by James Oswald
‘And the archaeologists?’
‘Should learn to keep their mouths shut.’ McLean had reached the head of the queue, ordered his coffee, gave his name and added, ‘She’s paying.’ Dalgliesh scowled, but pulled out a crumpled ten pound note from the pocket of her leather coat and handed it over with her own order.
‘Look, you’ve got to give me something.’ Dalgliesh leaned against the counter, waiting impatiently for the barista to do her business. ‘What were you looking for out there, anyway?’
‘That’s part of an ongoing investigation, so I really can’t discuss it.’
‘Oh, come on. You must have had a reason to go poking about down there.’ Dalgliesh scratched at her face with a yellow fingernail. ‘Your tattooed body wasn’t all that far away, was it? Washed down the river. You reckon he was a loony?’
‘The hospital’s been closed almost twelve years. William Beaumont was living on the streets, but he wasn’t ever a patient at Rosskettle.’
‘So that was why you were there.’ Dalgliesh had a grin on her like the Cheshire Cat’s idiot half-cousin. ‘And you reckon whoever did for him did for all these others. And them going back hundreds of years.’ Maybe not such an idiot.
‘Look, Dalgliesh. I can’t say much because I don’t know much. Not yet, at least. Yes, I can confirm we’ve found bodies, and some of them have been in the ground a long time. Foul play, or just an unregistered burial ground used by the mental hospital before everything became more regulated? Who knows? I aim to find out, and that would be a lot easier if you held back from publishing your usual lurid speculation. The last thing I need is the conspiracy nutters wandering on to a potential crime scene.’
‘Conspiracy nutters. Can I quote you on that?’
McLean grabbed his coffee the moment it arrived, somewhat startling the lady who handed it to him. He felt bad about that until he realized she’d spelt his name ‘Maclean’, like the toothpaste. Dalgliesh’s own drink hadn’t been made yet and he leapt at the chance to escape.
‘Print what you want. You just make it all up anyway.’
He left the journalist standing at the counter, preparing her response. Hurried out the door before she decided badgering him for more answers was worth more than an abandoned latte. Everything was going to hell anyway, what did it matter if he pissed off the press now?
51
Two days later, and things were going from bad to worse. Scene Examination Branch had so far found the remains of twenty-nine bodies, neatly buried a couple of hundred yards away from the old outbuildings of the hospital. All adult, all male, some were little more than bones, but three were more recent. Dr MacPhail, for all his apparent youth, had spent a couple of years helping to identify bodies from mass graves, and was now overseeing the whole process with a macabre glee that suggested when older he would fit the Angus Cadwallader mould well. The senior pathologist seemed happy to let his underling shine, less happy at the growing number of bodies now filling up his mortuary.
As yet, none of the bodies had been identified, but one thing was obvious enough from what they had found. All of them that still had skin were extensively tattooed; intricate swirls of black ink covering them from head to toe. It wasn’t hard to see the picture forming: a regular killing, structured, well organized, sacrificial. What McLean couldn’t work out as he sat alone in his office, late into the night, was what the sacrifices were for.
Of course, poor old Billbo Beaumont had escaped. After the tattoos had been done, but before the final act. Not that it had done him much good, alone and terrified, probably half crazy from whatever drugs they’d used to sedate him, the other half crazy already. In the dark and snow, running naked through fences and gorse bushes until his fear took him over the cliff. But how long had this been going on before that happened? Twenty-nine bodies, Billbo number thirty. One a year? Probably one every ten, by the age of some of them. Nearly three centuries’ worth.
McLean shuddered as he stared, unseeing, at the report on his screen. The press were having a field day, not helped by the tendency of the archaeological team brought in to help the forensics effort to talk long and loud about their latest theories in the pub every night. He’d spoken to their boss, a wannabe Indiana Jones-type with a stupid hat and an even stupider faith in his own abilities. This hadn’t worked, of course, and the lack of support from his superiors had only made things worse.
At least the disappearance and recovery of Weatherly’s body seemed to have passed without notice, but that didn’t mean the question didn’t still need an answer. Who had taken his body to Rosskettle? Why had they buried it there in the grounds so close to all those others, just waiting to be found? Almost as if it had been a signpost for them. It was far too big a coincidence, and anyway McLean didn’t believe in coincidences.
A knock on the open door startled him out of his thoughts. DC Gregg stood in the doorway, looking somewhat uncertain about whether she could come in or not. Moving to plain clothes seemed to have quietened her down a bit, which had to be a good thing.
‘You still here, Constable?’ McLean tried a weary smile, got one back in return.
‘Don’t think anyone’s going to be doing much sleeping for a while, sir.’
McLean shook his head gently in reply. ‘Anything I can do for you?’
‘There’s a woman in reception asking to see you. Duty sergeant’s tried to put her off, but she’s insistent.’
‘Does this woman have a name?’ McLean glanced from the detective constable to his desk phone, wondering why no one had called up. It wouldn’t have surprised him to find out the switchboard was buggered and all his calls were being routed to a cupboard on the fourth floor.
‘Said her name was Jenny Denton, sir. Keeps going on about the devil being in the details. Least, I think that’s what she’s saying. She’s not exactly dealing from a full deck, if you get my meaning.’
It was the same interview room where he and Grumpy Bob had interviewed Mrs Saifre, and yet while then it had been stifling hot, now it was as if there were no walls and they were sitting out in the frosty night. McLean had sent DC Gregg off in search of warming tea, and perhaps a few biscuits. Now he sat alone with Jennifer Denton, both of them huddled into their jackets against the cold.
At least Miss Denton was dressed for the part. McLean couldn’t remember how long it was since last he’d spoken to her, but the days had not been kind. He remembered a woman in total control, well turned-out and proper. It had surprised him to find out that she was doing anything so tawdry as having an affair with her boss. Now she looked haggard, her hair unwashed, face completely without make-up. She was greyer than he remembered, and she looked as if she were suffering from some terrible wasting disease.
‘You have to stop, Inspector.’
McLean shivered, although whether it was at the cold or Miss Denton’s voice, he couldn’t be sure. She spoke in a hoarse whisper, quite at odds with the confidence bordering on arrogance of before.
‘Stop? Stop what?’
‘You have to leave it alone. No good will come of it. No good at all.’
McLean tried to catch Miss Denton’s eye, but she wouldn’t look straight at him. She’d avoided his gaze almost from the moment she’d seen him come into the reception area at the front of the station, staring at the floor or her hands for most of the time.
‘Miss Denton. Jennifer. You came here to see me. You obviously wanted to tell me something. Has someone been threatening you?’
At that, she looked up, just briefly. A thin smile ghosted across her lips. ‘I’m beyond threats, Inspector. I’m damned whatever I do. I just don’t want any more people getting caught up in it.’
‘Caught up in what?’
‘I’ve not been home, you know. Not since the funeral, the wake.’ Miss Denton studied her hands again, and McLean could see that they were dirty, black marks under the fingernails. ‘Not a good time of year to start sleeping on the streets. Safer there, though. Least I thought it was.�
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‘You’ve been living rough—’
‘Saw in the papers that you’d found the bodies. Buried out at the hospital.’ Miss Denton stared at him now, as if it had taken her this long to summon up the courage. ‘Always thought Drew was up to no good. That place had an unnatural hold on him.’
‘You knew? That he was born there?’
Miss Denton gave the most minimal of nods. ‘It wasn’t common knowledge, but it wasn’t exactly a secret either. I take it you know the story?’
‘His mum was locked in there for getting pregnant, disgracing the family name. Yes, I’ve heard the story.’
‘And you know the kind of man it made him into. What he did to them when he found out.’
‘Seems he wasn’t one to take no for an answer.’
‘That’s a very kind way of putting it, Inspector.’ Miss Denton scratched at her eyelid with a quivering finger. Her whole arm was shaking like she had the DTs. McLean recalled the wake, her swift disposal of two glasses of wine. That single red drop on her pure white blouse. It was very possible she might be a functioning alcoholic who’d not had a drink in days. Perhaps not at her most reliable, then.
‘So how did he find out? About his true family, that is?’
‘I expect his mother told him, before she went mad. You’d think that would put him off the place, but he always had a thing for that hospital. Spent so much time there.’
‘Did you ever go with him?’
Miss Denton’s shakes disappeared for a moment, a look of genuine shock on her face. It didn’t last long. ‘Me? Heavens no. That was Drew’s place.’
‘But you knew what went on there.’
‘I …’ Miss Denton hesitated, either unable or unwilling to speak.
‘We found his body buried in the hospital grounds. Someone took it from the crypt and put it there, close to all those other bodies. Almost as if we were meant to find him, and them.’ McLean placed his arms on the table, leaned forward. ‘You know who did that, don’t you Miss Denton.’
‘I … I can’t … To name it is to summon it.’
Miss Denton shook her head violently from side to side, plunging her hands into her lap and hunching over like a small child trying not to be forced into doing something.
‘But you know.’
McLean let the words drift into silence, waited until Miss Denton calmed enough to nod. When she looked up again, there were tears in her eyes, tracks clearing the grime off her cheeks.
‘I’m going to hell, Inspector. There’s nothing I can do about that. You can’t save me, but you can save others. Save yourself.’
‘Save myself? From what? How?’ McLean leaned forward across the table, trying once more to catch Miss Denton’s eye. There was something not right about her now, even more so than when she had first come in. She was twitching like a person with advanced Parkinson’s disease. What he’d taken to be a shaking of the head to indicate that she couldn’t say now looked more like an involuntary muscle spasm.
‘You have to leave it alone.’ The words were coming in gasps now; Miss Denton was having some kind of seizure. McLean leapt up, took two steps around the table to get to her side. At the same moment, the door opened and DC Gregg appeared in the doorway, three steaming mugs in her hand, packet of biscuits clamped under one arm. Her eyes widened in surprise, the biscuits tumbling to the floor.
‘Get help. And call an ambulance.’
Gregg paused only to put the mugs down, slopping hot coffee on the chipped Formica before she turned and fled. McLean felt a hand grab his arm, shaking it hard as the spasms ripped through Jennifer Denton’s small frame. She pulled him close, forcing words out through clenched teeth.
‘If. You. Keep. Digging. More. Will. Die.’
52
‘She’s in intensive care, but the doctors aren’t very hopeful. Looks like she had a stroke.’
McLean sat at one of the empty desks in the tattooed man incident room, half-listening as DC Gregg brought the rest of the team up to speed. The rest of the team being DC MacBride and Grumpy Bob, as far as he could see. Everyone else was across the hall in the Weatherly room, although now it was re-purposed for the Rosskettle investigation. Everyone except DS Ritchie, of course. She was still off sick, cause unknown. He’d have to find time to pay her a visit.
His own brain felt like it was only half there. Following the ambulance to the hospital and watching helplessly as they tried to do something, anything, to save Jennifer Denton, had taken him to the small hours of the morning. He’d gone home, tried to get some sleep, grateful for once that Mrs McCutcheon’s cat had decided he needed company in the night. Even with her reassuring presence he’d not had any rest, and the alarm set for six hadn’t helped.
‘You got a moment, sir?’
McLean snapped his head up, not realizing until he did so that he’d been half-dozing. Sergeant Dundas stood at the door, a worried expression on his face.
‘What is it, Pete?’ He struggled to his feet, aware that the impromptu briefing had come to a halt.
The sergeant shifted, cast his eye over the rest of the room, saw Grumpy Bob over by the radiator. ‘It’s … Well, Bob, you might want to hear this too. Don’t know if the youngsters need to be bothered.’
‘No secrets in here, Pete,’ Grumpy Bob said, even though it wasn’t strictly true.
‘It’s Jack. Jack Tennant.’
‘What about him?’ McLean asked. ‘Not like you to be so reticent where there’s a nice bit of gossip to pass on.’
Dundas let out a weary sigh. ‘He’s dead, sir. Last night.’
‘You what … ?’ McLean rocked back on his heels, sending a shock up his spine and into his neck. ‘How?’
‘Way I heard, it was cancer. Didn’t tell anyone he was sick, the daft bastard.’
That much sounded like Jack Tennant, but surely you couldn’t go from looking pretty much fine to keeling over in such a short time. McLean thought back to the last time he’d seen the detective superintendent: the press conference when they drew a line under the Weatherly case. Well, the first line anyway. He’d been unwell then, but nothing life-threatening, surely.
Then he remembered Tennant’s warning, how keen he had been that the Weatherly case be done and dusted. No chance of it being re-opened in the light of new evidence. And a later memory of him too, referred to as an old friend by someone who’d probably never had any.
‘Shit.’
‘Couldn’t have put it better myself, sir.’ Pete Dundas grimaced. ‘There’ll be a good few of us heading up to the funeral once it’s announced.’
McLean didn’t have the heart to tell the sergeant that wasn’t what he’d meant. He’d be going too, if nothing else got in the way. Jack Tennant had been his mentor early on in his career. A friend, too, albeit a distant one. But somewhere in the past, the detective superintendent had chosen a side, and McLean couldn’t help but think that choice had come back to claim him.
‘Do us a favour, will you, Pete?’ McLean took a step towards the door as he spoke, forcing the duty sergeant back out into the corridor and away from the earshot of the others. No secrets in there, but out here anything was game.
‘Sir?’ Dundas asked.
‘See if you can get me a copy of the pathologist’s report, once it’s done, aye?’
‘Jack Tennant’s report?’ Dundas looked puzzled, perhaps understandably. ‘What you want that for?’
Good question. McLean couldn’t really put the reason into words even for himself. It was just that niggling feeling in the back of his mind that something, or someone, was playing fast and loose with the rules. And it all revolved around Andrew Weatherly. How many were dead, or as good as, because they’d had something to do with the politician? How many more might still die?
‘Just do your best, aye?’ McLean slapped the duty sergeant on the arm, and left him standing in the corridor as he headed back into the incident room.
McLean felt the blast of warm air from a fan heater on
his cold cheeks as he stepped into the little office just off the examination theatre. He’d walked down to the mortuary from the station, taking the time to mull over the news about Jack Tennant. It was difficult to take in the idea that the healthy-looking man he’d last seen a week or so ago could have succumbed to cancer so fast. But of course Tennant hadn’t been all that healthy-looking, really. He’d had that nasty cough, for one thing. And he was just obstinate enough to have ignored any medical advice to take it easy. Probably hadn’t even been to see a doctor at all.
‘Inspector McLean. Good to see you again.’ Dr MacPhail appeared from the back of the office, where he’d been hiding behind a large flat-screen computer monitor. He was dressed in heavy green overalls flecked with little bits of something probably best left unidentified. There was a powerful smell of loam about the place, a far cry from its usual mix of antiseptic cleanliness and the whiff of decay.
‘Angus told me you brought him the most interesting cases. I can see he wasn’t lying. Come.’ MacPhail indicated for McLean to follow him and led the way into the depths of the building. They passed along corridors he had never seen before, the impression of being deep underground heightened by the way the modern plastered walls gave way to a white-painted arched brick tunnel. Eventually MacPhail opened a heavy door, revealing a scene from another century.
‘We use this place when things get tight in the new block. Your little discovery was too much for the cold store, so we’ve got them in here for analysis.’
McLean shivered at the cold and the view laid out in front of him. It was an old basement, carved out of the rock beneath the Royal Mile, or perhaps a remnant of one of the many vennels and closes that had been built on top of as the city grew over the years. Heavy stone pillars held up arched ceilings, and arranged around the spaces in between were dozens of examination tables, each with a black plastic body bag lying on top. Towards the centre of the room, a set of LED arc lights had been arranged around one of the tables, a couple of trolleys of tools alongside and a familiar couple hard at work. Perhaps alerted by the noise of their arrival, Angus Cadwallader looked up, grinning like a schoolboy.
