The Gathering Dark

by James Oswald

  The first foster family were nuts. Ted stayed at home all day while Margaret went to work. I never found out what she did. To be fair, they didn’t abuse me, but neither did they exactly lavish me with attention. I’d spent my entire life being fed, washed and occasionally presented to some sick old man as a plaything. I had no idea how to look after myself, and they really didn’t know how to deal with that. The regular visits to the doctor must have rung some emergency bells somewhere in social services, as I was moved on fairly swiftly.

  Pete and Jemma tried to be nice, but I was just beginning to understand both what had been done to me and that I was free of that life. Sometime round about my eighth birthday I started to go off the rails, and I spent the next four years on heavy medication, making life hell for anyone who tried to care. I lost count of the number of homes I went through, never staying anywhere for long. The only constant was the policeman. Gordon. He’d bring me photographs, men, women, children, always the same question. Had I ever seen them before?

  I never had, probably wouldn’t remember anyway. At the time, I didn’t know what it was all about. Now I can see the ongoing investigation, the search for any clues as to how Maddy and I had ended up in that house. How that house could have existed in the first place in a world that grown-ups tried to pretend was good and fair. At least Gordon cared, even I could see that. Not that it did him any good. He aged a decade in every six-month gap between our meetings. At the last one, he told me he was retiring and I’d be seeing a new policeman after that. I never did. Not for a long time, and my stays with foster parents grew ever shorter.

  And then when I was about twelve I ended up with Sheila and Jean.

  Odd enough that a lesbian couple could have foster kids, but something about them worked for me. It might have been that I had a new doctor by then, new meds. New country, too, since I ended up here in Scotland. Whatever it was, I started to be a bit more reasonable around then. And Sheila was a wizard with computers. Taught me everything I know. She gave me a direction for the rage, a sense of purpose I’d been lacking.

  Or it might just have been that I was growing up, coming to understand the injustice done to me, Maddy and all the other kids who died in that fire I started.

  Whatever the reason, though, Sheila gave me the knowledge and the tools to fight back. I’ll always be grateful to her for that. And so I’ll try to put Maddy’s face from my mind, if only for a moment. Concentrate on the job at hand. Track down the bastards responsible for her death and make them pay.

  16

  Coming off the city bypass on to the A1, heading east, and McLean floored the throttle with perhaps a little too heavy a right foot. Something loud and angry roared under the bonnet, snapping his head backwards as it pinned him into his seat.

  ‘Whoa. I wasn’t quite expecting that.’ He eased off the fast pedal, let the needle on the speedometer drop back down to the legal limit, surprised at just how quickly it had swung past it and on towards three digits.

  ‘Five hundred and ten horsepower, I read. Not quite sure why anyone needs that many horses, but there you go.’ Sitting beside him in the passenger seat, Detective Sergeant Bob Laird took a sip of coffee from his lidless paper cup and stared at the newspaper on his lap. A quick glance down confirmed McLean’s suspicion that he’d not spilled a drop. It was uncanny how he managed to stay calm in the most desperate of situations. Especially when there was fine coffee involved. But then Grumpy Bob had always been like that. You couldn’t wish for a more level head in a crisis. Just don’t expect a finger to be lifted unless it’s absolutely necessary.

  ‘I’ll agree, it’s perhaps a little over the top.’ McLean accelerated more smoothly this time, overtaking a couple of trucks. ‘Not quite as bad as that Bentley I tried a few years back, but it’s more comfortable than the old GTV.’

  ‘True.’ Grumpy Bob shuffled in his seat slightly. ‘Still not sure why you have this obsession with Alfa Romeos, though. Why not get a Range Rover or a Jaguar like all the other senior detectives?’

  ‘Ha. The last thing I need is people thinking I’m a DCI, or, worse, a superintendent. Then they’d give me even more work to do.’ McLean rubbed a thumb lightly over the little badge in the middle of the steering wheel, the red cross and the tiny man being swallowed by a serpent. ‘As to the Alfa thing; you’d have to have owned one to understand.’

  They sped up the road in silence for a while, Grumpy Bob taking the occasional sip from his cup, scribbling the occasional answer to the crossword puzzle spread over his knees. McLean knew the old sergeant could have done this trip on his own, perhaps even sent a constable or two to do it while he found himself a comfortable empty room for a snooze. The same could be said for the visits to the hauliers and Extech Energy he’d made with Harrison the day before. There was no real need for a detective inspector to attend, other than that he hated sitting in his office waiting for the details to be brought to him. Hated not being at the sharp end of the investigation. After his conversation with DCI McIntyre, he’d thought twice about taking Harrison. Grumpy Bob had been next in line. There were worse people to take a trip out into the countryside with.

  ‘Did you call ahead to let them know we’re coming?’ McLean asked as the satnav steered him off the main road and into the wilderness around East Fortune. The twin lumps of North Berwick Law and the Bass Rock dominated the horizon, good arable land stretching away towards the coast and the Firth of Forth. Grumpy Bob folded his paper away, shoved his cup in a small circular indentation in the centre console that may or may not have been designed for that purpose, and dug out his notebook from a scruffy jacket pocket.

  ‘Aye.’ There was a short pause while the detective sergeant searched for his reading spectacles, found them perched on the top of his balding head. ‘LindSea Farm Estates. We’re to ask for an Emily Fairweather.’

  As if on cue, the satnav pinged for McLean to turn left, through a modern stone-walled gateway. Signs set into the stonework identified LindSea Farm, and beyond it a wide, tarmac drive ran arrow-straight through flat green fields towards a collection of modern farm buildings. As he drove along, he could see that the fences on either side of the drive were new, a modern variation of the old estate fences he remembered from childhood National Trust visits with his grandmother. Expensive, although in the long run they outlasted wooden posts and rylock wire netting.

  ‘Somebody’s been spending a bit of cash,’ Grumpy Bob said as they arrived in a large courtyard. ‘Didn’t realize the Single Farm Payment was so generous.’

  McLean parked alongside a nearly new Land Rover and a couple of Toyota Pickups of the kind favoured by extremist insurgents and African dictators. Most of the farm buildings looked much as he would have expected, if newer and cleaner than those he had seen before. Steel frames clad in dark-green corrugated metal with large roller doors and smaller personnel entrances, all closed. The only building with windows was the one in front of them, a neatly converted part of a much older stone-built steading. A neat plaque beside the door read ‘LindSea Farm Estates’.

  ‘Well, at least we’re in the right place.’ He reached for the door, but it swung open before he could touch the handle. A tall man, dressed in spotless blood-red overalls and wearing dark glasses stared out at him. His short-cropped blond hair reminded McLean of a prison inmate more than someone who worked the land.

  ‘Who’re youse?’

  McLean reached for his inside jacket pocket and his warrant card, seeing the man tense involuntarily at the movement. Not the sort of reaction you expected from a farmer.

  ‘Detective Inspector McLean. Specialist Crime Division. This is my colleague Detective Sergeant Laird. We’re looking for Emily Fairweather?’

  The man in the overalls relaxed a little, but still blocked the entrance. He hadn’t removed his shades, but he turned his head slightly and shouted into the office beyond.

  ‘You know anything about the polis coming?’

  A voice from beyond, too indistinct to ma
ke out any words, but feminine in its tone. McLean wondered what they had to hide here that they were so suspicious. Finally the man turned back to him, pulled off his dark glasses to reveal eyes of piercing grey-blue.

  ‘How’d you get through the gate? Not meant to be people just wandering in like that.’

  ‘Gate was open,’ McLean said. ‘Now can we come in?’

  The blond man opened his mouth to say something, but he was pushed out of the door by someone behind him. That feminine voice, but stiff and angry. ‘Stop standing there blocking the entrance, Gregor. Go fix the gates.’

  A middle-aged woman stepped into the entranceway as Gregor shoved his dark glasses back on, stalked past McLean and clambered into one of the pickups. Short and round, with greying hair tied up in a neat bun and dressed in sensible tweed, she clearly terrified the man even though he was twice her height.

  ‘Inspector. Sorry about that. The security gate should have been closed. If you’d used the intercom we’d have known you were here. Still, never mind.’ She held out a hand. ‘Emily Fairweather. Please, do come in.’

  ‘We mostly grow grass, actually. Some for seed, some gets made into forage for the equine market. The big money’s in turf, though.’

  Emily Fairweather, it turned out, was the CEO of LindSea Farm Estates, or at least that was how she had introduced herself after leading McLean and Grumpy Bob through an open-plan office and into a small meeting room beyond. The window on the far side framed an impressive view of the Bass Rock, climbing out of the choppy waters of the outer Firth of Forth. McLean knew it mostly from a series of engravings of famous Scottish castles that had hung on the wall in his bedroom for most of his childhood. From this distance the castle was impossible to see, nothing left of it but a ruin anyway.

  ‘Turf?’ Grumpy Bob asked.

  ‘Aye. You wouldn’t believe how much it’s worth. Time was, if you wanted a lawn you’d sow some grass seed and wait a while. Now everyone wants it done yesterday. I blame all those programmes on the telly. You know, the ones where they go in and make over someone’s perfectly good garden. Stick in some decking, maybe a rockery, and lots and lots of nice green turf. Still, I can’t complain. Keeps us right.’

  ‘You could say that.’ McLean dragged his gaze away from the view, glancing up at the ceiling. The building they were in might have been old, but it had been done up recently, and well. ‘You’ve spent a fair bit on this place.’

  ‘All part of the business plan. We knocked down most of the old stone steadings just over a year ago, converted this bit into the office block and put up the big shed on the site. Most of the old buildings were falling down anyway. Built in the late eighteenth, early nineteenth century, when this was mixed arable and dairy land. Back when everything was horse-drawn and a place the size of the home farm would’ve employed fifty men. Their families, too, come tattie-picking time. Sad but true, Inspector. One man and a tractor can do more in a day than all of them could in a month. Soon it’ll just be the tractor driving itself, mark my words.’

  ‘Just how big is the operation, then?’

  ‘The home farm – here – is twelve hundred acres. We’ve three other sites in the area. Total is somewhere around five thousand acres. Two thousand hectares, if you like.’

  Grumpy Bob let out a low whistle. ‘That’s a lot of land. My old granddad farmed a couple hundred acres up near Peebles and we used to think he was as rich as Croesus.’

  ‘It’s the modern way of things, Sergeant. The smaller farms aren’t economically viable these days. Old farmers retire or more likely die. Their families aren’t interested, so the land gets sold off to a neighbour. The fittest survive and get bigger and bigger.’

  ‘And sell turf to all the housing estates popping up around the city,’ McLean said.

  ‘Exactly so.’ Fairweather smiled. ‘But I’m guessing you didn’t come all the way out here for a lesson in modern farming methods.’

  ‘Not exactly.’ McLean leaned forward in his chair. ‘Digestate from anaerobic digesters. You spread it on the land here, I understand.’

  The tiniest flicker of something marred the corner of Fairweather’s eyes, her smile faltering ever so slightly before she answered. ‘It’s all above board, Inspector. I know the Food Standards people aren’t too keen on it going on to land used for vegetable crops, but all the digestate we use is for bulking up the soils after we’ve cut turfs. And it’s regularly tested for contaminants. We have a very good working relationship with our suppliers.’

  ‘Extech Energy. You get a lot of your stuff from them?’

  Again that flicker of uncertainty, swiftly locked down. ‘They’re our major supplier, yes. We get digestate from other outfits, but Extech are the most reliable. And they produce it in large quantities, too. Perfect for us as we expand.’

  ‘When was the last delivery you had?’

  ‘I’d have to check with Elaine.’ Fairweather nodded towards the door. ‘The secretary. She deals with the admin, all the permits and waste disposal licences and stuff. You wouldn’t believe the amount of paperwork.’

  ‘So you don’t know anything about a delivery the day before yesterday. Delayed a day, too, so it would have been meant to arrive three days ago. Finlay McGregor Hauliers.’ McLean kept his tone flat, stating the facts rather than asking a question. As he named the truck company, that twitch around Fairweather’s eyes came back so strongly she had to blink to get rid of it, looked away from him as if trying to cover it up by pretending she had something in her eye.

  ‘As I said, Elaine deals with all that, Inspector.’ She faced him again, features locked into a mirthless smile. She picked up the phone on her desk, but pressed no button to put a call through. ‘I’ll have her dig up all the relevant documents, but might I ask why you’re interested in it?’

  The gates were closed as they headed back down the driveway half an hour later, a pickup truck parked in the shade of one of the walls. As they approached, the blond man in the red overalls and dark glasses stood up from where he had been squatting beside a control box. He reached over and pressed a button, causing the gates to swing inwards and open, but instead of driving off, McLean lowered the window and pulled to a halt.

  ‘All fixed now?’ He tried a friendly grin, expecting nothing more than a scowl in return and not being disappointed.

  ‘Must be some turf you grow here, that it needs all this security to keep the thieves from stealing it,’ McLean continued. ‘Of course, you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you Gregor?’

  ‘You what?’ The man took a step towards the car, arms hanging loose at his side, fists lightly clenched. A fighting stance.

  ‘Took me a while, I have to admit. It wasn’t until your boss lady named you that the penny dropped. Gregor Wishaw. You used to run with Bunt McGhee and his gang, didn’t you? Spent a wee while in Saughton if memory serves. Armed robbery of a post office.’

  ‘Did my time, Inspector.’ Gregor leaned down, took his dark glasses off to reveal those pale grey-blue eyes once more. There was something very disconcerting about that stare, like a sheepdog at work. Fixated. Obsessive.

  ‘I’m sure you did. Same as I’m sure Ms Fairweather knows all about your past.’ McLean tried the smile again. ‘Like you said, you did your time. No reason why you shouldn’t be gainfully employed. Beats running with a gang of second-rate hoodlums. How was it we caught you again? That was it. One of your chums posted a photo of himself on Facebook. Only he forgot he was still wearing the same mask he used in the raid. Bet he was popular with the gang, eh?’

  ‘Was there something you wanted? Only I’ve got a job to do.’

  ‘Not really. I was just surprised to see you. It’s not often faces from old cases come back, even less so and they’ve turned over a new leaf. Good on you.’

  Confusion spread across Gregor’s face. McLean pressed the button, raising the window a few inches, then stopped. ‘There was one thing, actually.’

  ‘Aye?’

  ‘The tanke
r trucks that deliver the muck here. They all belong to Finlay McGregor, right? You’ll know Mike Finlay?’

  It was almost imperceptible, the tiniest tightening of the eyes that might just have been a reaction to the bright summer sun. Might have been, had it not come exactly as McLean spoke the name.

  ‘Never heard of him,’ Gregor said. ‘Trucks are in and out of here all the time. Can’t say I’ve paid much attention to who runs them. As long as they’ve got the paperwork they’re no’ my problem.’

  Gregor put his dark glasses back on. Conversation over as far as he was concerned. McLean smiled a final time, raised the window all the way.

  17

  The phone buzzed on his desk, and for the first time since he could remember McLean was able to pick up the handset without first having to find it under a sea of folders. The lights on the front of the machine told him it was an internal call, but he’d not managed to work out anything more sophisticated than that yet.

  ‘McLean.’

  ‘Ah, Tony. You’re in.’ The chief superintendent sounded a little too chummy, as if he had rehearsed his lines once too often to sound properly spontaneous.

  ‘Sir. Yes. Just going over the day’s reports. Was there something I could help you with?’

  A heartbeat’s pause. The sort of thing that let you know the suspect you were interviewing was lying. Or at least had something to hide. ‘There was, aye. Wondering if you could step into my office for a moment.’

  ‘Of course, sir. I’ll be right there.’

  ‘Good, good.’ Another telling pause. Something was clearly bothering Forrester, but he didn’t want to talk about it on the phone. ‘Nothing important. Just don’t tell anyone where you’re going, right?’

  ‘Fine. OK.’ McLean frowned even though there was no one about to see him. The chief superintendent’s office was just along the corridor at the far corner of the building. It was unlikely he’d be seen going there, but equally wouldn’t draw much in the way of suspicion if he was. He hung up, looked around the room as if it might suddenly have sprouted surveillance cameras and hidden microphones. As if this might be the prelude to an elaborate joke at his expense. But this was the chief superintendent. The man in charge of the whole station. Not some sergeant with a grudge and a childish imagination.