Tools of the Trade

Chapter 5

Five

Alisdair had returned within thirty minutes and signed for an unmarked Ford Focus for the short drive to the cliffs. Less than ten minutes after leaving the station, they were at the foot of Seaton Cliffs, looking at the soaked and lifeless body. A lone strand of brown, slimy seaweed wrapped around his left leg, like a vine that had worked its way from the rocks up the trunk of a young tree. The gashes in Bobby’s face were wide, clean and white from spending hours soaking in salt water, but Guthrie knew that they were not the result of being beaten against the rocks. It was clear that these were inflicted on the victim before he died.

"Do we have an ID on him?" Guthrie asked one of the Scene of Crime Officers who was walking gingerly around the body taking photographs and trying not to wind up on his rear end in one of the many rock pools.

"Aye. Bobby Gant. Got it from a couple of credit cards in his wallet, along with some other bits an' bobs in his pockets. Doesn't look like there was anything obvious taken. Wallet, watch. Everything’s there, so probably no' a robbery." The Scene of Crime Officer wiped his nose with the back of his hand and sniffed. The wind was picking up and coming from the east, from the sea. It was making the wet crime scene colder by the minute.

"Aye, well, I'd have to agree with you there. Anybody seen the doc? Do we have a time of death?"

"He's come an' gone. I asked him the same question, but all he had to say was that it was probably between midnight and six."

Guthrie looked at the SOCO with a furrowed brow. The officer took another picture of the scene, fished a lens cap out of a pocket, snapped it onto the wide angle lens, then gave Guthrie a parting raise of the eyebrows before slowly trudging toward the foot of the sandstone cliffs and back out to the slightly worse for wear Transit van. Guthrie surveyed the landscape, taking his own mental picture. "Low and high tide," he said to himself.

Guthrie knelt down by Gant's side and pulled back the sleeve of his jacket revealing both the watch and the rope that had rubbed Gant's wrist raw. The watch was a Breitling - an expensive, aviation-themed timepiece that cost about as much, Guthrie suspected, as he got paid in three months as a cop. It was still ticking away, keeping perfect time. Standing up, he motioned to a uniformed officer he was finished by making a slashing motion across his neck. Two men stepped forward and unfolded a black body bag and began carefully untying Gant's wrists before lifting him and placing him in the bag. The zipper was closed, and they began their unsteady journey with their cargo across the rocks to the path leading down from the walk at the top of the cliffs.

Alisdair had been careful not to get in the way and had busied himself taking notes. “Seen enough, son?” Guthrie called over. Alisdair nodded and put his notebook and pen in his inside jacket pocket. “Right. Let’s get out of this weather.”

They had already made it back to the car, engine running and heater blowing at full tilt, when the van passed on its way to deliver Bobby Gant to the mortuary in Dundee.

Guthrie sat and stared out over the North Sea, the wind now picking up the waves as they broke over the expanse of low, flat rocks. Even though the tide still had fifty yards to go, the wind still managed to carry the spray all the way to the car.

Watching the waves, he was drawn in his mind to whether or not his murder victim was alive when the tide came in. Chances are he was. Both arms tied to rings above the low tide mark, not to keep the body from floating away or tied down to keep it submerged and never found, but to be found. It also looked like someone was giving their victim one last chance to contemplate his pending demise.

Guthrie shivered at the thought and the involuntary action brought him back into focus on the dark water beyond the windshield. He turned the heater down, tapped the top of the dashboard and told Alisdair to head back to the station. Nothing was going to happen, as far as a post-mortem was concerned, until tomorrow. He really just wanted to head south out of town and head home, but he knew he needed to check-in back at the station at Gravesend and figure out a basic plan of action with Alisdair. Gravesend. He mulled on the fact that it was an appropriate location for a police station involved in the investigation of a murder.

Alisdair drove slowly along the road between the sea front wall on the left and the green expanse of the public park on the right, obeying the fifteen miles per hour speed limit. He let the silence between them linger. He too was thinking about the obvious sadistic mindset that had played with the life of Bobby Gant.