Read Online The Skeleton Road by Val McDermid - Free Book Online Page A

house before River was awake, taking a travel mug of strong coffee to kickstart her synapses. She could have checked out the forensic progress by phone, but she liked to eyeball the techies whenever she could. She’d always had the knack of flattering them into going the extra mile for her. And when you were working cold cases on the smallest of budgets, that extra mile could make all the difference.
    So early on a Sunday morning, there wasn’t much traffic and she made record time to the brand-new Scottish Police Authority’s Serious Crime Campus. It sat in what Karen liked to think of as Scotland’s answer to the Bermuda Triangle – the godforsaken area that lay between the M80, the M73 and the M8. It had been christened the Gartcosh Business Interchange to make it sound exciting and dynamic. It would, she thought, take more than rebranding to wipe the local population’s memory of the massive strip mill and steelworks that had employed getting on for a thousand men whose working lives had effectively ended when British Steel closed the plant in 1986. A generation later, the scars remained.
    The new building was a dramatic addition to the view. Its white concrete and tinted glass exterior looked like giant barcodes embedded in the landscape at odd angles to each other. The first time she’d seen it, Karen had been baffled, tempted to dismiss it as a piece of self-indulgence on the part of the architects. But Phil, who’d been reading about it online, had explained that it was in the shape of a human chromosome and that the barcode effect was meant to represent DNA. ‘It’s a metaphor,’ he’d said. Grudgingly, she’d accepted that since part of the building would be housing the forensic science arm of Police Scotland, there was a point to the design. She was just glad that nobody was suggesting she should work inside a bloody metaphor.
    One good thing about Sunday was the parking. The government wanted everyone to be green and use public transport to commute to work. So when new buildings went up, it was policy to create far fewer parking spaces than there were employees. According to one of Karen’s former colleagues, Gartcosh had two hundred and fifty spaces for twelve hundred employees. But those employees had mostly been relocated to Gartcosh from somewhere else in the Central Belt. And very few of those somewhere elses had public transport links to Gartcosh. ‘Some folk get to their work before seven o’clock, just to get a parking space,’ he’d told her. Others swore a lot and churned up the grass verges of the surrounding roads. It wasn’t going to change government policy, but it did make them feel better.
    Inside the building, everything was shiny and new except for the people. They were as dishevelled, nerdy and grumpy as ever. Fingerprint expert Trevor Dingwall still looked like he’d been reluctantly rousted out of a pub football game. St Johnstone FC away shirt, baggy sweat pants and oversize trainers might have looked passable on a student. On a paunchy balding beardie in his forties, they just looked depressing. Karen found him in a corner carrel in an almost deserted open-plan office, hunched over an array of tenprints.
    ‘See this job? It never ceases to amaze me,’ was how he began the conversation.
    ‘Good to see you too, Trevor. What’s on the amazement agenda today, then?’
    He pushed his glasses up his nose and peered at her. ‘How long do you reckon that body’s been up on the roof?’
    Karen rolled her eyes. Why could nobody get to the point these days? Everybody seemed determined to turn the most straightforward of conversations into performance art. ‘As things stand, the best estimate I’ve got is between five and ten years.’
    Trevor nodded sagely. ‘Like I said, amazing. The CSI said it probably started out inside a pocket, but when the fabric rotted away, it ended up leaning against the wall, at an angle. So one side was kind of protected, if you see what I