Dead Men's Bones

by James Oswald

  ‘Tony. Thought you might be along soon enough.’

  McLean picked a careful trail through the bodies until he reached the impromptu examination centre. He’d been expecting to see a corpse laid out, but when he finally saw what Cadwallader had been working on, it was just a skeleton.

  ‘The fresher ones are in the cool store. We don’t want to stink this place out.’

  Now that Cadwallader mentioned it, McLean realized that there wasn’t the kind of smell here that he would have expected. The temperature was low – both pathologists and their assistant Dr Sharp were wearing gear more appropriate for working outdoors – but it wasn’t so cold as to be uncomfortable.

  ‘What was the final count?’ He did a slow turn on one heel, trying to count the body bags. Got to twenty before Cadwallader answered.

  ‘They found twenty-nine bodies in all. Three of them still had some flesh on them. The rest have been in the ground at least thirty years.’

  ‘Thirty years?’ McLean emphasized the last word, hoping that perhaps Cadwallader had meant months. Looking at the brown-stained assortment of bones on the table in front of him, he realized it was a forlorn hope.

  ‘Sorry, Tony. It’s early days, but my best guess is this one is a hundred years dead. Maybe more. And it’s not the oldest by a long shot.’

  ‘So they could just be patients from the mental hospital? People who maybe died without anyone to claim them? Cheaper to lay them out in the grounds than give them a pauper’s burial.’

  ‘Well, it’s possible. That’s your department anyway. I’m just here to try to work out what killed them.’ Cadwallader reached out a latex-gloved hand and helped himself to something that looked like a neck vertebra. ‘In this case, it’s not all that difficult. See?’

  He held up the bone, angling it in the light. McLean was no great expert, but his grandmother had been a pathologist, and he’d witnessed too many post-mortems in the line of duty not to recognize the scratches on the surface as knife marks. Even after a century it was fairly obvious that the man whose bones these were had died violently, with a knife to the throat, deep and swift.

  ‘Murder, then.’

  ‘Looks like it. And not just him.’ Cadwallader put the bone back in the wrong place, Tracy quickly moving it to where it should be while he swept the room with one arm, indicating the collected bones. ‘Every single one of them’s exactly the same.’

  53

  ‘The Weatherly family owned most of the land around Bonnyrigg and Roslin in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They made their money in the munitions factories, mostly. Some sugar trading, slaves, stuff like that. It was Josiah Weatherly who built Rosskettle Hospital, back in the late 1800s. Well, I say built. He was on the Midlothian and Peebles District Lunacy Board. Pushed for the hospital to be built. Provided the site and a lot of the funds, too. The main building was originally one of the family homes. Been remodelled a bit over the years.’

  The small incident room was quiet, just McLean, Grumpy Bob and constables MacBride and Gregg. The core team. He’d called a meeting to bring everyone up to speed with the investigations, but MacBride seemed to be the one with all the facts.

  ‘How is it you know all this, laddie?’ Grumpy Bob asked. MacBride simply grinned, the tips of his ears reddening at the praise, then continued reading from his tablet computer.

  ‘There’s been a fair number of Weatherlys in the asylum down the years. Josiah’s younger brother, Nathan, was the first on record. I suspect that might have had something to do with his enthusiasm for the project in the first place. The last one there was Annie Weatherly, born in 1936. She was committed in late 1952. By then it was part of the South Eastern Hospital Board. NHS Scotland, basically. She died in 1961.’

  ‘Andrew Weatherly’s mother?’ This from DC Gregg.

  ‘The very same.’ McLean took up the story, pieced together from what Matt Hilton and Jennifer Denton had told him. ‘They basically locked her away for getting pregnant when she was just sixteen. I know it’s a rite of passage in some parts of the city these days, but it was frowned upon back then. Andrew Weatherly was born in Rosskettle. Spent his first eight years living there. Got fostered out when his mother died.’

  ‘You think that’s why his body ended up back there?’ Grumpy Bob asked. ‘That how you persuaded Duguid to get you the warrant?’

  McLean paused before answering, trying to get his thoughts about it in order. ‘I had a suspicion. There was too much linking him to the site, and I needed to move before the bulldozers erased everything. I never really expected to find him. Thought there’d be something, though.’

  ‘The other bodies?’ Grumpy Bob raised a laconic eyebrow. ‘That’s some leap, sir.’

  ‘Didn’t think there’d be so many.’ McLean shook his head, leaned back against the desk. ‘But I was working on the assumption William Beaumont wasn’t the first. You any idea how many people go missing from this city every year?’

  ‘But why?’ DC Gregg asked. ‘Why the tattoos? Why bury them in the grounds?’

  ‘Why do people do the things they do? Money? Power? Madness? Weatherly grew up in a lunatic asylum, remember. His family has a history of mental illness.’

  ‘It’s still a bit of a stretch, isn’t it?’ Gregg asked. ‘I mean, yes, the bodies are there, but you really think Weatherly killed them? I thought some of them went back centuries?’

  ‘Everything’s a stretch, Constable. But it makes most sense that Weatherly was behind it all. He controlled that hospital for years, even while it was part of the NHS. Bought it as soon as it was possible. He grew up there, had the run of the place. Who else would know all its secrets?’

  ‘But he was only just sixty.’

  ‘Don’t think I don’t know that.’ McLean rubbed at his forehead, hoping it would ease the headache. It didn’t. ‘Let’s not mess about here, these are sacrificial killings. Someone’s been offering up the mad or the homeless for a hundred years and more. The sophistication suggests it was well organized and protected from prying eyes. Weatherly was just the latest to do it, almost certainly with a great deal of help.’

  ‘And he killed his family because he thought his secret was going to come out?’ Gregg asked.

  ‘That’s the most obvious conclusion, and that’s what we’ll offer to the press.’ McLean pushed himself up from the desk, signalling to the team that their impromptu briefing was over. ‘Not much else we can do, really.’

  Now all he had to do was break the good news to Duguid.

  ‘What the fuck are we looking at here?’ Duguid slumped back into his seat like a man defeated by circumstance. It had taken a while for McLean to realize it, but now he looked closely, he could see just how tired the detective superintendent was. How worn down. Even his normal abrasive anger was tempered by a terrible weariness. And it was terrible, something that could break even Duguid’s intemperance.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t know. And that worries me.’

  ‘Ha. The great Detective Inspector McLean baffled.’ Duguid tried to make a joke of it, but it was too much effort. McLean looked around the office, wondering whether he could get away with sitting down. The only chairs other than the one currently occupied were over at the far side of the room, arranged around a small conference table. No informality in here.

  ‘There’s a possible link between Andrew Weatherly and William Beaumont, sir.’

  ‘Beaumont?’

  ‘The tattooed man. He was living on the streets. Ex-military. You’d be surprised how many there are. Seems he was dossing down for the night in a prime New Town spot, him and an old service friend of his, Gordy Johnson. The two of them were attacked. Gordy called them “dark angels” and said they shot lightning from their hands, so I’m guessing black clothing, tasers, professional.’

  ‘That’s a bit of a leap, isn’t it? From the ravings of a madman?’

  McLean bit his tongue to stop the obvious retort coming out. Best to humour Duguid when he wasn’t being de
liberately obstructive. ‘I’m just trying to build a scenario here, sir. Next thing we know, Beaumont’s naked, covered from head to toe in fresh tattoos and drowned in the North Esk, just downstream from Roslin Chapel.’

  ‘Oh Christ, not the bloody Templar conspiracy. Thought you had more sense, McLean.’

  ‘Funny you should say that, sir. DCI Brooks was telling me much the same thing earlier this morning.’ McLean paused for just enough time to let Duguid start speaking again, then interrupted him before he could get the words out. Petty but satisfying. ‘I think the proximity to the chapel’s coincidence, for what it’s worth. The body was washed downstream by the floods, so where we found it’s irrelevant, really.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It is. The important thing is the tattoos themselves. From what I can gather, Beaumont had a few tattoos from his service days, but nothing you’d notice unless he took his shirt off. And yet somehow in the space of a couple of weeks he ended up covered in them, quite literally head to toe.’

  ‘Someone else did this to him.’ Duguid’s weariness sloughed off a little as his brain began to engage.

  ‘Exactly so. And they must have kept him sedated. It’s not exactly painless getting a tattoo.’

  That got him a raised eyebrow. ‘You an expert, are you?’

  ‘Not as much as Detective Constable MacBride, sir. But you’re missing the point. It takes years to do a whole body, not weeks. Beaumont would’ve been in agony if he’d been conscious.’

  Duguid said nothing for a while, which might have suggested that he was thinking. McLean knew better than to be too hopeful.

  ‘Where are you going with this, McLean?’

  ‘Well, I think it’s fair to say Beaumont didn’t volunteer for this. Someone took him off the streets reckoning no one would miss a homeless person. And they covered him in tattoos for a reason, however far-fetched. This was organized and efficient. With Andrew-bloody-Weatherly smack bang in the middle of it.’ McLean reluctantly let the loose carriages in his train of thoughts join up, promising to take him to a place he really didn’t want to go. ‘Only whatever crazed reason, whatever ceremony he was performing, I’ve a nasty suspicion it went wrong this time.’

  ‘What are you suggesting, then? Beaumont escaped?’

  ‘Exactly that. He was ex-SAS. I don’t think they realized what they’d let themselves in for. He woke up, freaked out, ran. Somehow he ended up in the river. The other bodies were all buried in the hospital grounds.’

  ‘So Weatherly knew his little secret was about to come out. Topped his wife and kids, then turned the gun on himself.’ Duguid nodded to himself as he spoke, as if this made perfect sense. McLean didn’t buy it, though. It just didn’t fit the profile of the man.

  ‘But why?’ Duguid continued. ‘Why did he want to kill this Beaumont fellow in the first place?’

  ‘I never said it made sense, sir. Murder rarely does. I think it’s probably something Weatherly got involved in when he was a boy, growing up at Rosskettle. Some sort of cult, secret society or something.’

  Duguid stared at him for just a little too long, the expression on his face inscrutable. ‘Jayne warned me about you, McLean. Said you were a weirdness magnet. I thought she was making excuses for your poor record, but damn it if she wasn’t right.’

  McLean said nothing. Not sure there was anything he could say.

  ‘So they took this man, Beaumont. Hauled him off the streets for this fucking ceremony of yours. Covered him in tattoos. I’m guessing he wasn’t meant to come out of it alive.’

  ‘Doesn’t look that way, no. Not if the other bodies are anything to go by.’

  ‘Christ, yes, the other bodies.’ Duguid rubbed at his temples with his fingertips. ‘That’s a fucking mess right there. What are we supposed to make of them?’

  ‘Tattoos on the bodies that still had skin, not a Christian burial, all of them with deep cuts to the throat?’ McLean ran a quick precis of the initial forensic reports he’d read.

  ‘A sacrifice, then.’

  ‘That’s a reasonable assumption.’

  ‘Reasonable.’ Duguid let out a bark of humourless laughter. ‘Nothing about this is in any way reasonable. But here’s a question for you. If your tattooed man was a ceremonial sacrifice, then what the fuck was Weatherly hoping to get out of it?’ Duguid fixed McLean with a stare that was all the more alarming for the sudden insights that came with it. ‘What the fuck was he sacrificing Beaumont to?’

  Duguid’s question preyed on his mind all the way to his tiny office, tucked away at the forgotten back end of the station. It was a good place to sit and think; people rarely visited unless by mistake. Which wasn’t to say they didn’t occasionally drop by on purpose. Someone must have done on a regular basis to keep adding to the piles of paperwork, unless those really were breeding of their own accord. And someone had put a plain brown envelope in the centre of his desk recently enough for it not to have been buried.

  Heart heavy at the thought of yet another load of disturbing photographs, McLean pulled the envelope towards him and pulled out the contents.

  Not something from Special Branch or whoever the man in the tweed jacket worked for, but a detailed pathology report for the late Detective Superintendent Jack Tennant. Top marks to Pete Dundas for getting a hold of it so quickly; he owed the duty sergeant a pint or two.

  McLean had read enough PM reports in his time to know that they weren’t exactly filled with joy. Even so, the list of problems that had finished off his old friend made for grim reading. The lung cancer had been relatively recent, apparently, but was just the last metastasis of something that had started in his bones a long time ago and had even spread to his brain. The pathologist came to the conclusion that, like a lot of men of his age, Jack Tennant had ignored the early signs of his illness, missing the point at which anything could have been done about it. If anything ever could have been done about it. Nevertheless, he was surprised at how far-reaching the cancer was, how many vital organs it had attacked. A sample was being sent to a top research laboratory for genetic analysis, just in case it was something they needed to know about.

  He skim-read most of the report, saddened by how unfair life could be sometimes. The Jack Tennant McLean remembered had been full of energy and intelligence, with a deadpan sense of humour that caught everyone out most of the time. He’d been just months off retirement, though whether that was a good thing or bad, McLean couldn’t really be sure. Either way, it seemed just bloody unfair that he drop dead now.

  A sentence near the end of the report caught his eye. McLean had put his feet up on the desk, the chair tilted as far back as it would go before smacking against the wall. Now he dropped forward with a loud crash. Held the final page up to the light, squinting at the words as if he’d misread them the first time.

  Subject’s lips were swollen, with signs of recent blistering consistent with the application of excessive heat. It is estimated that this injury was sustained two to four weeks ante-mortem and was beginning to heal.

  Four weeks. What had Tennant been doing four weeks ago? Heading up the Fife end of the Weatherly investigation. Interviewing friends and work colleagues of the deceased. Weatherly himself had shown a similar injury, but if it had been Weatherly behind the abduction of William Beaumont, Weatherly who had employed Barry Timbrel to tattoo his entire body, then why had Timbrel been damaged the same way? Unless the burnt lips were the mark of a third party. What was it Duguid had asked? What was William Beaumont being sacrificed to?

  What did Weatherly expect to get in return? But what if that was the wrong way to look at it? What if the sacrifice was meant to keep something away?

  A shiver ran from his head down into his gut as the implications of the question started to come together. There was someone else who had fallen ill recently, suffering from a mysterious ailment that had the doctors baffled. He gathered up the papers with hands so shaky it was almost impossible to get the report back into its envelope.
Folding the whole thing lengthways, he shoved it in the inside pocket of his jacket. Pete Dundas had gone out on a limb getting it in the first place; no point dropping him in the shit by leaving it lying around where any Tom, Dick or detective superintendent might find it. Checking everything else was in order, he headed out the door. DCI Brooks might want him collating the forensic and pathology results coming in from the Rosskettle investigation, but right now there were much more important things to do.

  54

  She was asleep when he entered the ward, head sunk into the pillows as if the bed were slowly swallowing her. It wasn’t official visiting hours, but even so the other patients were all awake. McLean approached quietly once more, taking in the changes that had occurred to DS Ritchie in just a few short weeks of illness. Her skin was dry and cracked, her hair a mess of grease and sweat. Her eyebrows had never really grown back after the fire she’d pulled him out of a year or so back, and now the lines where they had been were white. The nutrient drip on a tall stand beside the bed suggested that she was still having a hard time eating anything, as did the faint dribble of bloody mucus around her mouth. As he leaned in close, he could hear her breathing ragged and forced. A smell rose off her quite unlike the faint perfume he would always associate with her presence. More rotting compost than rose water.

  He was staring at her face, trying to see whether there was any swelling or bruising about her lips, when she slowly opened her eyes. A puzzled frown grew across her face, then she started coughing, leaning up out of the pillows and bent almost double with the effort of clearing whatever it was that clogged up her lungs.

  ‘Easy now.’ McLean pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her, knowing full well the stern lecture on hygiene he’d get from the nurses if they caught him. Ritchie took it, shoving it so hard into her mouth he thought for a moment she was going to swallow it. Eventually the spasms subsided and she slumped back into her pillows. Held up the hankie for him to have back, then saw what it looked like and dropped it to the floor.