face, when she noticed the top of the head in more detail and stopped fast. The ripped skin, the dis-coloured pate, the awful patchwork of decay.
She turned to look back at her partner, easing the mask from her mouth and catching her breath.
‘From the other side of the room, I thought this guy was bald,’ she told him quietly. ‘He isn’t. It’s the colours of decomp that’s obscured it, but he’s been scalped.’
Salgado reached out and pushed the bathroom door closed. There was some news that didn’t need to be shared too widely.
‘The last piece of Garland’s collection. Well . . .’ he hesitated as he tried to see a plus side, ‘ . . . at least we have a DNA sample already typed up in Elvis’s lab waiting to match to this poor sap, whoever he is.’
O’Neill shook her head at him. ‘It’s not the last piece. There’s another whole body out there.’
CHAPTER 46
The accountant Ian Bryce worked for a charity named Meal Angels. Narey and Wells waited for him outside the warehouse on Dunn Street in Dalmarnock as he arrived to deliver meals to the elderly.
The man denied knowing the name Matthew Marr, and initially denied even being in Carstairs. He got angry and defensive, insisting that he hadn’t been a patient there, that he’d only been there for ‘unnecessary tests’.
They pushed him on knowing Marr. Bryce got increasingly anxious and angry but maintained he’d never heard of him.
Giannandrea traced John Paul Kepple from a rented flat above a shop on Kirkintilloch Road in Bishopbriggs to a forwarding address in Rosevale Street in Partick. The young woman who lived there had been in the flat for three years and didn’t know who’d been there before her. The landlords said they’d no record of a John Paul Kepple ever renting one of their properties.
Kepple had gone off the grid.
Martin Geir, the cat killer, had seemingly disappeared too. He wasn’t on the electoral roll, wasn’t receiving any benefits and wasn’t paying tax. Narey put in a call to a reporter on the East End Echo, a weekly local paper, and prayed he’d be able to help. Gerry Grady said Geir had moved from Bridgeton to Dennistoun but had to get out of Dodge one more time when people found out who he was. That time, he did a bunk in the middle of the night and no one knew where he’d gone. Grady promised to do his best to find out on the half promise of getting a story.
Derek Solomon and Colin McPake turned out to be the easiest of the six profiles to track down and eliminate from their enquiries. Solomon was in Barlinnie and had been for the past six months. McPake was also in the Bar-L, halfway through an eighteen-month sentence for aggravated assault.
There was no sign of Fraser Anderson. Nothing on the electoral roll, no council tax listing, and no mention of him on the local crime system or the Criminal History System since his release from Carstairs. Like Kepple, like many other people with severe mental health problems, he seemed to have dropped off the grid.
His ex-wife, Erin, now lived in Paisley. She was pencil-thin with short blonde hair and gave off a nervous anger. When Narey and Giannandrea said who they were, the woman had no doubt who they wanted to talk about.
‘What’s he done?’
‘We don’t know that he’s done anything,’ Narey told her. ‘We are just anxious to find him, and as quickly as possible.’
‘I can’t help you. If I could, I would, believe me. If you find him you could maybe tell Child Maintenance. They’ve supposedly been looking for the bastard for three years. Although I don’t think they’ve tried very hard.’
‘You haven’t heard from him?’
Her face twisted. ‘The kids get a Christmas card. That’s if I don’t recognise the handwriting and rip the thing up before they can open it.’
‘Do you know where the cards are sent from? From the postmark?’
‘Glasgow. They’ve always been sent from Glasgow. But I know he’s here. People have seen him. Every few months someone will say “Oh, I saw Fraser on Buchanan Street”, or “You’ll never guess who I saw on the subway”. It’s mostly been city centre so I’ve no idea if he’s West End, south side, wherever. I’m told he looks shit though, so that’s good news.’
‘When was the last time he was seen?’
Erin reached for a packet of cigarettes and fumbled one out. ‘My cousin Eleanor was in Glasgow, in the Buchanan Galleries, maybe six weeks ago. She was going up one of the escalators and he was going down the opposite one. He saw her but just looked at her, no hello, no expression, nothing.’