The Gathering Dark: Inspector McLean 8

by James Oswald

  And then as soon as it came, the weight was gone. McLean looked up, gasping for air, to see the man who had been Daniel Penston fade away to nothing, his scream drifting off into a wail of despair, echoing to the depths of McLean’s soul.

  The mournful wail in his ears drifted away, morphing into the sound of approaching sirens. McLean shook his head, wincing as a stab of pain lanced through his brain. Light oozed back into the room like brackish water, the shadows banished to the far corners. Beside him, DI Harrison let out a low moan as she began to stir, and through the door in the bathroom, Alan Lewis was still dead in his bath. Of Edward Gosford – Daniel Penston – there was no sign, but then why would there be? He’d died in the truck crash on the far side of the city over a week ago. There was no way he could have been here, in this room. No way he could have been anywhere near Extech Energy when James Barnton had died, or in the portable-cabin offices of Finlay McGregor, scaring Mike Finlay so badly he tripped over his own feet and speared himself on a lethal shard of broken glass. No way he could have hacked into the corporate network of Alan Lewis’s financial empire and revealed all its nasty secrets.

  ‘Inspector? Constable? Anyone?’ A voice drifted up from below, filtering through McLean’s thoughts and dragging him back to the present. The situation was almost hopeless. How could they explain Lewis’s death, let alone Harrison semi-conscious on the bed. Bad enough the gossip among the junior officers when that little story got out; worse still if someone thought she might be medically unfit for active duty. He’d seen one young detective constable go that way. There was no way he was going to let it happen to a second.

  But how to persuade whoever was calling from the hallway downstairs that this wasn’t what it looked like? McLean scanned the room, searching for something, anything that might possibly explain what had happened here. Time to improvise.

  Checking his latex gloves were still intact, he hurried around the bed, grabbing the bedside light off the stand. Its flex was just about long enough to reach. He tugged hard, easing the wire under the bathroom door. Lewis still lay there dead, head fixed in that rictus grin of horror. Suicide or murder, would anyone care? He lifted up the dead hand, still unpleasantly warm from the bathwater, wrapped it around the base of the lamp. So the prints would be distorted, if they took at all. There wasn’t much else he could do.

  ‘Sorry about this. But then again, you brought it on yourself.’

  He dropped the lamp into the bathwater, pleased to hear a slight spark as it shorted out. Back in the bedroom, he hurried over to Harrison, who was struggling to sit upright, her head clutched in her hands.

  ‘What the fu—, … hell just happened?’ She looked up at him, squinting against a pain he could easily imagine.

  ‘You stumbled. Cracked your head on the bedpost, remember?’

  ‘No … I … There was a young man. I … He –’

  ‘You stumbled coming out of the bathroom, cracked your head on the bedpost. Remember.’ McLean said it more forcefully now, and something must have sunk in. Harrison nodded, just once, wincing as pain shot through her head again. He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘You’ll be fine. Just let me do the talking, OK?’

  Harrison opened her mouth to say something, but then Detective Constable Stringer burst through the door, closely followed by DCI McIntyre. Her gaze flitted from the bed to McLean, to Harrison and then back to McLean.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Tony. What the fuck happened here?’

  61

  I’m dead.

  You’d think a person would know something like that when it happened, but apparently not.

  Things make sense now. Well, sort of sense. The past week going by in a blur, the accident that wasn’t really an accident, the people going crazy whenever they saw me. How they screamed and died.

  Because I’m dead.

  I watch them from the shadows, white-suited forensics technicians like you see on the telly. There’s plenty of them, traipsing across the bedroom and into the bathroom where Alan Lewis lies. He’s dead, too, nothing more than meat going soggy in the warm water. There’s nothing left of him here, so why am I still around?

  Everything changed when he said my name, the man in the tweed suit. Nobody was supposed to know that. And yet somehow he did. Was that what kept me here? The fact I was unnamed? But I wasn’t the only one without a name.

  Maddy. I remember now. She found me, never gave up looking. I’d given up. I’d lost all hope of ever finding her, ever having a life. But she found me.

  And then we died. And it was all my fault.

  Somehow I’m downstairs now, watching the technicians come and go. The detective’s there, looking a bit shaken up. I guess meeting a dead person might have that effect on you. It didn’t go well for that security guard, after all. Not for the fat man in the bath either. I’m just glad he was there to save the young constable. She didn’t deserve that.

  The detective rubs at his face, says something to the older woman standing in front of him, and then looks over in my direction. No one else can see me; I’m dead, after all. And yet somehow he can.

  ‘Dan?’

  The voice is distant, quiet. It doesn’t come from any of the people milling about this hall. I look around, see the shadows begin to wash away, the walls dissolve into whiteness.

  ‘Dan? Are you there?’

  It’s an adult voice, laden with years of hardship, but I can hear the child still in it. All around me is nothing, as if I am falling through warm clouds, weightless, not a care in the world.

  ‘Maddy?’

  I’m spiralling down into the light, and now she is with me, in front of me, arms held wide. I’ve not seen her in fifteen years or more, but she’s exactly how I imagined she would be. Pale blonde hair wafting in an unfelt breeze, and a long red scarf wrapped around her neck.

  She smiles, and nothing else matters any more.

  62

  His head still hurt, a small lump towards the back of his skull that throbbed in time to his heartbeat. McLean wanted nothing more than to go home, collapse on the sofa and treat his injuries with fine malt whisky. That didn’t look like it was going to happen any time soon.

  ‘You say you just found him there, in the bath, dead?’ DCI McIntyre stood in the main hall of Alan Lewis’s house as an army of forensic technicians trooped through and up the stairs. They wouldn’t find anything, but the financier was rich enough and important enough for them to have to look.

  ‘Door was open when we got here. Looks like he killed himself.’ McLean winced slightly as he nodded his head in its direction. He was sitting on an elegant antique chaise longue, waiting to be dismissed from the scene.

  ‘Why did you even come here? I thought we’d handed all of this over to the Organised Crime team.’

  ‘So did I, but I don’t see them anywhere yet.’ McLean tried to stretch the knots out of his neck, but movement just made the ache in his head worse. Keeping still was hard, though. He wanted to get up, get out of this place. Soon enough the paramedics would bring the body down and he’d rather not be here when that happened. Sitting beside him, DC Harrison stared blankly across the room. She should probably have gone to hospital, but McIntyre wasn’t letting her go anywhere just yet. At least she was still alive.

  ‘What did you expect? You only raided Extech, what …’ McIntyre checked her watch, ‘… just over twelve hours ago. They’ve hardly had time to read the background reports.’

  ‘Lewis was behind it all, Jayne. He financed Finlay McGregor, put up all the money for Extech’s biodigester site. He even owns a majority share of LindSea Farm Estates. He’s been cleaning money for everyone from Colombian drug cartels to the Russian mafia. Probably a few Tory politicians, too.’

  ‘So what the hell’s he doing dead in his bath, then?’

  McLean shrugged. ‘Everything was about to blow up in his face. He might be rich, but there’s no way he was going to buy his way out of jail on this one. Probably thought ending it all was preferable.’


  McIntyre looked unconvinced. ‘How is it you know all this? And don’t try to tell me Lofty Blane uncovered it. He’s good, but not that good.’

  McLean leaned back until his head rested against the wood panelling of the wall, ignoring the stab of pain from the bruised lump. Daniel Penston’s computer, with all its hacked information, was still in his flat in Gorgie, along with Mike Finlay’s mobile phone. Hopefully by now DCI Featherstonehaugh was there, too, making sure neither item mysteriously disappeared. But how could anyone explain either of them when the young man who lived there had died in the truck crash?

  ‘It’s … complicated. Do we have to go into it now?’

  A commotion at the top of the stairs interrupted McIntyre’s response, a stumbling and gentle swearing as two paramedics manoeuvred a stretcher with a bodybag strapped to it down the slippery polished wood steps. For a moment, he thought they were going to drop it, and he had visions of the bodybag bursting open, Lewis’s wet, naked form sliding out like a newborn infant. The paramedics recovered their balance, though, and soon enough they had placed the stretcher onto a trolley and were wheeling it out the front door.

  By the time it had gone, a slower, more measured tread creaked the stairs on its way down. McLean looked around to see his old friend Angus Cadwallader approaching, his assistant, Doctor Sharp, just a couple of paces behind as she struggled with his heavy bag.

  ‘I can think of worse places to die than in a warm bath in my own home.’ Cadwallader tried a smile. ‘Evening, Jayne.’

  ‘Angus.’ McIntyre nodded her hello. Beside him on the couch, McLean could see Harrison fidgeting nervously. It was fair enough; he didn’t really want to be here either.

  ‘So you reckon it really was suicide, then?’

  Cadwallader inclined his head slightly. ‘You never miss a thing, do you, Tony. Aye, suicide looks most likely. We’ll know once I’ve had a closer look at him back at the mortuary, but that won’t be until the morning.’

  McLean hadn’t realized how tense he was, but at the pathologist’s words the pent-up tension dropped away. There would still be questions to answer, forms to fill in, decisions to justify. Lewis’s financial empire would surely unravel, and there would be revelations to come, but none of that mattered to him. Let the Organised Crime experts deal with that; his job here was done.

  A movement in the shadows, right in the corner of his eye, dragged McLean’s attention to the dark corner where the stairs turned and crossed the passageway that led to the back of the house. For a single eye-blink he thought he saw Daniel Penston standing there, watching.

  Another blink, and he was gone.

  The light was fading by the time McLean dropped DC Harrison off at the front door to the tenement flat she shared with Amanda Parsons. They had said very little on the journey across town, each occupied with their thoughts about the events that had unfolded in Lewis’s house. Either that or she was just as dog-tired as he was and had no energy left for conversation.

  ‘No need for an early start tomorrow. Sandy Gregg will be co-ordinating the handover to Organised Crime, so you’ll not be needed for anything. Get some rest. You’ve earned it.’

  Harrison smiled, nodded her understanding. ‘Might want to think about taking your own advice, sir.’ She closed the car door on him before he could answer. Cheeky, perhaps, but the truth in her words stung. He checked his mirror, indicated and pulled out into the traffic. Time to go home and face Emma’s justified wrath.

  It wasn’t that he had been consciously avoiding her, but the analytical part of his brain could see the patterns all too well. The conversations that never happened, the bad dreams that left him weary all day, the way he convinced himself that letting her sleep late in the mornings was a good thing, these were all signs. How must she feel, all alone in that great old mansion? What must it be like to go to bed before him, wake to find him already up and gone? He had to try harder, be a better person. It wasn’t just him on his own any more. They were a couple, and soon they would be a family.

  The kitchen light blazed out on to the gravel driveway as he pressed the annoying little button that operated the handbrake, killed the engine and stepped out into the warm summer evening. The first thing he noticed was the quiet, as if someone had placed a bubble over the house and garden. The second thing he noticed was the eyes, staring out at him from the bushes. The cats were back, and whereas before that had given him a feeling of security, now it hurried him inside in unaccountable fear.

  Stepping into the kitchen only made the fear worse. A chair lay on its back on the floor, a spilled mug of tea splayed across the rough wooden surface of the table.

  ‘Emma?’

  McLean moved swiftly to the far door, then stopped in horror. A single handprint marked the painted surface in something dark and red. What he had taken to be tea spilled from the mug on the table took on a more sinister tone as he saw drops spreading on the floor, their spatters marking a path from table to doorway and on up the corridor.

  ‘Emma!’

  More forceful now, his voice sounded strange in the silence, the pounding blood in his ears the only response. McLean fought the urge to rush forward, years of training overriding the protective instinct. Instead he pulled out his phone, thumbed at the screen as he followed the blood trail towards the hall.

  Mrs McCutcheon’s cat lay on her side at the bottom of the stairs, and for a moment McLean thought she might have been attacked, that the blood might have been hers. But she stirred at his movement, sprang to her feet in a surprisingly lithe motion. Then she arched her back, tail straight up and twice as thick as it normally appeared. The hiss wasn’t directed at him, he could tell that much, but it was terrifying all the same.

  ‘Detective Inspector McLean. I need a squad car and an ambulance to my location. Now.’ McLean gave his address to the surprised man in the control centre as he climbed up the steps. More blood slicked the dark wood, what looked like lumps of flesh speckling the surface here and there. He shoved the phone back in his pocket and took the last few steps two at a time.

  ‘Emma!’ It was a shout now, the trail leading him not to their shared bedroom but the nursery. Another bloody handprint smeared the freshly painted door, more blood and gore leading across the room to the bathroom beyond. A mobile phone lay on the carpet beside the cot that had only just recently arrived, smears across its screen and dulling the chrome surround. McLean rushed to the bathroom, pushed the door fully open, his mind whirling with fear and horrible certainty.

  Emma sat in the bath, knees up, arms clutching them to her chest. There was blood everywhere, and for a moment he thought she was dead, hacked to pieces by some crazed axeman. But she stirred as he rushed towards her, looked up at him with tear-filled eyes.

  ‘You didn’t come home.’ Her voice was like a little child’s, weak and faint. ‘I tried to call, but the pain … And then …’

  McLean knelt down beside the bath, ignoring the wetness that soaked through the knees of his trousers. He reached out and put an arm around her, felt her cold and shivering body. A trail of blood and bits tracked down to the plughole, stained her legs and bare feet.

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said as she sobbed into his shoulder. ‘It’s all going to be fine.’

  But he knew deep down that it wasn’t. It would never be fine again.

  63

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mr McLean. Late miscarriage is rare, but not unheard of. Especially in first-time mothers who are … older.’

  McLean barely heard the words. He stared across the ward to where Emma lay asleep. Surrounded by the white sheets and pillows, her pale features looked somehow deathly, even though he knew that she was alive and not in any serious danger. The same couldn’t be said for their daughter, or what might have become their daughter had she been given the chance. The ambulance had arrived swiftly, along with a squad car and two constables, but it had always been too late. Even if he had been home when it had started to happen it would have been too late.r />
  ‘We’ll keep her in overnight for observation, but apart from the shock she’ll be fine.’

  Something in the nurse’s words finally got through to him. He didn’t know her, didn’t seem to know any of the busy hospital staff, but she had a kind face and a soft voice. From the Western Isles, if he was any judge.

  ‘I should have been there.’

  A momentary flicker of confusion ran across the nurse’s face. ‘But you were there. You called the ambulance.’

  ‘Earlier. When it started.’ McLean shook his head, knowing he was being stupid and yet somehow unable to stop himself. ‘I just should have been there with her.’

  The nurse laid a gentle hand on his arm. ‘You can stay as long as you like. I know visiting hours are over, but, well, they tell me you’re a policeman. Come here more often than most.’

  McLean wondered who ‘they’ were and what else they said about him. ‘It’s OK. I’d better head home. I’ll be back first thing to pick her up, OK?’

  The nurse nodded, then hurried off to deal with some other emergency. McLean had been fully intending to stand up, go out to the car park and drive home, but instead he just sat and stared into the distance. He couldn’t process anything at all. Not the events that had unfolded since they had raided Extech Energy that morning, not the revelations about Jennifer Beasley and Edward Gosford, Maddy and Dan as he should probably call them. His mind refused to even go near what he had seen in Alan Lewis’s house, and the full enormity of what had happened to Emma hovered over him like a thunderstorm waiting to break.

  So wrapped up in not thinking, he hardly noticed as someone sat down next to him. Or perhaps it was his subconscious reassuring him it was a friend, knowing by the bulk and the curious scent of rosewater and mothballs that he had no need to respond.