by James Oswald
McLean looked round to see DCI Jayne McIntyre approaching. She must have come in late, as he’d not seen her before the briefing began.
‘A week? I should be so lucky. Besides, I can’t see this taking that long. Unless you know something I don’t.’
‘Well, there is one thing. Ritchie won’t be back until late tomorrow. Someone else will have to get the ball rolling on those IDs.’
‘Tomorrow? Any reason why?’
‘If there was, nobody told me. Guess she’s not finished whatever it was she was doing up there.’
McLean scratched at his chin, feeling the rasp of stubble where he’d missed a bit in his hurry to shave that morning. Despite his nightmare, he’d fallen asleep again and missed the first alarm completely. ‘Doesn’t really matter. Kirsty’s never been much of a fan of the mortuary, so I’ll probably be the one liaising with Angus and the team anyway.’
McIntyre cocked her head to one side like a quizzical sheepdog. ‘Like you weren’t going to be running the whole thing yourself anyway. Come on, Tony. I know how you operate.’
‘Am I that predictable?’ It wasn’t a question McLean needed an answer to, but it reminded him that the PM on the driver was going to be taking place soon and he’d promised Angus he’d be there. He pulled out his phone, checked the time.
‘Somewhere you need to be?’ McIntyre asked with a mischievous smile. ‘The city mortuary?’
‘Aye, well. If Kirsty’s still stuck up in the Highlands.’ McLean glanced around the room, happy to see his team under control. ‘Guess I’d better go see what made our driver lose control of his truck.’
‘OK, but don’t be too long about it. You’ll need to be back here for eleven.’
‘Eleven? Why?’ McLean saw the expression on McIntyre’s face and had a suspicion he knew. Too much to hope they’d let him deal with the trauma of the truck crash on his own.
‘Boss’s orders, and by boss I mean the chief constable, not me, not Forrester, not even Teflon Steve. All officers at the scene yesterday have to report for an assessment with the station counsellor.’
McLean opened his mouth to complain, then closed it again. McIntyre was just the messenger for this particular piece of bad news. And a part of him had been expecting it anyway.
‘Cheer up, Tony. You’ll be fine.’ The detective chief inspector slapped him gently on the arm. ‘Not like you’re having nightmares or anything, right?’
‘You really know how to make an old man happy, don’t you Tony.’
He should really have been chasing up the investigation into the hauliers and how the truck had come to be carrying illegal waste, but the city mortuary held a curious fascination for McLean. He’d visited it uncountable times in the course of his professional career, true, but it had also been his grandmother’s workplace for years before that. Sometimes it felt like a second home, which didn’t say much for his choice of friends.
‘I mean, we’ve a busy schedule anyway, what with the staff cuts and everyone doubling up on shifts, but you just had to give us twenty fresh cadavers to examine. Just to keep us on our toes.’
Angus Cadwallader, city pathologist and perhaps the only one of those friends who wouldn’t think twice about the amount of time he spent here, struggled into a set of green scrubs in preparation for the post-mortem on the truck driver. Bernard Wilkins lay on his back on the stainless-steel slab in the middle of the examination theatre just a few paces away, covered in a white latex sheet to preserve what was left of his modesty. Unlike some of the other victims of the crash, he hadn’t been hard to identify, given that his fleece bore the same logo as that painted on the side of the truck. His wallet and driving licence had been inside the cab, too, even if he hadn’t.
‘Well, I guess we’d better get on with it. Sooner started, sooner finished.’ Cadwallader winked and strode out into the theatre like an actor in search of ham. McLean followed him, somewhat reluctantly. While he was more at ease in this place than most, he still didn’t like dwelling too much upon the frailty of the human form and the mortality of others. The mortality of Bernard Wilkins, truck driver, was all too obvious as Cadwallader’s assistant, Dr Tracy Sharp, folded back the cover to reveal the battered, naked body.
‘Subject is male, Caucasian …’ A pause while the pathologist read some details off from a clipboard. ‘165 centimetres. That’s, what? About five foot five in old money? Weight eighty-six kilograms, about thirteen and a half stone. Sixty-three years of age. Substantial subcutaneous fat deposits around the arms, legs and torso. I think it’s fair to say he was a tad overweight, don’t you?’ Cadwallader continued his exterior examination, dictating notes to the microphone that hung over the table. McLean didn’t need to listen, he could see well enough what had happened to the man. His face was a mess of cuts and abrasions where he had been thrown through the windscreen. As luck would have had it, away from the bus stop. He’d been found a few yards further up the street, the furthest dead body from the crash.
‘I’m mostly interested in what killed him, Angus. Was it the impact or something else?’
‘All in good time, Tony. All in good time.’ Cadwallader leaned close to the dead man’s head, peered first into one eye and then the next. McLean stood back, giving his old friend room and preparing himself for the bit when the scalpels and less subtle instruments of torture came out. It was hard to be dispassionate about this post-mortem – intentionally or accidentally, Bernard Wilkins had been responsible for the deaths of nineteen innocent people – but even so McLean had no great desire to see his innermost secrets. Viscera held far less fascination for him than they did the pathologist.
‘Ah. Yes. That would explain it,’ Cadwallader said after a few minutes of removing, inspecting and weighing organs. ‘Poor chap probably had no idea what hit him.’
‘Heart attack?’ McLean had witnessed enough examinations to know whereabouts the pathologist’s attention would be focused by this stage of the proceedings.
‘If you insist on such an unscientific description, then yes. Massive and sudden. Bloody bad timing, too, but given the state of him it could have happened anywhere.’ Cadwallader held up the dead man’s heart for McLean to see, then seemed to remember who he was showing it to and instead passed it to Dr Sharp for weighing.
‘So we can rule out terrorist activity, then. This really was nothing but a tragic accident.’
Cadwallader paused a while before answering. With his green scrubs spattered in Bernard Wilkins’s blood, arms caked in gore and thinning hair sticking out at odd, unkempt angles, he looked like nothing so much as a latter day Dr Frankenstein.
‘Tragic, yes. Accident? Well, I’ve another nineteen examinations to do, all of which are going to take a lot longer than this fellow. Some of them were brought to the mortuary in buckets, Tony. You tell me if that sounds like an accident.’
10
‘Come in, sit down. I won’t be a moment.’
Doctor Megan Black, as the plate on her office door had named her, waved McLean in the direction of a pair of empty chairs at the far side of the room. She held a mobile phone to her ear and was sitting behind a desk almost as cluttered as his own. He hadn’t met the new station counsellor before, wasn’t even sure how long she had been working there. It was a given in the job that you would have to deal with traumatic experiences, some more harrowing than others. He generally managed to compartmentalize the horror quite well, but it made sense to have trained professionals on hand to help those who found sometimes they couldn’t cope.
‘Sorry about that.’ The therapist dropped her phone on to a pile of folders and climbed out from behind the desk. ‘You’d be Detective Inspector Tony McLean.’ She held out a hand to be shaken. ‘Megan Black.’
‘Tony,’ he said, ever so slightly unsettled by the intensity of her gaze. She was much the same age as him, he guessed, her shoulder-length light-brown hair beginning to show a few streaks of grey, and there was something ever so slightly familiar about her face. ‘You
didn’t study psychology at the university here, did you?’
Doctor Black smiled, crow’s feet crinkling around her eyes. ‘Good memory for faces, I see. I was the year above you. Surprised you remember.’
‘The name didn’t ring any bells.’
‘Black’s my husband’s surname. I was Megan Christie back then.’
McLean tried the name for size, found it still didn’t fit. ‘Sorry. Still nothing. Just the face. I’d say you haven’t changed much, but we all change, aye?’
Something flitted across her eyes for a moment, perhaps a witty retort suppressed. Down to business. ‘Why don’t we have a seat.’ Doctor Black pointed to the two chairs again and McLean took one.
‘So, Detect—, … Tony. You were at the scene of yesterday’s terrible accident.’
‘Yes, I was there when it happened. Not the best way to start the day.’
An arched eyebrow, but no other comment. ‘I imagine it must have been very traumatic.’
‘At the time I was too busy dealing with it, to be honest. I usually find that’s the case.’
‘Usually? Have you had many such experiences?’
‘I’ve been a serving police officer for over twenty years. What do you think?’
This time the eyebrow arched a little higher, Doctor Black shuffling herself more upright in her seat. ‘And have you had any reaction since? Any unaccountable anxiety? Perhaps bad dreams or difficulty sleeping?’
McLean caught himself before he could check his watch. It was a reflex action, he knew, but not one that a therapist needed to see. ‘It’s maybe a bit early for that, isn’t it? I had a bit of a nightmare last night, but I was kind of expecting to. Probably be more worried if I’d not had one, really.’
‘Your subconscious mind processing the trauma while you sleep. Yes, that can be a good form of catharsis. But it can also be a warning sign.’
‘I’m fine, really. I doubt very much I’ll have any trouble sleeping tonight. Especially if I can get on with finding out how this happened in the first place.’
Doctor Black leaned back in her chair, and that was when McLean noticed that she wasn’t taking any notes. Nor did she have a folder full of his darkest secrets to bring up for discussion, or even just as a prop.
‘Why did you come to see me if you’re so sure you’ve got it all under control?’ she asked after a few silent seconds.
‘Because DCI McIntyre and Chief Superintendent Forrester both said I should. It’s a box-ticking exercise for them. Just in case I go off the rails later, isn’t it?’
Again the arched eyebrow and straightened back. McLean didn’t want to wind the therapist up, but there were times when other people looking out for his mental health wore him down. He knew how to deal with the trauma he had witnessed the day before, and it didn’t involve sitting in uncomfortable chairs and talking about his feelings.
‘And if the box-ticking involves you taking a couple of weeks of medical leave?’
He almost laughed, except that Doctor Black’s face suggested she was entirely serious. McLean’s initial response was going to be to point out how short-staffed they were, but his brain overtook his mouth, spotting the trap well before he could fall into it.
‘I rather think I’d need to be showing more clinical signs of PTSD than one bad dream, don’t you?’
The therapist nodded her head once in agreement. ‘True enough. And sometimes keeping busy is the best way to help the mind come to terms with what it’s experienced. But there’s a fine line between busy and overworked, wouldn’t you say?’
‘And overwork can exacerbate the problem. I know. And I’m fine. Honest.’ McLean tried a smile. You never knew, it might work.
‘I’ll need to see you again. Not more than a week’s time. That OK?’
The swiftness of the dismissal took him by surprise. ‘I … Yes. Of course.’ McLean stood up. ‘Thank you.’
‘My pleasure.’ Doctor Black followed him to the door, opened it. ‘Just remember I’m here to help, though. Any more bad dreams, come see me, OK?’
‘We didn’t have anywhere big enough to store this out of the weather. That and the stink was putting everyone off their sarnies.’
McLean stood just outside the entrance to a large lock-up shed in a nondescript industrial estate on the western fringes of the city. Inside, the crashed truck lay on a flatbed trailer surrounded by high-power arc lights. It had been emptied of its noxious cargo, but the smell was still overpowering. Two large extractor fans rumbled away in the background in a vain attempt to make things better.
‘Not had time to do a thorough inspection yet. It’s fairly obvious this was an accident rather than a deliberate act, though. Here. Put this on and I’ll show you.’ Amanda Parsons – Manda, McLean corrected himself – handed him a full-face breathing mask, then pulled one over her head. She took a moment to adjust the straps where they had snagged her hair and he noticed for the first time that she had grown it longer than her normal boyish crop.
‘Is this really necessary?’ He hefted the mask, wondering who had worn it last.
‘Depends on how many brain cells you want to have at the end of the day.’ Parsons’s voice sounded muffled behind the mask. She had a heavy-duty set of mechanic’s overalls on, a logo McLean didn’t recognize stitched into the breast pocket. As it was at least two sizes too big for her slim frame, she’d hitched it in with a wide belt and rolled up the trousers like a navvy. Perhaps not the most flattering of looks, but somehow she managed to pull it off.
Still unsure about the mask, McLean followed her into the workshop. The smell grew stronger still, watering his eyes far more than it had back at the crash scene. The headache that had haunted his dreams the night before threatened to come back with a vengeance.
‘Told youse.’ Parsons’s eyes flashed a mischievous grin at him as McLean struggled to fit his own mask. ‘Here, let me help you with that.’ She stepped up close, dextrous fingers adjusting the straps around the back of his head. The difference was immediate, although he could still feel the prick of fumes around his eyes. With a sigh, he realized that his suit was going to stink by the time they were done.
‘You found out what this stuff is yet?’ McLean nodded at the side of the tanker when they reached it. A long rip along one side revealed its shiny stainless-steel interior under the harsh arc light.
‘It’s horrible, that’s what it is. Best guess is a mixture of all manner of industrial solvents, acids and toxic waste. The labs are analysing it right now but where it came from is anyone’s guess. A lot of different places, I reckon. Lucky it didn’t explode.’
‘Not digestate from an anaerobic digester, then.’
‘No. And not something you’d want to spread on your fields. Well, not unless you didn’t want anything growing there for, oh, a hundred years or so. There is some digestate in there, though.’
‘There is?’
‘Aye.’ Parsons pointed to the top of the tanker, where several metal domes lined it like a spine. ‘See there’s half a dozen compartments, all filled and emptied separately. The ones at each end had the real shit in them, it was only the middle four that were filled with that toxic gunk.’
McLean filed away the information as he walked around to the cab and looked up at the open door. Another masked and overalled forensic technician sat behind the steering wheel, painstakingly swabbing at the dashboard. A third peered in from the other side, using a powerful pen torch to look under the seats.
‘Any idea why it crashed?’
‘Early days, Tony. We’ve only just got it in here and siphoned off the last of that gunk it was carrying.’ Parsons took a step closer to the cab and pointed towards the accelerator and brake pedals. No clutch, so an automatic. ‘If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the throttle jammed open. Might’ve been something with the gearbox. There’s a lot of stuff online about problems with this model kicking down without warning.’
‘Kicking down?’
‘Dropping a couple
of gears at a time. Usually happens when you floor the throttle to get away at a junction or overtake something. It can be a bit –’
‘Got a moment, Manda?’ Parsons was interrupted mid-flow by one of the other technicians. A frown furrowed her forehead as she answered.
‘What’s up?’
‘Think this might be what the problem was. Should have seen it before, but with all that stuff out of the tank we must’ve missed it.’ The technician led them both around to the other side of the truck, pointing up to the cables and lines that ran from the back of the cab to the tanker trailer behind. McLean was no expert on these things, but even he could see that they were in a parlous state.
‘Worst of this happened in the crash, of course. There’s a bit of play in these pipes, but they’re not really designed for the truck jack-knifing and the whole thing rolling on to its side.’ The technician hauled himself up into the gap, heavy work boots slipping slightly on the gunk that covered everything. McLean stepped back, all too aware that he wasn’t really dressed for this.
‘There’s two air lines here. For the brakes. Main and auxiliary backup just in case. Main’s popped out of its junction. Not connected properly when they put the trailer on the cab. Any driver worth his salt should’ve checked that before setting off.’
‘And you’re sure that didn’t happen in the crash?’ Parsons asked.
‘Sure as can be. If it had been pulled out by brute force it would have given here.’ The technician pointed a heavy-gloved finger at the junction. ‘It’s popped out here instead.’
McLean couldn’t be sure he could see any difference, but he was prepared to defer to the experts. That was what they were here for, after all. ‘What about the auxiliary?’
‘Still connected.’ The technician reached up and jiggled another one of the coiled pipes. ‘But there’s a wee hole here, so it’s about as much use as a chocolate fireguard.’
‘So what you’re saying is this truck had no brakes and possibly a dodgy gearbox that would make it accelerate out of control.’
