Close to the Bone. Stuart MacBride

      Dr Graham looked up at him. ‘Miss Dalrymple let me in. Hope that’s OK? Wanted to get cracking.’

      She took a Stanley knife down one corner of the box and peeled off the cardboard like the skin of an orange, exposing the blue rubbery flesh below. ‘Moment of truth. . .’ Dr Graham dug her fingers into the blue stuff and pulled – ripping it away to reveal a yellowy-white skull. Then held it up and scrubbed at it with the palm of her hand. ‘Perfect.’

      ‘This our victim? ’

      She placed the cleaned skull on a little plinth, slotting it onto a rod set into the base. ‘Resin cast. Dr McAllister wouldn’t let me use the real one for the facial reconstruction. It’s a bit of extra work, but on the plus side it no longer counts as human remains, so we can forget all that rubbish about having to be supervised by a “registered medical practitioner with five years’ experience”. . . As if I’m going to take a can opener to someone’s skull, or use it as a football.’

      Logan leaned against the cold stainless-steel surface. ‘So what’s the diagnosis? ’

      ‘Well, he’s definitely dead.’ She grinned. Then cleared her throat. ‘Sorry. I’ve mapped out the tissue depth and cut the markers, so all I need to do is apply them and I can get on with the real work. . .’ A little crease appeared between her eyebrows. ‘You didn’t put ice on that, did you.’

      ‘Didn’t have any. And fish fingers didn’t work.’

      ‘No, probably not.’ She pulled over a small metal tray, laid out with discs of pale rubber, as if she’d cut them off the end of pencils – each one marked with a number in black ink. ‘You know, with bones we can tell almost everything about a person: what they ate, where they lived, where they lived before that, height, weight, sex, ethnicity. . .’ A dab of glue went on the end of a disc, then she fixed it right in the middle of the skull’s forehead.

      ‘What happened to Dr Dempsey? ’

      ‘Sulking. Threatening legal action.’

      ‘You hit him first? ’

      A shrug. Marker number one was joined by two and three. ‘He pushed me.’

      Logan nodded up at the shiny black globe hanging from the ceiling over the central cutting table, like a store security camera. ‘Tell him it’s all on film.’

      ‘Your victim was male, Caucasian.’ Four, five, and six followed the ridge of the eyebrows. ‘To be honest, he’s been spoiling for a fight for years, ever since I got sent to Iraq instead of him. Said he should be the one digging bodies out of mass graves, not me. . .’ She sat back and tilted her head to one side. ‘Blue, brown, or green? ’

      Shrug. ‘Blue? ’

      ‘Brown’s more neutral.’ Dr Graham dipped into her massive handbag and pulled out a wooden box, a little bigger than a pencil case. When she opened it, three pairs of glass eyes stared back at Logan. She plucked the brown eyes from the box, then fiddled around with rubber batons and glue until they were staring out from the skull instead. ‘There we go, much better.’

      Seriously? It looked like something out of a cheap horror film.

      ‘Can’t you just do all this on computers? ’

      ‘What, like they do on the telly? ’ Markers seven to ten were longer, sticking out of the upper and lower jaws. ‘Facial reconstruction’s half science, half art. You have to really know bones. How’s a computer ever going to do that? ’

      ‘Go on then.’ Logan went into his jacket pocket, pulled out the junior soup starter kit that had been left on his doorstep, and dumped it on the cutting table. The bones rattled against the stainless steel. ‘What can you get from a bunch of chicken bones and some manky herbs? ’

      She peered at them, then added the next couple of markers to the skull. ‘They’re not chicken bones, they’re phalanges. Finger bones. Human.’ A smile. ‘Do I pass the test? ’

      ‘Finger bones? ’

      A sigh. ‘OK, we’ll do it properly. . .’ She pulled an A4 lined notepad from beneath one of the books, flipped over to a clean sheet, then stuck her left hand flat down on it and drew around the palm and fingers with a pencil. Then untied the bundle. ‘This one,’ she held up one of the little bones, ‘is a proximal phalanx from the middle finger.’ She placed it on her wobbly outline of a hand in the right place. ‘This one’s an intermediate. . . Might be from the index – going by the growth on the distal articular surface – but it’s impossible to tell for sure without having all the other bones for comparison.’ It went on the drawn hand. ‘And lucky number three is a proximal from the thumb.’

      ‘They’re human? ’

      ‘Yup.’ She lowered the last bone into place. Then picked it up again. ‘I don’t know who cleaned them for you, but they seriously need to go on a training course. Boiling bones damages the joints, look,’ she wiggled the end at Logan, ‘see how it’s all pitted and porous? ’

      It looked like a pale Crunchie bar with all the chocolate sucked off. She shook her head. ‘Very amateurish.’

      Oh God. ‘Boiled? ’

      ‘Yup – there’s much more efficient and less damaging ways to clean skeletal remains: boiling breaks down the cortical bone, that’s why you can see that cancellous bone underneath. If you haven’t got Dermestid beetles to clean the remains, then simmering’s the way to go – long and slow, like you’re making stock.’ She put it down again. ‘I don’t know who you’re using, but they should be ashamed of themselves.’ Another marker went on the skull.

      ‘Boiled. . .’ Something cold slithered its way down Logan’s spine.

      She picked up the last marker in the set, then frowned at him. ‘Are you all right? You’ve gone all pale.’

      ‘When? When were they boiled? ’

      Dr Graham backed off a pace. ‘Look, I identified them, didn’t I? Can’t you just tell your bosses I’m not faking it here? I really do know what I’m talking. . .’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Did Dempsey put you up to this? Is he the halfwit who ruined them? ’

      ‘Was someone eating them? ’

      ‘Because if he did, you shouldn’t touch him with a bargepole. He’s a bitter, twisted old sod and I’m doing a good job here!’

      The cutting table was cool beneath his fist. ‘Was someone eating the meat off those bloody fingers or not? ’

      She pulled her chin in. Then picked up the bone again, held it up to her nose and sniffed. ‘You smell that? Bleach: that’s why it’s so chalky and crumbly. Who’d eat something they’d boiled in bleach? ’

      Oh thank God. . .

      Dr Graham picked all the bones up and held them in the palm of her hand. ‘It wasn’t a test? ’ They made a dry sandpaper sound as she rolled them back and forward. ‘Seriously? ’

      ‘Someone’s been leaving them outside my house.’

      ‘Phalanges? ’ She put them back on the paper hand. ‘My life coach told me Aberdeen was weird. . .’ She cleared her throat, then dug a ruler from her stack of books and measured each of the bones in turn. ‘You can estimate height and sex from phalanges, but it’s unreliable. And I mean seriously unreliable. I wouldn’t even put it in writing.’

      Logan licked his lips. ‘Thought they were chicken bones.’

      ‘You have to promise not to quote me on this, but best guess: these belong to a woman, about five-two, five-four, something like that. There’s a touch of arthritis, so she might be in her fifties, possibly sixties? They’ve been boiled, so you can whistle for DNA, but you could try stable isotope signature analysis? ’

      ‘Human fingers.’

      ‘There’s