Dark Flight Read Free

the back alley, which involved climbing a wall. According to Bill there were no signs of a forced entry. So he had a key, or both doors were unlocked. There was no back garden, just a shared area of grass with a wooden bench. If the child or assailant ran out of the front door, then there could be blood on this path somewhere.
    But the path proved to be clear. Her only reward for a careful search was a wad of chewing gum just outside the gate.
    Chrissy appeared at the front door, pulled down her mask, and inhaled deeply. ‘The old woman was incontinent. The carpet’s reeking.’
    ‘Anything else?’
    ‘Someone pissed on the body.’
    ‘You’re sure?’
    ‘I’m sure.’
    ‘Her attacker?’
    ‘Who else would piss on an old woman?’
    Drugs and their metabolities were often detectable in urine for longer periods than in the blood. If the attacker was high on something, they would find evidence of it in his urine.
    ‘McNab wants a word.’
    ‘Right.’ Rhona tried to keep her face expressionless. The attempt wasn’t lost on Chrissy. Not many people knew that piece of Rhona’s history and she wanted it kept that way.
    ‘He’s in the hut.’ Chrissy indicated the mobile crime scene office set up across the road.
    ‘Okay. I’m finished in the kitchen anyway.’
    ‘Ten minutes, then we go for a drink?’ Chrissy suggested.
    Rhona stripped off the suit, boots and gloves, composing herself as she did so. DS Michael McNab. A moment of madness a couple of years back that had lasted three months. Her dad had died and she’d felt like a boat without a rudder. Sleeping with McNab had made her temporarily forget the emptiness. When she broke it off, he was the one all at sea. He got angry. Tried everything to get back into her life. Rhona still felt bad that she had encouraged him to think there was more to them than sex.
    She pulled on her jacket. The spring sunshine had gone and she shivered in the cold April air.
    When she pushed open the door of the hut, she was relieved to see McNab wasn’t alone. Bill Wilson was there, in his hand a mug of coffee with skin on its surface, just the way he liked it.
    McNab had done a good job as Crime Scene Manager. Rhona congratulated him.
    Seated at a computer, he accepted the compliment in silence, an inscrutable look on his face. ‘
We
always did make a good team.’
    She ignored any hidden message in the reply and asked if there was any word on the child.
    ‘We’ve established the younger victim as Carole Devlin, the old woman’s married daughter,’ Bill told her. ‘She has a boy of six called Stephen. A neighbour says Carole often came to help her mother. She brought Stephen with her.’
    ‘So where is he now?’
    McNab shook his head. ‘We don’t know.’ He pushed a photo in a silver frame across the desk. ‘This was on the sideboard.’
    A live and animated Carole Devlin sat beside her mother on a settee. Between her knees perched a boy, wearing a blue school sweatshirt. He had the creamy chocolate-brown skin of a mixed-race child. Handsome, with big brown eyes and a cheeky grin.
    ‘Is there a dad?’
    ‘No idea. The school badge belongs to the nearby primary. DC Clark is contacting the headmistress. We have an address from Carole’s handbag that could be her own flat. It’s in Gibson Street.’
    Gibson Street was a stone’s throw from Rhona’s lab,about a fifteen-minute walk from the granny’s flat in Dowanhill Road.
    ‘We’ll know more by the strategy meeting tomorrow,’ Bill said
    ‘There’s no sign of the boy, apart from the footprint beside the body and two on the gate,’ Rhona told him.
    Bill said what she’d been thinking. ‘If the attacker took him . . .’
    Neither of them wanted to say it, but they feared the child might already be dead.
    ‘There’s something else.’
    She showed them the bagged finger bones.
    McNab examined them through the plastic, his face puzzled. ‘They look human.’
    ‘They are.’
    Bill gave a weary sigh.