The Blackhouse by Peter May Read Free Book Online Page A

post-mortem in a while.
    â€œNo.” Professor Wilson wheeled around. “I want you to gather them into a little pile and set them on fire.” He glared. “Of course I want you to put the fucking things on. Unless you want to catch AIDS or whatever viral particles might be lurking in the bone dust that’ll fill the air when we take the oscillating saw around the victim’s skull. Alternatively, you can stand out there.” He waved a hand toward the large window that opened on to the corridor beyond. “But you’ll not be able to hear a fucking thing I say.”
    â€œJesus,” Gunn said, as they pulled on their protective clothing in the pathologist’s room. “And I thought the CIO was bad.”
    Fin laughed, and almost stopped dead at the sound of it. It was the second time he had laughed today, and he hadn’t laughed in such a long time. Becoming aware of it, whatever he had thought amusing was quickly choked off by a tidal wave of returning emotion. He took a moment to recover himself. “Angus is okay. His bark’s worse than his bite.”
    â€œI’d be frightened I caught rabies if he bit me.” Gunn was still reeling from the sharp edge of the pathologist’s tongue.
    When they went back into the mortuary room, the professor had spread photographs across almost every available space. He was examining the victim’s clothes on the table. The stainless steel was covered by a large sheet of white butcher’s paper to collect any stray fibres or dried particles of vomit that detached themselves from the material. The victim had been wearing a zip-up fleece over a white cotton shirt and blue denim jeans. Big, dirty-white misshapen running shoes sat on the end of the table. The pathologist had slipped on his protective gloves and was holding a square magnifying glass in his left hand and picking delicately at the dried vomit on the dark blue fleece with a pair of tweezers. “You didn’t tell me the victim was my namesake.”
    â€œThey never called him Angus,” Fin said. “Everyone knew him as Angel. You could send him a letter addressed to Angel, Ness, Isle of Lewis, from anywhere in the world and it would get to him.”
    DS Gunn was shocked. “I didn’t know you knew him, Mr. Macleod.”
    â€œI was at school with him. His younger brother was in my class.”
    â€œAngel …” Professor Wilson was still focusing on his tweezers. “Does he have wings?”
    â€œThe nickname was ironic.”
    â€œAh. Maybe that explains why someone wanted to kill him.”
    â€œMaybe it does.”
    â€œGotcha, you little bugger!” The professor straightened up and held his tweezers up to the light, with what looked like a small white bead pinched delicately between its prongs.
    â€œWhat is it?” Gunn said.
    â€œIt’s a ghost.” He looked at them, grinning. “Of a pill. One of these extended-release pills. The shell is full of micropores that let the medicine leak out slowly. This one’s empty. But these pill casings can sometimes survive in the stomach for hours after they’ve served their purpose. We see them all the time.”
    â€œIs there any significance in it for us?” Fin said.
    â€œMaybe. Maybe not. But if this really is the killer’s vomit, then it could tell us something about him that we wouldn’t otherwise have known. Whatever medicine this contained may or may not show up on a tox screen, but we’ll still know what it was he was taking.”
    â€œHow?”
    The professor held up his magnifying glass to the tiny shell. “You can’t really see it with this, but stick it under a dissecting scope and we’ll almost certainly find numbers or letters etched on the surface, even a drug company symbol. We can check the markings against those listed in drug books to identify the medication. It might take a little time, but we’ll get