What Will Burn

by James Oswald

  Miserable, angry, not even enough spare change to catch a bus, Gary hunches his shoulders against the rain and slouches off towards Gorgie.

  51

  Early morning, and McLean was surprised to see the major incident room fairly bustling with activity. For a moment he thought that maybe some well-hidden clue had been unearthed and the investigation into Cecily Slater’s murder had gained new impetus. Then he noticed that a couple of IT technicians were unplugging computers and rolling up lengths of cable. An admin support officer was carefully wiping names and other unwanted comments off the whiteboards. Files were being packaged into boxes, ready to be shipped down to the basement and Grumpy Bob’s tender mercies. Everything was winding down.

  ‘Have you seen DS Harrison?’ he asked the first uniformed constable to come within range. He knew the detective sergeant’s shift had already begun, but she hadn’t been in the CID room either.

  ‘Think she went out with the new DCI, sir. Not sure where.’

  McLean thanked the constable, cursing inwardly. He’d texted Harrison the night before to tell her about the connection between Fielding and Slater, or at least Fielding’s law firm and Slater. He’d hoped to have her set up a meeting with the other partners, but he couldn’t really complain if Kirsty had nabbed her before he got in. He remembered when Ritchie had first turned up in Edinburgh, a fresh-faced young detective sergeant looking to break out of the goldfish bowl of Aberdeen. He’d been her superior then, and now she was the one giving orders. Other officers might feel aggrieved at that, but somehow he found he didn’t really care.

  The door clicked open and a tired-looking DC Stringer shuffled in, scratching a thoughtless armpit. He looked like he’d overslept and not taken the proper time or care to dress himself before rushing to work. It didn’t matter for what McLean wanted done.

  ‘Morning, Constable,’ he said, getting the startled reaction he’d hoped for.

  ‘Oh. Morning, sir. Late one last night and I slept right through the alarm.’

  ‘Boozing with your mates, was it?’

  Stringer gave him a slightly shocked, slightly astonished look. ‘Don’t drink, sir. But I was with my mates, right enough. We were playing D&D and lost track of time. I’ll make it up at shift end.’

  ‘Don’t worry. I wouldn’t want to come between a Paladin and his campaign. You can make it up by sorting us a pool car. I need to head out to Bairnfather Hall Hotel and have a word with His Lordship.’

  Stringer stared a little longer than was perhaps necessary, eyes a little wide before he pulled himself together. ‘On it, sir. You want me to give you a call when it’s ready?’

  McLean checked his watch, wondering how many other senior officers were in already. ‘Give me half an hour. I’ll meet you in the CID room.’

  ‘His Lordship is not receiving any visitors at the moment. Did you make an appointment?’

  Apart from a little more discussion of Dungeons and Dragons than he’d perhaps wanted, the journey out to Bairnfather Hall had been uneventful and swift. A pity the same could not be said for their reception, once McLean had presented himself to the day manager and then passed on to Lord Bairnfather’s personal assistant.

  ‘Perhaps you could tell him that it concerns the murder of his aunt, Lady Cecily. I have new information about the case that he might want to hear.’

  McLean hadn’t met the personal assistant before. This new barrier between him and what he wanted was a young woman in an unflattering business suit who had yet to give him her name. She wore her hair tied up in an intricate knot high on the back of her head, and stared at the world through a pair of rimless spectacles, all the while maintaining a look on her face of horrified disgust at what she was seeing.

  ‘His Lordship does not like to be disturbed whilst taking his breakfast,’ she said. ‘Perhaps if you could come back later?’

  McLean took a deep breath, held it a moment, then let it out again slowly. ‘Or I could ask him to accompany me to the station for a more formal interview.’

  The personal assistant held his gaze for just long enough to let him know that she wasn’t intimidated by him. Then she nodded minimally.

  ‘Come. I will inform him you are here.’ She turned away and strode off towards a door marked ‘Private: Staff Only’. McLean raised his eyebrows at DC Stringer, then the two of them followed.

  Through the door was every bit as opulent as the part of the hotel frequented by paying guests, which made McLean think this was the Bairnfather family’s private suites rather than the route to the kitchens and staff quarters. The personal assistant walked with the same brusque efficiency she showed in all her movements, and by the time they had caught up with her, she was knocking at an unmarked door. If a command to enter came, McLean didn’t hear it, but the woman pushed on through all the same, ushering them into a large room dominated by a vast dining table. Silver domes covered plates of food, enough to feed a small army if they weren’t merely for decoration.

  ‘What is it, Ashley? Can’t you see I’m eating?’

  The voice came from the far end of the table, but the view of Lord Bairnfather was obscured by an arrangement of quite spectacularly vulgar flowers and several enormous silver candlesticks. As he followed the personal assistant down one side of the table, McLean finally saw the man himself, sitting in a large chair at the end. He had a napkin tucked into his collar, the starched white cotton already pocked with stains from his breakfast.

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, Your Lordship. It’s the police. About Lady Cecily.’

  Bairnfather scowled at the woman, but his face darkening when he saw McLean. He dabbed at his lips with the napkin and then beckoned him forward.

  ‘Detective Inspector. What an unexpected surprise.’ He stared past McLean at DC Stringer. ‘Not got the tall chappie with you today?’

  ‘Detective Constable Blane is taking some time off for paternity leave, Your Lordship. This is his colleague, DC Stringer. I’m sorry to disturb your breakfast. Most important meal of the day, I know. But some things have come to light that need swift attention, and I thought it best to come straight over rather than waste time going through channels.’

  Bairnfather grunted something unintelligible through a mouthful of food, then spoke before he had swallowed. ‘Heard that about you, McLean. Gail said you could be a bit terrier-like when you smell a rat. Have a seat. I’m sure Ashley will get you a coffee. Then you can ask me whatever it is you need to know.’

  ‘Actually, this won’t take a moment. It concerns the Bairnfather Trust. I understand you and your aunt were both trustees and beneficiaries.’

  Bairnfather had lifted a fork of what looked like very fine kedgeree to his mouth, ready to eat, but he placed it back down on the plate carefully, then dabbed at his lips with his soiled napkin again. All the while he fixed McLean with a far more calculating look than before.

  ‘What’s this about, McLean?’

  ‘Just clearing a few things up, that’s all. I was wondering who would succeed your aunt as trustee now. Tommy Fielding perhaps?’

  Bairnfather’s face went as white as the non-stained parts of his napkin. ‘I really don’t know what you mean, Detective Inspector.’

  ‘You do know Tommy Fielding, though. Has an annoying habit of calling you Reggie on the phone? Senior partner at DCF Law? They looked after your aunt’s legal affairs, didn’t they? Do you know when she switched from using Carstairs Weddell? Old established law firm like that must have been sad to see a client like her go.’

  The colour seeped back into Bairnfather’s cheeks in odd splotches. He ripped his napkin away and flung it on the table like a petulant child. ‘I’m not sure I like your tone, Inspector. Coming into my house and throwing accusations around like that.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I wasn’t aware that I’d made any accusations.’ McLean turned to DC Stringer, standing at the far end of the
table. ‘Did I make any accusations, Constable?’

  It was unfair, dragging the young lad in like that. He was clearly uncomfortable in this setting.

  ‘Get out, McLean. I’ve had quite enough of your baseless insinuation. Bad enough that Sissy’s dead and you’ve utterly failed to find out who’s responsible.’ Bairnfather’s petulant child imitation had taken on a desperate edge now. He struggled to push the heavy wooden chair back, and when he stood with his hands pressed knuckle down to the wooden tabletop he wasn’t a great deal taller than when he’d been seated. McLean knew he wasn’t going to get anything more from him, though. It didn’t matter; what he had learned was more than enough.

  ‘We’ll not waste any more of your time, Lord Bairnfather. Thank you for your help.’ He turned to where the nervous personal assistant, Ashley, stood stock-still but for her fidgeting hands. ‘We’ll see ourselves out.’

  ‘Be sure that you do,’ Bairnfather yelled. ‘And you can be sure I’ll be speaking to the chief constable about this. I’ll have your job, you know.’

  McLean paused at the door, but only for a moment. And when he muttered, ‘You’re welcome to it’, it was quiet enough that only he could hear.

  The drive back to the station took a little longer than getting out had done, mostly because they hadn’t spent long enough at Bairnfather Hall Hotel for the rush hour traffic to subside. There were routes into the city where it never really did any more. McLean tried to call DS Harrison while DC Stringer drove, but her phone went straight to voicemail. He pinged her a text instead, then settled back in his seat as they inched slowly along the Gorgie Road.

  ‘What was that all about, sir?’ DC Stringer asked after they’d been silent in the car for a good twenty minutes.

  ‘Lord Bairnfather?’ McLean realised that it was the first time the detective constable had met the aristocrat, and given Stringer’s background it had probably seemed rather strange. ‘First time I spoke to him, he came across rather differently. He’s extremely rich, very well connected, and he gave the impression he was distraught at his aunt’s death. Nothing we turned up in the initial investigation suggested he was in any way involved. He had very little to gain and a lot to lose from her murder. Least, that’s what we thought. Turns out it’s not quite as straightforward as that.’

  ‘How so?’ Stringer asked, then swore as a car swung out of a turning into the flow of traffic in front of him without warning. McLean braced himself against the dashboard with one hand.

  ‘For starters, he’s using Tommy Fielding as his personal and business lawyer. Nothing wrong with that on the face of it, but it’s a coincidence and I’m not overly keen on those. There’s also the Bairnfather Trust itself. I don’t know the full details, really need Lofty to look into that, but it was set up originally to avoid death duties on that massive pile of a house and the estates surrounding it. Lots of old families have done the same down the years, I’m not going to argue the morality of it. All I know is that the trust is extremely wealthy. It owns the hall, not Lord Bairnfather. It also owns the Scotston Hotel in Fountainbridge, and I dare say a great deal else as well. Two people controlled how that money was invested, Cecily Slater and Lord Reggie there. As long as they both agreed, then everything’s fine. But if old Cecily decided she didn’t like the way things were going? I’d say that was starting to look like motive.’

  ‘You think he’d kill his own aunt?’ Stringer asked.

  ‘Not with his own hands, no. And not without cast-iron deniability either. Men like him don’t make that kind of mistake. And think about the murder. Cecily Slater was beaten almost unconscious before having petrol poured on her and being set alight. That’s rage at work, not some hired hit man.’

  ‘Which goes against what you’re saying then, doesn’t it?’ Stringer said, then added ‘Sir,’ for good measure in case he’d overstepped his authority.

  ‘On the face of it, yes. Slater’s murder being so brutal makes it seem unplanned. Spur of the moment. Except that she was an old lady who lived on her own in a cottage in the middle of the woods. She barely interacted with anyone, so it’s hardly likely she’d have pissed someone off enough for them to track her down, beat her up and burn her to death. There had to be a reason she was chosen, same as there had to be a reason for the violence used against her.’

  Stringer shook his head slightly. ‘I don’t understand where you’re going, sir.’

  ‘OK. Bear with me here. This is wild speculation based on a few things I’ve heard recently. Someone’s been stirring up men’s rights activists. Radicalising them, forming them into a loose army of angry men all nursing a grudge against women. You know what an incel is, right?’

  Stringer nodded slowly. ‘Aye. Involuntary Celibate. What we used to call Billy No-Mates. Like those nutters in the States who go and shoot up nightclubs and schools and stuff.’

  ‘The same. I reckon it was a bunch of them who killed Cecily Slater. It would have been the final part of their indoctrination. A rite of passage if you like. Once your anger’s been stoked that high, once you’re that committed, there’s no turning back. You’ll do anything for your cause.’

  ‘Makes a sick kind of sense, I guess.’ Stringer sounded like he was having a hard time getting his head around the idea, which McLean took as a positive sign.

  ‘The thing is, though, why her? And why now? You might argue that she was an easy target, but she was also unknown to almost everyone. Look how hard we’ve tried to build a background on her. Weeks of work and we’ve virtually nothing. So how did our incels know about her?’

  ‘And you think it’s to do with Lord Muck there? His trust fund?’

  McLean shrugged as Stringer eased the pool car into the station car park and alongside Emma’s little Renault ZOE, still sipping electricity from its charging point. ‘It’s all very circumstantial and tenuous right now, but it’s the best we’ve got.’

  ‘Isn’t the whole case meant to be going to review and then to the archives anyway?’

  ‘Aye, it is. And I’m not happy about that. Seems hasty. Pressure from high up to sweep everything under the carpet. And you’d think Lord Bairnfather might be upset that we’ve not found his dear aunt’s killers, but I get the impression he’d be happier if the whole thing went away too.’

  McLean climbed out of the car, shivering at the change from the warm interior to the bitter chill wind that whistled around the high walls of the building. He had almost reached the back door, hurrying to get out of the cold, when his phone started buzzing away in his pocket. He pulled it out, saw Harrison’s name. Juggling with screen and security keypad, he almost dropped the phone on to the concrete steps, but managed to catch it and slap it to his ear as he pulled open the door.

  ‘McLean,’ he said, somewhat unnecessarily.

  ‘Sir. Harrison here. Are you anywhere near the station?’

  ‘Just heading up the stairs to my office now. Did you get my message about setting up a meeting with Fielding’s law firm?’

  ‘Aye, sir. About that. You might want to hold off on it for a wee while.’

  McLean looked behind him to see DC Stringer push through the door. He was staring at the screen of his own phone, frowning. ‘Why? What’s happened?’

  ‘It’s Fielding, sir. He’s dead.’

  52

  McLean had Stringer drive him back across town to Fielding’s address, which was just as well since there was nowhere to park anywhere nearby. A forensics van, a couple of squad cars and Angus Cadwallader’s British Racing Green Jaguar were parked on a double yellow line outside the soulless modern glass-walled apartment block, and a pair of uniformed constables were busy diverting pedestrians from the front door.

  ‘Morning, sir. It’s the third floor you’ll be wanting,’ one of the constables said to him before he could even present his warrant card. He struggled to remember her name, even though he knew she was friends with
Harrison. Settled for a nod of the head and ‘thanks’, before going inside.

  The ground floor of the building was given over to high-end retail space, on one side an expensive office furniture showroom, on the other what McLean would have called a barber’s shop, except that it seemed far too clinical and modern for that. Both had their own entrances, leaving a wide foyer for the residents to access their apartments on the upper floors. At the far end, windows looked out on to a small plaza hemmed in by more tall glass buildings. A door with a security keypad beside it opened on to stairs, and opposite that another door was marked ‘Security’. McLean tried the handle, but it was locked. He thumbed the button to call down the lift, but before it arrived, the door to the stairwell clicked open and DS Harrison appeared.

  ‘Jay told me he’d dropped you off, sir.’ She held the door open for him. ‘We’re keeping the place locked down for the moment. At least until the pathologist’s had a chance to see whether it’s suspicious or not.’

  ‘How is it not suspicious?’ McLean asked. ‘He’s dead, didn’t you say?’

  Harrison half shrugged, half shook her head. ‘It’s . . . weird, sir. And there’s more. She . . .’ She stopped talking as a paramedic came down the stairs towards them. ‘Best if I tell you after you’ve seen.’

  ‘How was he found? I didn’t think there was a Mrs Fielding.’

  ‘There’s no’,’ Harrison said. ‘But he has a cleaner come in every morning after he’s gone to work. She’d already done most of the flat before she found him in the bedroom.’

  ‘That’s going to please forensics if it comes to it. Nothing like a nice, freshly cleaned crime scene to work with. The cleaner still here?’