A Song for the Dying

by Stuart MacBride

  Here we go.

  ‘In my hotel room. I ran a bath and read through the case notes on a rape-murder in Birmingham I’m consulting on. Watched a little TV to unwind, then went to bed about … eleven thirty?’

  Jacobson sat back. ‘So, when Laura Strachan and Ruth Laughlin were abducted, you were in your room, alone, in bed.’ He put a finger on the sheet of paper and shoogled it from side to side. ‘Really? Don’t want to think about that a little more?’

  Detective Superintendent Knight was on the phone, hunched over a notepad, doodling gothic skulls-and-crossbones across the paper. ‘Uh-huh… Yes… No, sir, I understand, but it wasn’t my… Yes… No, I suppose it wasn’t…’ A red tidemark throbbed above his collar, stretching up his neck and into his cheeks. He stopped doodling and ran a hand across his bald head. ‘Well, with hindsight… Yes, sir.’

  Alice stopped scrawling boxes and lines on the whiteboard to take a sip of the twelve-year-old Glenfiddich I’d confiscated from the CID office. Then went back to her marker pens.

  I leaned on the conference table, stared up at the screen. ‘Stop sodding about and burst him.’

  Jacobson made a big show of writing something down. ‘Half eleven… And you’re sure?’

  ‘That’s where I was, Detective Inspector, right through till my alarm went off at six this morning.’

  ‘Because we’ve got a witness who says you weren’t in your room at midnight. In fact, your bed was still made and there was no sign of you.’

  Docherty pursed his lips.

  His lawyer placed a hand on his arm. ‘I really must insist on that break.’

  Ness stared at the ceiling for a moment, then looked at Jacobson.

  ‘Why not.’ He reached for the recording equipment. ‘Interview suspended at sixteen-o-five.’

  Ness slumped into the chair behind her desk, scrubbed her face with her hands. Sighed. ‘Docherty’s not going to pop. He’s been on our side of the fence too often – he knows how it works.’

  The walls were lined with faces – head-and-shoulder shots of people smiling at weddings and parties, on the beach, birthdays, holiday snaps… Never the same person twice.

  Alice peered at one of a man standing behind a BBQ, ‘SNOG THE CHEF’ on his apron, tongs in one hand, a beer in the other raised in salute. ‘Isn’t this Tony Hudson? Dismembered body washed ashore at Cullen?’

  Jacobson slouched in one of the visitor’s chairs, hands clasped over his belly. ‘We’ll find out where he’s got them sooner or later. Going to be much worse for Docherty if it’s later and they’re dead.’

  I settled into the chair opposite. Stretched my leg. ‘In the old days—’

  ‘These aren’t the old days, Ash.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘The eyes of the world are watching. If renowned psychologist and TV personality, Dr Frederic Docherty, starts falling down the stairs, people are going to notice. We’ll all be out of a job.’

  ‘I’d rather be out of a job than let Ruth Laughlin, Laura Strachan, and Jessica McFee die because we let the bastard wait us out. Ten minutes, in a room. I won’t leave a mark on him.’

  Ness gave a snort. ‘And then what – watch the case collapse and him walk free because we violated his human rights? No thanks.’ She blinked a couple of times, then stuck her hand over her mouth, covering a cavernous yawn.

  Alice moved on to a woman in a trench coat: blonde, big all over, mouth wide as if she was singing. ‘And that’s Rose McGowan. Abducted, raped, and strangled.’ Alice pointed at a framed picture of three kids in swimsuits grinning in a paddling pool. ‘Liz, Janet, and Graeme Boyle. Stabbed by their mother… They’re all victims, aren’t they?’

  Ness let her head fall back, arms limp at her sides. ‘Did you get anything from Docherty’s “insights” into the Inside Man?’

  Alice did the hair-twiddling thing; leaned back against a filing cabinet, frowning at the walls of the dead. ‘Many points correlate with his own childhood: the abusive mother, the distant father, the trips to hospital; lashing out by burning things, a major arson event in the pre-teen years… He deviates when he talks about Tim having an unskilled job, but then he says he’s got low self-esteem, which would tie into the private persona, not the “Dr Docherty” he presents to the world.’

  ‘Anything that’ll help us find where he’s keeping them?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Ness covered her face and groaned.

  ‘I mean, if the teams can come up with some viable addresses we can run them through what he’s told us, but it’s not enough right now to point at somewhere…’ Alice cleared her throat. ‘Sorry.’

  Jacobson dunted the toe of his shoe against the desk’s modesty panel. ‘Any reason our illustrious colleague Knight’s not here?’

  I didn’t bother hiding the smile. ‘Detective Superintendent Knight has been summoned to a telecom with the SCD and the top brass. Apparently hiring serial killers as consultants is against official policy.’

  Jacobson’s lips pinched, cheek muscles twitching. But at least he didn’t laugh. ‘What a shame.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Ness let her arms fall limp again, ‘we’re in no position to gloat. The Chief Constable has taken an interest in Virginia Cunningham and Charlie Pearce.’ She blew out a sigh, then sat forwards. ‘Mr Henderson, did you do “A Song for the Dying” in school? No? It’s a poem: William Denner, I think it is. “The raven folds his blood-black wings, and struts before what darkness brings, to feast upon the dying breath, and murder sacred things…” Why does that make me think of you?’

  ‘We didn’t know Charlie was there. We couldn’t know.’

  She reached into a drawer and pulled out an evidence bag, snapped on a single blue nitrile glove, and tipped the mobile phone into her palm. Thumbed the screen a couple of times, then held it out so Jacobson could see.

  The sound of Virginia Cunningham singing the ‘Bravery Song’ came from the little speaker.

  When it was over, Ness slipped the phone back into the bag and sealed it.

  Jacobson blew out a breath. ‘That’s … bad.’

  I poked the desk. ‘What else could we do? We didn’t have powers to search the place, and—’

  ‘I know, I know.’ Ness shook her head, snapped off her glove and dumped it in the bin beside her desk. ‘It’s going to kill Charlie’s parents when that gets played in court. Not to mention the lawsuits. And someone’s bound to call for a public enquiry.’

  Alice tucked her hands in her pockets. ‘Maybe I could speak to Virginia Cunningham? I mean it’s obvious she did it – she filmed herself killing him – but perhaps we can find out why she did it and maybe give Charlie’s mum and dad some closure?’

  ‘Well … I suppose it couldn’t hurt.’

  As soon as the door closed behind Alice, Ness sagged back in her chair again. Let another yawn ripple through her. Blinked at the piles of paperwork on her desk. ‘We’ve got nothing: no witnesses, no victims, the forensics are compromised, and unless he confesses, all we can do him for is theft and attempting to pervert the course of justice. He’ll be out in four years. And we’re back where we started.’

  Jacobson slapped his hands against his knees. ‘No, we’re not. We’ve got the bugger in custody – that’s something. We keep at him, we apply for a detainment extension, and we find his operating theatre. In the meantime,’ Jacobson stood, ‘I think the team needs to blow off a little steam. We caught him.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Bear, but I don’t think that’s really appropriate. We’ve got three women out there who’re going to die if we don’t find them.’

  I levered myself out of the chair. ‘Nobody gets to celebrate till we’ve got Ruth, Laura, and Jessica back.’

  He lowered his voice. ‘I understand, but—’

  ‘They’ve got what, thirty-six hours? Maybe forty-eight? We don’t have time to sod about with—’

  ‘First off, it takes between three and ten days to die of dehydration. Second
ly, look at the pair of you.’ He pointed. ‘Elizabeth, how long were you on for yesterday? Fourteen hours? Sixteen? And the day before? And the day before that?’

  She waved a hand in his direction. ‘That’s not the point. We have to—’

  ‘It’s exactly the point. You’re dead on your feet, and Limpy the Boy Wonder here has bags under his eyes only a panda could love. The rest of the team’s the same. Won’t be long before they start making mistakes.’

  I banged my cane against the filing cabinet, setting it ringing. ‘We need to find them.’

  Ness looked from the pile in her in-tray to the one in pending, to the stacks of forms littering her desk. ‘It’s a lovely idea, Bear, but we can’t.’

  ‘I’m not saying we should all troop off to the pub for beer and karaoke, I’m saying give the team a little space. Send half of them home on time for a change. We’ll draw up a big list of actions and make the nightshift chase them down. Then you can head off.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘Jessica, Ruth, and Laura aren’t going to die just because you went home to get some sleep. If nightshift get something, they’ll call. Tomorrow morning everyone’s going to be recharged and ready to nail the son of a bitch.’

  And Wee Free would start carving bits off Shifty.

  Nenova squeaked her chair closer, squinted at the TV in the downstream monitoring suite. Her partner, McKevitt, tore open another packet of cheese-and-onion, ferrying them from bag to mouth like a factory robot, crunching as the screen filled with Virginia Cunningham.

  She settled into her seat, then her solicitor shuffled into view and sat next to her. He was a rumpled man in a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows. A single horn of hair stuck out above his left ear. He took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase and ruffled through them. Didn’t look at his client once.

  Alice leaned her head against my shoulder, let out a low shivery breath.

  I rubbed her back. ‘You OK?’

  She didn’t look up. ‘Long day.’

  On screen, Detective Superintendent Ness got a PC to do the date and time thing, then nodded. ‘I believe you want to make a statement.’

  Cunningham smeared her fingers across the tabletop. Her maternity frock was rumpled, the white cardigan missing a button. ‘I…’ She licked her lips. ‘I want to plead guilty to the abduction and murder of Charlie Pearce. I’ve been thinking about it, and I want to…’ A frown, as if she was trying to remember something. When she started again, the words sounded dead and flat. Rehearsed. ‘I want to spare his parents the grief of a trial. They have suffered enough.’

  ‘I see.’ Ness looked at the solicitor. ‘And…?’

  He slid the top sheet from his stack across the table top. ‘Full confession and admission of guilt, signed, witnessed, and dated. We want this taken into account during sentencing.’

  Cunningham kept her eyes down. ‘I just… I kinda want to apologize for what I did and, you know, so they can put me somewhere I can get the help I need. So I can get better.’ One hand reached down to stroke the pregnant bulge. ‘For my baby.’

  Nenova folded forward, until her head rested on the worktop. ‘Thank Christ for that…’

  McKevitt blew out a crispy breath. ‘Yup. Knows she can’t win, wants a plea bargain.’ A shrug. ‘Still, at least it saves the parents having to watch her strangling the poor wee sod. Christ knows I’ll be seeing that in the dark for weeks…’

  I put a hand around Alice’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. Kept my voice low. ‘Proud of you.’

  She squeezed back. ‘I wish I was…’

  Alice dumped her satchel on the bar of the Postman’s Head. A photo of TV’s Dr Frederic Docherty now graced the dartboard – a single arrow stuck between his eyes.

  Huntly sat at a table in the corner, slumped in front of a laptop connected to an external hard drive the size of a hotel bible. Chin resting in his hand, head nodding up and down as he popped in a handful of dry-roasted and chewed.

  He looked up from the screen, voice deadpan: ‘Well, well, the conquering heroes return. I suppose you’re expecting cakes and balloons?’

  Cooper had taken up position on the other side of the pub, frowning at a laptop of his own, scribbling things down in a notebook. Put his pen down. A smile ripped across his face. ‘Guv, Dr McDonald – great result!’

  Alice blushed, shrugged one shoulder. ‘It was really all Ash, I just—’

  ‘Gah…’ Huntly rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, yes, false modesty, blah, blah, blah.’ He sagged till his forehead rested against the laptop. ‘It’s all very well for you, but I’m the one stuck in here with hours and hours and hours of CCTV footage. And I wouldn’t have to wade through the bloody stuff if you’d done a decent job and got a confession out of the odious creature in the first place.’ A pout. ‘I’ve been sitting here, watching grainy little people whizzing about on a computer screen, for so long I’m at risk of developing haemorrhoidae. And there’s still twenty hours’ worth to go.’

  Cooper folded his arms and scowled across the room. ‘Don’t hear me moaning about having to go through the TV footage from that demo, do you?’

  ‘Television footage? I should be so lucky.’ Huntly slapped a hand to his chest. ‘I’ve done all the CCTV from Claire Young, and all the cameras where Jessica McFee went missing, and the surrounding streets.’ He slumped forwards again. ‘And that’s just the modern coverage; Bear wants me to go over the historic stuff too.’

  Alice opened her satchel and produced the deposition-site photographs for each of the Inside Man victims. Spread them out in front of the beer taps.

  ‘And you would not believe the state of the old CCTV tapes. Some of it’s rotted, some’s been eaten by mice, a big pile looks as if it’s been underwater for the last eight years…’

  I limped over. ‘Any sign of Docherty?’

  The laptop’s screen was broken into three windows, each showing alternative views of the same scene. The timestamps clicked over to midnight. Tiny people moved in stop-motion lurches through the darkened streets, heading home after being turfed out of pubs and lovers’ embraces, preserved for a moment in the lonely glow of a streetlight.

  Huntly pursed his lips and stroked his chin. ‘You know what? Now I think of it, I believe I did just see him on the clip I was watching a minute ago. He was outside a betting shop on Donovan Lane, with a dead woman thrown over one shoulder and Jessica McFee tucked under the other arm. I wasn’t going to mention it – seemed rather trivial at the time – but as you’ve asked—’

  ‘Don’t be a dick.’

  Huntly raised an eyebrow. ‘I am not, as you so crudely put it, “a dick”. I’m refreshingly challenging.’

  ‘You keep telling yourself that.’

  Alice unfolded a map of Oldcastle and started marking the dump sites in red pen.

  I took the barstool next to her. ‘So, how did you get Cunningham to confess?’

  She frowned at the map, forehead furrowed. ‘There has to be something significant about the distribution of deposition sites. Not just that they’re within quick emergency response time of the hospital and a working phone box, I mean they have to be close to the operating site as well, don’t they? There’s no point going to all that effort, making sure an ambulance can attend in under fifteen minutes, if it takes you an hour to get your victim there in the first place.’

  ‘What did you say to Cunningham?’

  The blush was back. ‘So we have to work back from where he left their bodies. What’s within ten, fifteen minutes of all of them?’

  ‘Other than the hospital?’

  She rocked backwards and forwards in her seat a couple of times. Sighed. ‘I told her it wasn’t fair to make Charlie’s parents go through the mobile-phone video in open court, in front of everyone. That it’d make things much worse for them. That every time they thought of him, every time a song came on the radio he liked, they’d see her strangling him.’

 
; Wow. ‘And that was it: she decided to plead guilty?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Alice picked up her pen again. ‘So I told her about all the people I’d helped in prisons all over the country – all those people with mental health problems and violent tendencies – and how it’d only take one word from me and they’d be falling over themselves to make her life a living hell. Well, not one word, obviously, it’d probably take at least a dozen, but the point’s the same.’

  She drew a circle on the map around the spot where Claire Young’s body had been discovered, covering Blackwall Hill and part of Kingsmeath. ‘I thought, if Mrs Kerrigan could do it, why couldn’t I?’ Another circle went around the lay-by where we’d found Tara McNab. Eyes fixed on the map. ‘And before you ask: no, I’m not proud of myself.’

  ‘Well, I am.’ I poked a finger at Castle Hill Infirmary. ‘What about the hospital?’

  She chewed on the inside of her cheek for a bit. ‘A disused operating theatre?’

  ‘Or mortuary? Been a hospital there since the seventeenth century. Every hundred years or so, they’d build new bits on top of the old structure. God knows what’s down there. There’s even supposed to be secret tunnels heading out to the docks.’

  ‘I don’t know… It’s all a bit, Dan Brown, isn’t it?’

  ‘Probably.’ I pulled out my phone. ‘Worth a call anyway.’ I dialled Rhona’s number and made for the pub door, pushed through into the little airlock.

  Rain bounced off the pavement, battered against the chipboard barrier on the other side of the road. Soaked into the abandoned breezeblock.

  ‘DS Massie.’

  ‘Rhona, I need you to take a look at Castle Hill Infirmary. Any old operating theatres or mortuaries in the place? Anything that’s not been in use for years?’

  ‘Yeah, let me guess – someone’s just figured out that the hospital’s the only thing definitely within emergency response times: there and back?’

  ‘Ah…’

  ‘I looked into it last week. The original mortuary got turned into a museum as part of that Oldcastle Millennium bollocks, so that’s a nonstarter. There’s an old surgical wing that’s not been used since the seventies, but it’s been completely stripped for a refurb. Not so much as a kidney dish or a bed pan left in the place.’ A yawn ripped free, followed by a long sigh. ‘And there’s been architects and builders and councillors in and out of there on a regular basis for months.’