The Gathering Dark: Inspector McLean 8

by James Oswald

  ‘It’s no matter. I’ve been busy, too, and making travels of my own.’ Rose sat a little more upright than she had been, folded her hands across her lap as if to underline the importance of what she was about to say. ‘There is a change in the air. I have felt it, and I’m sure you have felt it, too. Dark forces are gathering on the horizon and we must ward ourselves and our city against them.’

  He wanted to scoff, as he so often did when Madame Rose leaned more heavily into her role of fortune teller. It didn’t help that he was tired, still smelled strongly of the crashed truck, and was barely managing to suppress the worst memories of the carnage. McLean had wanted nothing more than to come home, stand in the shower until the water ran cold and then wipe out the day with an unhealthily large dram of expensive single malt whisky. And yet he could no more turn Madame Rose away than cut off his own hand; the tradition of hospitality was deeply ingrained in him. He had to admit that he kind of liked her, too, and something about her voice, the mask-like quality of her face and the silence that filled the kitchen after she had spoken made her words all the more serious.

  ‘Dark forces?’ Emma asked after a moment that was an age. ‘You mean we’re in danger? From who?’

  ‘From whom, my dear,’ Madame Rose corrected her. ‘And well you might ask. Tony knows, I suspect. Although I also suspect he won’t allow himself to admit it.’

  ‘How so?’ Emma looked at McLean. ‘Tony?’

  ‘The cats are back.’ He nodded his head to indicate the door and the garden beyond. ‘I take it that means someone’s out to get me.’

  ‘Exactly so. Remember the last time?’

  ‘How could I forget? It’s not an easy thing to overlook, a couple of dozen stray cats taking up residence in your garden.’

  ‘Oh, they’re not strays, Tony. The whole city is their home. They are its protectors and its Night Watch. And they will keep you, Emma and your unborn child safe while you are within these walls.’

  ‘Does this mean Mrs Saifre’s back in town? Only the last time I saw her, she was busy dying in a helicopter crash.’ McLean tried to keep the sarcasm out of his voice, but it wasn’t easy when all he wanted to do was sleep.

  ‘Mrs …?’ Madame Rose cocked her head, flared her large nostrils as if sniffing out evil on the wind. ‘No. Not her. Not now. There is something else. I felt it just this morning. Something dark and nameless.’

  McLean went to take another drink from his mug, the tea a poor substitute for what he really wanted. At least it had washed the chemical taste from his mouth, which beer and whisky might not have done so effectively. A quick glance up at the clock above the door showed that it was still early by his normal work standards, although he’d been making an effort to come home at a sensible time ever since Emma had announced she was pregnant. Madame Rose noticed, a flicker of a smile ghosting across her face.

  ‘I can see that you’re still sceptical, but that is no matter.’ She stood up with all the elegance of an arthritic elephant, creaks and groans that might have come from the table, the chair or herself. ‘You will see, Tony. Things are starting to happen. Today’s events are only the beginning.’

  ‘Today’s events?’ McLean had stood up on reflex, and now his head spun a little, as if filled with helium. ‘What do you know of today’s events?’

  ‘Only what I’ve seen on the news. Which is enough to know that you were at the scene for most of the day. I can smell it on you, too.’ Madame Rose sniffed again, then stepped past McLean in the direction of the back door.

  ‘Do you need a lift anywhere?’ he asked, unsure whether he should be driving at all. Madame Rose smiled, and patted him on the shoulder surprisingly gently.

  ‘No, thank you, no. I’m going to drop in on the minister before I head home. I’ll get Mary to phone me a taxi when we’re done. Besides, you need rest, Tony. You were touched by death today. You must give it the respect it’s due.’

  He took the wrong turning at the top of the stairs again, heading to the bedroom for a change of clothes. His old bedroom. The room he had slept in all the days of his childhood when he wasn’t at that hated boarding school. The transformation was in its early stages, but his bed was gone, the carpet pulled up. Emma had suggested they get the floorboards sanded and sealed, just have some rugs around the cot. Easier to clean the inevitable mess that way. All the furniture had been moved out, the ancient wallpaper stripped away to reveal even more ancient wallpaper beneath it. He stared for a while, taking everything in under the harsh glare of a light bulb stripped of its shade. Change coming, something in the air. Madame Rose’s cryptic nonsense mixed in with the mess of images from the crash, his brain addled by too many chemical fumes.

  ‘You OK?’

  Emma stood right behind him, so close he should have been able to smell her were it not for the powerful odour rising off his jacket and trousers. She grabbed a handful of fabric and held it up to her nose.

  ‘These really stink, Tony. What the hell have you been doing all day?’

  ‘You saw the news, right? The truck crash?’ McLean clicked off the light, struggled out of his jacket as Emma followed him across the landing towards the master bedroom. His gran’s old room; it still felt strange sleeping in there.

  ‘I had the day off today, remember? Spent most of it stripping that bloody wallpaper. Heard something about a crash, but I figured if it was important they’d have called me in. Or you’d have called to say you were going to be late. Then Rose turned up and we spent a couple of hours just chatting. He’s a strange old bird.’

  ‘She, Em.’ McLean stripped off his trousers, holding them up to his nose for a sniff before recoiling from the stench that disturbing the fabric released. ‘Think this suit might be better off binned.’

  ‘Reckon you could be right. What the hell is that?’ Emma took the trousers and jacket, carried them to the door and dumped them outside on the landing. The improvement in air quality was almost instant, but the smell still lingered in a faint, headache-threatening miasma around McLean’s head.

  ‘The truck that crashed was hauling a big tank of something seriously nasty. Still not really sure what it was, but it melted the tarmac and anyone unlucky enough to come into contact with it.’

  ‘You were there?’

  The question was so simple, and yet the answer eluded him. For a moment, McLean was back there in the mayhem, doing his best to help those he could.

  ‘What happened, Tony? You’ve been acting all vague since you got in.’

  ‘Sorry. I breathed in a bit too many fumes. Brain’s a bit addled.’

  ‘Why did you stay there? Surely the firemen would have dealt with it. They’ve got breathing apparatus.’

  ‘There were twenty people killed, Em. Probably another fifty injured. The ambulances took for ever to get there, and they couldn’t get enough paramedics in, so I helped with the triage. I don’t know. Sounds stupid now, but it made sense at the time.’ McLean rubbed at his face, his eyes gritty and dry, skin cracked as if he’d been out in the sun for days. He’d been doing a good job of blanking out the memories, but talking about the crash brought them all back. The blood and gore, broken bodies and shattered glass. The moans of the injured and the terrible silence of the dead. Twenty years and change of service had inured him to horror, or at least he had thought so until now. He looked up to see Emma staring at him, mouth slightly open, eyes wide as she processed what he had just told her. How she’d not been called in by the forensics service he had no idea.

  ‘Rose was here for a couple of hours, you say?’ he asked after a moment, a weak attempt at changing the subject. It seemed to work, giving Emma something else to focus on.

  ‘Something like that. He must have turned up about five. You didn’t get home till after seven.’ Emma glanced at her watch. ‘Not sure where the evening’s gone, really. You want me to order a pizza?’

  ‘Don’t think I could eat anything, actually.’ McLean slumped down on to the end of the bed, contemplated taking
off his socks. The floor was so very far away, and he was all of a sudden so very weary. ‘Think I might have a shower, try and wash off this stench and then get an early night. Briefing’s at six tomorrow and I’ve a feeling it’s going to be a busy day. I’d really like to face it without a splitting headache.’

  ‘Here, let me.’ Emma knelt down and gently eased off his socks, rolling them into a ball and throwing them towards the door. She sat down beside him, expert fingers undoing the buttons on his shirt. McLean still couldn’t smell her over the reek of the crash, but her fingers were warm against his skin, her closeness reassuring. She stood up, hauling him to his feet beside her with exaggerated huffing and puffing. He let himself be manhandled, turned in the direction of the bathroom and its promise of soap and shower.

  ‘I’ll deal with the dirty laundry. You go. Get yourself clean.’ Emma shoved him in the middle of the back. Not hard, but firm enough to propel him towards the door. ‘And don’t forget to use lots of shampoo. I’m not sleeping with someone who smells like they’ve fallen into an oil tank.’

  McLean snapped awake with such force he was sitting upright before he realized he had moved. Breathing hard, heart hammering, the echoes of his nightmare scream faded into the not-quite-silence of the night-time house. Sweat prickled his back and shoulders, slicked his face and damped the sheets as reality slowly reasserted itself. Beside him, Emma snorted, rolled over and began to snore.

  He slid quietly out of bed, padded across to the bathroom, making sure the door was closed before he clicked the light on. No need for both of them to have their sleep disturbed by the nightmare, even if dawn had already begun to light up the bedroom. Peering at himself in the mirror, he half expected to see his skin peeling off, blood oozing from sores, fires burning deep within his eyes, but the same old face stared back at him.

  Cold water washed away the last of the dream and the sticky residue of sweat. Turning the light off, he went back to bed only to discover Emma had stolen the duvet. It didn’t matter, the room was warm and the alarm told him it would be going off soon anyway. Hardly surprising his brain should deal with the horror of the previous day while he slept. Just a shame it couldn’t have waited until it was nearer the time to get up.

  8

  I’ve been watching the news almost constantly since it happened. That’s the wonderful thing about modern media. And its curse. Rolling twenty-four hours of people talking shite about stuff they don’t understand. Anything to fill the void. Half the press is convinced this is a terrorist attack, even though nothing about it really fits. I can still see the old geezer in the cab as it hurtled towards us. He wasn’t doing anything more suspicious than having a heart attack. Trying to avoid hitting people, not hit them.

  They’ve named a few of the dead now. Not the driver yet, and not Maddy either. I’ve still got her scarf on, ends wrapped around my hands. It stinks, and the bits soaked in her blood have gone crusty now, but I’m not letting go. It’s my only anchor to reality at the moment, my brain still working through the shock. I can’t believe she’s gone, right at the moment when I’d just found her again. Fifteen years since I last saw her. Fifteen years since I burned down that house.

  It was a big old place, hidden away in rolling parkland surrounded by forest. I’m not supposed to know, but I’ve pieced enough together to work out that it was in north Essex, not far from a village called Great Hallingbury. It could have been anywhere the sun shined and the rain fell for all I knew at the time. I was never allowed outside, spent most of my time in a tiny room somewhere up in the eaves. I was fed, kept clean, given a few toys to play with and colouring books to scribble in. There were others there, too, mostly boys like me, but a few girls. We weren’t allowed to play together, though, barely saw each other except in passing, led by a sour-face nurse along the plain corridors from bathroom to dining room to bedroom. A nod maybe, sometimes a word, though I didn’t really speak much back then. Never had the chance to. Mostly it was boring but safe enough.

  But every so often the men would come.

  I’d know they were coming by the way the nurse fussed over me. Made sure I was bathed and clean. Fresh clothes, no food after lunch and only water to drink. Then sometime in the evening I’d be taken to one of the big bedrooms downstairs. On the good days, the best days, I’d just be asked to undress and stand there while the man did something to himself. Those days were very rare.

  I know what it is now that they made me do, and just thinking about it makes me angry. Angry at myself for letting it happen, even though I was only six years old so what the fuck else was I supposed to do? It always hurt, some times more than others. I learned early on not to cry if I could help it. Grin and bear it, soon enough it would be over. Usually the nurse would take me away after a while, bathe me, treat any injuries, put me to bed with a mug of hot milk that now I think about it was almost certainly laced with something strong enough to knock me out for a while. Then there’d be a week or so of healing, trying to forget, sitting alone and sobbing. And then the whole thing would start all over again.

  After a while they started taking two of us at a time. That’s how I met Maddy.

  I don’t know why they liked us together, Maddy and me. Maybe it was because she looked so innocent, with her hair cropped short like a boy, her clothes ever so slightly ruffled. She had a way of biting her lip that might set a pulse racing if she was a bit older, but at six it wasn’t really sexy at all. And yet week after week the men would have us both brought to them.

  I didn’t understand it then. If I’m being honest, I still don’t understand it now. But I was grateful, in that pathetic way of beaten dogs given a scrap of food. Together, the experience was shared and somehow that made it worse but easier to bear, what they did to us, what they had us do to each other. And sometimes, all too seldom, whichever man it was whose lusts we had temporarily sated would fall asleep before the nurse came to fetch us. Before we could be separated and spirited away to our individual attic cells. I came to cherish those short moments, naked and shivering and hurt, when I could just cling to Maddy and she to me. We neither of us had much in the way of language, deprived of conversation in those formative years. But we had our ways, could speak well enough to make up tales of escape, promise that neither of us would ever leave without the other, cry and hug and wonder what we had done wrong to deserve this terrible, enduring punishment.

  It was so much more than friendship that was forged in that terrible adversity. More than love, and certainly more than the sickening lusts that drove the men who abused us. Losing her now, after so long apart, feels like someone has cut me in half. Feels like I’m dead, too.

  I need to get out of this room. I need to find that someone.

  I need to make them pay.

  9

  ‘Are we discounting terrorist involvement in this one now, sir? Only the tabloids are all harping on about ISIS cells and everywhere being on heightened alert.’

  Morning briefing, and McLean was glad that they had moved operations out of his new office and along the corridor to the major-incident room. It looked like every constable in the city had been drafted in and most of the sergeants, although what they were supposed to all do he wasn’t sure. They’d barely started and already the inevitable questions were coming in.

  ‘You should know better than to believe anything you read in the papers these days. Especially the ones with more pictures than words.’

  A low ripple of laughter greeted his answer, and McLean allowed himself to relax a little. Morning briefings were never much fun, but at least this investigation had the look of being relatively straightforward. Horrific, yes, but straightforward.

  ‘Forensics are still looking at the truck, but this doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a terrorist operation. The truck wasn’t stolen, and the driver doesn’t fit the profile. His post-mortem’s scheduled for later today, and that should shed a bit more light on the matter.’ He paused a moment, looking out over a sea of expectant faces. Word
had no doubt got out that the chief constable himself had green-lit a full investigation. Nothing like the prospect of unlimited overtime to motivate the workers. That and something a bit out of the ordinary, a change from the day-to-day tasks and repetitive run-ins with the less savoury aspects of Edinburgh society.

  ‘Key tasks are to identify those victims we haven’t already been able to name and inform their families. DI Ritchie will be heading up that side of things as soon as she gets here. We’ve reason to believe the truck was carrying a dangerous cargo without licence, and may have been inadequately maintained. I’ll be looking into that myself. DS Laird will be co-ordinating interviews with all the members of the public we took details from at the scene. The hotline number’s already out there and generating a lot of calls, but we’ll have a team going over CCTV footage and combing social media, too. I want as much information about this crash as we can put together, as quickly as possible. I don’t need to tell any of you that we’re under public scrutiny with this one. People are worried and the press stirring things up doesn’t help much. If you’ve any more questions, see DC Gregg or DS Laird. Now let’s get on with the job, aye?’

  McLean watched as the mass of uniforms began to dissolve away, individual officers seeking out the teams and tasks to which they’d been assigned. A few left swiftly, the chancers who’d thought they might get out of regular beat patrols. Or looking for an excuse to be late with their paperwork. Thinking about his own office and the innumerable extra forms this investigation would generate, he could only have sympathy for them. ‘Reckon that went well enough. I wouldn’t give you much more than a week before the high heidyins start moaning about the cost, though.’