Dead Men's Bones (Inspector Mclean 4)

by James Oswald

  That was when he noticed the envelope.

  He probably should have seen it before; it wasn’t exactly inconspicuous. Propped up against a dark pottery biscuit barrel he may or may not have left in the middle of the table. Inside there would be more incriminating photographs of Andrew Weatherly, sickening and pointless and heading to a journalist near here soon. He picked it up, slid a finger under the flap and tore it open. He was sick of the bloody politics of it all, the tiresome games. If they had something to say, then why couldn’t they just bloody well get on and say it?

  Only they weren’t photographs of a dead politician having sex with his personal assistant.

  It was probably the sky that caught his attention. All the earlier pictures had been from video taken indoors. These were proper photographs, and they showed a scene that took him a while to recognize. Perhaps it was because all the buildings were there, rather than just the couple that were left by the time he’d first visited Rosskettle. Or maybe it was because they had been taken in summer, with the mature oak trees in full leaf.

  Either way, it was clearly a set of pictures of the prefab buildings that Price Developments were busy demolishing. That was if they hadn’t finished already.

  McLean settled back in his chair and leafed through the collection again, more slowly this time. The pictures had that slightly faded quality about them that suggested they’d been taken a while ago, and they were true photographs rather than digital prints. There were no people visible in any of the pictures, and the more he studied them, the more he realized that they all focused on one building in particular. Some were close-ups of the windows and doors, others wider-angled shots, all with that same building right in the centre. He couldn’t have said how he knew, but he was sure it was the building into which he had climbed just a few days earlier. The one that had been bulldozed even while he was still inside. The one with the basement that wasn’t on any of the plans.

  ‘Supposed to be a hint, is it?’ McLean asked, of no one but the cat. She looked up at him with an expression that suggested she thought him an idiot, then went back to washing herself.

  46

  Darkness still. Dawn wouldn’t be with them for at least an hour. Just the cloudy, moonless sky and the dull orange glow cast from the city to the north. McLean checked his watch for the hundredth time. A quarter past six and they were already late starting.

  ‘Where’s that bloody ARU got to?’ Grumpy Bob gave voice to the thought occupying McLean’s mind. The rest of the team was ready to go; just the armed unit holding everyone up. They probably wouldn’t be needed anyway, but in hindsight it had been a mistake to suggest as much at the briefing.

  Headlights swept across the parked car, momentarily dazzling McLean. The black Transit van pulled to a halt alongside them, wound down a window.

  ‘Sorry about that, sir. Got a bit lost in the glen.’

  McLean bit back the retort he wanted to give. ‘Right, let’s get this done.’

  He nodded to Grumpy Bob, sitting in the passenger seat, and started up his engine as the sergeant relayed the go command on his Airwave set. They’d parked up at the top end of the lane leading to the hospital site, and now McLean led the convoy of Transit vans and squad cars down to the gates. Lights shone from the security guard’s hut, and the barrier was down. McLean pulled in at the side of the lane, letting the vans past, then climbed out of his car as a sleepy guard came to see what was going on.

  ‘Private property, mate. You can’t go in there.’ Blind as well as sleepy.

  ‘Police. I have a warrant to search this site.’ McLean held up the sheet of paper, thankful for whatever strings Duguid had pulled to get it. ‘You can either lift the barrier now, or we’ll drive through it.’

  McLean followed the guard as he scurried back to his hut. Grumpy Bob was already there, and pressed the button to raise the barrier as they both entered. The guard went straight for the phone, but McLean held down the receiver with a finger. ‘Not until my men have secured the site.’

  ‘But … My boss—’

  ‘Will find out about this just as soon as we’re happy to let her know.’ McLean paused until the guard sat down, then took his hand off the phone again. ‘Shouldn’t be long.’

  The three of them waited in silence. Through the window of the guard hut, McLean could see past the skeletal trees to the shadowy bulk of the main building a hundred yards or so away. After a few minutes, spotlights lit up the stone facade. Not long after, Grumpy Bob’s Airwave set buzzed the all-clear.

  ‘OK then. Let’s go see what they’ve found.’ McLean let Grumpy Bob lead the way out before speaking to the hapless guard. ‘You can phone your boss now.’

  ‘Site’s empty, sir. No one here.’

  DC MacBride met them at the drive end. He was dressed up in full protective gear, though not armed. The ARU officers were milling around at the back of their Transit, an air of disappointment boiling off them as they checked their weapons back into storage and shucked off their Kevlar kit. McLean breathed a sigh of relief that they’d not been needed.

  ‘What about the rest of the site?’ he asked.

  ‘This is the site, sir. Everything else has been levelled, far as we can tell.’

  McLean looked past MacBride to the imposing three-storey bulk of the old hospital. Overhead, the sky was starting to tinge with the coming dawn, the scene slowly revealing itself as the shadows retreated. Where he stood, the ground was tarmac, a large parking area funnelling into the driveway. Narrow lanes curved through the trees to where the other buildings had been, but almost everything had gone. A churned mess of snow and mud was evidence of the haste with which the site had been cleared. How long was it since he and Grumpy Bob had been here before? Couldn’t have been more than three days. They’d been going at it some to get the site cleared so quickly. Not Edinburgh workmen, for sure.

  ‘The other van arrived yet, Bob?’ McLean asked as the detective sergeant ambled up.

  ‘Just on its way from the gatehouse, sir.’

  Headlights swept over the trees and on down the lane, then a panel van swung into view, pulling up a distance away from the car park already full of police vehicles. By the time McLean had walked over to it, a young uniform officer had climbed out and opened the back, releasing a pair of very excited spaniels. He stopped a distance away, not because they posed any great threat so much as he didn’t really want to get muddy pawprints all over his clean trousers.

  ‘Constable Fraser?’

  The officer growled a command and the two dogs instantly sat. Only when she was happy they were behaving did she turn to answer. ‘You’ll be Detective Inspector McLean, aye?’

  ‘Yes. Thanks for coming at such short notice. I just hope these two are as good as I’ve heard.’

  In the half-light of dawn it was hard to tell if Constable Fraser was scowling at that. She was short, not plump but rather stocky in build, and had a no-nonsense air about her that suggested Young Farmer.

  ‘If there’s a dead body then Eilidh and Maisie will find it. You’ve no worries there, sir.’ She looked up at the building, her neck craning as she took in the size of the place. ‘I’m no’ saying it’ll be quick, mind. That’s a big wee hoose.’

  ‘Don’t think there’s much point going through there, to be honest.’ McLean pointed off to the side of the building, where the light was starting to reveal something of a battlefield. ‘A wee bird tells me what we’re looking for’s going to be over there.’

  The spaniels busied themselves quartering the ground as McLean and Constable Fraser picked a careful route across the building site. It took a while for him to build the picture in his head, digging up the memory of his brief visit just a few days earlier. He had the photographs, of course, but half the trees were missing, as well as all the outbuildings. There was no sign at all of the single-storey blocks that had stood in an arc around the west end of the main house; just a sea of broken earth, ankle-breaking chunks frozen as hard as rocks. In the pale l
ight of dawn, he identified the fallen tree, still half-buried in drifts of snow and close to the metal perimeter fence. Working back from there brought him and the dogs and the constable to a point he was fairly certain marked the entry to the basement he’d not been able to investigate. Maybe within fifty yards either way.

  ‘Somewhere around here.’ He pointed at the ground around his feet. Fraser gave another growl of a command, and the two dogs came to attention. Another, and their heads went down, tails up as they set to working. Back and forth with the single-minded intensity of something mostly imbecilic, but very, very good at doing just one thing.

  It didn’t take long. First one of the dogs stopped, quivered and started barking. Within moments its companion had done the same. They didn’t dig, which impressed McLean almost as much as the sniffing. Instead they just sat side by side, looking from their handler to a point on the ground in front of them and back again.

  ‘X marks the spot, Inspector. I’m impressed.’

  ‘You think there’s something down there?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. You sometimes get false positives, but these two are my best, and if they agree on something then I’d put money on it being a body.’ She took a handful of biscuits out of her pocket and gave the dogs a reward; lots of patting on the head and encouragement, too. McLean hoped they’d earned it.

  ‘Jesus, this stuff’s like concrete.’

  Detective Constable MacBride was wielding a pickaxe with all the skill of a navvy, and two uniform constables were scraping away soil as best they could with shovels, but there was no getting away from the fact that it had been below freezing, even in the middle of the afternoon, for several days now. The earth was as hard as iron, and when it did break, it formed clumps too heavy for one man to lift. They’d been at it for half an hour now, but you’d be hard pressed to tell if you hadn’t watched them from the start.

  ‘Can’t be too deep. Should get softer as you go down, too.’ McLean wasn’t sure if this was true, but he felt the need to give encouragement. The day was as light as it was likely to get now, almost half-past seven in the morning and a dull grey cloud blanketed the distant Pentland Hills, freezing fog clinging to the nearby woodland.

  ‘You sure you don’t want a go, sir?’ MacBride asked, offering up the pickaxe handle.

  ‘Wouldn’t want to deny you your workout, Constable.’ McLean cradled a mug of coffee in his hands, courtesy of Grumpy Bob. Where DS Laird managed to magic the stuff up from he had no idea; he was just happy to feel the heat of it in his belly. He had been savouring the rich aroma too, but a waft of something much less pleasant reached his nose at the same time as one of the uniform constables let out a yelp.

  ‘Got something here, sir. Oh, sweet hairy—’ he stopped mid-sentence, dropping his shovel in his haste to scramble out of the shallow pit. To his credit, he made it at least ten yards from the scene before vomiting.

  ‘I think we’ve found our missing body, sir.’ MacBride handed up his pickaxe again as the second uniform constable clambered out more carefully. McLean took it this time, hauling the detective constable up by the business end. With all three of them out of the way, he could peer down and see what the sniffer dogs had found. It wasn’t pleasant.

  Encased in mud as if he’d been thrown there while it was liquid, a man’s face peered up from the bottom of the hole. His lips were blistered and torn, teeth showing through the ragged, pale pink and burned black flesh. His eyes were gone, black holes filled with mud where once eyeballs had been. You might have thought it would be hard to recognize a person from such a small bit of their face, damaged, bloodless and blind. But there was no mistaking the identity of the man whose body they had uncovered. Andrew Weatherly.

  ‘Looks like you were right, sir.’ Grumpy Bob sidled up, looked into the hole. ‘You going to tell me how you knew?’

  McLean thought about the page of notes Matt Hilton had given him, and how it had crackled and burned in his fireplace. It was cold outside in the fog and the pale dawn light, but that wasn’t what sent a shiver right through him.

  ‘To be honest, this wasn’t what I thought we’d find, Bob. Not going to complain, mind. Let’s get Scene Examination Branch in here, eh?’ He cast a glance over to where MacBride and the two uniform constables were huddled together shivering.

  ‘Think they can dig the rest of him out, don’t you?’

  47

  He heard the commotion long before he reached the parking area in front of the main house. McLean didn’t need to see the shiny Range Rover with its black-tinted windows or the hulking forms of Karl and the other bodyguard to know who was making it. Part of him was impressed that Mrs Saifre had come to the site herself, and that she had made it there so quickly, but another part of him wondered how it was she hadn’t known long beforehand.

  ‘I want to speak to whoever is in charge. This is quite outrageous, young woman.’

  Of all the plain clothes officers she could have picked on, Mrs Saifre had chosen DC Gregg, probably thinking that as she was both young and female she would be easy to push around. That, McLean realized as he approached the scene, was her first mistake.

  ‘I’m very sorry ma’am, but I cannot let you go any further. This is a potential crime scene and it’s imperative we keep contamination to a minimum. We wouldn’t want to have to take your clothes away for forensic examination now, would we?’

  ‘Do you have any idea who I am, young lady? What’s your name, your rank? Who do you report to? I will be taking this up with the Chief Constable himself.’

  ‘Mrs Saifre. I must say I didn’t expect to see you here.’ McLean half-shouted the words, anxious to defuse the situation even though he was still too far away. Or at least turn it on himself and away from his junior officers. If there was one thing he couldn’t abide it was people in authority bullying the underlings. That was his job.

  ‘Detective Inspector McLean. Tony. Surely there has been some mistake here.’ Mrs Saifre flashed him a smile that would have weakened the knees of any red-blooded male. Except that McLean could see the artifice in it; could see this woman for the parasite that she was.

  ‘I’m afraid not.’ He finally reached the little group of people, noticing that several uniform constables and a couple of the Armed Response Unit sergeants had formed a loose semicircle around DC Gregg. With only Karl and her other bodyguard behind her, Mrs Saifre was quite clearly outnumbered, for all her bluster about connections in high places. McLean took the search warrant from his inside jacket pocket, unfolded it and handed it to her.

  ‘We had reason to believe a man was held against his will and tortured on or near these premises. This gives us permission both to search the entire grounds and to exclude anyone from them while we carry out that search.’

  ‘Had reason?’ Mrs Saifre picked up on McLean’s use of the past tense. ‘So you’ve conducted your search already.’

  ‘Oh, we’re not finished yet. No. We’ve only just begun. Tell me, Mrs Saifre, how involved are you in the day-to-day running of Price Developments?’

  A dark scowl creased Mrs Saifre’s brow, her eyes flashing with a red flame that must surely have been a reflection of the rising sun. The cold air seemed to chill even further and McLean felt the pain in his hip twinge. Through the corner of his eye, he noticed several of the collected officers take a step back, as if they had been standing too close to a bonfire that had begun to burn more vigorously than expected.

  ‘I am the money, Detective Inspector,’ Mrs Saifre said eventually. ‘So naturally I take an interest in anything that might affect the bottom line. Technical aspects of the development are left to the engineers and architects.’

  ‘And yet here you are. Where are they?’

  ‘I own this land.’ There was something about the verb, the way Mrs Saifre voiced it, that put McLean on edge. It was as if she were saying she owned someone’s soul. Where had that thought come from? He felt a growing pressure to back off, to order everyone to pack up and leave. But
that was mad; they’d only just got here and a couple of hundred yards away DC MacBride and Grumpy Bob were helping a couple of uniform constables to guard a dead body that was somewhere it really shouldn’t have been.

  ‘Then ultimately you are responsible for what we find on it. Is that not so?’ McLean held Mrs Saifre’s gaze even though it actually hurt to look into those black, bottomless eyes.

  ‘You have no idea what you’re messing with here, Detective Inspector McLean.’ She looked away, cast her eyes over all the assembled police. ‘None of you do. This will go badly for you all.’

  ‘Please don’t threaten my officers, Mrs Saifre.’ McLean took a step forward. He had been going to take her arm and guide her back to her car, but the way the two bodyguards stiffened made him think twice. He looked at Karl, who gave him the most minimal shake of the head. Not so much a discouragement as a warning. McLean turned the touch into an open-handed gesture, pointing with his other hand back towards the Range Rover. ‘I’ll have to ask you to move off the site until the forensic team have finished their examination. We will, of course, keep you informed as to our progress.’

  Mrs Saifre glowered at him and again he felt that pressure building up in his head, his whole body. There was a heat boiling off her that should have melted the icy ground all around them, driven off the freezing fog. But it was a heat only felt inside, a warning of the rage that was yet to come. McLean felt a momentary pity for the two bodyguards, whose journey back to the city was going to be difficult to say the least.

  ‘You haven’t heard the last of this.’ Mrs Saifre stalked back to the car, climbed in. McLean followed her over.

  ‘I don’t doubt it. I’ll be wanting to talk to you anyway, so don’t go far.’

  Karl the bodyguard and chauffeur closed the door, the black tinted windows making it impossible to see Mrs Saifre’s angry glare any more. As he turned and opened the driver’s door, ready to climb in, McLean caught the expression on his face. A more complete and horrifying terror he had never seen.