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the neck. Just a few remnants of grey-white tissue were left holding the skeleton together. The pathologist removed a long, pointed instrument from his breast pocket and gently poked about among the bones. ‘Pretty porous and brittle. These are going to break very easily, and the remaining tissue’s not going to hold them when we start moving him. Best leave him in these clothes for transporting him. They’re about the only thing that’s keeping him in one piece. If this water had been any warmer, all we’d have found here would be a pile of bones.’
    He turned his attention, then, to the skull.
    ‘Massive trauma,’ he said. ‘Half his jaw’s gone. His brain on this side would have been pulverized.’
    ‘Is that what killed him?’ Fin asked.
    ‘Impossible to say, Fin. The injury could have been inflicted after death for all we know. All the same, it might be a good guess.’
    ‘Any idea what could have done it?’
    ‘Something blunt. Big. The size of a baseball bat, though flatter I’d say. But the force that was used to inflict an injury like this . . .’ He shook his head.
    ‘Not the result of a plane crash then,’ Gunn said.
    The professor threw him a look. ‘Does this plane look to you like it’s crashed, Detective Sergeant?’
    Gunn glanced at Fin. ‘No, sir, it doesn’t.’
    ‘No, it fucking does not! I’m no expert, but I’d say this plane didn’t crash into the loch. It landed on it and sank. And one thing’s for sure, this fella wasn’t flying it.’ He eased open the jaw with his metal probe. ‘And all this damage to the jaw and the teeth means we’ll not be able to make a positive ID from any dental records that might exist.’
    ‘What about DNA?’ Fin said.
    ‘We can extract some from the bones, for sure. And there is a little hair left. But what do we have to compare it to?’
    Gunn said, ‘His parents are dead. No brothers or sisters.’
    ‘So no immediate familial match possible. And I don’t suppose he’ll be in the database. What about personal items? Comb, hairbrush, shaver? Anything that might have remnants of his DNA.’
    Gunn shook his head. ‘I don’t think so, sir. The parental home would have been cleared out for sale after their death. And who knows what happened to Mr Mackenzie’s personal items from Glasgow?’
    Professor Wilson scowled at him. ‘Not much bloody use are you, Detective Sergeant?’ Then he turned back to the corpse and slipped two fingers very carefully into the inside pocket of the leather jacket. By gentle increments, he eased out a bleached leather wallet. ‘We might just have to rely on this.’ He opened it up. If there had been paper money in it once, it was long gone. There was a handful of coins, and three credit cards all in the name of Roderick Mackenzie. From an inside flap the pathologist drew out a plasticized card with Roddy’s photograph on it. Membership of a Glasgow fitness club. He looked back at Fin. ‘You knew him?’
    Fin nodded.
    ‘I guess that’s him, then?’
    ‘It is.’ Fin found himself staring at the faded face of the once handsome young man, with his head of blond curls and slightly lopsided smile. And, as before, when Gunn had referred to him as
the deceased
, he felt an odd sense of grief.
    ‘So . . .’ Professor Wilson turned towards Gunn. ‘What do you think, Detective Sergeant?’
    ‘I think he was murdered, sir.’
    The pathologist shrugged, for once finding himself in accord with the policeman. ‘Not conclusive, of course, but I’d say there was a damned good chance of it. What do you think, Fin?’
    ‘It’s what I thought the moment I opened the door of the cockpit, Angus. And I’ve not seen anything to change my mind.’
    The professor nodded. ‘Right, then. We want that recovery team up here as quickly as possible. Photograph the body, then get it back to Stornoway, and we’ll see if there’s anything else we can divine on the autopsy table.’
    As the pathologist slithered down off the