The Gathering Dark

by James Oswald

  McLean undid his seatbelt, opened the door. The afternoon sun beat down on an empty street, and while nearby curtains might have twitched, he doubted anyone would stir beyond their front rooms.

  ‘Not scared of a little norovirus are you, Constable?’ he said.

  ‘I’m guessing you’ve never had it, sir.’ Harrison’s expression was deadly serious as she, too, climbed out of the car. ‘Believe me. Not knowing whether to sit on the toilet or kneel in front of it isn’t a fun way to spend a few days.’

  McLean bit back a flippant response, and the two of them walked the short distance to the front door. There was no doorbell, so he knocked hard. A moment’s silence and then the ominous sound of a toilet flushing.

  ‘Would it be considered impolite if I put on some gloves, sir?’ Harrison pulled a pair out of her pocket, then shoved them back again as the door swung inwards. A young woman glowered at them through narrow eyes.

  ‘Whut youse want, aye?’ She looked the two of them up and down with an expression of utter contempt.

  ‘Mrs Tafferty?’ McLean asked.

  ‘Fuck no. I’d never marry that wee bastard even if he had the balls to ask.’

  ‘Detective Inspector McLean. Police Scotland.’ He held up his warrant card. ‘Is Mr Tafferty in?’

  The toilet flushed again, louder now the door was open. The young woman grimaced at the sound. ‘Aye he’s in. No’ goin’ anywhere soon either. Been shitting and puking like a baby near enough two days now. I’m fair sick of it.’

  ‘Who is it, doll?’ A gruff voice echoed down the narrow hall behind the young woman, followed by a shuffling sound as a man approached. Hamish Tafferty was dressed in a tartan dressing gown, someone else’s fluffy slippers on his feet. Two days of stubble roughed his thin face and his hair looked like it hadn’t seen a brush recently.

  ‘Polis.’ The young woman managed to squeeze a lifetime of disdain into the two short syllables.

  ‘Aye? What youse want, then?’ Tafferty shuffled to the open door, the young woman shrinking away from him. McLean tried not to wrinkle his nose at the smell.

  ‘You drive a truck for Finlay McGregor. Had a tanker cargo couple of days ago, that right?’

  ‘Aye. Big new power plant over Livingston way. Dunno how it works, but they’ve tonnes of shit needs carting to and from the site.’ Tafferty lifted a hand to his mouth, belched, swallowed hard. ‘What of it?’

  ‘You took a tankerload back to the yard. Day before yesterday. That when this started up?’ McLean waved a hand towards the truck driver to indicate his illness.

  ‘Last time I do my wee brother a favour, aye. Picked up his kid from school the day before. Those places should come wi’ a health warning.’ Tafferty belched again, his face turning paler.

  ‘Sorry to hear it. Just one more question, if you can?’

  Tafferty nodded, mouth closed tight as he swallowed again.

  ‘The tanker. You signed off the manifest for its contents, right? Did you watch it being filled?’

  Tafferty paused a moment before answering, although whether that was because he was thinking or just trying not to be sick, McLean couldn’t tell.

  ‘Aye,’ he said eventually. ‘Well, no’ all of it. Takes a whiley to fill up one a’ them tankers y’ken. Big rig like the one I was on can take thirty thousand litres if you fill all the compartments. That place they usually do. Saves money in the long run.’

  ‘So you saw them put at least some digestate in?’ McLean asked.

  ‘Aye, digestate. That’s the word. Shit.’ Tafferty’s stomach made an ominous noise and he clutched at his dressing gown. ‘Shit.’

  He turned and hobbled at speed down the narrow corridor, flung open a door at the end and disappeared inside. McLean winced at the sounds that came afterwards. He reached into his pocket and pulled out one of his business cards, handed it to the young woman.

  ‘Give him that when he’s a bit better, aye? We’ll need to speak to him again soon. Get a formal statement.’

  The young woman took the card. ‘Formal statement? What the fuck’s he done?’ She looked back down the corridor to the closed toilet door.

  ‘You heard about the truck crash in town yesterday, I take it?’

  ‘Aye, it was on the news. Horrible. Why the fuck would they take something like that through a built-up area?’

  ‘You tell me.’ McLean pointed back into the house. ‘All I know is that it was the same tanker Hamish there was meant to be driving the day before.’

  ‘Poor sod’s not going anywhere soon. I can see why he didn’t want to drive a truck full of shit over to East Lothian, though.’

  McLean stared out at the line of slow-moving traffic heading towards the airport and the city bypass. Once more the reality of Edinburgh’s roads made mockery of the absurdly overpowered engine in his shiny new car. At least it didn’t have a tendency to overheat like his old Alfa, and the air conditioning made the interior a pleasant enough place to be.

  ‘You’re right, by the way.’ He glanced sideways at DC Harrison sitting in the passenger seat. ‘Never had norovirus, and after that little encounter I hope I never do.’

  ‘It’s no’ much fun, I can tell you that, sir. We still need a full statement from him, though.’

  ‘It can wait a few days, I reckon. I doubt he was in much of a state to lie to us back there, and it didn’t sound like he was trying to hide anything. Chances are he really didn’t know what was in that tanker, and we know from Manda’s team that there was digestate in some of the compartments.’

  ‘What do you think, then? This is clearly some kind of scam, but the driver didn’t know?’ Harrison shook her head slightly as she spoke. ‘If he didn’t, then someone at the hauliers did. And what about the brakes being tampered with? I notice you’ve not mentioned that to anyone yet.’

  ‘I want to see what the Health and Safety team come up with first. Let them have a look at the other trucks. It might be that wasn’t the only one.’ McLean flicked down a gear, blipped the throttle and felt his head pushed back against the rest as the car surged forward into a gap that had opened up in the traffic. ‘To be honest, I’m still trying to get my head around that, but I’m not sure it’s the story we need to be following right now.’

  ‘How no?’

  ‘Think about it, Constable. Sure, someone made that truck crash, and we need to find who it was and send them to prison for a very long time. But there’s another crime going on here, too.’

  ‘The toxic waste?’

  ‘Exactly so. I’d give good money Finlay knows all about it. I’d bring him in and sweat it out of him but I don’t think he’s working on his own. And proving anything’s going to be hard if we can’t find where that solvent came from.’

  ‘That where we’re going next?’ Harrison nodded in their direction of travel, and McLean noticed he was in the wrong lane approaching the roundabout to go straight over and on into the city. Given the mayhem still ongoing from one half of the Lothian Road being closed, it probably made sense to head south around the bypass and in from the other side anyway. Or they could just avoid Edinburgh, the station and the major-incident room for a while longer.

  ‘Makes sense. You got the address there?’

  Harrison pulled out her notebook and flipped through the pages. ‘Place called Easter Balgenzie. Just outside Livingston.’

  ‘Thought it was something like that.’ McLean swept round the roundabout in an improbable sequence of green traffic lights, then accelerated on to the motorway. Away from the backed-up traffic, he could let the engine sing a little, feel himself pushed back into his seat once more. ‘Shove the postcode in the satnav, won’t you? Think we might pay them a visit.’

  McLean didn’t know much about the technology of anaerobic digestion; something to do with taking food waste and other organic rubbish, fermenting it down and extracting the methane gas to generate electricity. All very laudable, and he’d expected to find a ramshackle site manned by yoghurt knitters with e
xpansive beards and too-tight trousers. Extech Energy turned out to be something else entirely.

  A ten-foot mesh fence topped with razor wire surrounded the site, security cameras strategically placed to make breaking in unseen all but impossible. The security guard at the gate stared long and hard at his and DC Harrison’s warrant cards before calling up the office, and only guided them through to the visitors’ parking area after confirmation had been given. McLean drove slowly past a dozen gleaming stainless-steel tanks. Squat and round, they wouldn’t have looked out of place in an oil refinery or chemical plant. Neat pipework ran between the tanks, everything surrounded by close-cropped grass or freshly laid tarmac.

  ‘Lot of money gone into setting this up,’ Harrison said, ever the master of understatement as they parked in front of a sleek, low building, all glass walls and expensive architectural flourishes.

  ‘Where there’s muck there’s brass,’ McLean added, although judging by the look on the detective constable’s face he couldn’t be sure she’d understood his unconvincing Yorkshire accent.

  A young woman in an elegant trouser suit and tiny frameless spectacles greeted them as they entered the building.

  ‘Detective Inspector, Constable. Claire Ferris. Welcome to Extech Energy.’ She held out a hand more to be gently squeezed than shaken, smiling with her lips even though her eyes spoke more of anxiety.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to see us at such short notice, Ms Ferris.’ McLean indicated the minimalist yet expensively furnished reception area. ‘Nice place you’ve got here.’

  ‘Thank you. We only finished this building a couple of months ago. Before that we were in an old shed at the back of the site. It’s something of a relief to be somewhere that isn’t constantly draughty.’ Ms Ferris paused a moment before adding. ‘Might I ask what this is all about?’

  Another smartly dressed young woman sat behind a reception desk a few paces away. She had glanced at them and smiled as they entered, but otherwise had said nothing. McLean considered asking if there was somewhere private they could speak, then realized it didn’t really matter.

  ‘Yesterday’s crash in the city centre. You’ll have seen the news, I take it?’

  Ms Ferris paled, lifted a hand up to her neck instinctively. ‘Horrible. Yes. All those poor people.’

  ‘Were you aware that the truck belonged to Finlay McGregor Hauliers? I understand they do work for you.’

  ‘We use a lot of different hauliers, Inspector. If you say Finlay McGregor are one of them, then I have no reason not to believe you. But I heard the tanker involved was transporting some kind of industrial solvent. We produce only inert digestate here. It gets put back on the land to improve the soil. The most toxic waste on site is slurry from the local dairy farms, but that comes on to the site. It doesn’t leave like that.’

  ‘That is indeed how I understood it. I’m sure there’s nothing irregular going on here, but the manifest on the tanker truck that crashed yesterday said it was carrying digestate from this site.’

  ‘You can’t think –’

  ‘I don’t know what to think, Ms Ferris. That’s why I’m here. I take it you’ll have records of all movements on- and offsite? CCTV footage too?’

  The anxiety was back in the young woman’s eyes, but now it was matched by a worried frown, her lips pursed as she considered the implications of what she had heard.

  ‘Of course, Inspector. Everything is tracked and traced.’ She looked past him to the receptionist, who made no attempt to pretend she hadn’t been listening in to the conversation the whole time. ‘Zoe, can you pull up all the records for the inspector, please? And give Jim in security a call. We’ll need to collate all the footage from the cameras at the loading bays.’ She turned back to McLean ‘Will that be sufficient?’

  13

  An excited buzz of conversation filled the major-incident room as McLean stepped in through the open door, DC Harrison close behind. Over on the far side, a row of uniform officers sat at workstations, taking notes as the calls from concerned members of the public flooded in. Judging by the chatter, the hotline must have been almost overrun. He’d have to see about getting in some more resources, if DS Gregg hadn’t done so already.

  He spotted her at the back of the room, reaching up to write in a neat hand on the whiteboards. Walking over, he made out some of the names of the victims, a brief summary of their lives. John Sullivan had been a teacher nearby, Eleanor Danton, a film director. McLean suspected there was more to Riuchi Takamora than simply tourist, but that was all he would be remembered as here. Not much of an epitaph. Rachel Sprake, Andy Spong and Fiona Mclellan didn’t even have that, just a tick in red that he assumed meant their next of kin had been given the bad news. Other names had no tick, some had question marks and a few lines remained empty, just a number to indicate a body still unknown. Given that not much more than twenty-four hours had passed since the crash, he was heartened to see that there were fewer blank spaces than filled. Still plenty of work to do, though.

  ‘Ah, Tony. You’re back. I was beginning to wonder whether you’d make it for the briefing.’

  McLean looked around to see DCI McIntyre, surrounded by a small army of constables and sergeants like a queen bee in the middle of the hive. She pushed through the throng as if it wasn’t there, leaving a trail of discarded officers in her wake.

  ‘It’s just as well the chief superintendent’s new to Specialist Crime. I don’t think he quite understands how little respect for procedure you have.’ McIntyre looked over his shoulder at DC Harrison. ‘Or decorum. Going off into the wilds with the youngest female detective constable you can find. I’d have thought you’d know how the rumour mill works by now.’

  McLean turned to Harrison, aware that he was blushing and seeing the red across her cheeks at the same time. It was stupid, of course. She was a good detective, true, but the only reason he’d taken her out that morning was because nobody else had been around.

  ‘Really? Is the station so starved for gossip they have to go making up stuff like that?’

  McIntyre gave him a smile, but it was weary enough to tell him she was worried. ‘Just be careful, Tony. And you, too, Constable. I know it’s bloody ridiculous, but the last thing either of you need is a stupid rumour going around.’

  McLean looked at DC Harrison, her eyes wide at the DCI’s comment. Yes, she was young and he was two ranks senior to her, perhaps twenty years older, but what of it? They were professionals tasked with a difficult job, for Christ’s sake. You used whoever was available and preferably most competent. Should he only ever take male detective constables out when he wanted to interview witnesses or review crime scenes? If he did that then the rumours would suggest he was gay. Perhaps he should start evaluating the attractiveness of the female officers he worked with, but then what were the criteria? Christ, there were times he wanted nothing more than to jack the whole thing in.

  ‘I’ve enough on my plate without having to worry about what the station’s latest rumour is, Jayne.’

  McIntyre shook her head from side to side just the once. ‘I know, Tony. And it’s not you I’m worried about. You don’t give a damn what anyone says about you. Janie here’s still got to prove herself, though.’

  ‘Well, she can prove herself now by getting all those notes on to the system so we can bring everyone up to speed. Go see if you can’t find your chums Stringer and Blane, will you, Constable? I need Lofty’s particular skills.’

  Harrison nodded once, then scurried off. McLean watched her thread her way through the busy incident room, pausing to talk to some officers, watched with critical eyes by others.

  ‘Are they really talking about her behind her back?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Remember how they treated the last keen young DC you took under your wing, aye? And he wasn’t anything like as pretty.’

  ‘You’re as bad as the rest of them, Jayne.’ McLean shook his head to try and get rid of the frustration at
having to work with people no more mature than the children at his old boarding school. ‘So, what’s been going on here while young Harrison and I have been away on our tryst?’

  ‘You can see for yourself.’ McIntyre pointed at the whiteboard as Gregg wrote in another name. ‘Mostly we’ve been identifying the dead, informing next of kin, sorting out formal identification procedures with the city mortuary. I’m hoping Ritchie will be back in time for the evening briefing. She’s on her way, apparently. I’ve not had much to do, actually. The chief superintendent’s been running things most of the day. He’s a damned good organizer, loath though I am to admit it. Every time we get a new name in, he’s right there. Been contacting the next of kin himself, I’ve heard.’

  McLean scanned the room, seeing the smoothness of the operation. He’d put that down to DC Gregg’s management skills, but it made more sense if the boss had been whipping everyone into shape.

  ‘I’d heard he ran a tight ship. Didn’t expect him to be quite so hands on, though. It makes a change from Brooks and Duguid. Which reminds me. Any news on the detective superintendent job?’

  ‘Why? You fancy your chances?’

  ‘Probably just about as good as anyone else here. But seriously, Jayne. I don’t see why they haven’t just given it to you. Pissing about trying to get someone from the regions to come in and sort us out. I wouldn’t mind, but it’s taking so bloody long. Not as if we were overstaffed before …’ McLean stopped. No point going over old news.

  ‘If it makes things any better, the DCC has said that if they can’t get anyone by the end of the month then the job’s mine.’ McIntyre took a breath, let it out as a long sigh. ‘Not sure I want it, if I’m being honest. But there’s a few DIs and DCIs have put their names forward already. If they’re that keen to move, maybe we can encourage some of them to transfer even if there’s no promotion in it. Looks like you’ve got the new constables under control anyway.’

  McLean followed McInytre’s gaze to the far side of the room, where a group of plain-clothes officers were huddled around a computer terminal. Most were standing, some leaning forwards. One sat on a low chair directly in front of the screen, and even so his head was on a level with the rest of them. Detective Constable Lofty Blane. McLean checked his watch.