Dark Flight by Lin Anderson Page B

trickled down in green and slimy trails. Apart from the single shoe and the strange altar, the place was empty.
    McNab fetched another couple of treads and laid them in a path to the back wall. He stepped across first then held out his hand. Rhona took it and joined him. They both stared down at the grey bony object on the makeshift altar.
    ‘What kind of animal is it, do you think?’ McNab looked to her for guidance.
    ‘I don’t know – maybe a sheep or goat.’
    Rhona took some camera shots. The flash lit up rusting barbed wire and four six-inch nails that were driven through the bone.
    She turned it and took some more shots from a different angle.
    ‘The smell’s stronger here,’ McNab said. ‘Where the hell is it coming from?’
    He was right. They had grown gradually used to the scent of decomposition. But it was stronger in the area of the altar. The skull was old and clean, washed almost white and there was nothing on the floor or the walls to explain the smell.
    Rhona bagged the skull and the candles, then bent closer to the bricks. ‘It’s coming from inside the altar.’ She placed the bags at her feet and examined the bricks. ‘They’re not cemented together.’
    She pulled at the top front one and it slid forward. She removed it and placed it carefully on the ground.
    The smell rushed out at them.
    She heard McNab smother a gag.
    ‘Use the mask!’
    Officers’ vomit was not welcome on a crime scene. The bile was full of DNA.
    Above the hastily pulled-up mask, McNab’s eyes were watering.
    ‘Maybe you’d better wait outside,’ she suggested.
    He shook his head.
    The space left by the top brick was too small for the torch. McNab held it for her while she removed two more.
    This time she could shine her torch inside.
    The altar appeared to be built around a hole in the ground filled with stagnant water. A long grey thing floated on its surface.
    ‘What can you see?’ he muttered through the mask.
    ‘Dirty water. And something that looks like a stick.’
    She caught it with her gloved hand and pulled it towards her.
    The resulting sensation was both peculiar and horrific. The surface of the object seemed to part from the whole, stripping down its length like a snake discarding its skin.
    She let go and quickly withdrew her hand, realising with sickening certainty what she had grabbed. Disintegrating skin and hair stuck to the pale latex of her glove.
    ‘It’s a dead dog,’ she told him. ‘The stick was its tail.’

    Lamps had been rigged up inside the concrete structure. It was like illuminating a grave: harsh, unrelenting and without respect.
    Chrissy’s face was a livid white. In the forensic suit she looked ghost-like, a wraith in a tomb, as she finished sampling the damp walls.
    From somewhere in Rhona’s memory came the thought that in African culture, buildings were made circular to prevent evil spirits from lurking in the corners. But within this cylinder, evil was in the very air they breathed.
    The altar had been dismantled and the dog’s body removed. There had been no other body parts in the hole, human or otherwise.
    She had collected human faeces, both fresh and old, from the foot of the wall, which also smelt strongly of urine. This place had been a prison, but the lack of blood suggested it had not been a place of torture or death. The red cross on the wall had been made with ordinary household paint.
    The shoe could be a match to the ones worn by Stephen. That was all they’d found of the missing boy. Their one stroke of luck: the trainer had a Velcro fastening and everything stuck to Velcro.
    ‘I could do with a drink,’ Chrissy exclaimed with gusto. ‘A big one.’
    ‘Me too.’ Rhona rolled the latex gloves off her hands.
    They had gone over the building with a fine-toothed comb. Collected plenty of material, none of it pleasant. And none of it seemed likely to lead them to Stephen.
    The light had faded, leaving a faint red glow to washthe western sky. It had