Page 21 of Better the Devil

Palmer pressed a finger to his nose and pointed with the other hand. ‘Prize for the newly appointed detective inspector.’

Hamza handed the bag back to the Scene of Crime man. ‘Right. Aye. Good work.’

Palmer waited. DI Khaled shifted on the balls of his feet, aware that something more was expected of him. Panic gripped him by the throat, so even if he could think of the words to say, he wouldn’t be able to get them out.

‘I’ll tag and record it,’ Geoff eventually said. ‘Get it boxed up.’

‘Get it boxed up, yes!’ Hamza practically shouted the words into his face. The ringing of his Aberdeen accent drew a few looks from the officers and staff nearby. ‘Um, aye. Yes,’ he said, lowering his voice. ‘Please. Do that. That’d be great.’

Palmer gave him a brief up-and-down look, then nodded and headed for the SOCO van. Hamza ran a hand down his face, partly to wipe away the drizzle, but mostly to hide his embarrassment.

‘You alright, boss?’ Tyler asked.

Hamza grimaced. ‘Please don’t call me that.’

‘I don’t know. Senior officer, and that…’

‘Tyler.’ Hamza met the younger detective’s eye. ‘Just… Just please, mate, alright?’

‘Eh, aye.’ Though he’d been caught off guard, DC Neish pulled together a reassuring smile. ‘Aye, sorry, Ham. No bother. You know me, I was just being a dick.’

Hamza exhaled slowly through his nose, then mustered a smile of his own. ‘That’s fine. That I can handle.’

Tyler snorted. ‘You can handle a dick? That’s a bold admission out of nowhere, but it means a lot you chose me to share it with.’

‘Haha,’ Hamza said. ‘Very funny.’

But his anxious glances at the faces of the officers around them suggested he was a long, long way from laughter.

CHAPTER NINE

Shona was bloody starving.

She hadn’t eaten since lunchtime, and it was now not a kick in the arse off ten o’clock. That Chicken and Mushroom Pot Noodle was now just a distant memory. If she were to burp now, she reckoned, she wouldn’t even still be able to taste it.

There was a Bombay Bad Boy in the bottom drawer of her desk, of course. She’d stashed it there several months ago, after a double post-mortem that had taken most of the day. It was in a little container on which she’d written, “In case of emergency, break glass.”

OK, the container was plastic, but she’d been bored at the time, and had liked the joke.

But a Bombay Bad Boy at this time of night would be a bold play. That wasn’t the sort of thing you got into lightly. The potential for repercussions was high. The last time she’d done anything similar—a Doner Kebab flavour just before bed—she’d found herself banished to the spare room at three a.m. while Jack opened all the windows.

She was ravenous, though. And, with the best intentions in the world, this might be a long night.

She had just clicked the kettle on and pulled open the drawer when there was a knock on the double swing doors of the mortuary office. Through the dappled glass, she saw the hi-vis jackets of a couple of paramedics.

Her stomach grumbled in complaint—or possibly with relief—as she slid the drawer closed again.

The handover took a few minutes. Boxes were ticked, forms were signed, reference numbers were swapped, and small talk was engaged in, while the kettle rumbled to the boil in the background.

The body was taken through to the mortuary proper, and transferred from one gurney to another, still nestled in its zip-up wrapper.

She checked the tag. Noted the name, weight, time. The computer was booted up through in the office, ready for her to log the new arrival in the system.

But first, given the nature of the injury, and some of the road conditions between Aviemore and Inverness, she wanted to take a peek inside the bag. Just to be safe. Just to make sure nothing was sloshing around in there that shouldn’t be.

She set up her camera to record the process, pulled down the zip just enough to reveal the dead man’s face and his open throat.

‘Nice,’ she said, her voice slightly muffled by her protective mask. She winced and turned to the camera. ‘I meant… because there’s no serious fluid leakage. I wasn’t saying, you know,thiswas nice, or…’