Dead Men's Bones (Inspector Mclean 4)
Page 36
‘Not going to get much of anything. Clean-up’s gonnae cost a bob or two and all.’
‘Aye, well I’m sure that’ll be taken care of.’
‘By the cooncil, no doubt.’ The chief fire officer spat at the ground as if the injustice tasted foul in his mouth.
McLean shook his head. ‘Polluter pays. This belongs to Weatherly Asset Management. They’ve plenty of money. Them or their insurance company. Then I guess someone’ll build houses on the site.’
‘That’ll be something to see them try. That hole goes doon a long way. And there’s mine workings and all manner of shite underneath. All smouldering away. Might keep burning for years.’ The chief fire officer spat again. ‘Still, the hoosies’ll be warm, aye?’
McLean took an involuntary step back as one of the walls collapsed in on itself with a cascade of sparks and a low rumble he felt in the pit of his stomach. They were more than far enough away to be safe, but the memory of the fire and explosions was still fresh. Andrew Weatherly had opened up a gaping maw here, its gullet leading straight to hell, and the creature that was Mrs Saifre had crawled out. Together they had woven something terrible, and now it was fraying at the edges. At least that was the irrational explanation; a rational one was still a work in progress.
He turned away from the scene, saw the wreck of his car off a ways. He wondered if he could get someone to cart the lump of stone back to his house as a memento. Perhaps put it in the middle of the lawn for the cats to sun themselves on. He’d not had the car long, but he felt a strange nostalgia for it. Time to go looking for something else.
‘I’m not an old-age pensioner, sir. Can manage by myself.’
She batted away the hand that he’d held out to steady her, but the way DS Ritchie hobbled down the corridor, pausing every ten short paces or so to cough, gave the lie to her claim. McLean indulged her though, taking the time needed for her to leave the hospital under her own steam. She’d been to hell and back, after all. It was the least he could do.
‘MacBride was going to tag along too, but he’s had to go and have his stitches out. Going to have quite a scar once it’s all healed.’
Ritchie gave him a withering stare. ‘I don’t need your help or his, sir. I’ve got this.’
Considering how close she’d come to dying, McLean wasn’t about to argue. Or point out his role in her recovery. He wasn’t really sure whether the drink of holy water he’d given her had done anything. It could have been the antivirals, after all.
They made it outside, and Ritchie stood a little straighter as the sun played on her face. She looked horribly thin, her hair lank and greasy, her eyes sunk deep in their sockets. Rest was what the doctor had ordered, but McLean couldn’t help thinking plenty of wholesome food was in order as well. Perhaps he could take her to Chez Innes, except that he’d have to take the whole team then, and probably DC Gregg’s husband as well. And that would be an expensive outing indeed.
‘Where’s the car?’ Ritchie asked after a while, looking in the direction of the car park.
‘Last I heard it had been towed to a scrappy in Loanhead.’
Ritchie frowned at him. ‘You crashed it? But you only just got it.’
‘I didn’t crash it. It got flattened by a falling door lintel.’ McLean waved over the taxi that had been waiting for him, running up a horrendous bill on the meter all the while. Ritchie looked at him in puzzlement, then her face broke into a grin.
‘I’m not joking.’ McLean opened the door. She let herself be helped into her seat, then he climbed in after her, gave the taxi driver the address. All the while Ritchie was smiling, which suited her much better than the frown.
‘It’s really broken?’ she asked after a while.
‘Squashed flat. Lucky I wasn’t inside it at the time.’
‘You’ll get another one, though? I liked that car.’
McLean assured her that he would be getting another car, even though he had no idea when he’d have time to look for one.
‘She went after us all, didn’t she?’ Ritchie said as the taxi eased itself into the traffic headed towards the city centre.
‘Reckon so. Grumpy Bob, Stuart, even Sandy Gregg – and she’s hardly been on the team a month.’ McLean had a sudden mental image of DC Gregg holding her own with Mrs Saifre at the hospital. ‘Stood up to her, though.’
‘Heard old Dagwood got it in the neck too.’
‘Car-jacked. Idiot would’ve been fine if he hadn’t tried to fight back. Shook him up that bad he’s talking about early retirement.’
‘Bloody hell. And Christmas just been.’ Ritchie coughed a little in her excitement at the news, but it was nothing like the lung shredding of before.
‘Don’t get too excited. He’s named Brooks as his successor.’
‘Can he do that?’
‘Probably not, but I can’t see them promoting anyone else.’
‘That means there’ll be a chief inspector post going, though.’ Ritchie looked at him with a sly twinkle in her eye. McLean held up his hands in protest.
‘Not me. Bad enough having to deal with you lot on a daily basis.’
‘True. You never struck me as the ambitious type.’ Ritchie leaned back against the headrest, closed her eyes. ‘Still, if they give it to Spence then there’s an inspector post open. Interesting.’
McLean watched her as she fell asleep, head lolling in time to the movement of the car. She wouldn’t get Spence’s DI post. Not because she didn’t deserve it, and neither because he’d rather not lose her as a sergeant. He knew it was going to take her months to get over the mysterious illness that had laid her low. That alone would keep her out of the running for promotion any time soon. But more than that, she had long ago taken sides, chosen to work with him. Sad, but true, that would hold her back far more than anything else she ever did with her career.
‘We ever going to find out who killed him?’
William ‘Billbo’ Beaumont might have fallen through the safety net, but his old regiment were doing their best to make it up to him with a decent funeral. The Old Kirk at Penicuik had been packed with uniforms singing old favourite hymns with gusto, and a perfectly turned-out honour guard had carried the coffin to the waiting hearse, its final destination a plot in a military graveyard alongside the remains of some of his former platoon members. Outside the kirk, McLean and Grumpy Bob stood to one side, not wanting to get in the way of the soldiers. Standing in the lee of the old stone building kept them out of the worst of the wind, too.
‘It was the fall that killed him, Bob.’ McLean shuffled his feet against the cold seeping in through his shoes. ‘But I know what you mean. Know who it was, too.’
‘Weatherly again?’ Grumpy Bob shook his head. ‘Don’t you think you’re pinning just a bit too much on him?’
‘Oh, I know I can’t prove it, Bob. And there’s bugger all could be done about it even if I could. But he did it. Well, he set out to do it, like he’d done maybe half a dozen of the bodies we found out there. One every few years.’
‘And the other bodies? Some of them go back centuries.’
‘That’s the point though, isn’t it? Weatherly wasn’t the first. Just the most recent. He made a deal and it brought him his fortune. But our man Billbo here mucked it all up. Escaped before he could be sacrificed. That’s when it all went wrong.’
Grumpy Bob let out a low whistle. ‘A deal with the devil.’
‘The devil? Maybe. I don’t know.’ McLean shivered, though that might have been from the cold. A fresh north-easterly wind was bringing arctic air in from Scandinavia. It had little respect for things like clothes and skin. He remembered his last meeting with Mrs Saifre, the temptations she’d put in his way, the subtle power of her seduction. The things that had corrupted Weatherly so completely were of no interest to him; the influence, the wealth, the excess. But she’d played him differently, a dance that suggested he might be able to control her, use her to more noble ends. And he’d been tempted, he had to admit i
t.
‘Poor sod was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, then.’ Grumpy Bob nodded in the direction of the hearse as it pulled away from the kerb, vapour spiralling from the exhaust like playful ghosts in the frigid air.
‘Could be, Bob. It usually is.’ McLean watched as Lieutenant Colonel Bottomley helped Gordon Johnson into a waiting car, then climbed in beside him. It pulled away from the kerb in slow pursuit of the hearse, and for a moment he saw the ex-soldier clearly, sitting ramrod-straight, chin up. Gordy had been convinced the dark angels were coming for him, that his friend Billbo had gone to his rescue and ended up being the one taken. A selfless, heroic act to break the cycle of evil.
‘Either that, or he was exactly where he was supposed to be.’
He’d grown accustomed to the cats filling his garden and prowling the streets around the house. They never came in, apart from Mrs McCutcheon’s cat, of course. She was even more full of herself if that was possible, preening around the house with her tail up, sitting in the middle of the kitchen table as if she were the lady of the manor, sleeping curled up at the end of his bed.
McLean had tried leaving some food out for his newfound glaring of cats, but by and large they disdained his offers. Neither would they approach him for a scratch behind the ears. They were just there, watching – and, he couldn’t help thinking, protecting him.
They didn’t stop the postman, he was pleased to see. And the takeaway delivery service seemed unaffected. He’d not seen or heard from Mrs Saifre since their interrupted kiss a couple of weeks earlier, though. As the cold, bright February sun had given way to waves of March rain, melting the snow and ice, turning the ground to mud, he worried that they might leave, but still the cats maintained their vigil. It was oddly comforting. He’d never really thought of himself as an animal person, certainly not a great cat lover. He’d taken Mrs McCutcheon’s cat in out of a sense of responsibility, and she had repaid him time and time again.
Only this time she’d let him down, it would seem. She was nowhere to be seen, and there in the middle of the kitchen table, propped up against the pepper grinder, was a slim brown A4 envelope. McLean dumped his handful of case notes and bag of curry down on a chair with a sigh, picked up the envelope and slipped it open.
Inside, a half-dozen photographs were held together with a paper clip, a torn-off strip of paper wedged in at the top of the pile with a single handwritten word.
Thanks.
He leafed through the photographs, seeing first an image of Mrs Saifre climbing into her Rolls-Royce outside the house that had once belonged to Gavin Spenser. Another photograph showed the car leaving, a third it pulling up beside a private jet on an airfield somewhere. Two more photographs were Mrs Saifre climbing aboard and the plane taking off; not hard to work out the narrative he was being shown. And then the final image. The gates to the house, closed as they had been when he’d walked over there after the night everything had almost gone to hell. Only this time there was a big sign attached to one of the gateposts, the logo of one of the city’s more exclusive solicitors and the words For Sale in big blue letters.
‘Gone,’ McLean said to the empty kitchen. ‘But I don’t suppose for ever.’
He left the photographs on the table, went to the front door and scooped up the day’s post. It was mostly junk, still a couple of catalogues for his grandmother, and one small tatty postcard. He knew even before reading it who it had come from. Emma always chose pictures of ancient ruins, and she managed to find places even he had never heard of. This one came from somewhere in Montenegro, an old monastery perched on a clifftop over sweeping Mediterranean views. It looked like it had probably been printed in Communist times and had been battered about during its journey to Scotland. He flipped it over to read the words.
Getting there slowly. Two sad souls from this place. They cried when they left, like losing old friends. Heading eastwards. It gets harder each time. Missing you. E.
There were four large Xs under the E, and nothing else. McLean took the pile of post back to the kitchen, dumped the junk straight in the recycling bin. He went to the fridge and found himself a beer, then scooped his rice and curry out on to a plate, leaving enough of both for Mrs McCutcheon’s cat when she deigned to make an appearance. Finally he shuffled the photographs back into the envelope, then propped the postcard against the pepper grinder so that he could see Emma’s words to him while he ate.
Acknowledgements
Much has happened in the time between writing The Hangman’s Song and this book. For one thing, the many separate police regions in Scotland have all been merged into one – the inspirationally named Police Scotland. My stories may have the occasional thing that goes bump in the night in them, but they are set in a reasonable facsimile of the here and now, and that needs to be reflected in the way Tony McLean’s job has changed.
I am hugely indebted to Kaye Norman, who voluntarily condensed down the mountains of documentation on the change into something I could understand. David Erskine has been of invaluable help too, and to both of them I offer a heartfelt thanks.
Which is not to say that the Police Scotland in my books is a perfect example of how the real Police Scotland works. These are stories – fiction – and I have frequently changed things to suit the needs of the book. That’s my excuse when I get something wrong, and I’m sticking to it.
Of course, none of this would have happened without my agent, the indefatigable Juliet Mushens. Or without the great team at Penguin: Alex, Bea, Katya, Tim, Charlotte and all the rest. A big thank you to you all, and to my early-draft readers, Heather Bain, Keir Allen and my brother, Duncan.
And to Barbara, thanks for being there.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in Penguin Books 2014
Copyright © James Oswald 2014
Cover images: House © John Woodworth / Getty Images, Image of fallen tree © Dan Jurak / Masterfile
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Typeset by Jouve (UK), Milton Keynes
ISBN: 978-1-405-91710-0
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