Natural Causes

by James Oswald

  He went back to guddling around in the dead man's chest, taking out unidentifiable bits, peering at them, weighing them and placing them in individual containers; as happy as a pig in shit. Pity poor Tracy who would have to put them all back again and stitch the cadaver up later.

  'So would you like to hazard a cause of death?' McLean asked when he felt he could take no more.

  'Heart failure due to massive loss of blood would be my best guess. The knife wound to the throat went deep enough to sever the carotid artery and leave marks on the neck vertebrae. We've got the weapon, haven't we?'

  Tracy produced a plastic bag with the hunting knife in it. Cadwallader weighed it in his hand, inspecting the blade and holding it to the dead man's neck.

  'Yes, that would do it. And it would also explain these marks here on his sternum and ribs. The killer cut him open to remove his heart. It's a tricky organ to get to without either a great deal of skill or being very messy indeed.'

  'Can you hazard a time of death?'

  'Thirty-six to forty-eight hours. He'd been sitting there quite a while. I'm surprised your man hadn't made a run for the border. Could've been in a different country before you found the body.'

  McLean did the maths. Wemyss had been killed not long after David Brown. Dead in the bushes on the boundary of Wemyss garden. Killed by Jethro Callum in a violent fury.

  'He was waiting for us, in the room where we found him.' McLean nodded at the eviscerated man lying on the table. 'He tried to kill himself. Right in front of me.'

  'Ah. I see a pattern emerging.'

  So did McLean, but before he could say anything more, his jacket pocket started to buzz and vibrate furiously. It was such an unusual sensation, it took him a long time to realise that his mobile phone was ringing. He flipped it open, noticing an almost full battery readout.

  'Do carry on without me,' he said to Cadwallader, then stalked out of the room. Past the doors, he answered the call. 'McLean.'

  'MacBride here, sir. There's been an incident at the hospital. It's Callum. He's collapsed.'

  Violence is all it knows. McLean recalled the words of Jonas Carstairs' letter. And then names: Peter Andrews, watching Jonathan Okolo die violently in a city centre pub; Sally Dent, witnessing Peter Andrews taking his own life; David Brown, watching Sally's body plunge through the glass ceiling of Waverly Station, smashing into the windscreen of the train he was driving; Jethro Callum breaking David's bones, throttling the life out of him; Callum smashing his head into the glass window, trying to kill himself. What had he said? 'You'll understand soon.' That voice so different and strange.

  Despite the summer heat, a shiver ran through his whole body. Maybe he did understand. And maybe he knew what had to be done. If he was wrong, he was going to have a hard time explaining himself, but if he was right? Well, that didn't really bear thinking about.

  ~~~~

  66

  The hospital had a sad familiarity for him. McLean had visited his grandmother here too many times to count. The nurses all smiled and said hello as he walked the corridors; he knew most of them by name. Walking beside him, DC MacBride blushed at the attention. A junior doctor, looking tired and harassed, walked up to them as they strode down the corridor.

  'Inspector McLean?'

  McLean nodded. 'What's the story, doc?'

  'It's hard to say. I've never seen anything like it before. Mr Callum's a very fit man, young, too. But his organs are packing up one by one. If we can't stop it, or stabilise him, he could die in hours.'

  'Hours? But yesterday he was fine. Better than fine.' McLean felt his bruised ribs, remembered the muscled man he'd fought with not twenty-four hours before. Another piece of the puzzle slotting into place, a picture emerging that he really didn't want to see.

  'We're working on the hypothesis that it's some form of steroid reaction. He didn't get the size he is just by pumping iron, and whatever he was on might have made him over-sensitive to something we've given him. But I've never seen anything come on so quickly before. I treated him for his damaged eye yesterday evening, and apart from a little hyperventilation, he seemed fine.'

  'Did he speak to you?'

  'What? Oh. No. He didn't say a word.'

  'Didn't struggle, didn't try to kill himself?'

  'No. But he was restrained, and there were three constables with him at all times.'

  'Where is he now?'

  'We've put him in one of the single rooms up by the coma ward.'

  'So that if he becomes too violent, no-one will be disturbed?'

  'Well, yes. But we've got all the intensive care monitoring kit up there as well. Here, I'll show you the way.'

  'That's all right. I know where it is. I'm sure you've got a hundred and one things more important to worry about than a murderer who's going nowhere.'

  They left the doctor behind, looking slightly puzzled. McLean lead the way through the miles of faceless corridors, MacBride trotting at his heels like a faithful hound to keep up.

  'What are we doing here, sir?'

  'I'm here to interview our only surviving murder suspect before this mysterious illness kills him,' McLean said as they approached the room he had been seeking. A bored looking PC sat on an uncomfortable plastic chair outside, reading an Ian Rankin novel. 'You're here because Grumpy Bob's developed a talent for hiding when he knows I'm about to do something the chief superintendent won't approve of.'

  'Inspector. Sir. No one told me...' The constable stood to attention, trying to hide the book behind his back.

  'Don't panic, Steve. I just want a word with the prisoner. Why don't you go off and get yourself a cuppa, eh? DC MacBride'll keep an eye on things.'

  'What do you want me to do?' MacBride asked as the relieved policeman scurried off to the canteen.

  'You stand guard here.' McLean opened the door and stepped through. 'And don't let anyone in.'

  *

  The room was a small and soulless, a single narrow window opening onto a view of sun-blasted concrete and glass. Two plastic chairs lined up against the wall, and a narrow cabinet had been pressed into service as a bedside table. Jethro Callum lay at the centre of a bewildering array of humming machinery. Tubes pumped noxious looking fluids to and from his body. He looked nothing at all like the fit bodyguard McLean had wrestled with just the afternoon before. Propped up in a mound of pillows, his face was sunken and pale, his eyes dark hollows. Most of his hair had fallen out, some still lying on his pillow in dead heaps. The skin on his scalp was mottled with vivid red spots. His arms lay on top of the blankets, fat with muscle but all the tone gone. He still had his bulk, but now it hindered his breathing, pinning him down far more effectively than the leather restraint straps that tied him to the bed frame.

  'You came. I knew you would.' Callum's voice was barely audible above the hum of the life-support machinery. But it wasn't the voice of the bodyguard. This was the other one, the voice that had threatened and promised. The voice that had a strangely hypnotic power behind it.

  McLean picked up one of the chairs, wedging it under the door handle. He took the emergency call cord and looped it out of reach. Then he leant down to study the machines for a moment. Wires trailed from an ECG to a slim sensor attached to one of Callum's fingers. McLean slipped it off, pushing it swiftly onto his own. The machine gave a few hurried bleeps then settled back down into a steady rhythm. He inspected the other machines, but only the ECG seemed to be plumbed into the emergency monitoring system. He searched for the switches and turned them off, one by one. Medical science kept the body alive, but Jethro Callum had really perished the moment he had killed David Brown. Whatever it was that had taken hold of his soul then had been slowly devouring his flesh ever since.

  'Tell me about the girl.' McLean settled himself into the other chair.

  'What girl?'

  'You know who I'm talking about. The girl they killed in their sick ceremony.'

  'Ah, yes. Her.' Callum sounded oddly distant, like an emphysemic ventr
iloquist's dummy, but the pleasure in his voice was sickening. 'Little Maggie Donaldson. Pretty little thing. Can't have been much more than sixteen. Pure, of course. That's what attracted me to her. But they soiled her, all of them. One after the other. The old one, he knew what he was doing. He trapped me inside her and then they split her up. Took a part of me each.'

  'Why did they do it?'

  'Why do your kind ever do anything? They wanted to live forever.'

  'And you? What happens to you?'

  'I go on. In you.'

  McLean looked at the pathetic figure dying in front of him. This was what it was all about. This was what had caused all the shit that had happened to him since they'd discovered the dead girl in the basement of Farquhar House. This was what had killed innocent people, twisting them to its purpose without a care. This was why Alison Kydd had been run down in the street. He was filled with an urge to strangle the man. It would be so easy to wrap his hands around his throat and squeeze the life out of him. Or better still, to grind something into his blinded eye, and on through to his brain. He had a pen in his pocket, that would be enough of a weapon. You just needed the right entry point, the right leverage. There were so many ways to kill a man. So many...

  'Oh no you don't.' He shook the alien thoughts from his head. Barnaby Smythe, Buchan Stewart, Jonas Carstairs, Gavin Wemyss. They had all sat calmly, unrestrained as they were butchered and killed. And Fergus McReadie, too. He had taken his own life just because of a word. Now McLean knew why. They had been in thrall to that voice, connected to it by an act of savagery to which they had all been party. But he hadn't killed the girl, hadn't planned to murder Chloe. There was no connection between him and this monster.

  'Oh but there is, inspector. You made the circle whole. You're as much a part of this as any of them. More so. You have a strength of spirit they all lacked. His blood runs through your veins. You are a fit vessel to contain me.'

  This time the persuasion was like a wall of darkness, pushing against him. McLean saw glimpses of gruesome scenes: Smythe's face contorted in pain as the knife bit into his grey-haired chest; Jonas Carstairs' heart still beating beneath his exposed ribs; Gavin Wemyss sitting calmly, only his eyes showing his true state of mind as his throat was slowly cut. And with each image came a surge of power, a feeling of unrestrained excitement and joy. He could have this, be this. He could live forever.

  'I don't think so.' McLean pushed himself out of his chair and crossed to the bed. He reached up to the saline drip, twisting the tap around until the flow was cut off. 'I understand now. I didn't want to believe it, but I guess I have to. You need the violence to pass from one host to the next. Without it you're stuck. And when this one goes, so do you. Back to wherever it was they summoned you from with their foul ceremony.'

  'What are you doing? I command you to kill this body.' Callum fought against the straps and the sheets that pinned him to the bed, but it was a weak effort, and he fell swiftly to a fit of gurgling coughs.

  'You're doing a good enough job of that yourself.' McLean shrugged off another wave of compulsion, weaker this time, more desperate. He sat himself down again, staring at the wasted form in the bed. 'I'm guessing you never meant to stay in poor Jethro this long, but you had to cover your tracks and that took time. He was never strong enough to carry you, was he?'

  'Kill me.' The voice was little more than a faltering breath now. 'Set me free.'

  'Not this time.' McLean settled himself into the chair. Watched and waited as Callum's last few breaths rattled out of him like escaping insects.

  'This time you die of natural causes.'

  ~~~~

  Epilogue

  Christopher Roberts sat at the table with his head drooped low. He smelled of too many nights in the cells, and his once-fine suit was quite ruined. McLean stood with his back to the wall of the interview room and considered him for a moment, trying to dredge up some sympathy for the man. Failing.

  'Gavin Wemyss is dead, and Jethro Callum too.'

  Roberts looked up as the words sank in, a gleam of hope in his eyes. But before he could say anything, McLean spoke again.

  'The thing is, Mr Roberts, I'm almost certain that you were coerced into your actions, and we could well have taken that into consideration. Chloe's safe, though I doubt she'll ever forget being locked in a cellar for days with a mutilated corpse. I could almost see my way to persuading her not to press charges against you.'

  'You'd do that?' Roberts looked up at him like a beaten puppy. McLean stepped forward, pulled out the seat and dropped himself down into it.

  'No. I won't. Not now. You had your chance, Mr Roberts, when we brought your wife in for her protection. You could have helped us then, and we might have been able to catch Callum before he killed Wemyss. As it is, all the people I want to charge with abduction and murder are dead. Except you.'

  'But... but... I was forced. They made me...'

  'No they didn't, Mr Roberts. You made yourself. You had it all and you wanted more. And now you're going to go to jail for a very long time.'

  *

  A grey, windswept cemetery overlooking the Forth. Summer had finally broken; now squalls of rain rushed down the far side of the firth, leaving the little party dry, but cold. McLean was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who'd turned out for the burial. DC MacBride and Grumpy Bob were there, as was Emma Baird. Chief Superintendent McIntyre had found time from her busy schedule to come too, though she fretted a bit and kept looking at her watch. Angus Cadwallader had scandalously brought his assistant, Tracy with him. But perhaps most surprising was that Chloe Spiers had insisted on coming. She clung to her mother at the graveside, looking down at the plain coffin as the dirt was thrown on top. It had taken some detective work, but he had managed to track down the graves of John and Elspeth Donaldson, and now McLean was making sure that their daughter Maggie was buried alongside them. He hoped no-one would ever find out he'd paid for the service himself.

  'I still don't understand how you were finally able to identify her,' McIntyre said as they all walked away from the grave.

  'We managed to trace a Sighthill builder who went missing in forty-five. That gave us a better idea of the time of death. Mis Per records are a bit patchy from then, so DC MacBride waded through the Scotsman archives. He found a small article about a missing girl. Turns out her mother was a housemaid at Farquhar House. We tracked down a living relative in Canada. DNA profiling did the rest.' It was a slight distortion of the truth, but not much. He'd given MacBride what hints he could, told him to look into it. And McLean could hardly admit where he'd really got the dead girl's name from.

  'Most detectives would've been content to have found the killers.'

  'You know me, ma'am. I don't like leaving a job half done.'

  'Do you think it worked? Do you think they really trapped some demon and used its power to prolong their lives?'

  'You should listen to yourself, Jayne. Of course it didn't work. They're all dead, aren't they?' McLean shook his head as if that might dislodge the truth. 'There's no such things as demons.'

  'But they were all so fit for their age.'

  'Well, except Bertie Farquhar and Toby Johnson. They both died young. No, they lived long because they believed they would. Christ, they couldn't do what they did and not believe it. And they were successful men because they were born into money, had the best education.'

  'Let's hope you're right, Tony. This city's bad enough as it is without the supernatural making life a misery for us poor coppers.'

  'Gavin Wemyss died intestate.' It was a snippet of news that McLean had picked up from the news and which had stuck with him for various uncomfortable reasons. 'He never married, had no family. The lawyers are going mad looking for someone to inherit his fortune. Anyone with a half-decent claim stands to inherit billions. It's a mess. But that's how certain he was he would live forever.'

  'Perhaps there are demons after all. But they're just up here.' McIntyre tapped at her tem
ple with a finger, then twirled it round in little circles.

  They reached the cemetery gates and the short line of parked cars waiting to take them all back to their various different lives. A uniformed sergeant stood to attention beside the chief superintendent's car, sandwiched between Phil's elderly rust-coloured Volvo estate and Cadwallader's muddy green Jaguar. McLean's bright red Alfa Romeo was parked off to one side. McIntyre watched in horror as he unlocked it and opened the passenger door for Emma to clamber in.

  'Good God, Tony. Is that yours?' she asked.

  For a moment, McLean wondered whether she meant the car or Emma. Deciding that even Macintyre couldn't be that rude, he shook his head, trying hard to suppress a grin.

  'Not mine, no,' he said. 'It's my dad's.'

  *

  He stood in his grandmother's bedroom, looking down at the dressing table with its collection of hairbrushes, make-up tools and photographs. The black bin liner weighed heavy in his hand, already half-filled with rubbish; the disposable detritus of a life long gone. He should have done this months ago, when it was obvious his grandmother was never going to regain consciousness, never return to her home. She had no need of lipstick, disposable hankies, a half-finished roll of extra strong mints, and he had no need of the contents of her wardrobe. Or most of the old photographs that dotted the room, and one in particular.

  It hung on the wall, close to the door to the bathroom. Black and white, it showed two men and a woman, Bill McLean, Esther Morrison and A.N.Other. When he'd first noticed it, he'd been intrigued at how little he looked like his grandfather yet how much his own father resembled the other man. How much he himself looked like him. Was this the sordid little secret that his grandmother had kept, not to be revealed until after she died? Something that she felt she could tell her lawyer but not her grandson? What had the letter said? You are plainly not the man she feared you might become. And then there was Jethro Callum: His blood flows through your veins. The words of a madman, or maybe a demon, but somehow impossible to ignore. Well, it wasn't really difficult to work out what was going on. What had gone on.