‘Who did the planting?’

  ‘A specialist forestry management firm. I don’t remember what they were called, but the name might be on file somewhere. Then again, it might not. I can have a look if you want.’

  ‘I don’t, Mr Sexton. I have no role in this; I haven’t been a cop for a few years. However, I’m fairly sure that an officer by the name of Detective Chief Inspector Haddock . . .’

  ‘Sounds fishy,’ Sexton interrupted.

  ‘Don’t ever say that to him, however long you’ve been here,’ Skinner warned. ‘He’s young Cheeky’s husband.’

  ‘Ouch! Thanks for that.’

  ‘Don’t mention it, just remember it. You can call him Sauce though. He might approach you, more likely one of his officers will. If you can find or recall the name of that contractor, it would be helpful.’

  Nine

  ‘If I’d known we were coming here, I’d have fetched my clubs,’ Arthur Dorward announced. ‘I’ve heard that the course here’s a cracker.’

  ‘You’d have been wasting your time,’ Sauce Haddock told the head of the forensic team. ‘It’s closed for maintenance until April. It’s true though; off the back tees it’s championship length, and quality too.’

  ‘You play it a lot, do you?’

  ‘As often as I can. I have course privileges.’

  ‘Meaning you get on for free?’

  The young DCI beamed, and nodded.

  ‘What’s your handicap, Sauce?’ the scientist asked.

  ‘At the moment it’s two,’ he said.

  ‘Only twenty less than me.’

  ‘Yes, but I haven’t played much since the baby was born.’

  ‘Bastard.’ Dorward pulled the hood of his sterile tunic over his mop of grey-streaked red hair. ‘Okay,’ he continued briskly, ‘let’s see what we’ve got here.’

  Haddock, who had also donned disposable crime scene clothing, followed him as he stepped into the clearing. ‘Nothing’s been touched, Arthur.’

  ‘I should fucking hope not. But how do you know? Can you say that you and your pals were the first on the scene?’

  ‘Not for certain,’ the DCI admitted. ‘But I’m assuming that none of the hotel guests were here before us or the alarm would have been raised before.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Dorward countered. ‘You might look at that and not realise what it was.’

  ‘Jazz Skinner realised, and he’s twelve.’

  ‘Fine, but he’s big Bob’s son, isn’t he? It’s in his genes. Look at my boy Paul over there. He’s been on my team for less than a year, and yet he’s after my job already. Speaking of Bob, if his laddie’s here then he must be too. Yes?’

  ‘He was earlier on, but he went off somewhere.’ Haddock checked his watch. ‘He might even have left for home by now.’

  ‘Good. Most of the time he just gets in the way. As you’re doing at the moment, Sauce. Back off now and let me get the area floodlit so that my people can work properly. Who knows what clues there might be in the ground to this guy’s identity?’

  Ten

  Bob Skinner had never been a man who mixed conversation with driving. Therefore, James Andrew’s silence on the drive back to Gullane did not strike him as out of the ordinary. Mark, the older of the boys, had taken the front passenger seat as his right. As always, he was busy on his tablet, playing one of his many games. Or is he creating one? his father wondered. Even in primary school, Mark had shown an aptitude for computer programming; in secondary he was taking it to another level.

  The size of their family had dictated that he and Sarah take two cars to Perthshire; she had followed him with Seonaid, Dawn and Trish.

  They had still not arrived as Skinner stood in the kitchen studying the contents of the fridge with lunch in mind.

  ‘Dad.’

  His younger son’s call took him by surprise, he had been unaware of his presence. ‘Jazz,’ he exclaimed. ‘Are you practising stealth?’

  ‘No. I wanted to talk to you, that’s all.’

  As he read the concern that showed in the boy’s eyes and in his frown, Bob felt a wave of guilt wash over him. ‘About the thing you found in the wood?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded. ‘It’s a thing now, Dad, but it was somebody once, and somebody must have put him there. Mustn’t they? Mum said it was a man,’ he added. ‘How could somebody do that, just bury a dead body and leave him? Or did they? What if he died in the woods and the tree grew over him? Or he was climbing another one and fell?’

  ‘I wasn’t close enough to see, but I’m sure that he was put in the ground rather than being absorbed into it.’

  ‘Why?’ his son asked. ‘Why couldn’t that have happened?’

  ‘It would take years for that to happen, Jazz. It might even take longer than the forest’s been there.’

  ‘Maybe it did though,’ he insisted.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it’s not right. To kill someone is bad, even if you didn’t mean to, but if you do you should respect them, and their family. The army doesn’t do that; soldiers respect their enemies.’

  Skinner was touched by his son’s vision of the morality of warfare. ‘Sometimes an army isn’t able to show that respect,’ he explained. ‘Special Forces for example. Their operations can be in and out, if they meet resistance and someone dies . . . They might have trouble taking care of their own casualties, let alone the enemy. I hear what you’re saying, Jazz, and I’m sure that most soldiers do treat the opposition with a respect that they hope will be reciprocated. But the man you found wasn’t a soldier. I don’t know what he was or who, but I do know that he was a victim.’

  ‘How do you know that, Dad? Maybe he just died and his family couldn’t afford a proper funeral.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Skinner conceded, ‘but that would be a first as far as I’m concerned. I know through experience. When I was a policeman, I saw a couple of murder victims in graves like that: not under trees, but close to the surface, just covered over, more or less. It puzzled me at the time, and it still does. Why are they always shallow, those graves? I mean, if a person kills someone and doesn’t want him to be found, surely it makes sense to prevent that happening. If you’re going to bury someone, then make a proper job of it. Don’t just dig down a foot or so, go much deeper; it’s a grave you’re digging so do it right, go down five or six feet. Most murderers are lazy, or sloppy. At the end of the day they get themselves caught.’

  ‘What if you don’t have time to do that? Dig that deep,’ James Andrew demanded.

  ‘Then don’t kill them in the first place,’ Bob suggested wryly.

  ‘But if you have done?’ the boy persisted, looking up at him. ‘Wouldn’t it make more sense to weight the body, take it out to sea and dump it over the side? Or take it into the middle of a big loch or a reservoir, like Sauce and Noele think happened to Matthew Reid? Or in a bottomless quagmire like Oz Blackstone did to one of his bad guys.’

  ‘Who the hell’s Oz Blackstone?’

  ‘He’s a character in a book I’ve been reading.’

  Skinner frowned. ‘Maybe I should take more interest in your library, Sunshine,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ he continued, ‘it would make more sense to do something like that that if you want to make a body disappear permanently. However,’ he added, ‘that is not what Sauce and Noele think happened to Matthew. They don’t believe he was put there. They think he did it himself.’

  ‘What do you think, Dad? Is that what you told them?’

  ‘No chance,’ he chuckled. ‘I’m yesterday. They don’t listen to me any more, so I keep my opinions to myself. But since you ask, Matthew Reid is the most imaginative man I’ve ever known. His books are full of pranks and hidden twists and turns. If Matthew really wanted to do himself in, rather than just make it appear that he had, I like to think he’d have done it in a way that was far more original than anything you and I have mentioned.’

  Eleven

  Noele McClair stared at the remains in the tree roots. ‘Do we have any idea how long he’s been there, Sauce?’

  ‘I’m hoping that the estate manager will be able to give us a starting date,’ Haddock told her. ‘The gaffer paid a call on him before he left. I knew he’d get involved somehow.’ A smile appeared but only for a second. ‘It’s a bit creepy, actually. The manager’s spent his entire working life on this property and knows all its recent history. He says that this forest was planted by Grandpa McCullough to celebrate Cheeky’s birth. That makes it a little under thirty years old, and it follows that the remains go back before that.’

  ‘What was the land used for before?’

  ‘Nothing. That’s what the gaffer said. They couldn’t grow on it, and it’s too far away from the golf course to be used as a practice area.’

  ‘It’s not very accessible,’ the DI observed. ‘Bringing a body here wouldn’t have been easy.’

  ‘We don’t know that he was brought here, Noele. He might have died here.’

  ‘Been killed, you mean?’

  ‘Yes,’ Haddock said, ‘but that will need to be proved; we’re a way short of doing that. The priority is to identify him.’ He turned as the younger Dorward approached them. ‘How are you doing so far, Paul?’

  ‘My dad says to ask us when we’ve had a chance to test the material we’ve collected,’ he replied. ‘For now, if you were hoping we’d find a St Michael clothing label with a barcode, or even the guy’s name in ballpoint ink, you may forget that one. There are scraps of clothing down there, but there’s nothing identifiable. That’s how it was meant to be,’ he added. ‘Obviously . . . at least it’s obvious to someone with a basic knowledge of anatomy . . . not all of the skeleton came up when the tree blew over. We’re having to recover the rest. So far we’ve found the skull, and it appears to be intact. By that I mean there are no fractures, bullet holes or any other signs of violence that I can see. Don’t be looking to identify him from his dental records. This laddie has the best set of gnashers even my old man’s ever seen. They’re all there, every one of them and we can’t see a single filling. This is a young adult male, and Mummy must have made sure he brushed three times a day. The other remarkable truth, and here we come back to identification, is that the tips of every one of his fingers, and his thumbs, are missing. There are markings that suggest they were all sheared off. That suggests to me that whoever killed and buried young Smiler was being doubly careful. He put him deep enough not to be dug up by foxes or any burrowing animals, and he took added precautions should anything else disturb the grave.’

  ‘Farm machinery?’ McClair suggested.

  ‘For example,’ Dorward said, nodding. He raised his arms above his head and stretched his back. ‘That’s all we have for you for now. Have you got anyone else, like a bone specialist, coming to look at him?’

  ‘No,’ Haddock said. ‘Everything’s been photographed and filmed. You can start to recover the skeleton from the roots, for reassembly in Edinburgh.’

  ‘It’s going there, and not Dundee?’

  ‘Aye. Sarah’s laid claim to him. She hopes to extract DNA from the bone marrow.’

  The young scientist nodded. ‘That might be your best means of identifying him. I’ll get the team starting to untangle him. With a bit of luck, we’ll have him on the road this evening.’

  The two detectives watched him as he stepped back into the darkening woods. ‘Do you get the impression that Dorward junior enjoys giving us bad news,’ McClair asked.

  ‘Yes and it runs in the family,’ the DCI replied. ‘The only thing his father enjoys more than that is coming up with a piece of evidence that’ll lead him into the witness box. He likes to piss off CID, but he loves to showboat before a High Court jury. In this case he’s a long way off that. I told you that Sir Bob sounded out the estate manager; well, having established when the woodland was planted, he asked the man, Sexton’s his name, if he could find records that show the name of the firm that did the planting. It could be a long shot; there’s no legal need to keep company records beyond six years, but you never know. Whatever, he needs to be re-interviewed formally, for the record. I thought that Jackie Wright and young DC Benjamin might do that. Where is Tiggy by the way? I saw Jackie but not her.’

  ‘She’s still in Edinburgh,’ McClair confessed. ‘I asked her to stay behind and check something out for me.’

  Haddock frowned. ‘Something that takes precedence over a thirty-year-old murder that’s only just come to light?’

  ‘In the moment it did with me,’ she said, defensively. ‘Trust me, Sauce, please.’

  ‘I always do, Detective Inspector; I always do.’

  Twelve

  ‘How long will your people be here, Sauce?’ Mia McCullough asked. ‘Are we talking days or weeks? The hotel’s quiet just now, but we have a party of Swedish lady golfers booked in when the course reopens next month and I wouldn’t want them to be looking at a crime scene tent from their bedroom windows.’

  ‘I can’t say for sure,’ Haddock replied, warming his hands on a mug of coffee in the kitchen of the villa that Mia and Cameron had shared. ‘It depends on what they find, and on what progress we make in identifying the body.’

  ‘After all this time, will you actually be able to do that?’

  ‘I’m hoping so. DNA deteriorates as a body decomposes but there are techniques for recovery even from skeletal remains. The only thing I know for sure, thanks to your Mr Sexton, is that he’s been there for at the very least thirty years. Was he reported missing at the time? That’s a question I’ve got my DS Jackie Wright trying to answer, but it may not be that easy. She’ll have to go back to the days of the old Tayside police force. Records that far back will be on paper rather than digital. More than likely they were archived, or even destroyed, before the national force came into being.’

  ‘She could always check the Dundee Courier back issues,’ Mia suggested. ‘If somebody went missing it might have been reported. From what I’ve been told most things were in those days, even the most mundane.’

  ‘She could,’ Haddock agreed, ‘but how far would she have to go back? Like I said, he’s been there for a minimum of thirty years. It could have been a lot longer.’

  ‘Why here?’ she said. ‘That’s what I’m wondering? Before Cameron bought the estate from the old lord who owned it, he said it was the back of beyond. If I’d a body to dispose of I’d have been looking for an easier way than that.’ Her expression seemed to darken. ‘I had a young brother who became a missing person,’ she murmured. ‘Part of him was found; they reckoned that the rest went into someone’s incinerator.’

  ‘I’ve heard that story,’ the detective told her. ‘The gaffer told me.’

  She gazed at him. ‘You know, Sauce, other than him and his pal Xavi who were both around at the time, nobody’s ever made the connection between my family and me. If it broke now, I’d be tabloid fodder. “The secret past of radio star Mia Sparkles”, I can see the headlines now. It won’t, will it?’ she asked, suddenly anxious. ‘When the news of our pal under the tree hits the media, they won’t start digging will they?’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ he reassured her. ‘You’re not the owner on record of the estate. The company is, and that means Cheeky. You’re the beneficiary of the liferent that Cameron set up. When you die, it ceases to exist. If the press focus on anyone it’s more likely to be me.’

  ‘I never thought about that,’ Mia exclaimed. ‘Does that worry you? Is it even ethical for you to be in charge of the investigation?’

  ‘Frankly, I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘This has all developed very quickly. When we found the bones, I reacted instinctively. It’s my territory, East of Scotland Serious Crimes. But you’re dead right: I have a personal connection to the scene. I need to call my boss, sooner rather than later, and see what she says.’

  ‘Who is your boss?’

  ‘An ACC called Becky Stallings, based in Glasgow. I used to report direct to DCC McGuire, but the last chief, Maggie Steele, added her as an extra rung on the ladder. Lottie Mann, my opposite number in the west, reports to her as well.’

  ‘How do you get on with her, Stallings?’

  ‘I don’t really know, to tell you the truth. We haven’t had time to develop a working relationship. That said, we’re not strangers. I was on her team when I was a raw DC and she was a DI. She’d come up from the Met for personal reasons; she went back again, but Neil McIlhenney, the new chief, brought her with him. Since then I’ve only met her the once, just after Sammy Pye died and I was confirmed as DCI. When I say that I report to her it’s usually by phone or email. I get the impression that she’s become one of the Zoom generation. Cheeky says that in accountancy there’s a younger element with no real idea of what going to the office every day is like.’

  ‘Is Cheeky planning to go back,’ Mia asked, ‘after her maternity leave finishes?’

  ‘She says she is, but I’m not so sure. She’s still coming to terms with the financial maze that Grandpa left her. She may find that managing it becomes a full-time job.’

  ‘That and the baby.’

  Sauce shook his head. ‘She’s talking about having a nanny, like the Skinners have, once Samantha’s a few months older.’

  ‘Is the wee darling all right now? I was so worried about her when she had her intestinal problem. Surgery on a baby, it’s always scary.’