by Lin Anderson
‘Please? We need to talk.’
Rhona wanted to tell him to go away, but found herself unable to. Maybe he was right. Maybe they did need to clear the air.
Rhona released the door and let him in.
Michael Joseph McNab looked better than he had done for some time. Gone were the shadowed eyes. He’d shaved, and he definitely hadn’t been drinking. When she’d offered him a whisky, he’d turned it down and asked for coffee instead.
‘Make it strong,’ he requested.
Rhona did as asked then poured herself another glass of wine.
McNab sniffed the air. ‘Been cooking?’
‘I don’t cook. You know that.’
He smiled. ‘Smells good whoever made it.’
Rhona sipped her wine in silence. McNab swallowed the coffee and held the cup out to be replenished.
Eventually he spoke. ‘I’m in a better place now. Off the booze, for a start.’ When Rhona didn’t respond, he went on. ‘That night at the stone circle, I’d had God knows how many drugs pumped into me. I was high and mad and when I saw that bastard on top of you, I . . .’ He halted.
His words had conjured for Rhona a memory as vivid as when it had happened. Suddenly she could smell him again, feel his weight bearing down on her. She stood up and walked to the window and looked down on the tranquil scene below, trying to dispel that other image.
‘I’ve written it all down,’ McNab said. ‘Everything I can remember. You can read it if you want, before I hand it to the boss.’
Rhona didn’t turn from the window.
‘We were both debriefed. Neither of us told the full truth then,’ she said.
‘I’m going to tell it now,’ McNab said.
‘If you do, then I’ll be the liar. By omission.’
‘Not the way I’ve told it.’
‘Then it’s not the truth,’ Rhona said.
She turned and their eyes met and held for the first time since that fateful night in the dark, in the middle of the stone circle.
‘I have to fix this,’ he pleaded.
Rhona slowly shook her head. ‘It’s unfixable.’
McNab was trying to read her expression. ‘You want to let it go?’ he said, surprised.
In that moment, Rhona made her decision. ‘Yes.’
A flurry of emotions crossed his face, relief and hope among them. Rhona felt a little of both herself. McNab had offered on numerous occasions to reveal the last moments of the serial killer they had come to know as Stonewarrior, yet she had refused to discuss it with him.
Now that she had made a decision, it was as though the weight of the killer’s body had been lifted from her.
‘Can we change the subject now?’ she said.
‘Gladly.’
‘I’ve been studying the photographs from the suspicious death,’ Rhona said.
‘And?’
‘Did you notice the presence of the number nine?’
‘Not particularly,’ he said cautiously. ‘Unless you mean that twenty-seven dolls constitutes three times nine.’
Rhona beckoned him to follow her through to the sitting room and fired up the laptop again. She showed him the photographs she’d taken of the dolls. McNab’s recoil at that image reflected her own.
‘There are nine of each hair colour,’ she said. ‘Each row is made up of nine dolls, divided into threes.’ Rhona pulled up an image of the red cord still encircling the victim’s neck. ‘You’ll have to take my word for it until the PM, but there are nine evenly spaced knots in the ligature used to hang her.’
‘So what’s special about nine?’
‘Lots of things.’
She brought up the Wikipedia page and watched as McNab’s eyes glazed over.
‘For fuck’s sake. Don’t make it maths or we’ll have to bring in the nutty professor again,’ he said, alluding to Professor Magnus Pirie, criminal psychologist and McNab’s very own bête noire.
Rhona ignored the dig at Magnus. ‘I don’t think it’s anything to do with the maths properties, but it’s significant in some way.’
‘Her pal said Leila was a New Age believer, if that helps,’ McNab offered.
‘It might.’
Rhona tried a search on ‘nine’ and ‘New Age’. What appeared was anything but enlightening, unless you believed that the Masonic Lodge was behind the Twin Towers attack and that both the Bible and the devil used the number nine in their scriptures.
Rhona closed the laptop.
‘I didn’t think you would give up so easily,’ McNab said.
‘I haven’t.’ She looked pointedly at her watch.
McNab took the hint. ‘Okay. I’d better head for the pub, before it’s closing time.’
‘What?’ Rhona said.
He smiled at her reaction. ‘To talk to the barman on duty last night when Leila met her man.’
She didn’t return the smile, irritated at him for setting her up, but then again, that was the real McNab. She walked him to the door.
Rhona didn’t want him to bring up their earlier discussion and was keen for him to leave. Sensing this perhaps, he exited, but as she made to close the door behind him, he stopped her.
‘We are okay, Dr MacLeod?’ he said.
Rhona wasn’t willing to go quite that far.
‘Let’s wait and see,’ was all she could manage.
He appeared to accept this, because he nodded, then headed downstairs.
Rhona stood for a moment, listening to his echoing footsteps, hearing the main door slam shut behind him.
What the hell had she done? Whatever way you looked at it, she had bound herself to McNab by keeping the secret.
And secrets, she knew, had a habit of coming back to bite you.
5
Mark checked his watch for the umpteenth time.
They must have found her by now.
He felt his heart quicken at the thought. Funny how he’d never noticed the speed of his heart before, not even when he was playing football. Now he heard every beat resounding in his head.
What the hell had he done?
The trouble was he had no idea. He remembered fucking her, the weird cat digging its claws into his shoulder, then nothing until he was sick. What happened in between? How had she got in that room and onto that hook? And the dolls. Those freaking dolls.
He suddenly registered Emilie calling to him from the bedroom.
‘Coming,’ he shouted back.
He observed himself in the mirror, then splashed his face with cold water. He needed to stay calm and focused. Emilie didn’t suspect a thing. He’d turned up at her flat as promised to take her to lunch. She hadn’t seemed interested in knowing about the football, but had regaled him with her own story of a meal out with friends.
After lunch they had come back to her place.
Emilie had been up for sex and he’d obliged, but only after he’d snorted a line to blot out last night’s lingering image. She’d spotted the cat’s claw marks on his shoulder, but appeared to buy the story of a fall during the football game.
Re-entering the bedroom, he gave an audible groan and even managed to limp a bit. Emilie was sitting up in bed, arms stretched above her head, her breasts eyeing him in the hope of a second round.
Something Mark didn’t think he could manage.
He groaned again.
‘What’s up?’ Emilie said.
‘My shoulder where I fell. Think it’s stiffening up.’
She eyed his penis, which definitely wasn’t.
He gave her a plaintive look. ‘Would you mind if I went home for a kip?’
This time suspicion did lurk in those baby-blue eyes.
Mark leaned over and kissed her. ‘I could come back later?’
Somewhat mollified, she stroked his hair. For some reason, that got a response where the pointed breasts had not. Noting this, she slid her hand downwards to massage his growing erection.
Mark blanked all thoughts of last night and got on with it.
He left Emi
lie at nine o’clock. After round two, she’d phoned out for pizza. Mark had eaten his quickly, after which he’d indicated just how tired he was by a series of yawns, and had eventually been permitted to leave.
Outside now, he took a deep breath of cool night air, then pulled out his mobile, which he’d kept switched off all day. There were three messages from Jeff, all brief, asking in a variety of ways how he’d got on last night. The final one had come in around eight o’clock.
Mark decided to look at that positively. Jeff obviously hadn’t heard about the body of a female being discovered in a flat near the pub, or he would surely have mentioned it.
He knew he should text back. Jeff would expect that. But what to say?
I had sex with her, then found her hanging in the next room.
The half-digested pizza flipped in his stomach, making him feel nauseous.
Let’s face it, I’m fucked whatever I do.
He set off towards the Grassmarket, deciding a pint would help him think.
The night was fine and pleasantly warm. Being Saturday, the tables outside the string of pubs that called the Grassmarket home were full.
Mark gave up on an outside seat and, choosing the bar emitting the least noise, went inside. It took him a good five minutes to order a drink, but he did manage to find a small corner table next to the toilets, where he could sit in relative peace.
Free now of Emilie and her keen observance, he ran over last night’s proceedings. At least, what he could remember of them. He could recall how everything had been sharpened by the coke. Colours, sounds, touch, all enhanced by that snap pack of white powder. He had a sudden memory of laughing when she’d ordered him to strip. God, that had been a turn-on. He realized with a start that had she wanted to whip him, he would have readily agreed to that as well.
Which stirred a sudden memory. The knotted cord.
After she’d ordered the cat off his face, she’d made him sit up and, his penis still inside her, had bound them together round the waist with a red knotted cord, pulling it tighter as he’d reached climax.
Mark’s heart was racing now, as though he’d taken another line of coke. He brushed away a drop of perspiration that ran down the side of his face, realizing if she hadn’t been dead, he would have gone back for more.
A thought struck him.
What if she wasn’t dead? What if he’d been hallucinating with the mix of coke and alcohol? What if it had all been a bad dream?
Then he remembered the smell.
When he’d opened the door and the cat had pushed its way in, there had been a bad smell. Like piss or shit. Then the cat had wailed and he’d seen her, the red cord round her neck, those eyes staring at him.
That’s what he’d smelt in that room. Death.
His hand trembling a little, Mark drank down the remainder of his pint and ordered another, then set about scouring the news on his mobile, looking for some mention of a dead girl found last night in Glasgow.
Twenty minutes later, he had nothing, which either meant she hadn’t been found or that the police hadn’t released details yet. But she would be found eventually and, he decided, probably by the friend.
The friend who had watched him leave with her, which would make him a suspect. And he’d watched enough cop dramas to know he was all over her, the bedroom and the red cord. Still, DNA was no use without a suspect to match it to, and he didn’t have a record.
So, he persuaded himself, he was safe. Unless they picked him up.
Mark suddenly realized how important it was to talk to Jeff. If Jeff had broken the golden rule and given out his real name and mobile number, the police would be able to trace him via Jeff.
He pulled up Jeff’s number. It rang out four times, then Jeff picked up.
‘Hey, mate, at last. Where are you?’
‘Back in Edinburgh.’
‘How was she?’
While Mark figured out what his answer should be, Jeff came back. ‘The bitch ditched you before you got a taste?’
Mark couldn’t help himself. ‘Oh no. I made it into the garden all right,’ he heard himself boasting. ‘How about you?’
‘Same.’ Jeff gave an appreciative whistle.
‘Seeing her again?’ Mark said.
‘No way. A one-off as agreed, to spice up the regular love life.’ He paused. ‘I take it Emilie bought the five-a-side routine?’
‘No problem. Did you tell her your real name?’ Mark checked.
‘Treated myself to a new one. George. How about you?’
‘Never got round to names, too busy doing other things,’ Mark said.
‘Excellent. See you next month for more of the same?’
‘You bet. And, Jeff? Whatever happens, we were never in that pub. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
Mark felt better when he rang off. Maybe he could survive this. He had tomorrow to get his head straight before work on Monday. He would avoid Emilie until next weekend. Plead too much work. Play it safe. Play it low.
The phone call had calmed him a little.
Now that he had thought it through, he was pretty sure that the sex games they’d played had never reached that room with the dolls. So, if he didn’t have a hand in her death, then how did it happen?
He’d been trashed by drink, drugs and sex. Not so much asleep as unconscious. And while he was comatose, had someone else come into the flat? He’d toyed with the idea that she’d committed suicide, but it didn’t fit with the way she’d acted. Why invite him there for sex then top herself?
He’d blotted out the image of her on the hook, but he forced himself to recall it now. She had been off the ground and there was no upturned chair.
So how the hell had she got up there?
Someone must have entered the flat while he was asleep. It was the only explanation. And that someone must have killed her. Did the killer realize he was in the bedroom? If so, why wasn’t he killed too?
It only took him seconds to work out why.
He was the mug that would take the blame. The last one seen with her alive and the one whose DNA was all over her and the murder weapon.
Let’s face it, he was totally fucked.
6
Saturday night and the pub was busy, both with regulars and, McNab could hear from the voices, tourists, come to taste the wide variety of whiskies on offer. He made his way through the throng to the bar and, showing his ID, asked to speak to Barry Fraser.
The young woman disappeared round the back and, minutes later, a tall, blond man emerged, looking worried.
McNab flashed his ID again. ‘Barry Fraser?’
When the guy nodded, McNab asked, ‘Anywhere we can talk in private, Barry?’
He looked unsure. ‘The cellar’s about the only quiet place tonight.’
‘That’ll do.’
Barry looked nonplussed at this, but realizing McNab was for real, lifted the counter and ushered him inside. As they passed the shelves lined with malt whiskies, McNab kept his eyes firmly on Barry’s back.
A narrow corridor led to a door that opened on a set of stairs. Barry headed down them and McNab followed. The cellar was tidy and well stocked with a row of barrels attached to pipes leading upwards. There were shelves with whisky bottles all arranged by distillery. It was something a connoisseur would notice and McNab did. How the hell anyone worked here and didn’t imbibe, he had no idea. Barry took up a stance in front of a barrel and waited with worried eyes for his interrogation to begin.
‘I wanted to ask you about someone who was in here last night.’
Barry gave him a disbelieving look. ‘Have you any idea just how many folk were in here last night?’
McNab nodded. ‘This one you would have noticed.’
‘Okay. Try me.’
‘A young woman. Auburn hair. Green eyes. About five five. A real looker. She was with a pal. Pretty, petite, blonde. They were in here about ten o’clock?’
The barman eyed him warily. McNab guessed he had see
n Leila. She would have been hard to miss and he thought Barry Fraser would be well practised at bird spotting in his bar.
Barry was considering his reply and wondering what it might lead to. Curiosity tinged with a little concern eventually decided him.
‘It sounds like Leila Hardy. Why, what’s happened to her?’
McNab ignored the question. ‘You definitely saw them?’
He nodded. ‘Sure. They were over in the corner with two lads.’
‘Can you describe these lads?’
He shook his head. ‘I notice the lassies, the lads don’t interest me.’
It was a fair comment. Had McNab been asked to describe one of the crowd of blokes propping up the bar tonight, he would have been hard pressed to do so.
‘Did you see Leila leave?’
In that split second, McNab knew his barman was about to tell a lie. Call it police intuition or psychology in action, but he just knew.
‘No.’
‘What about the blonde one?’
‘Leila, I noticed. The pal not so much.’
‘How well do you know Leila?’
McNab already suspected the answer to that, but he was pretty sure Barry wouldn’t reveal it. Not until he sussed out why the policeman was interested.
McNab decided to go for the jugular.
‘Leila Hardy was found dead this morning.’
Barry’s eyes widened. The shock appeared real enough for him to seek a seat on the edge of a nearby barrel.
‘Jesus,’ he whispered under his breath. He looked up, his face now suffused with anger. ‘You bastard, you never said anything about that on the phone.’
McNab decided not to warn him about swearing at a police officer, but waited as Barry tried to pull himself together. Eventually he did and rose to his feet again. ‘What happened to her?’ he said, genuine concern in his voice.
‘That’s what we’re trying to establish.’
Barry searched McNab’s expression. ‘You mean she was murdered?’
‘She was found hanged in her flat.’
Barry looked as if he was trying to compute and couldn’t. ‘Leila committed suicide?’
When McNab didn’t respond, Barry came back. ‘No way. Leila had everything going for her. She really enjoyed life.’
