Dead Men's Bones (Inspector Mclean 4)

by James Oswald

  ‘You don’t know?’ Duguid asked, a look of incredulity spread across his florid face.

  ‘Oh, I know who she is. Jane Louise Dee, the Scottish Bill Gates was what they used to call her back in the eighties. Married some Middle East financier who didn’t last long. Has been building her business empire ever since. Probably the richest woman in the world.’ McLean ticked off the results of his most recent Wikipedia search on his fingers. ‘For some reason she seems to have taken an interest in me recently. Flattering, I’m sure, but she’s not my type. Like I say, not sure really who she is at all.’

  Duguid’s mouth had fallen open, which meant he slurred his first few words trying to get control of it again. ‘She’s what? How do you mean “taken an interest in you”?’

  ‘You’ve met her, I take it? Before today?’

  ‘Briefly. At official functions. Can’t say as we’ve exchanged more than a couple of words. But …’ Duguid tailed off as the thinking part of his brain demanded all the processing power available.

  ‘Look, sir. If you think it’ll help, I’ll go and apologize to her in person, but if we’d found Weatherly’s body on anyone else’s building site we’d have them down in the cells right now, sweating. OK, so she’s powerful, but she’s not that powerful. She can’t make this go away.’

  ‘You actually believe that, don’t you?’ Duguid slumped down into his seat, sending another stack of papers cascading to the floor. Someone was going to have a lot of fun sorting out this lot later.

  ‘Look at this place.’ He flicked a clumsy hand at a folder on the desk. ‘You know why I’ve had to dig this lot out and go through every single fucking one of them?’ Duguid paused, but not long enough for McLean to answer. ‘Because the Deputy Chief Constable wants to know details of every single investigation you’ve been involved in while under my command. That’s why.’

  McLean said nothing, just swept the room with his eyes. He tried to remember when Duguid would first have been his superior officer. There’d been at least half a dozen different superintendents in charge of CID in the station since he’d first made detective, but Duguid had always been somewhere in the pecking order as well. Even so, looking at the collected folders, it seemed an awful lot of cases for them to have both been involved in. But then again, it had been a long time.

  ‘Why does he want to know that, sir?’

  ‘Why do you fucking well think, McLean?’

  Because he’s worried. Because he’s in someone’s pocket and wants to make sure he’s got everything covered. Or someone even higher up is leaning on him.

  ‘Exactly.’ Duguid took McLean’s silence as understanding. ‘I’ve had politicians from every party on the phone. City councillors, too. Christ, I even had some nob from Holyrood calling. And you know what? They’re all fucking scared of that woman. She’s got leverage on every single one of them. And you brought her in here for questioning.’

  McLean was about to explain once again that he hadn’t brought Mrs Saifre in. That she had come of her own volition. He’d been meaning to interview her, yes. But she’d beaten him to it. Then he saw the edge of a smile on Duguid’s face, something he couldn’t really recall ever having seen before. Not like that.

  ‘I’ve always said you’re trouble. You know that. Christ alone knows this lot needed kicking up a bit.’

  ‘You want me to call her back in?’

  ‘Fuck, no. Leave her alone.’ Duguid’s smile disappeared, his hands shooting up to his chest as if the very thought of Mrs Saifre in his station was enough to give him a heart attack.

  ‘And Weatherly?’ McLean took the unprecedented occurrence of goodwill from Duguid to press home his advantage. Probably a mistake, in hindsight. The detective superintendent’s face darkened once more. Normal service resumed.

  ‘He’s dead. Worst thing you’ve got is interfering with a corpse. If you can pin it on anyone. If I thought we could get away with it I’d say stick him back in his crypt and hope no one noticed he was gone.’ Duguid shook his head; they both knew that would never work. ‘No. You rattled the cage, now you’d be best to leave things alone a while. Don’t push your luck.’

  49

  It was a sad but inevitable part of his job that McLean spent far too much time in hospitals. More often than not, the victims of the crimes he investigated ended up either here or the mortuary. Sometimes both. All too often recently it had been his personal life that had brought him down these familiar corridors. He wasn’t entirely sure how DS Ritchie fitted into that. She was a work colleague, but also a friend. And she’d saved his life, which had to count for something.

  He found her in a quiet ward at the end of a long corridor lined with an odd mixture of modern art and medical warning posters. She looked like she was asleep, a saline drip the only medical intervention evident. As McLean approached, she stirred, looked up at him with tired eyes. Her expression turned to fluster as recognition dawned.

  ‘Sir. I … Sorry—’

  ‘Take it easy, Kirsty. You’re not at work here. No need for any of that “sir” nonsense.’ McLean found a chair, pulled it across so he could sit beside her on the opposite side of the bed from the drip stand. She looked like shit; there was no other way of putting it. Her face was sunken, dark bags around her eyes. Even the speckled blotches of her freckles had faded away almost to nothing in the greyness of her skin. Her hair hung lank from her head, tightening up into rings where she’d not been looking after it properly. Lying by her sides on top of the covers, her bare arms were thin and weedy.

  ‘Fainted,’ she said as he settled into the chair.

  ‘I was there, remember?’

  A moment’s confusion, then a look of consternation narrowed her eyes. ‘It’s nothing. I’ll be up and about in no time. Just need to shake this bastard flu.’

  That sounded like the old Ritchie, but her voice was thin, wavering. Looking closer, McLean could see the damp of sweat on her forehead, feel the heat radiating off her.

  ‘Doctors know what’s wrong with you, then?’

  A slight shake of the head, followed by a wince as Ritchie discovered that perhaps shaking her head wasn’t a good idea. ‘They’ve sent some blood off to the labs. Pumped me full of antivirals. Hope they work it out soon.’

  ‘Me too. And not just because we need you back at work.’ McLean saw the ghost of a smile flit across Ritchie’s face, but the effort was obviously too hard to maintain for any length of time.

  ‘How’s everything going there?’ she asked. ‘You were getting ready to raid Rosskettle or something?’

  McLean settled back in the chair and brought her up to speed on their investigations. About halfway through, she closed her eyes. He stopped talking once he’d noticed, but she just said ‘Go on’ in a quiet whisper. It reminded him painfully of the long hours he’d spent sitting at his grandmother’s hospital bed, talking to her while she lay unresponsive in her coma. On the other hand, it had helped him then, to marshal his thoughts by talking them through without interruption. As he spoke to Ritchie about Billbo Beaumont, Barry Timbrel, Andrew Weatherly and his mysteriously wandering body, Rosskettle Hospital and the hurried demolition of the outbuildings, a picture began to form in his mind as to how, and why, it might all fit together. How it all seemed to hinge around the strange figure of Mrs Saifre. Jane Louise Dee.

  ‘Remember interviewing her. At Weatherly’s office.’ Ritchie’s voice was sleepy, her eyes still closed.

  ‘She said she’d spoken to you. Asked how you were, actually.’ Now McLean mentioned it, the concern seemed odd.

  ‘Haven’t been right since I left that place.’ Ritchie opened her eyes, struggled upright and started coughing. She pulled the clean white sheet to her face as she did so, and when she had finished, McLean saw that it was speckled with red.

  ‘You want me to fetch a nurse?’ He leaned over the bed, unsure what to do. Ritchie waved him away.

  ‘’M fine. Getting better, honest.’ She dropped into her pillows, face wax
y, arms flopping back to the blankets, exhausted after the effort of seconds.

  ‘You never were a good liar, Kirsty.’

  ‘Meant what I said, though. I felt a bit rough after we got back from Fife, but the next day I was pretty much OK. Only started to get sick after I’d left the office. After I spoke to that woman. Ask in there. See if anyone else’s been off a while. Whatever I picked up there’s proper nasty.’

  ‘You know, I—’ McLean began, but was cut off by a buzzing from his pocket as his phone rang. He looked around the ward guiltily as he pulled it out. He couldn’t swear he’d remembered to turn it off when he came in, despite knowing better. The caller ID told him it was DC MacBride on the other end, and he couldn’t see any of the officious ‘No Mobile Phones’ signs about like there were in the ICU. Ritchie had barely raised her head, but he could see the look in her eyes that suggested she would have rolled them had she the energy.

  ‘It’s MacBride,’ he told her. Then thumbed the screen and raised the phone to his ear. ‘Constable?’

  ‘Ah, sir. Good. Hoping I’d catch you.’

  ‘I’m in the hospital. Can’t speak long. Is it urgent?’

  ‘Scene Examination Branch phoned. Seems they’ve found something at Rosskettle. Need you back on site as soon as possible.’

  One thing to be said for the endless snow that was gripping the whole of the country that winter: it meant the traffic was generally light. On the other hand, McLean’s new car was hardly designed for cold weather driving. He’d left Ritchie to the tender ministrations of the nurses and hurried south as fast as he dared, but it was still almost dark by the time he turned down the narrow lane to Rosskettle. At least there was a uniformed officer at the entrance where they’d met the security guard when they’d first raided the place, keeping the general public out. He couldn’t help noticing the parked cars a short distance away, little clumps of dog-ends on the ground below the windows, long lenses glinting behind windscreens. Someone had tipped off the press and now they were circling like jackals.

  A half-dozen Scene Examination Branch vans filled the parking space in front of the main building. They’d even brought their big truck, which didn’t normally get wheeled out unless something serious was up. McLean found a space to park close enough that he wouldn’t have to walk for miles, but far enough away that no one would reverse into him, then went in search of someone in charge.

  He found Jemima Cairns directing a small platoon of SOC officers armed with spades. Her face spread into a wide beam when she saw him, quite out of character for the dour woman he was expecting.

  ‘You got the message, I see.’ She dismissed the last of the SOCOs, who all traipsed off in the direction of the area where they’d found Weatherly’s body that morning.

  ‘You said you’d found something interesting.’ McLean shook the hand that was proffered, half-expecting to be grasped in a bear hug by the short, round woman. She’d helped him in the past, and had a thing about knots, he remembered. But her reputation was not one of great humour and bonhomie.

  ‘Indeed we have. Not often we get something like this to investigate, either. You’ve made my year, Inspector. Possibly my decade. Grab a bunny suit and follow me.’

  Intrigued as much by the casual reference to full protective gear as Miss Cairns’s obvious excitement, McLean did as he was told, pulling on the white paper suit and slipping his feet into a pair of spotlessly clean rubber wellies. The two of them walked through snow churned by countless feet to the point where they had dug up Weatherly that morning. A set of arc lights illuminated the ground around a deeper hole. McLean stopped to peer in, but Miss Cairns motioned him on. A second, larger array of lights had been set up to illuminate an area close by the fallen oak tree and the temporary fence. A team was struggling with the largest tent frame he had seen in a while.

  ‘Those cadaver dogs you got in went crazy over here.’ Miss Cairns walked with surprising speed over the ice-crusted snow. Looking at her, McLean had thought she’d crack the surface and disappear up to her thighs, but she seemed to have a way of walking that meant she floated over the surface. Not so himself, and he found out soon enough that the SEB-issue rubber boots were not as tall as the snow was deep.

  ‘We did a preliminary dig and came up with some very old bones. Thought it might have been historic. You know there’s been a mental hospital on this site for centuries. The dogs wouldn’t have smelled them, though. So we kept digging.’ They approached the lit area, stepping from late afternoon gloom to a sparkling whiteness that hurt McLean’s eyes. In the middle of it all, the snow had been shovelled back, the grass with it, and several feet of rock-hard earth. Now the SOCOs were working with tools you might see on Time Team, gently picking at the soil to reveal what looked like a cemetery in a country where coffins hadn’t been invented yet.

  ‘What am I looking at?’ McLean asked after several minutes of stunned silence.

  ‘So far? Twenty-two bodies. All male, adult. They’ve been buried carefully, but this isn’t a Christian graveyard. They’re all facing the wrong way for starters. Some are very old, even I can tell that. Others, less so. That’s what got the dogs going.’

  McLean let out a long, slow breath, the steam rising in the frigid air to surround him like his own personal cloud. ‘Foul play?’

  ‘Your friends from the city mortuary’ll have to decide that.’ Miss Cairns nodded at a point a few yards in where two figures were kneeling around a set of bones. ‘At the very least, we’ve got an unregistered burial ground that’s been used some time in the last ten years. Reckon we’ve a good fortnight’s work here. Maybe even a month’s. Congratulations, Inspector. You’ve hit the jackpot.’

  50

  ‘Jesus Christ, this is a mess. Thirty bodies. Thirty fucking bodies! Have you any idea what kind of grief I’m getting?’

  The morning after the gruesome discoveries at Rosskettle Hospital, and McLean wasn’t at all surprised to find himself hauled up in front of Duguid. He pulled out his phone, flicked it on and held it up for the detective superintendent to see.

  ‘Not just you, sir. I’ve had sixteen calls from Jo Dalgliesh in the past three hours, and she’s not even supposed to have this number.’

  Duguid rubbed at weary eyes with his prehensile fingers. ‘You really do know how to fuck things up, don’t you?’

  ‘Why does everyone think this is my fault? Not like I put all those bodies in the ground myself.’

  ‘No, but you had to go and dig them all up, didn’t you?’

  McLean bit back the retort he wanted to give. No point descending to Duguid’s level. ‘I can’t un-find them, sir. We have to investigate. And there’s one small bit of silver lining in all this.’

  ‘There is?’ Duguid looked genuinely surprised.

  ‘Aye, there is. The press are so excited by this mass grave they’ve completely forgotten about Andrew-bloody-Weatherly.’

  ‘How long’s that going to last, though?’ Duguid muttered to himself, pulled some folders across from the mess all over his desk. ‘It’s a major incident now. That’s official. So you’ll be handing over to DCI Brooks. I have oversight of the whole thing for now, but it might go higher yet.’ He shook his head as if that might make it all go away. ‘What the fuck’s actually happening out there?’

  ‘Best guess so far is that there’s been an unofficial burial ground there for as long as the hospital. Maybe even before. If they were all ancient, then we’d just get the archaeologists in, but some of these burials are recent. At least in the last ten years or so.’

  ‘So who are they? Dead lunatics?’

  Nothing like sympathy for the victims. ‘Could be. The older ones almost certainly. We won’t know until the pathologists have finished with them.’

  ‘Well, hurry them up, McLean. We need answers fast, or this is going to blow up in our faces.’

  ‘Always thought you were one to watch.’

  He should have gone straight to DCI Brooks’s office and then organ
ised a major incident room for the investigation. Instead, McLean had taken his opportunity, and dashed out for a decent cup of coffee and something to eat. He should have known better, of course. That was how she’d caught him the last time.

  ‘I’ve nothing to say to you, Ms Dalgliesh.’ McLean ducked into the coffee shop, only to find a queue snaking its way up to the counter. Dalgliesh slipped in behind him. Trapped.

  ‘C’mon. I’ll buy youse a coffee if you just give us the heads-up.’

  ‘You don’t know already?’ Despite himself, McLean couldn’t help rising to the bait.

  ‘Oh, aye. Lots of SOC vans and the likes out at the old loony bin. Ten vans heading back to the mortuary. University archaeology team wandering about the place talking about an ancient burial site not mentioned in any of their precious history books. Sounds like a mystery to me.’

  Trust the civilians to speak out of turn. Either that or Dalgliesh was making stuff up in the hope he’d fill in the gaps for her. On the other hand, she’d had someone following the vans taking the remains back to the mortuary. Chances were she’d had a few unattributable tip-offs too. Amazing what a little bit of cash could do if you found the right officer to flash it at.

  ‘We’re having a press conference this afternoon. Can’t you wait until then?’

  ‘And miss my scoop?’ Dalgliesh looked genuinely hurt. ‘I know you’ve found bodies. Lots of them. I’m just looking for a few more details. Like how old they are.’

  ‘It’s only been a day. Let the pathologists do their job, aye?’

  ‘So they’re old then. Twenty years or more?’ Now she was fishing.

  ‘This is a major enquiry. I can’t say anything until we know what we’re dealing with.’

  ‘Major enquiry, eh?’ Dalgliesh’s eyebrow shot up. ‘So you’re no’ the man in charge.’

  ‘Not even close. I report to DCI Brooks. Duguid’s Gold on this one. At least for now. You never know, it might escalate beyond even his enormous capacity.’