Candles and Roses Read Online Free PDF Page B

tended to wander round the room, poking his nose into files that were none of his business and sniffing disapprovingly at what he found there. She knew he did it only to wind her up, but that didn’t stop her being wound up. On the whole, it was easier to deal with McKay on his own territory, but she had the comms team on her back wanting a line on the Clootie Well killing, as the local media had inevitably dubbed it.
    ‘A few things,’ McKay said. ‘We’ve got the path report. Seems there’s evidence of poisoning by inhalation. Good old fashioned chloroform, would you believe?’
    ‘I thought chloroform didn’t work,’ Grant said. ‘All those old whodunits where the villain holds a handkerchief to the victim’s mouth and the poor wee thing drifts off into la-la land.’
    ‘According to Doc Green, it certainly doesn’t work like that,’ McKay said. Dr Jacquie Green was the senior forensic pathologist the local force used for its post-mortems. ‘Bloody nasty stuff. You’re more likely to kill the victim than just knock them out. Liver damage, the lot.’
    ‘And in this case?’
    ‘She thinks the dosage might have been fatal in itself. But looks like the killer also made a point of suffocating the presumably unconscious victim, just to make sure. Kept the chloroform-soaked cloth, or whatever it was, pressed over the poor lassie’s mouth for as long as it took. There’s burning to the skin around the mouth. Jockie Henderson missed that.’ The last said with some degree of satisfaction.
    ‘So what’s this telling us?’
    ‘We’re dealing with a killer. Chloroform suggests pre-meditation and serious intent. If the aim was just to render the victim unconscious, there are easier and less risky ways of doing that.’
    ‘What else do we have?’
    ‘Doc reckons the body had been in the ground for maybe four or five days before it was found. Death probably occurred within the forty-eight hours before that. So the time of death in within the last week or so. She can’t be much more precise than that. The body was moved after death, but that doesn’t tell us much, given we know she wasn’t killed where she was found. Could have been moved one mile or several hundred.’
    ‘No ID yet?’ Grant asked.
    ‘Not yet. There are no recent local missing persons that fit the bill. We identified a couple of other recent possibles in Scotland, but neither panned out. There are a few other UK cases we’re following up, but nothing very promising. We’re still waiting on fingerprints and DNA.’
    ‘What about the flowers and candles?’
    ‘Nothing much. None of the local florists has any recollection of any unusual purchases, so it looks like they were just bought piecemeal from supermarkets and the like, as we thought. The vases are a bog-standard cheap model sold by various garden centres and DIY stores. Same with the candles and candlesticks.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘Not so’s you’d notice,’ McKay said, gloomily. ‘We’ve considered the tattoos, but again they’re just standard off-the-shelf designs. We’ve checked with a couple of the local tattoo parlours and they reckon they could have been done anywhere. There’s nothing traceable.’
    ‘OK,’ Grant said, ‘so where from here?’
    ‘If the DNA and fingerprints can’t help us, I reckon we need a media appeal. Unless we know who the victim is, we can’t make much progress.’
    ‘The other question,’ Grant said, ‘is why the Clootie Well. Did it have some significance? And if the killer’s not local, how did they know about it?’
    ‘That place attracts nutters,’ McKay said, ‘like crap attracts journalists. But, aye, you’re right. The place isn’t exactly world famous. Suggests some local knowledge. But could just be someone who’s been up here on holiday. I’ve heard tell there are people who do that.’
    ‘OK, I’ll agree some sort of holding line with comms. There’s a lot of media interest in this, so we need to give them