Fire in the Blood (Scott Cullen Mysteries) Read online

  Strachan had been nodding vigorously throughout.

  "So, these barrels," said Cullen, keen to distract them from the potted history of Dunpender Distillery.

  Fraser slowly turned around to look at Cullen. "What we can tell you is just from our memories, I'm afraid," he said with a frown. "When we computerised the stock system in 1997, we didn't have any paperwork on them."

  Cullen turned to Strachan. "I thought you said these were filled eighteen years ago?"

  "We think so," said Strachan.

  "Hang on," said Cullen, "are you saying that you found these barrels?"

  "Yes," said Strachan.

  "So really, you know nothing about these barrels?"

  Strachan just shrugged. "We assumed when we found them that they were part of a private stash for Alec, or maybe Fraser's brother, so we added them to the records."

  "My father was always taking his own private malts," said Fraser.

  "Wouldn't they be recorded?" asked Cullen.

  Fraser and Strachan shared a look. "Sometimes they weren't," said Strachan.

  "Do I need to get some agents from Revenue and Customs in here?" asked Cullen.

  Both of them stared at the floor.

  "Is your brother around?" asked Cullen.

  Fraser looked away. "Iain went missing a few years ago," he said. "He was presumed dead ten years ago."

  "Sorry to hear that," said Cullen. He gestured at the PC. "Do you know who filled them?" he asked.

  Fraser tapped at the screen. "No, the field is blank for these barrels," he said.

  "It might be in the paper ledger," said Strachan, "but the paper trail on these is pretty sketchy, to say the least."

  "Do you still have the original ledgers?" asked Cullen.

  "They're in Dad's attic," said Fraser. "He stored them at the house when we computerised it all."

  "I wouldn't mind having a look at them," said Cullen.

  Fraser raised his eyebrows. "You'd need to arrange that with my father."

  Cullen scribbled it down on his notebook.

  "I've been scratching my head trying to remember what happened," said Strachan, butting in again. He thumbed in Fraser's general direction. "If memory serves, it was young Fraser here that found these barrels when we were doing a stock check just as we were computerising the records. We had some discrepancies, as you can imagine in this place, but finding two extra barrels wasn't exactly what we'd expected."

  "Who would have been working here at the time?" asked Cullen.

  "We both were," said Strachan. "I was Chief Cooper at the time. Fraser was just commencing his training in the art."

  "Would there have been anyone else?" asked Cullen.

  Strachan thought it through for a few moments. "Just the two of us."

  Cullen nodded. "So if these barrels were found in 1997 and you don't know where they've come from," he said, "was there any whisky unaccounted for?"

  Strachan tapped away at the computer. "Can't find anything," he said after a few moments. "Might be better checking the original paper ledgers."

  Cullen closed his eyes - their inept stock management system wasn't making his life any easier. "Can I have a look at the barrel, then?"

  six

  The barrel room that contained the particular cask that Strachan had found the body in was located downstairs. It occupied half of the cellar of the building, the other half filled with another barrel room - Strachan had mentioned something about the cooperage being in an extension to the basement.

  The large room was roughly thirty metres square and was filled with rows of barrels mounted on stands three high. Stout pillars were dotted around the cavernous space, holding up both the ceiling and the building above it. A row of naked light bulbs hung from the ceiling, giving a harsh glow to the place and casting ominous shadows in the darkened corners of the room. There was an elaborate winch system at one side - like a dumb waiter in an old hotel, though it appeared to be several orders of magnitude stronger.

  At the front of the room, one cask was mounted on a stand and lying on its back, while another barrel stood upright and looked like it had been carefully opened.

  The room was swarming with Scene of Crime Officers. James Anderson - one of the lead SOCOs - wore a white coverall and stood examining the barrel. Another officer stood beside him, completely covered in overall and face mask except for her eyes, which were presently obscured by a sizeable digital SLR camera. She was clicking away at everything, making sure that every action Anderson took was captured and documented.

  Cullen told Strachan and Fraser to wait at the entrance. He marched over to Anderson and the barrel.

  "Found anything?" asked Cullen.

  Anderson pulled down his mask, revealing his thick goatee beard covering every square millimetre of skin and which just tucked under this chin. He looked over at Fraser Crombie and Strachan before answering. "Just found an annoying DC," he said, his voice low.

  "Very good," replied Cullen.

  "In all seriousness," said Anderson, "which I know is something that you struggle to maintain, Cullen, I've found very little."

  "Do you need us to suit up?" asked Cullen.

  Anderson looked Cullen up and down. "You're all right," he said. "The body's clearly been in there a while, so we don't need to go through common protocol."

  "Mind if I have a look inside?" asked Cullen.

  Anderson pointed at a torch lying on the floor. Cullen picked it up and shone it into the barrel. The body was pretty much intact, though a cloudy mush sat at the bottom. The barrel was almost filled by the body - there wasn't much room for the alcohol and there was probably only a small fraction of what it would normally hold. He felt his buttocks clench as he saw the head, totally smashed in and barely recognisable as human, looking like something out of Lord of the Rings.

  "I thought that the alcohol would preserve the body," said Cullen, replacing the torch on the floor.

  "That's right," said Anderson. "But you need to prep the body properly if you want a perfect preservation. This was clearly done in a hurry, so it's decomposed slightly."

  "You know a thing about preserving bodies in alcohol?" asked Cullen.

  Anderson raised an eyebrow. "Not in front of the public, Cullen," he said.

  Cullen blushed slightly. Anderson and he had a somewhat antagonistic relationship, stretching back almost a year. Cullen struggled to work out where to draw the line with him sometimes and continually risked coming off worse than Anderson. In his head, he knew that he really should stop the nonsense but it never quite worked out like that...

  "Any closer to an identification?" asked Cullen.

  "Not my department," said Anderson, grinning. "Someone's been at the skull with a hammer or something, so Jimmy D will have his work cut out for him when he eventually pitches up."

  "Caldwell is looking through MisPer reports," said Cullen, "so an approximate height and weight would be appreciated."

  Anderson picked up the torch and shone it into the barrel. He spent a few minutes looking into the cask and thinking. "By the looks of things," he said, "I'd say most probably Scottish by the colour of that skin."

  Cullen jotted it down - he extended it to include Ireland, another legendary land of the peely wally.

  "The bits of hair that are still attached to the skull show very dark hair," said Anderson. "The bit of jaw that hasn't been mangled is clean shaven, for what it's worth. From the way the corpse is positioned, it's hard to tell the height, probably between five ten and six foot. Weight, I have no idea - not overweight, by any stretch."

  "Age?" asked Cullen.

  "No real wrinkling on the skin," said Anderson. "I'd expect Deeley to give the official statement, but I'd say between twenty and thirty. Anything else is just guesswork and might be misleading."

  "Thanks," said Cullen. "Any idea how it got in there?"

  "Nothing I'll share with you yet," said Anderson.

  Cullen glared at the SOCO. "Is there any way that
the barrel could have been tampered with since it was filled?" he asked.

  Anderson sighed. "It doesn't look like it," he said. He pointed at the ends of the two barrels they had in front of them. "It'd be a bugger to get a body in there once it was full and surely someone would notice the spilt whisky."

  "Wouldn't be so sure of that," said Cullen, looking over his shoulder at the two Dunpender employees, and thinking that their somewhat fragmented computer system indicated a general lack of control in the company.

  "That said, they bugger about with the barrels so much that it would be next to impossible to say," said Anderson, with a sigh. "We've got some boys in the Northern Constabulary who know a thing or two about whisky barrels. I'll be giving them a call soon."

  "So you're just about done here, then?" asked Cullen.

  "Not long now," said Anderson. "Tell your boss that I'll get him a rough draft report in the next few hours or so."

  "Less of the 'or so' when dealing with Bain," said Cullen. "I'm going to get those pair over here, so you'd better be on your best behaviour."

  Anderson smiled. "You started it, Cullen."

  Cullen almost mentioned that it was actually Anderson that started it, but he bit his tongue. He went back to the entrance and ordered Strachan and Fraser Crombie to come over to the barrel. He introduced them to Anderson, who barely acknowledged them.

  Cullen looked at Strachan and Fraser Crombie. "In your expert opinions," he said, "does it look like the barrels have been tampered with since they were filled?"

  "They were whisky-tight when I popped the dog in," said Strachan. He held up a metal cylinder on a chain - to Cullen, it looked like one of the larger shot measures he'd seen in pubs. "There are no obvious signs that anyone has been at them - and believe me, we would know. Other than taking the end off, the only way in to the barrel would be through the bung." He pointed at a wooden stopper that protruded from a hole in the side of the barrel. "I had to give a good dunt to get it off. If we rolled the other barrels from the batch over, you'd see that they looked the same."

  Cullen tapped the end of the barrel mounted on its back. "So it looks like the body has been in there since twelfth June 1994?" asked Cullen.

  "Aye, it does," said Strachan, nodding.

  "Is the date on the barrels correct?" asked Cullen. "Was there a batch on the go at the time?"

  Strachan frowned. "Aye, there was." He led Cullen and Fraser down the rows of barrels, heading towards the back of the room. A row of barrels sat there, all stamped thirteenth June 1994. "There was a 14 year old batch made in 2008, as I said, and we kept a fair few barrels behind for this year" Strachan pointed back over to the barrel. "That pair would have been over a hundred quid a bottle with the quaich and everything. It's all ruined now, of course."

  "Is that right?" asked Cullen.

  Fraser piped up. "We can use another of the bourbon casks," he said, "nobody will mind."

  "Once I let you have this barrel back, mind," said Anderson, tapping the sherry barrel. "Might be a good while."

  Fraser and Strachan exchanged a look that Cullen couldn't quite read.

  "What happens to the barrels once you're finished with them?" asked Cullen.

  "We use the casks three times," said Fraser. "Doug and I fix them up in the cooperage. It's a long process. The bits of a barrel could be used for forty-two years, consecutively."

  "And how much does each one hold?" asked Cullen.

  Strachan took a deep breath. "When filled, they would hold 650L of the undiluted spirit," he said. "That's when they're filled, mind. They do lose some liquid to evaporation over the years. Something like ten to fifteen percent of the original volume would go in eighteen years."

  Cullen whistled. "Seems like a lot of loss," he said.

  "That's the process," said Strachan with a slight shrug. "It's a traditional business Mr Crombie runs here."

  Cullen checked his watch - Bain would be expecting an update soon. He couldn't think of anything more to ask the men. "Thanks for your time," he said, and handed them each a card. "Give me a call if anything else crops up or you think of anything that might assist the investigation."

  seven

  Bain had co-opted the stock office as a temporary base in spite of the mutterings from the few additional uniformed officers that had recently arrived from Haddington, who thought that Bain should be looking into acquiring a room at Garleton nick, just over the hills from Drem. Bain sat at the stock computer desk with his feet up. The keyboard was now sitting on top of the old monitor, which had been pushed back against the wall, almost falling off.

  Cullen waited as Bain shouted down the phone at Jimmy Deeley, the pathologist, trying to get him out to the distillery any earlier than the following Monday. He used the time to consolidate some of his notes and to think things through. Just then, Caldwell appeared through the doorway, clutching her mobile to her ear. She clocked Cullen and ended the call quickly.

  Cullen pointed at Bain. "Deeley," he said.

  "Aha," she said, smiling. "How's it going?"

  Cullen sighed. "Enthralling," he said. "I feel like I know practically everything there is to know about the whisky distillation and maturation process. It's fascinating."

  "Certainly beats phoning control only to be passed around from department to department," she said. "Finally got hold of someone at the Sighthill document centre who could help rather than make an arse of things. How's your stuff going?"

  Cullen leaned away from Bain and spoke in a low voice even though he knew that Bain was wrapped up in berating Deeley. "I'm seriously pissed off at doing Bain's skivvy work," he said. "Asking some people about the history of a barrel won't be among my career highlights when I retire."

  "You are such a princess," said Caldwell. "This must beat sitting in Gorgie with Irvine."

  Cullen gave her a grudging nod. "That's the thing, though," he said. "I'm stuck with flitting between working directly for Bain and for Irvine. It doesn't look like Turnbull is going to boot Bain off the park any time soon so I'm going to continue getting tarred with the same brush as him. He's not exactly doing anything to boost my career prospects and he certainly wouldn't fight my corner."

  Caldwell grinned at him and gave a little shake of her head. "Scott, you've only been a full DC for like a year," she said, "and you've managed to solve two front page cases. It usually takes five years to get promoted to a DS."

  Cullen stood there for a moment - he was sick of hearing the same things from people. Maybe Sharon was right - he needed to stop waiting and do something about it.

  Caldwell leaned in close. "Look, Bain's stock is pretty low with the big boys," she said. "If what Turnbull told you about his plans for our team are true then Bain'll be gone before too long. All Bain wants from this case is another quick collar, and making him look better than Wilko."

  "The few scores that Bain has on the board are largely the result of my efforts," said Cullen. "Somehow I've not managed to get any sort of wider recognition."

  Caldwell laughed. "Are you serious?" she asked. "You couldn't get any more profile. I'm sick fed up of hearing about you."

  "You serious?"

  "Yes," she said. "Just stop being such a bloody diva. There are worse things happening to people than not getting promoted early, believe me."

  Before Cullen could get her to elaborate, Bain slammed the phone down, his eyes receding into his skull. "Cannot believe how long it fuckin' takes him to get over here for a dead body," he said.

  "There's no hurry," said Caldwell. "The body has been dead for a while."

  Bain gave her one of his many long hard looks. "There's a hurry if I fuckin' say there's a hurry," he said. His head suddenly jerked round to glare at Cullen. "What have you found, Sundance?"

  Cullen took them through all the facts he'd learnt about the barrel - the dates, the missing information about who filled it and when, the consistency with contemporary barrels, the paper ledgers that might contain some facts.

  "Bi
t of a fuckin' mystery there, Sundance," was all that Bain said. He looked over at Caldwell. "Right, princess, what have you got?"

  Cullen was continually surprised that Bain had never been formally reprimanded for the nicknames he gave people - it was, however, one of his more endearing traits, if not the only one. Cullen had come close to going to Turnbull a few times, but Sharon had managed to talk him around from it. The usual shite about developing a thick skin. He wondered why he could go to Turnbull to complain about Bain but not to further his own career.

  "Control have six male disappearances in this area in the three months around that approximate date," she said. "I got them to search pretty wide, from Musselburgh to Dunbar and down to Gifford. They've got another seventeen in Edinburgh in that three month period if that doesn't get us anywhere."

  "Good work," said Bain.

  "James Anderson gave me some approximate vital statistics of the body," said Cullen. "Between twenty and thirty years of age, and five ten to six foot."

  She scribbled it down. "Give me a minute," she said. She sat down at the office desk and looked through a list of names and cross-checked them.

  Bain looked at Cullen again. "So, Sundance, the body was put in the cask at the time, right?" he asked.

  "That's what Strachan and Fraser Crombie think," said Cullen, "but I'd expect the SOCOs to confirm it soon. Anderson should be giving you a report this afternoon."

  "I'll chase his skinny arse for it, soon, don't you worry," said Bain. "How certain are you?"

  Cullen exhaled. "I'm a bit dubious," he said. "They don't know for a fact that the barrel was filled in June 1994. It could be up to three years later."

  "How?"

  "I already told you," said Cullen.

  Bain grinned. "Remind me," he said.

  Cullen took a deep breath. "The barrels were actually only found in 1997," he said, "but they had been stamped as being filled in 1994. They could have been filled later."

  "Any whisky missing?" asked Bain.

  "They didn't know," said Cullen. "I need to speak to Alec Crombie - he's got the original paper ledgers in his attic. He might be able to help us."