Final Cut by Lin Anderson Read Free Book Online Page A

wound so tightly that the noose was half the circumference of the neck. The cat hadn’t been run over and thrown there from the road. Someone had deliberately strangled it.
    Now Rhona looked down at the small skeleton slowly taking form under her hands. Establishing how the cat had been killed had been easy. Establishing who this child was and how he or she had died would be far more difficult.
    There were many gender differences between male and female skeletons. The clearest indicators were found in the pelvis and the skull. In females the pelvis was flatter and more rounded, proportionally larger to allow a baby’s head to pass through. Women usually had narrower ribcages, smaller teeth, less angular mandibles. Their brow ridges were less pronounced, their chins less square and the small bump at the back of the skull less prominent.
    All of this helped identify gender, but only when dealing with an adolescent or adult skeleton. Bone morphology couldn’t sex this age group either. The truth was, she had no idea whether the dead child was a girl or a boy.
    If she had been asked to hazard a guess, she would have said female. There were two reasons: first, she had come across no evidence of clothing and suspected the body had been naked when dumped, suggesting a sexual motive; and second, statistically speaking, more little girls were abducted, assaulted and murdered than boys.
    Rhona wrote up her report, seated next to the remains. Her work with the skeleton was over. A forensic anthropologist would need to examine it as an expert witness. Rhona’s next task was to carefully examine the wood mulch and soil to try to establish how long the child’s body had lain in its woodland grave.

10
    The woman was attempting to give him detailed instructions on how to find Fern Cottage but McNab’s pounding head, the result of too many whiskies the previous evening, was refusing to take it all in.
    He cut her short. ‘I’ll find it.’
    ‘OK,’ she said dubiously. ‘If you get lost, give me a call.’
    McNab managed the road south out of Glasgow no problem. It was when he entered the wilderness (as he thought of it) that it threatened to go pear shaped.
    How many roads can a man walk down, before he admits he’s lost? When he and Rhona had been together she’d liked to tease him about his reluctance to ask for directions. McNab briefly lingered on the memory of that time before reminding himself that he’d ceased to obsess about Dr MacLeod. Even as he silently repeated this mantra, McNab knew the empty whisky bottle from the previous night was evidence to the contrary.
    The car crested yet another hill and McNab looked out on more white fields dotted with desultory sheep grazing on turnips. He decided he’d rather live in Glasgow any day. At least there you only had to worry about getting lost in the one-way system.
    Five minutes later he reluctantly reached for his mobile. The number rang for a few moments before she answered.
    ‘Tell me what you’re looking at.’
    ‘White fields and sheep.’
    ‘You’ll have to be more precise. Imagine you’re at a crime scene.’
    ‘You mean where one sheep murdered another over a turnip?’
    She laughed. It was a nice sound.
    ‘Can you see any windmills?’
    He examined the skyline and spotted a blade due east. He told her so.
    ‘OK, you need to turn round and come back for about a mile. You’ll see a narrow entrance on your left. There’s no sign, but if you’re in the right place you should look back and see two turbines on the brow of the hill.’
    They were the same directions he hadn’t listened to earlier.
    ‘The cottage is half a mile down that track. It has a blue door and the fire’s on, so there will be smoke from the chimney.’
    He came on it minutes later. Even to McNab’s jaundiced eye, the setting looked beautiful.
    Mrs Watson was at the door as he drew up.
    ‘You found us, then?’ she said as he climbed out of the car.
    ‘No problem.’ He grinned