by James Oswald
For the second time that night McLean felt himself hit by the massive, body-shaped fist of an explosion. The hard tarmac pavement rushed up to welcome him, and as the wind was driven from his lungs he couldn’t help thinking there’d be the devil to pay.
59
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
Dawn had painted the sky pink and grey by the time McLean made it out of the hospital. His suit was ruined, his face and hands cut and bruised, but he was alive. DC Gregg’s husband was expected to make a full recovery, too, which was more than could be said for their two goldfish. For some reason Gregg seemed to be more upset about their demise than the loss of her house. McLean had thoughts of home and soaking in a long, hot bath, perhaps getting a bit of sleep before going in to the station around noon. What he hadn’t expected was to be accosted outside the hospital reception area by Detective Superintendent Duguid.
‘And a very good morning to you too, sir.’ McLean thought he was in a bit of a sorry state, but it was nothing compared to Duguid. Someone had set about his face with a crowbar, or at least it looked that way. His eyes were black and puffy, nose clearly broken. The bandage around his head suggested that he had received some medical attention. That and the sling supporting one arm. The other hand held a lighted cigarette, smoke coiling upwards in little jagged whirls. He was shaking, though for once not because of barely controlled rage.
‘Christ. What happened to you?’
Duguid eyed McLean with his usual suspicion, made worse by the swelling around his face. ‘Could ask the same of you.’
‘Been a bit of a rough night.’
‘Way I heard it you were hobnobbing with that Saifre woman. Not rich enough you have to go chasing that kind of tail?’
McLean almost laughed. ‘Sometimes, sir, you get it so spectacularly wrong it’s funny.’
‘Do I look like I’m fucking laughing?’
‘No. You look like you’ve been in a car crash.’
Duguid scowled, or something close to a scowl. ‘Not far off. Fucking car-jackers boxed me in. Two Transits. Bottom of the London Road. Half a dozen of the foreign bastards.’
‘And you tried to fight them off ?’
‘They were going to steal my fucking car.’ Duguid took a long drag from his cigarette, hand shaking so much the ash tumbled to the icy ground. McLean wondered if it was just a coincidence that his boss had been attacked on the same night that half of CID seemed to have been targeted. He didn’t really believe in coincidences. Not any more.
‘So what happened to you, then?’ Duguid flicked his used dog-end into a nearby bush. ‘Come to blows with your new girlfriend already?’
McLean almost told him then exactly what he thought about Mrs Saifre and exactly who he was coming to the conclusion she was. Almost. He was tired and hurt and his brain wasn’t working properly, otherwise his sense of self-preservation would have stopped him even thinking about offering up such a ludicrous idea.
‘I was out at Rosskettle Hospital. There was a fire, then an explosion. DC MacBride’s still in there.’ He flicked his head back at the hospital as if Duguid wouldn’t know what he was referring to. ‘I got off lighter than him. Better than DC Gregg, too. She’s going to be looking for a new house.’
Duguid’s face dropped as McLean listed the night’s disasters. He skipped the bit about Grumpy Bob’s bath; no need to confuse matters. Still slightly addled from his beating, or maybe just not caring enough, Duguid didn’t ask what the two of them had been doing in Gregg’s street at four in the morning.
‘Jesus, when you poke the hornet’s nest you poke it good, aye?’ The detective superintendent pinched the bridge of his nose, then winced as he remembered it was broken.
‘You think this is all my fault?’
‘Isn’t it always, McLean? When you get down to it?’ Duguid stared at him, his piggy little eyes made even more accusing by his swollen face. ‘You just don’t know when to stop. It can be useful sometimes, but fuck me, it’s irritating too.’
‘You wanted justice. For Weatherly’s girls.’
‘Aye, I did at that. And two fingers to the high heidyins as wanted it all covered up nice and quiet. Fat lot of good it did me, too.’ Duguid limped back towards the hospital door, turned stiffly before going back inside as if to say something else. Then just shook his head one more time and was gone.
The taxi dropped him at the bottom of the drive. McLean thought it a bit odd that the driver didn’t seem inclined to take him to the front door, but it wasn’t far to walk. He paid his fare and then watched as the car disappeared around the corner in a cold haze of exhaust. He was dog-tired, felt filthy, and his suit needed to go in the bin. Shoes too, probably. Still, the day had dawned cloudless for the first time in days, a weak sun just starting to paint the tops of the taller buildings gold. He was still alive, despite it all, and that had to be a good thing.
He noticed the first cat sitting on the wall that ran along the front of the property, separating his garden from the street. Not that unusual perhaps; there were plenty of cats around here; some feral, some loved and fed and watered. He even recognized some of the regulars, but not this one.
The next cat sat in the middle of the driveway, staring at him in that way cats do. This was more puzzling. As far as he knew, Mrs McCutcheon’s cat had taken less than a week to establish herself as owner of this particular patch of the city, and few others dared venture into her territory. Yet this one was sitting as calm as you like. It didn’t even run off as he walked past it.
There was another cat by the front door, and two more on the lawn. They all stared at him like Stepford wives, heads swivelling silently as he slowed. Looking up he saw more in the trees. It was midwinter, never a time for much birdsong, but the silence hanging over the garden was ominous. And yet instead of fear, he felt only an odd comfort in the feline army surrounding him. He laughed out loud at the thought: a feline army. Standing guard around his home and protecting him from the evil that had almost certainly been trying to get in.
Mrs McCutcheon’s cat was sitting in the middle of the kitchen table. It, she, looked at him warily, then went back to cleaning herself. He reached out, scratched her behind the ears until she started to purr.
‘Looks like I owe you,’ he said, then turned to peer back out the door. ‘I just hope they don’t all want to be fed.’
60
Bathed, shaved, wearing clean clothes and having drunk enough coffee to wake the dead, McLean locked up the house and walked back down to the street, half an eye out for the cats that still watched him from all around. It wasn’t far to where he was going, and Shanks’s pony was pretty much the only option he had right now.
The sun had climbed about as far into the southern sky as it was going to manage at this time of year. It was weak against a thin blue sky, but it lit the snow-capped Pentlands and Blackford Hill, Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat. The cold air did its best to be fresh, not filled with the normal city fug. It was sweet to his lungs anyway, so long abused with gas and fire and brimstone.
It wasn’t a long walk to the house. The Rolls-Royce stood by the stone steps leading up to the front door. This was wide open, heat tumbling out of the hallway like an escaping animal. McLean knocked on the door jamb, poked his head in.
‘Anyone home?’
No one answered, so he stepped inside. He tried to remember his previous visit, walked across to the door he thought led into the living room.
‘Tony. What a pleasant surprise.’
She emerged from the shadows at the far end of the hallway. As the light played across her face she appeared first old and haggard, her hair streaked with grey. Then the image shifted and he saw the same perfectly presented woman he’d taken out to an expensive restaurant just a dozen or so hours earlier.
‘Mrs Saifre.’
‘Oh, I do wish you’d call me Jane Louise. All my friends do.’
‘We all wish for things we can’t have. Karl about?’
‘Karl?’ Mrs Saifre seemed momentarily confused. ‘Oh, Karl. No, he left.’
‘Left? You sacked him?’
‘Something like that, yes.’
‘Have you heard about Rosskettle?’
‘I have, yes. Terrible news. John Brooks came round first thing. No one was hurt, I’m told.’
John, not Detective Chief Inspector. McLean wondered if his boss knew what he’d got himself into.
‘Your Range Rover was there, at the scene.’
‘My … ?’ Mrs Saifre clutched a theatrical hand to her breast. Then let out a little laugh. ‘And you think … Oh, my, Tony. They told me you had an imagination.’
‘I don’t think anything, Mrs Saifre. I gather the facts first, then try to make sense of them. It’s not always as straightforward as you might imagine. So perhaps you could explain why your Range Rover was parked up at Rosskettle just before it burned down? And why it had a muddy shovel and a body bag in the back?’
Mrs Saifre smiled, but there was no mirth in it. Rather it was the smile of a predator knowing it’s going to feed soon, and well. ‘We left the Range Rover yesterday morning because it broke down. I was there to see how your forensic friends were getting on. Had to wait almost an hour for the Rolls to come and pick me up. One of the reasons why Karl’s no longer in my employ.’
‘And the body bag?’
‘That you’d have to ask Karl. The cars were his responsibility.’
‘That would be Karl who you just sacked. And I don’t suppose you’ve any idea where he is right now.’
‘He lived here, in the servants’ quarters. No idea where he went.’ Mrs Saifre wandered across the hall to a sideboard. Several crystal decanters sat on a silver tray and she took her time un-stoppering one after the other, sniffing the contents before finally pouring a large measure of something amber and expensive into a glass.
‘Dram?’ she asked.
‘Thanks, but I’m on duty.’
‘Really? After the night you just had? I’d have thought they’d give you a little time off.’ Mrs Saifre took a drink, leaned back against the sideboard.
‘What are you going to do with the hospital site now?’
‘Goodness me, am I under interrogation?’ She pushed away from the sideboard and walked slowly across the room towards him, hips swaying provocatively. Without thinking, McLean slid his hand into his pocket, felt the thin slip of card tingling under his fingertips. Emma’s postcard, he’d picked it up off the kitchen table just before leaving. His anchor to reality. Or at least a kind of reality.
‘What are you suggesting? That I ordered Karl to bury Andrew out there at his favourite spot?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘It’s ridiculous, and you know it.’
‘Well, we have your car and forensics will prove Weatherly’s body was in the back of it. There’s only your word you knew nothing about that.’
‘Am I being arrested? Will you put me in handcuffs, Tony?’ Glass in one hand, Mrs Saifre put her arms out, wrists together in mock submission. She gave up when it became clear he wasn’t going to play. Slumped down into the nearby sofa.
‘Look, I’ve no idea what my staff get up to half of the time. Andrew was my business partner, yes. But I work mostly out of the US these days. This is the first time I’ve been back in Edinburgh in almost a decade. If you want to know what’s happening to the hospital site or where Karl might have gone after I sacked him, then you really need to talk to Jennifer. She was Andrew’s mistress, after all.’
‘You do know that Miss Denton is in hospital, don’t you? She had a stroke. Not expected to regain consciousness.’
‘Oh dear. Poor thing. I rather liked her.’ Mrs Saifre put down her whisky glass and stood up again, stretching like a cat. She had a smell about her, an allure that even McLean couldn’t deny. She was exquisitely made up, and yet somehow managed to appear tousled and vulnerable. She fixed him with hungry eyes, stepped closer than was really necessary.
‘What did you really come here to see me about, Tony?’ She reached out and took his right hand. His left was still in the pocket of his jacket, the thin slip of card between two fingers.
‘I know who you are. What you are.’
‘You do?’ Mrs Saifre raised her hand to her lips, taking his with it. She kissed the back of his fingers ever so lightly, warmth spreading right through him with each slow touch. When she released it, his arm took far longer to sink back down to his side than gravity would have liked.
‘Yes. I do.’ McLean stood his ground as she reached up and stroked his cheek with the backs of her nails. The small animal deep inside him was screaming run, hide, get away. Only the thin card between his fingers gave him the strength to stay put.
‘Then you’re either very brave,’ Mrs Saifre said. ‘Or else very stupid.’
‘Can I be both?’
She laughed, and far away a forest burned to the ground. ‘This! This is why I like you, Tony!’ She spun away like a little girl, pirouetting around the table before coming back to a standstill, close again.
‘We should be together, you and I. We could do such great things.’
‘Like driving a man to murder his children? What did you have on him? The bodies out at the hospital? Were you going to tell the world about his terrible secret?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Mrs Saifre pouted, and McLean knew she was lying.
‘I don’t think you meant for us to recover the Range Rover. That was your mistake. It was supposed to be destroyed in the fire. Convenient, too, that Karl should disappear. Did you arrange that like you arranged to have the other buildings razed, all evidence of your complicity carted off site and destroyed? Everything pointing neatly back to Weatherly.’
Mrs Saifre stepped close again, and McLean finally saw the dance she was doing. She took his free hand again, her touch uncomfortably warm. ‘You’ve got me all wrong, Tony. I helped Andrew, I really did. Made him what he was. I had nothing to do with his downfall. How could I?’
‘Don’t worry. I can’t prove anything. Not trying to trick a confession out of you.’ McLean extracted his hand from her grasp. ‘And anyway, you’d just buy your way out of any trouble. You’ve got the money, the influence. I can’t beat that.’
‘Then come with me.’ This time Mrs Saifre’s eyes seemed to light up with excitement. ‘With me at your side you could be anything. Chief Constable? First Minister? How about the first President of an independent Scotland?’
And there it was. The offer. The temptation. McLean studied Mrs Saifre’s face, looking for any sign that she was joking. She was so hard to read, so unpredictable. That, of course, was her nature. This might have been some elaborate joke, but something told him it was true. If he said yes, if he surrendered to her will, then she would make it all happen. He could have fame and power and a beautiful woman at his side, in his bed. But more, he could use that fame and power to do good works. Others had, in her name, in the past. They were precious few in number, but they had existed.
The card in his pocket felt like it was vibrating between his finger and thumb as he stared into those black, bottomless eyes. So easy to lose yourself in them, so inviting to dive into that warm pit of sensual pleasure and carelessness.
Then he remembered another pair of eyes. Cold, dead, terrified and mad. Andrew Weatherly had stopped being useful to this creature, and look what had happened to him.
‘Is that what you promised Weatherly? And all he had to do was give you his soul?’
‘A soul’s such an overrated thing. You’ll hardly miss it when it’s gone.’ Mrs Saifre reached out to touch his face again. Slowly, gently, she pulled him towards her as she stretched her neck upwards for a kiss. McLean could fool himself and say he’d let her get that close on purpose. Truth was she had sneaked in under his guard. He was trapped, helpless as he watched those lips part, red as burning coals. Her glistening tongue darted over sparkling white, pointed teeth, moistening them with
saliva that would burn whatever it touched. Her grip was insistent, bending him down towards her as she let out a low, hissing ‘yes’.
But his hand still gripped the postcard. He could feel the shiny side with its picture of ruins and flowers, and there the other side, the words Emma had written to him. The little row of Xs.
‘No. I don’t think so.’ He pulled away, surprised at how easy it was to do. Mrs Saifre stared at him, stunned, her hand motionless, still holding the air where his chin had been.
‘Why?’ she asked eventually.
‘I’m already spoken for.’ McLean let go of the postcard, took his hand out of his pocket and straightened his coat. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Saifre. I want you to leave now. Go back to wherever it was you came from. And don’t ever threaten my friends again.’
He left her there, staring at him in bewilderment. Outside, the thin sun warmed his face as McLean closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Sweet air filled his lungs. He stood for a moment, just enjoying the fact that he was alive. Then he shoved his hands back in his pockets, dipped his head against the chill and headed off home.
61
‘Seems there were some big old oil tanks in the basement, fed the boilers for the central heating. Five of the buggers. Must’ve been ancient; you can’t have anything like that these days. A couple thousand litres in the bottom of each, turned to gas with the heat.’
Rosskettle Hospital didn’t look all that good in the cold light of day. There were a couple of places where the walls made it up to the second floor, but not many. Mostly it was a pile of rubble, steaming in the morning sun. Deep underground the fires were still burning, apparently.
‘Not going to get much in the way of evidence out of there.’ McLean stood alongside the chief fire officer, a good distance away from the mess. Two days had passed since the fire and explosions, but one of the fire engines was still there, its wheels stuck to the tarmac by the heat. From this side it looked almost normal, but he’d been around the other side earlier and knew just how hot things must have been.
