Perfect Silence

Happier times. There had been some. Early days when her mother had doted on her father, before her brother had left home. A day when her father had pretended it was their six-monthly trip to the dentist, only to take the family to a dog rescue centre. They had spent the afternoon cooing over every mutt before finding a scruffy little terrier forgotten in the last pen. They had called him Warrior, a sweet joke, although he had proved a fiercely faithful pet from that day on. Every day Zoey wondered if she would tire of walking, feeding and grooming him as she’d seen her friends grow bored of the neediness of animals they’d been given. Not so. Warrior had remained by her side from the age of five until she was twelve. He had slept on her bed and quieted her crying when the big girl from over the road had bullied her every day for a month until her father had a quiet word with the girl’s parents. Warrior had let her carry him around the house like a doll when she was sad. He sat on the doormat of their house Monday to Friday at half past three waiting for Zoey to walk in from school. It had always astounded her that dogs could tell the time. And Warrior had pressed his furry muzzle into her face as she’d cried when her father’s car had been hit by a vehicle containing a man with more alcohol in his bloodstream than anyone had a right to. There had been no trip to the hospital, no long farewell, only a police officer at the door, solemn of face and softly spoken. Her mother had evaporated in grief.

Eighteen silent months later her stepfather had arrived. A year later her brother had celebrated his sixteenth birthday by signing up to join the army with their mother’s consent. Zoey had hated her for it. She wondered if she would be able to find forgiveness with her last breath, but forgiveness required effort and concentration. It needed to be nourished by hope. There was none left where she was lying. Her brother’s escape had been her entrapment. There was no barrier left between Zoey and her mother’s new husband.

The fists her brother had tolerated until he could leave were turned to her. Her mother, a shard of broken china, said and did nothing. Perhaps she didn’t care. Perhaps she was only grateful the blows did not touch her. The bruises were limited in their geography. Zoey’s face remained untouched until the school summer holidays came around and then it was a free-for-all, the fear of prying teachers alleviated a while. Zoey had cried her tears into Warrior’s warm fur, and shivered into his skinny but comforting frame in her bedroom at night. Until her stepfather had found the love she had for the hound too much joy for Zoey’s life. He had declared himself allergic, and the dog food too expensive, in spite of their large house and his good income. Letting out the odd, badly faked sneeze, he had said the dog must go.

That day had been etched in Zoey’s memory like the scene from The Wizard of Oz, only Toto had not escaped from her stepfather’s clutches to return to her. Warrior was pulled from her arms as she huddled on her bed, declaring that she would die if they took him.

‘Stop making such a fuss,’ her mother had said. Those five words had been a death sentence for whatever mother-daughter bond still fluttered like a fragile butterfly in the summer of Zoey’s childhood. Her stepfather told her Warrior had gone to the dogs’ home. He would go to a loving family better suited to him, he’d lectured. Zoey sat down that night and calculated how many days it was until her own sixteenth birthday, when she could flee as her brother had. Seven hundred and two. She had marked each one down in a notebook, ready to cross off with a red pencil as she waded through them.

What a waste of a life it had been, she thought. And the horrible truth right now was that if she could have even a tiny percentage of those bruise-filled, hate-inducing days back, she would take them with a grateful heart.

By seventeen she had been living with a college friend until the girl’s mother had lost her job and couldn’t feed or house Zoey any more. She had tried and failed to study and pass exams, but the constant moving between sofas was too exhausting. In the end she had given her mother one last try. Promises had been made. They were just as swiftly broken. Fists had flown once more.

At eighteen, Zoey had been wise enough to know when to cut her losses. She had walked out into the street to shout her opinion of her stepfather to the world, publicly enough that he wouldn’t dare retaliate. Then she had taken herself and her plastic bag of clothes to a shelter she’d heard about. Sporting the bruises that were her passport inside the safe haven, she had settled down while she waited in the endless queue for social housing. Scars were examined. An offer to prosecute was made. Still Zoey couldn’t be so cruel to her mother that she could put the man who kept a roof over her head in prison. Even if he deserved it a thousand times over.

The sky came closer as she stared at the moon. A gust of wind danced through the branches of the trees above her, scattering a sheet of golden leaves over her body. A many-legged creature skittered over her neck, but Zoey didn’t mind. No point flinching now. In a while, all she would be was bug food. The road was long and straight, unadorned by regulatory white lines. She was in the countryside, then. The next car might not pass until morning. It would be an awful discovery for the poor driver, Zoey thought. Imagine starting Monday morning with such a monstrosity. That was if the car didn’t run over her.

The last seven days of her life had begun with a mistake. How many times were children told not to get too close to a car asking for directions? She had been distracted, wondering what to cook for dinner as she made her way to the local supermarket in Sighthill. Zoey hadn’t noticed the car following her, although she knew now that it had been. There had been no sixth sense as she’d cut through a car park between tenements. It hadn’t occurred to her that the man who wanted to know how to get to the zoo might have a large knife up his sleeve, ready and waiting to poke into the side of her neck. Get into the car or bleed out in the parking lot, had been her options. She wished she’d chosen the latter in hindsight. It would all have come out the same in the end.

In the passenger seat, knife pointed into her chest, he had told her to put on handcuffs. Her hands had shaken so badly that she hadn’t been able to close the locks until the fourth attempt. Just rape me, she’d thought. Just get whatever this is out of your system. Use me, then let me go. But let me live. Please let me live. I crossed so many days off in red pen. It’s not fair for me to die now. The man had driven her further away, beyond the scope of roads she recognised as she lay across the rear seat. No bravery had been lacking. She’d slipped a foot under the door handle and tried to prise it open, only to find the child locks engaged. Dark windows at the rear of the vehicle had ruined her chances of waving for help. Even attempting to hit the man over the head with her bound hands had won her nothing but a contemptuous laugh and an elbow in her eye.

‘Please don’t kill me,’ she’d said, as they’d finally pulled up into an overgrown driveway.

‘I’m not going to,’ he’d said. ‘But you’ve been a bad girl.’

‘What?’ she’d asked, her mouth dry with fear and the shameful knowledge that her bladder had allowed its contents to run away, even while the rest of her couldn’t.

‘I need you to say it,’ the man had said calmly. ‘You’ve been a bad girl, haven’t you?’

‘You’ve got the wrong person,’ Zoey had replied. ‘I don’t know who you think I am, but I’m not bad. I’ve never hurt anyone. If you let me go, I promise I won’t say a word. I won’t get you into trouble.’

‘But you are a bad girl,’ the man said. ‘You’re disrespectful. You’re uncaring. You only ever think about yourself. Say it.’

‘I’m not,’ Zoey had cried, slinking away from him in the back seat. ‘I’m not bad. You don’t know me.’

At that, the man had climbed out of the front seat and opened the rear door. He was tall. His close-set eyes were such a dark shade of brown that Zoey couldn’t discern pupils from irises. He smelled. As he leaned over her, grabbing a handful of hair to wrench her off the backseat, she caught the whiff of rotten matter.

‘I’ll do whatever you want. You can … you can have sex with me. I won’t fight you. If you want me to be a bad girl for you then I can be. Okay? I can be whatever you want,’ she had whispered, turning her face away as he pulled her to stand against him.

‘You see? How many seconds did it take for you to show me exactly what you are? Say it to me,’ he said.

‘I’m a bad girl,’ Zoey had complied, as he’d grabbed a handful of hair and marched her along the driveway towards a cluster of trees at the rear of the garden. The freedom with which he’d paraded her had signalled the end of hope. There could be no one around to notice what he was doing if he was so confident that they wouldn’t be seen.

‘Touching her is against the rules,’ he had muttered as they walked. ‘No touching. None at all.’

She had lifted her head to peer over the boundary bushes. Not a building in sight save for the one she was destined to enter. No one to hear her scream.

An owl hooted in the trees above her. Zoey had always loved owls. A snuffling sound came from the verge beyond her line of sight. It’s Warrior, she thought. Warrior’s coming to sit with me, and I’ll be with Daddy again. Nothing to be scared of any more. The stars reflecting in her eyes went dark. Edinburgh’s autumn was set to be long and cold.

Chapter Two (#ub69f8a1f-fa1d-583b-a431-2132bef6c32e)

Detective Inspector Luc Callanach brought his car to a halt on the verge of Torduff Road. A pair of curious horses watched passively over a six-bar gate as blue flashing lights destroyed the early morning peace. Pulling a hoodie over his t-shirt, he checked the time. Five thirty in the morning. The crime scene investigators were in the process of erecting floodlights around the scene to make up for the lack of sunlight. The weak October rays wouldn’t touch the ground until six thirty at the earliest. DCI Ava Turner pulled her car up behind his and climbed out in sports gear that had already seen a work out that morning.

‘Do you never sleep?’ he asked, as they fell into step together.

‘Is it a French thing, using a question as a greeting? Because in Scotland we tend to say hello first. Surely you’ve been here long enough to know that by now. What do we know about the victim?’ she replied, rubbing her hands together furiously.

‘I haven’t seen her yet,’ he said, peeling off his gloves and handing them to Ava. ‘Put those on, it’s freezing out here. It’s quite a long way up the lane. The route’s long and narrow, heading south towards the reservoir, so the squad have sealed off a full mile section. Scenes of Crime are already getting started. I gather it’s a single victim, young adult female.’

Ava showed a uniformed officer her identification as they ducked under yellow tape. ‘The usual pathologist, Ailsa Lambert, is on leave at the moment, so who’s looking after the body?’ she asked.

‘I am,’ a man replied from behind them. ‘Jonty Spurr. It’s nice to finally meet you in person, DCI Turner.’ He held out his hand, smiling. ‘Luc, it’s been a while. I would say it’s good to see you again, but not under these circumstances.’

‘Jonty,’ Luc replied. ‘What are you doing in Edinburgh?’

‘Stepping in for Ailsa while she looks after her sister. Had a stroke, I gather. I have a good deputy in Aberdeen, but you’re short-staffed here, so I’m on a temporary transfer. Shall we go and visit the young lady who’s waiting for you?’ he asked, handing them suits, boots and gloves. As they dressed, the forensics team erected an awning beneath the trees a few metres ahead of them, and the sound of a generator sent birds flying from the nearby woods. ‘Sorry about that, seems incredibly loud out here,’ Jonty said. ‘The body is getting covered in leaves and water droplets, hence the tent. You’ll need to keep your distance. There’s a substantial area covered in blood and we don’t want to disturb the trail. Have either of you had breakfast yet?’

‘Only coffee,’ Ava said. ‘Why?’

‘I’ve had two of my people lose their stomach contents so far this morning. We don’t need any more distractions,’ Jonty replied.

‘We’ve both been doing this long enough to keep our lids on,’ Ava said. ‘But thanks for the warning.’

They trod slowly forward on the white matting path beneath the canvas roof, avoiding stepping to either side and contaminating whatever articles of evidence might be lying there. Dr Spurr went ahead of them and hunkered down next to a small mound that was covered by a forensics sheet. He lifted it slowly, as if trying not to wake a baby.

Callanach looked away. Ava covered her mouth with a hand. There were crime scenes, and then there was carnage. Whatever had happened to the young woman on the ground fell firmly into the latter category.

‘Luc, call the station. Ask them if they have a young woman listed as missing in the last forty-eight hours. Just say between sixteen and twenty, long brown hair, red-brown dress. No other description for now,’ Ava instructed Callanach.

‘It’s not,’ Jonty said.

‘Not what?’ Callanach asked.

‘It’s not a coloured dress,’ Jonty replied. He slid a gloved hand under the girl’s left shoulder to raise her a few inches off the floor, exposing a small section of the dress behind her shoulder blade. The bright white patch of cotton glowed in the floodlights.

Ava took in a sharp breath. ‘It’s a white dress?’ she muttered. ‘How the fuck did she …’

Jonty answered the question by raising the hem up over the girl’s thighs and abdomen. A massive section of skin had been cut from her stomach, the raw sections of flesh curling back where her body had begun to dry out. Blood was crusted over the whole of her lower half, washing down her legs and her bare feet.

‘That’s not all,’ Jonty said. ‘There’s another equally large section of skin cut from her back. Her underwear was missing when we found her. I was preserving the scene for you to see it first-hand.’ He stood up, covering the girl again as he pointed along the road in the opposite direction from which they’d come. ‘She crawled several metres along the road. There are pieces of skin in the tarmac, which we believe came from her hands and knees. The bleeding increased as she crawled. We’ve found two large wads of wound packing that must have dropped away from her, both completely blood-soaked. Whoever left her here gave medical assistance initially, then abandoned her to die where she almost certainly wouldn’t have been found until it was too late.’

They stood silently, contemplating the scene for a few moments. A tractor could be heard starting up in the distance. The wind rushed noisily over the expansive reservoir to the south. It was a place of extraordinary beauty, just a few miles south of the Edinburgh City Bypass, and now it was home to a ghost.

‘She was on her back,’ Ava said. ‘You think she collapsed from her knees and rolled?’

‘No, she’d have stayed face up if she’d simply collapsed. There’s not enough of a gradient for gravity to have moved her. I believe she stopped crawling and decided to rest. Or gave up hope. She’d have been delirious with blood loss and shock by then. Can I move the body now? I don’t want it to degrade any further before I start the post-mortem,’ Jonty said.

‘One more look,’ Ava said. ‘You were right about the breakfast, Jonty. Every time I think my years in the force have hardened me, something new comes along.’