A Song for the Dying. Stuart MacBride

and their rancid mother’s picked the place clean, leaving dirty big footprints everywhere. And why, oh why, oh why, didn’t they put down a walkway? It’s all compromised. How am I supposed to work like this?’ He turned around, doing a slow one-eighty, left the cordoned-off area, then stomped and crackled away into the woodland.

      So much for Jacobson’s hand-picked, decades of experience, top of their game, experts.

      I ducked under the tape marking off the access path and scrunched through the knee-high grass towards the inner cordon. Stopped. Looked back to where Alice was standing with her arms wrapped around herself. ‘You coming?’

      ‘Aren’t we supposed to stick to the authorized path?’

      ‘You heard Huntly. Operation Tigerbalm have tromped all over it with their size elevens. There’s nothing left to compromise.’ I went back to wading through the frosty grass. Paused at the line of tape. Opened the folder and pulled out the photos.

      They were the same ones Jacobson had given me in the Range Rover, the colours a lot more vibrant in the daylight.

      It took a little back and forth, but eventually I found where the photographer must have stood to take the first couple of shots. I stood in the same place, holding the pictures out.

      Claire Young’s head lay pointing back towards the path we’d started on, her skin pale and veined like marble.

      ‘She died somewhere else …’

      Alice hadn’t moved, still hiding behind the blue-and-white line. ‘What?’

      ‘I said, she didn’t … Will you get your backside over here?’

      I pointed as Alice picked her way across to the deposition scene. ‘There’s not enough blood. He slit her open, stitched a doll inside, and sewed her up again. Ground should be saturated with it. And the positioning’s wrong too.’

      ‘But we know the Inside Man has an operating room, it was on the DVD and—’

      ‘Supposed to be keeping an open mind, remember? And Unsub-Fifteen didn’t drag her here from the car park either, he carried her. Otherwise there’d be drag marks on the path.’ I planted my feet apart and hefted an imaginary Claire Young’s dead body up onto my shoulder. ‘So: you’ve got her in a fireman’s lift. You stagger down the path, till you think you’ve gone far enough that no one will see you from the car park. You don’t dump her at the side of the path, do you? No, you strike out at ninety degrees, put some distance between you and the path. Then you dump her.’ I mimed it, tipping the body off my shoulder and onto the grass. ‘Her head would be pointing that way, towards the woods, not away from them.’

      ‘Well … maybe he turned around and then dumped her body?’

      Possible.

      Then again, we’d already established that Professor Huntly couldn’t be as daft as he looked.

      He was still crashing about out there, breaking branches and singing what sounded like opera to himself.

      Alice picked at her satchel. ‘Ash, the big car chase … You ended up all covered in glass and blood and you broke your wrist and your ribs – I looked it up in the case file – but it doesn’t say why the Inside Man wasn’t all bashed up in the crash.’

      ‘Luck? Angle of collision? Not having a moron like O’Neil behind the wheel? How should I know?’ I put the photos back in the folder. ‘Listen, once we’ve dropped Rain Man back at the Postman’s Head, I need to run a little errand.’

      Alice took a sudden interest in the path. ‘Oh.’

      ‘Nothing important. Just need to pop in on an old friend.’

      ‘Right …’

      ‘You can stay in the car if you like, I probably won’t be long.’

      ‘Ash, do you think we could talk about what happened with you and Mrs Kerrigan, I mean I know you’re not—’

      ‘There’s nothing to talk about. What happened, happened; there’s nothing I can do to bring Parker back.’

      ‘Ash, it’s perfectly normal to—’

      ‘She had him shot twice in the head, then framed me for it. What’s normal about that?’

      Nothing.

      Silence.

      And then Huntly was back, stumbling out of the woods a good twenty yards further down than where he’d gone in. ‘Behold!’ He held a small digital camera aloft. ‘The Mighty Bernard Huntly has returned.’

      Oh, lucky us.

      He turned back towards the woods. Then froze. Looked over his shoulder at me. ‘Well, don’t just stand there – come, witness my brilliance.’

      ‘Gah …’ Alice stumbled, staggered forwards a few paces and thumped into a tree. ‘This is stupid.’

      The forest floor was rutted, littered with roots and fallen branches. Dark with rotting pine needles and the brittle bones of dying ferns. Heady with the smell of earth and decay. Cold enough to make our breath fog as we picked our way deeper into the woods.

      Huntly kept going, ducking under the jagged thicket of branches. ‘On the contrary, it’s infinitely sensible.’

      She lowered her voice to a mutter. ‘Infinitely stupid, more like.’ Then back to full volume again. ‘There’s no way the killer came this way – there’s no path. How would you carry a body through all this? It’d get snagged in the branches, you’d drop it, you’d leave a big trail of snapped stuff and my hair keeps getting caught on these horrible twigs. Gahh!’

      Huntly smiled back at her. ‘You are, of course, perfectly correct. We’re wading through the thicket here precisely because Unsub-Fifteen didn’t. There’s a track, ten foot to our right, that we’re walking parallel to. I don’t want either of you treading in any evidence.’

      He shoved his way into a clump of broom and disappeared. The gap snapped closed again, dark green tendrils shivering behind him, seedpods rattling and angry.

      Alice stopped. Stared at the bushes. Then stared at me. ‘I’m not a violent person. But if I look the other way, can you break his legs for me?’

      I hauled a handful of broom back, making a gap. ‘Put your hood up, it’ll be fine.’

      She did. Sighed. Then lowered her head and pushed her way into the bushes, setting the rattling going again.

      Three, two, one. The branches snatched at my hair and shoulders, as I clambered in after her, ducking and weaving through the thicket, following the sound of swearing.

      More rattling, and the bush opened out at the bottom of a ditch. Damp earth squelched beneath my feet, slippery as I scrambled up and onto a grass verge.

      A road stretched away left and right, disappearing into the woods. Ten or twelve yards from where I’d emerged was a bus shelter, alien and battered beneath the reaching claws of more pine trees. Graffiti tattooed the phone box next to it – a sickly, twisted thing with a buckled door and half the Perspex missing. Snakes of soot curled up the remaining panes, the plastic warped and pitted by heat.

      Huntly stood in the middle of the road, hands on his hips, a grin stretching his stupid little moustache wide. ‘Well? What did I tell you?’

      Alice pulled a burr of pine needles from her hair. ‘… just washed it this morning …’

      I stopped, twenty feet from the bus shelter. ‘So you’re saying the killer took the bus here, hauled the dead girl over his shoulder, and stomped off into the woods? Do dead bodies have to pay full fare, or do they count as luggage?’

      A sigh. ‘You may mock, but what about this …?’ He made his way around to the back of the bus shelter, giving the side a wide berth, and pointed. ‘See?’

      I