Where the Bodies are Buried by Christopher Brookmyre, Brookmyre Page A

compared to when they were bouncing off the walls during the day, then promptly
     tried to banish the image. Not here, not now.
    Too late.
    Have you seen a dead body?
    Fraser’s voice got into her head before she could stop it, in the same way that the worst possible thing you might say could
     sometimes leap to mind in a sensitive situation. She had read that certain mechanisms of the brain could not distinguish between
     positive and negative, so the very awareness of what it was she didn’t want to think about wouldin fact provide the impulse that conjured it up. This scene was everything she wanted to protect her boys from, everything
     she didn’t want them to know about the world and, most particularly, about herself.
    ‘Single shot to the forehead,’ Cal told her. ‘Close-range, execution-style, resulting in an exit wound you really don’t want
     to see. No ligature marks or other evidence of restraint but plenty of facial injuries and defensive bruising to the forearms.
     He had the resistance beaten out of him instead, so he’d sit nice for the man with the gun.’
    ‘I’m guessing very little blood?’ Catherine suggested. ‘Indicative that they had their party elsewhere and just dumped the
     empty back here when they were finished.’
    ‘Spookily prescient, Superintendent McLeod. As ever.’
    Cal liked to remark that Catherine ‘creeped him out’ with certain of her deductions, and tended to sound like he was only
     half-joking when he did so. He wasn’t referring to Holmesian leaps of logic or an ability to observe what others had missed,
     but the insights she often gleaned merely from imagining the view from inside the killer’s head. Catherine had subsequently
     made a point of playing up to this, endeavouring to turn a half-joke into a full joke. It seemed the best way of covering
     up the fact that she was a little uncomfortable about Cal alluding to her having such a facility. A guy who spent all day
     around dead people finding
you
creepy was wisest written off as a joke. The other implications were best not dwelt upon.
    ‘Hardly,’ she replied. ‘You don’t light a guy up on a dry summer’s night around the back of a shopping parade that houses
     two takeaways and a late-night supermarket. Somebody’s bound to notice something, even in Gallowhaugh.’
    ‘And yet by the same token, even abandoning the body here exposes the perpetrator to a measure of risk. Are we to ascertain
     that there was some benefit or significance accruing from the choice of location?’ Cal was speaking rhetorically, familiarly
     hamming up the professorial patter as though to patronise the daft polis.
    ‘He owns the tanning salon next door to the Chinese,’ said Raeside. ‘He was dumped next to his own bin.’
    ‘Ah, so the deceased was in the health and leisure industry?’
    ‘Tangentially,’ Raeside replied. ‘More the pharmaceutical end. The salon was a money-laundering front. Punters pay cash, you
     inflate the number of punters, suddenly your drug takings are legit.’
    ‘You’re right, of course, Cal,’ said Catherine. ‘They could havedumped him anywhere. Burnt him, buried him, made sure he was never found. Instead they left him round the back of his own
     premises, like rubbish for the borough men to lift.’
    ‘You know,’ Cal observed, ‘there are a select few semiologists who might be able to decode some kind of message in that.’
    This is Glesca, Catherine thought. We don’t do subtle.
    ‘Aye,’ said Raeside. ‘Somebody’s telling Paddy Steel his tea’s oot.’
    ‘Begging the question, Bill, given that a blind man could see this is gang-related, when you sent this up the chain, why didn’t
     you take it to Locust?’
    Raeside wrinkled his nose, a sour look instantly coming over his face.
    ‘Abercorn,’ he said with a scornful hint of laughter and a slight shake of the head, simultaneously an answer to her question
     and an indication that he found the very notion