stone dead battery. I tried the lights; the dashboard panel barely flickered. I gripped the steering wheel and my hand became enmeshed in a spider’s web that I hadn’t noticed before.
And that’s when I realised what had been out of place: those flies in the kitchen. How many flies do you expect to find in a cold house in the first week in February?
There were three other keys on the ring that fed the ignition. I pulled it out and examined them. One was long and thin, and had to be for the up-and-over, another was a Yale, and I suspected that it matched the lock I’d noticed on the side door.
The third was for a mortice lock. I returned to the back door, looking into the kitchen again as I passed the window. There were quite a few of those damn flies, especially if I counted the dead ones that lay at the foot of the pane. I tried the key; it turned, I opened the door, stepped into the kitchen . . . and that was when the smell hit me.
The geeks who post on lurid online forums say the odour of decomposing human flesh is unique; they’re wrong. In my experience, the smell of death is more subtle than that. There’s an underlying, cloying sweetness to it, but it varies with the stage of decomposition and with the shape and bulk of the person before life became extinct. The one thing that is universally accepted is that it’s horrible and you don’t want to be breathing in the molecules that create it.
I’ve asked Sarah how she copes with it; all she says is ‘mental conditioning’, and yet the same woman has repeating deodorant sprays in every bathroom in our house.
I grabbed a towel that was hanging from a hook on a cupboard door, held it over my nose and mouth and went in search of the source. All I had to do was follow the flies; the closer I got the thicker they swarmed.
I found him in the living room. Jock Hodgson had been tied to a chair; his wrists and left ankle were secured by some form of restraint that I couldn’t see properly because they were so swollen. His face was black, and his head lolled on his left shoulder; his body was distended, and his clothes stretched, by gases. He looked ready to burst; I hoped he would contain himself, literally, until I was gone.
The swelling was most obvious in his feet, for he wore neither shoes nor socks. They had been removed and lay beside him. I could guess the reason.
I backed out of there. I didn’t want to contaminate the scene, nor did I want the scene to contaminate me, any more than it had already. In the garden I drew deep breath after deep breath, and blew my nose hard, on the handkerchief from my breast pocket, yet the stink of the dead Hodgson was still with me. My suit wasn’t going to the dry cleaner, that I knew; it was bound for the incinerator.
I took my phone from its pocket inside my jacket and thumbed through my directory until I reached ‘M’. A few months before I’d probably have stopped at ‘Martin’, but in the new situation there was no guarantee that my call would be accepted. Instead I carried on to ‘McGuire’.
‘Bob,’ my friend answered on the first ring. ‘What’s up? Have you decided you need to speak to McGarry?’
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got somebody else in mind, two people in fact. My assignment for Eden Higgins has just become very complicated and very smelly. You need to send a CSI team to Dunglas Avenue, in Wemyss Bay; that and the best matched CID pair you’ve got.’ I told him who they were.
‘They’ll all be on their way inside ten minutes,’ Mario promised. ‘And I won’t be far behind them. I’ve hung around you too long, chum: I can’t stay away from a juicy crime scene either.’
Thirty-Nine
As it happened Mario beat the crime scene team to Wemyss Bay by fifteen minutes, but he trailed behind his detectives by five.
Detective Inspector Charlotte Mann and I didn’t have the best of starts to our professional relationship, the first time that we met in Glasgow. A major public figure had just been murdered, she was the senior officer attending from the Strathclyde force, and she thought I was getting in the way. But once the new reality had been explained to her,