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

mean?’
    Karen saw what he meant. In her mind’s eye, she could imagine the dark red plastic card propped against the wall, left stranded as the material of a hip pocket decayed around it. ‘Uh huh. So, what have we got?’
    ‘Two fingermarks. Probably index and middle finger.’
    OK, Karen thought. Fairly amazing. ‘What’s the quality like?’
    ‘Actually, surprisingly good. Flat surface, not handled too much. It didn’t take much processing to get them either. To be honest, I thought it would be more of a challenge.’ He looked disappointed.
    ‘Next time I’ll try and come up with something a bit more worthy of your skills.’
    Oblivious to her irony, Trevor pressed on. ‘If I had to guess, I’d say he was handed a room key at the hotel check-in. Maybe used it once then stuck it in his pocket. There’s traces of what might be a mark on the other side, possibly a thumbprint, but it’s too degraded to get anything from it.’
    ‘So, the prints you did get – have you run them?’
    ‘I input them before I went home, had them running overnight. And they came up clean on the IDENT1. So your body has no criminal record here in the UK. And that’s it, I’m afraid.’
    Good news, bad news. Karen sighed. ‘OK. Thanks anyway. Can you pass the card on to the digital forensics team? I need them to look at the magnetic strip, see if we can get any details on that.’
    ‘Already done it. I dropped it in after I’d lifted the prints.’
    ‘I’ll pop in and see what they’ve got to say for themselves. Thanks, Trevor.’
    ‘No bother.’
    Karen was halfway to the door when she stopped, struck by a thought. ‘Trevor, do the military keep fingerprint records at all?’
    He frowned. ‘What, you mean of serving soldiers? No. They print insurgents when they’re somewhere like Afghanistan, so they can check out likely lads that they pick up at checkpoints or in raids afterwards. But that’s about it.’
    ‘What about the security services? Do they print people they have working for them? I’m thinking foreign nationals.’
    Trevor’s bushy eyebrows jerked upwards. ‘Now you’re asking. I’ve never come up against anything like that. Any reason why you think your skeleton might be one of them?’
    ‘The anthro thinks his early dental work happened in the old Eastern bloc. I just wondered if he’d been working for us.’
    Trevor sniggered. ‘More likely a Polish plumber than a spook.’
    Karen sighed. ‘You’re probably right. Except why would a Polish plumber have a bullet in his brain at the top of the John Drummond?’
    An unconcerned shrug. ‘They’ve got gangsters, just like us.’
    ‘Great. That’s all I need – an excursion into East European gang-bangers,’ she groaned. ‘As if we don’t have enough home-grown hard men.’ But she made a mental note to talk to the squad who dealt with organised crime among the immigrant communities of the central belt.
    Walking through the building to the digital forensics department, Karen was struck by a dramatic view of the distant Campsie Fells. That was one of the things she loved about living in Scotland. The landscape was always butting in, showing its face in the most unexpected of places. Really, it wasn’t surprising that so many foreigners came here intending it to be a way station on their journey, only to find that they wanted to stay. Was that what had happened with the John Drummond skeleton? Had he come here for whatever transient reason then been sucked in to a different kind of life? Or had it been a life on the wrong side of the tracks that had brought him into her orbit?
    Karen pushed open the door into the reception area of the digital forensics lab. There was nobody behind the desk, but a sign instructed her to ring a bell on the wall. She’d almost given up hope when a door opened to reveal a broad-shouldered young woman in a muscle vest and magenta jeans with a pimped-up shock of platinum blonde hair and a nose stud. Karen