by James Oswald
‘Thank you. That’s all we’re asking right now.’ McLean stood up as Saunders did the same, accepting that the meeting was over.
‘Just be sure and arrest the men forcing her into this work. They’re the ones you should be concentrating on. The pimps.’
‘If we can prove someone’s profiting from immoral earnings, trust me we’ll prosecute. You know as well as I do how hard it is to do that, though.’
‘Aye, like that brothel you raided? Nice cover-up someone worked there.’
McLean almost missed what Saunders was talking about, then remembered her previous visit, to the SCU the day after they’d raided Heather Marchmont’s house. Remembered Marchmont’s own words about the house and how long she had been living there.
‘Cover-up? It was a private party in somebody’s home. We cocked up. Bad intelligence.’
‘Aye, right.’ Saunders let out a very unladylike laugh. ‘And you believe that? So why was Stacey working there?’
‘Stacey wasn’t working there. As far as I’ve managed to find out she wasn’t working at all.’
‘Then why did you lot arrest her down in Leith? Charge sheet says soliciting in a public place. You threw her in the cells.’
‘Prior to that we’d had no interaction with her for several years. That’s why we let her go with a caution.’
Saunders grinned at some joke only she had heard. ‘You really don’t have a clue, do you? Stacey never gave up the sex work, she just moved up-market. Safer that way, and she wasn’t trying to compete with the Eastern European girls who get trafficked in under your noses.’
‘So you’re saying Stacey Craig worked at Heather Marchmont’s house?’ Ritchie asked. ‘People paid to have sex with her there? Rich people with a thing for rubber and whips?’
‘Not just her, by all accounts. She said there were at least a half-dozen girls there the last time she worked one of their parties.’
Hearing it from Marchmont had been one thing, but this was corroboration he couldn’t ignore. McLean sat down again, took out his notebook. ‘Don’t suppose you’ve got any names?’
This time Saunders’ laugh was more bitter. ‘And have them end up like her? Even if I knew I’d no’ put them in harm’s way like that.’ She nodded in Ritchie’s direction. ‘Sure I don’t think either of you were in on it, but if you can’t see a cover-up when it’s so bloody obvious, you’d best look for another line of work.’
‘You know what’ll happen if you even suggest reopening the brothel raid case, sir.’
Ritchie stood beside him at the front entrance to the station as both of them watched Saunders climb into a taxi. They’d offered her a lift in a squad car, but she’d just laughed. For some reason she seemed to find the two of them very funny all of a sudden.
‘I know. I wasn’t even going to mention it. I’ve a horrible feeling it’s going to rear its ugly head soon enough, though. And what she said just confirms a lot of things for me.’
‘You really think the DCC’s part of some group of … what? Sex addicts? S&M enthusiasts? Swingers?’
‘God, no. I think it’s something much deeper than that. I doubt Call-me-Stevie’s ever been unfaithful to his wife, and I’ve met her. Not the kind to join any group activity unless singing hymns features high on the agenda.’
Ritchie scratched at the top of her head with a thoughtful finger. ‘You say that, but you never know. All those people we busted in the raid seemed normal enough folk. Bankers, management consultants, lawyers. Who knows what people get up to in the privacy of their own homes? Or other people’s, I suppose.’
‘Fairly sure it won’t be sex with the DCC. I just can’t see him being caught up in anything so tawdry. But someone’s got something on him, or can give him something if he cooperates. Or maybe he just thinks he’s doing a friend a favour. That’s how it works, carrot and stick. Christ, I never thought I’d admit it, but Dalgliesh might well have been on to something.’
‘Dalgliesh? What’s she got to do with all this? I heard she collapsed. They took her to hospital.’
‘Aye, she did. Doctors thought she had an allergic reaction. Nuts in a piece of cake she nicked off me. Only I spoke to her boss and she’s not allergic to anything, far as he knows. Certainly not nuts. I’ve been meaning to look into it, but …’ McLean shrugged, not quite sure why he’d not looked into it, except that he’d been busy. And it was Dalgliesh.
‘Why’s she suddenly your new best friend?’
‘Very funny. She came to me a while back. Working on a story. Well, maybe not a story so much as a mad theory. Not sure I really understood it if I’m being honest. She was looking for connections, some kind of secret society. The more she looked, the more she found. Only they didn’t go very deep.’
‘Not sure I quite understand, sir. Deep?’
It was McLean’s turn to scratch, only his finger was less thoughtful, more confused. ‘Perhaps deep’s not the right word. It’s like the whole six degrees thing. A friend of a friend of a friend and suddenly you’re connected to everyone on the planet.’
‘Well, that’s hardly news.’
‘No, but Dalgliesh reckoned she was on to something. Someone using these connections to manipulate people. Blackmail some, promise others favours, all to some unexplained end.’
‘Umm … Isn’t that just how, you know, life works?’
Put like that, McLean had to admit Ritchie had a point.
‘Yes, but there was more to it than that. As if people were being deliberately manipulated to cover up things like the brothel, and worse.’
‘But she couldn’t find out who was doing the manipulation? Just some kind of shadowy force?’ Ritchie waved her hands around, fingers splayed slightly, to illustrate how seriously she took the idea.
‘It was more along the lines of something emerging from the complexity of the system. It’s grown so far-reaching, and for so long, it’s almost as if it’s alive.’
‘You any idea how nuts that sounds, sir?’
‘I know.’ McLean shook his head as much at his own stupidity as anything. ‘And when did you start calling me “sir” again?’
‘Habit, I guess.’
‘Not trying to distance yourself from the station pariah, then. That’s what I’m going to be soon.’
‘Oh aye? Planning on doing something that’ll piss off Brooks and the DCC?’ Ritchie laughed, and McLean smiled at the joke. He knew well enough that anything he did would piss off Brooks, and Call-me-Stevie wasn’t much better, for all his faux camaraderie. What Ritchie didn’t know was exactly what he was intending doing, which could indeed easily land him in the shit again, most likely covering anyone close to him with it at the same time. He checked his watch, surprised at how late it was.
‘Knocking-off time, I think. Must be way past your shift by now.’
‘Detective inspectors don’t work shifts, remember? Acting detective inspectors even less so.’ Ritchie’s grin was welcome relief at the end of a busy day.
‘Aye, well, it’s still time to go home. I can screw up my career again in the morning.’
47
‘Terrible shame. Terrible. She was a sweet old dear. Wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
McLean hadn’t needed to visit the doctor too often, but he was pleased to see the standard decoration of a GP’s consultation room hadn’t changed all that much since he was a boy with a skinned knee. The walls were lined with posters informing him of an alarming variety of diseases, the importance of good personal hygiene, and the perils of smoking. Over in one corner, an examination couch was draped with a white plastic sheet not unlike the ones he saw too regularly in the city mortuary.
Beside it, a replica human skeleton hung from a frame by a hook drilled into its skull. At least, he assumed it was a replica. You never knew.
‘Had you been her GP for long?’
Doctor Gillespie looked as if he might have been present at Miss Prendergast’s birth. His skin was thin and blotched, eyes slightly sunken in a face that had once been strong but was now succumbing to the ravages of time. A great profusion of yellow-white hair sprouted from his head in seemingly random tufts, as if he had been an early experiment in hair-loss remedies. He had a ready smile, though, and the kind of bedside manner you wanted in a man with whom you might discuss prostate problems.
‘Eileen? Gosh, there’s a question. Probably going on forty years. Maybe more.’
‘And did she have a history of mental illness? Was she …?’ McLean broke off, uncertain quite how to voice the question.
‘Going senile?’ Doctor Gillespie offered. ‘It’s possible, perhaps. But only very slightly. She’d had a couple of falls recently I put down to old age, but they could have been symptomatic of something else.’
‘You wouldn’t have expected her to go wandering off into Holyrood Park without her shoes on, then.’
Doctor Gillespie considered the question for a moment before answering. ‘I’ve other patients I’d have expected to do so before Eileen. She was always very lucid. When I saw her, that is. She didn’t visit me very often.’
‘What about her family? She had a sister die recently, did she not?’
‘Esme? Yes, that was what, a couple of years ago? They were twins, you know.’ Doctor Gillespie pulled a pair of spectacles out of the breast pocket of his jacket, slipping them on as he leaned in to peer at the screen of the computer sitting on his desk. He tentatively poked at a few keys on the keyboard, moved the mouse, poked a few more keys, moved the mouse again. Clearly he wasn’t confident of using both at the same time, but eventually he found what he was looking for.
‘I tell a lie. It was three years last April. Where does the time go?’ He nudged his spectacles down his nose and peered over the top of them. ‘She went a bit strange at the end, Esme. And it happened quite quickly too. So I suppose there’s that to consider. Still, she didn’t wander off without her shoes on.’
‘How did she die?’
‘Esme? Oh, she contracted pneumonia. But she had to be put in a home before then. Kept saying that old house of theirs was full of ghosts. You’ve seen the place, I take it?’
McLean nodded. ‘From the outside. Surprised it’s not been turned into flats, to be honest.’
‘Well, it probably will be now. Though quite who’ll stand to inherit, I’ve no idea.’
‘Did she not have any family then?’
‘No, just her and Esme. Well, after her mother passed away, but that was a long time ago.’
‘And her father?’ McLean could see as soon as he asked the question that this was what Doctor Gillespie really wanted to talk about. He had come in ahead of morning surgery, but the clock was ticking away. How many patients were out there waiting to be seen?
‘Well, there’s a question, isn’t there? Of course the birth certificates all say that Esme and Eileen’s father was William Prendergast. But their mother, Amy. Now she was quite a character, let me tell you. Must have been a looker when she was young, too. There was some scandal, though. During the war, when he was away in the Navy, she used to hold parties in that big old house of theirs. And she was always very close to her twin brother. Very close. That was the really shocking part of it. If even half the rumours of what they used to get up to are true then … Well …’ Doctor Gillespie ran out of steam.
‘Her brother being Daniel Calton,’ McLean said.
‘Oh, you know about it all then?’ Doctor Gillespie perked up, his enthusiasm for salacious gossip reinvigorating him.
‘We know he went missing in ’seventy-two. Think we might know what happened to him, too. Or at least where he ended up.’ McLean peered down at his notebook and the scribbles he’d made on the open page. ‘If what you say about Miss Prendergast’s mother is true, then that’s interesting. Sadly I don’t think germane to our investigations, though.’
‘The children of incest are highly prone to degenerative disorders, Inspector. Double recessive genes and all that. If Daniel Calton was Esme and Eileen’s father, as well as their uncle, then that might go some way towards explaining how they ended up the way they did, wouldn’t you say?’
McLean stood for a moment outside the GP surgery, wondering what the hell he thought he was doing. Chasing down Miss Prendergast wasn’t his job, wasn’t even his case. They already had the DNA sample from her that might confirm the identity of the Pentland Mummy; that was as far as his involvement with her should have gone. And yet he couldn’t leave it alone.
Doctor Gillespie’s words hadn’t helped to dampen his curiosity either. It was conceivable that Eileen Prendergast had simply and catastrophically lost her mind, wandered out of her house in bare feet, up Arthur’s Seat without a care in the world. It was entirely possible she might have sat down on a rock and simply stopped functioning as a human being, her mind completely gone. Either way, it didn’t really matter. None of this really mattered to the Pentland Mummy investigation, except that both cases were too weird to be so easily explained away. Too weird, and too connected.
But what had caused it? What had made her snap? Or had there just been a little clock ticking away deep inside? An alarm just waiting to go off?
He really needed to see inside Miss Prendergast’s house. Get an idea of who the old woman had been. It would be easier than asking DI Carter anyway. He just needed a way of justifying it. Visiting the GP was one thing, searching the house would be impossible without treading on toes.
But then they knew Eileen Prendergast was Daniel Calton’s niece. Or maybe even Daniel Calton’s daughter by his own sister. And Daniel Calton might just possibly be the man found mummified on the back of Scald Law in the long, hot summer of 1976. A man who had remained unidentified for almost forty years. What he was doing could, just about, be justified in terms of that investigation. And the DCC had put him in charge of the Cold Case Unit, along with its budget.
McLean drummed his fingers on the roof of his Alfa, staring off into the distance as he tried to make his mind up. Eventually he realised that he was staring sightlessly at a public library just across the car park. It was a long shot, and there were far more important things he was supposed to be doing, but then they involved being back at the station in a room with Duguid, or in his tiny office faced with a mountain of paperwork, or justifying his every action to Detective Superintendent Brooks. No, there were far better ways to spend his time.
‘This’ll give you access to the internet. Although I have to warn you that some sites are blocked. You wouldn’t believe what the local lads try to look up in here. And with the wee kiddies running around too.’
Like a lot of the local libraries, at least those that hadn’t been closed down already, this one was partly a place where you could check out books, and partly an impromptu day care centre. The duty librarian was a cheerful, round-faced woman with smiling eyes, who had laughed at his request for a computer with internet access, but shown him to a line of elderly desktop machines anyway. The one he was using appeared to have something sticky smeared liberally over its keyboard, and its screen was missing some of the colours the manufacturer must have put in originally, but it connected him to a search engine and from there to the archives he was looking for.
Scrolling through page after page, he reached for his phone, intending to call DS MacBride for help. Then he remembered where he was and slipped it away again. Given
what he was searching for, he’d have been better off calling Dalgliesh, asking her to trawl through the paper’s archives. Except that then he would owe her a favour. And she was in hospital, possibly still unconscious.
‘Brought you a cuppa. You looked like you needed it.’
McLean looked up to see the smiling librarian standing beside him, two mugs of tea in her hands. She put them both down beside the sticky keyboard, then pulled up a chair alongside him.
‘Looking for anything in particular? Only I thought we had it bad with the budget cuts. Didn’t realise the polis were having to share too.’
It was meant as a joke, and McLean smiled, thanking her as he took his mug of tea. But it was also too close to the truth to be really funny. The police might moan about cuts, but they had a certain security. How long could places like this be kept open? And when they closed, where would the local youth go? What would they get up to?
‘I just wanted to try and track down someone who lived around here a while back. I’ve a sergeant who’s brilliant at that sort of thing, but he’s busy right now.’
‘Oh, aye? Anyone famous?’ The librarian peered at the computer screen, then seemed to remember herself. ‘Och, it’ll be police business. Sorry.’
‘No, you’re all right. I’m really not sure how to start. Just a name, an address, a vague idea it might be important.’ McLean took a sip of tea. It was surprisingly good, although it would have been improved immeasurably by the addition of biscuits.
The librarian stood up as a couple of young boys walked up to the counter across the big open-plan room. ‘You’d be best starting off with the National Archive website. Costs money, but if you’ve a name and a birth year you should be able to find them.’
McLean thanked her, both for the help and the tea, but she was already bustling over to help the two lads. He briefly checked his phone, surprised no one had called him back to the station yet, then turned his attention to the computer. He searched first for the name Amy Prendergast, then Amy Calton and then, in a flash of inspiration, Amy Prendergast-Calton. Eventually he found a collection of obscure obituaries, indexed by someone with clearly far too much time on their hands. There wasn’t much information on Eileen Prendergast’s mother other than that she had died in a psychiatric hospital in 1979, having been committed there seven years earlier. McLean made a few notes, before turning to another site, a few more details. He tried not to let Doctor Gillespie’s gossip colour his thoughts as he read the few articles he could find, but by all accounts she seemed to have been something of a firebrand in her youth.
