Prayer for the Dead

by James Oswald

  ‘Still in here,’ McLean shouted, his voice echoing in the darkness. A couple of seconds later the lights came back on again. He squinted, surprised at how quickly his eyes had become accustomed to the darkness.

  ‘I’m sorry sir. Thought everyone had left.’ A young SOCO shuffled through the opening, then stood up tall. He was the complete opposite of his boss, Dr Cairns. Wiry-thin and at least six foot four. Completely the wrong build to be down here in the tunnels.

  ‘It’s no matter.’ McLean stood up, rolling his jacket sleeve back down and feeling the dampness in it. Soaked right through. ‘Has anyone checked out the well?’

  ‘How do you mean? We took a sample of it, but …’ The young SOCO looked puzzled.

  ‘We’ll need to get a remote underwater camera. There’s something down there.’

  ‘You know, I don’t think it’s a well at all. Think it might be another passage.’

  All the arc lights in the cave had been gathered around the well. Pointing downwards, their glare reflected off the surface of the water, but enough penetrated into the depths to show a series of steps spiralling to the bottom. With the extra light, McLean could tell that the white object wasn’t a fallen rock or something old. It looked like a discarded shopping bag, moving back and forth ever so slightly as if tugged by an invisible current.

  ‘Could be. We’re heading in a downhill direction so it’d make sense to go deeper if you were digging tunnels further.’

  The unusually tall SOCO’s name was Karl. He had managed to find a telescopic pole with a hook on the end, but it wasn’t quite long enough to reach all the way to the bottom. McLean watched from the other side as he leaned over the short parapet, arm up to his elbow in the water. A couple of shorter forensic experts looked on, one with a camera on a strap around his neck, the other holding a clipboard that, as far as McLean could tell, had no paper attached. He got the impression they were there more out of idle curiosity than any kind of professional pride. Only Grumpy Bob was paying no attention to the well. The old sergeant seemed to find the cavern walls far more interesting, peering up at the vaulted ceiling as he wandered around muttering to himself.

  ‘How far do you think they go?’

  ‘Ah, now that’s a question for the archaeology boys. I’ve heard there’s caves like these up Roslin Glen way, and the city centre’s full of hidden passages and stuff. Could be it all links up.’

  From where he was standing, McLean couldn’t tell whether Karl was being serious or not. He knew about the caves at Hawthornden Castle though, and there was the small matter of the subterranean world underneath Rosskettle Hospital that had come to light recently. Mine workings and tunnels lay undiscovered all over Midlothian, dating back to Roman times and earlier. It wasn’t so far-fetched to think that these mysterious caverns might spread further than anyone realised.

  ‘If it’s not a well, then why’s it full of water?’

  ‘Looks like it’s blocked at the bottom. There’s a jumble of rocks and stuff. All the rain we’ve had the past few weeks, wouldn’t surprise me if it just got flooded out. Ah, here we go.’ Karl leaned even further into the water, his chin just a fraction of an inch above the surface as he extended his considerable reach. He’d stripped off to the waist, and McLean couldn’t help but shiver at the thought of how cold he must be.

  ‘Got it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yup.’ And slowly Karl pushed himself away from the low stone parapet surrounding the hole, with first his shoulder, then his arm and finally the long telescopic pole emerging from the water like Excalibur.

  ‘Get some plastic sheeting down, can you? And turn that floodlight round.’

  The SOCO with the clipboard frowned at McLean, but did as he was told. Soon Karl was pulling the end of the pole out of the water, a sodden mess of something fabric drooping from its hooked end. He manoeuvred it, dripping, over the stone parapet and on to the freshly laid sheet, rivulets of water flowing away from it as it took on a more recognisable shape. A pale white jacket.

  McLean slipped on a pair of latex gloves as he approached the newly fetched plastic sheeting where Karl was laying out the coat as if he were the best man setting out the groom’s suit before the big day. The SOCO with the camera was busy taking photos, the flash making it hard to focus on any detail.

  ‘Doesn’t look all that old to me. Craghoppers. You can buy them in pretty much any outdoor clothing shop. Got one myself.’ Karl opened up the front of the coat, fingers working slowly down the line of the zip, checking the pockets. McLean wondered if he was going to get dressed any time soon, felt it best not to say anything.

  ‘Sort of thing a journalist might wear?’ he asked.

  ‘Sort of thing anyone might wear. Ah, here’s something.’ The SOCO put his hand carefully into one of the pockets and pulled out a damp notebook and pen. ‘Bag, please.’

  His colleague bustled over with an evidence bag, sealing up the notebook before it could disintegrate any further.

  ‘Can I see that?’ McLean put his hand out.

  ‘We need to get it to the lab. We can dry it out properly there.’

  ‘I’m not going to open it. Just want to look at the cover.’

  A short pause, then with obvious reluctance, the SOCO handed his bounty over. McLean turned the notebook around very carefully. He could feel how sodden it was, and the water pooling in the bag was grey with pulped paper. It was cheap, spiral bound, the sort of thing you picked up in packs of six for a pound from the local supermarket. There was nothing written on it, no useful name or address, but there was a crude symbol, etched in biro across the cover.

  ‘That what I think it is?’ Grumpy Bob loomed over his shoulder, blocking out the best of the light. ‘Aye, it is. Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yup.’ McLean handed the notebook carefully back to the SOCO, taking one last look at the compass and set-square. ‘Bloody Masons. Dagwood’s going to be happy as a clam.’

  12

  If I were a kind man, I’d tell him to improve his home security. I’m not though, at least not like that. So I won’t.

  It takes thirty seconds to get in through the front door, and I don’t even have to try all the entry buttons until someone buzzes me in without asking who it is. The lock is old, the electro-mechanical release mechanism worn enough that a couple of well-timed shoves spring it open. Inside, the city noise drops away, leaving me with a smell of foreign bodies, bin bags left out too long, cat piss. Upstairs the only way of knowing I’ve got the right place is a torn-off strip of paper with a name written on it in biro, taped underneath a bell-push that has long since been painted solid. Security here is no better, just a Yale lock that yields to a supermarket loyalty card, and I’m in.

  I know these tenement flats are small; I posed as a buyer for the one being sold next door so I could get a look at the layout of the place. Even so, the sense of being in a cave is almost overwhelming. A narrow skylight darkened with many years of city grime is the only source of illumination for the tiny hallway, filtering down from high above and setting me at ease. I take a moment to gather my wits about me, listen for any sound that the flat is occupied even though I know it won’t be. He has no family, no life beyond his work. This is his lair, but it is no more than a place to sleep, occasionally to eat. And to feed his obsession.

  The kitchen is barely more than a cupboard; the cooker, sink, fridge and cupboards squeezed in with commendable ingenuity. An empty bowl and mug sit by the sink, waiting to be washed. From the smell of sour milk it’s been a day or two since last he had breakfast. Black grounds in the bottom of a one-person cafetière are the only sign of sophistication. I move on.

  The shower room – no bath here – is at least tidy, although limescale pastes the glass enclosure and black mould is feasting on the grouting between cracked white tiles. The medicine cabinet over the basin holds no surprises. He may be a doctor, but he doesn’t self-medicate. Not that desperate. Not yet. It’s the pile of reading material beside the toilet that interests m
e most. Some medical texts, printouts from the teaching hospital library, slipped between copies of Scientific American, New Scientist and a couple of more obscure medical research titles. They are well thumbed, the pages stained with toothpaste and saliva where he’s read them whilst brushing his teeth. The articles are about new techniques in stem-cell therapy, off-licence drug treatments, alternative medicines of a kind far removed from the homeopathic. I begin to see a picture of the man emerging.

  The bedroom is tidy, which surprises me. I expected more scientific papers, clothes thrown across the bed, signs of the hunger that gnaws at him, that has honed his soul to such a fine edge. I find them instead in the living room to the front, overlooking the street, and the depths of his obsession become apparent.

  This is where he lives when he’s not at the hospital. The other rooms have functions that can more or less be circumvented; who needs to sleep in a bed when there’s a couch? There are no pictures in the whole flat, that’s one of the first things I noticed. The decor looks as if it was left behind by the previous owner. But the walls in the living room are covered in papers torn from medical journals, printouts of emails from research scientists across the globe, newspaper cuttings and other snippets of information. This is what I was looking for, what I saw in him the first time we met in the hospital canteen. This is what drives him to the exclusion of all earthly temptations, what shrives him.

  This will be the key that opens him up.

  13

  McLean stared at the pile of reports, folders and other general detritus strewn across his desk and stacked precariously alongside it. Just looking at the mess made him weary; the thought of tackling it, doubly so. He’d managed to grab a bite to eat once he and Grumpy Bob had returned from Gilmerton Cove, but had completely failed to find either Detective Superintendent Duguid or DCI Brooks. There were other officers in the station who were Freemasons, but those two, and Duguid in particular, held senior enough positions to be of use. Not that he really thought the Masonic link was anything other than a hoax, a diversion maybe, but it was a lead that would have to be followed. He rubbed at tired eyes, not looking forward to having that conversation with either man.

  When the phone rang, at first he couldn’t work out what it was. The handset on his desk normally lit up when a call came through. Then McLean realised it was his mobile, hidden under a folder containing transcripts of the interviews with all the archaeology students. Yet another dead end in the investigation. He snatched up the phone and managed to hit the right button on the screen before it switched to answerphone.

  ‘McLean?’

  ‘Aye, so it is. Thought I’d get you on this number rather than go through the station.’

  McLean took a moment to recognise the voice. The short, round, senior forensic scientist. ‘Dr Cairns?’

  ‘The very same. We’ve processed the crime scene photographs from the cave. Thought you might like to see them.’

  McLean looked around his office again, disappointed to see that it was just as full of unnecessary paperwork as it had been five minutes ago. His laptop was folded up and buried under the mound somewhere. ‘You want to ping them over in an email?’

  ‘Aye, well, I could do that. But then you’d only see what you wanted to see. Better if you come over and I show you what we’ve got.’

  He didn’t really need an excuse, even if the paperwork would still be waiting for him when he got back.

  ‘I’ll be right over.’

  ‘You said you had something to show me?’

  It had only taken him half an hour to get from his stuffy little office to the fresher, air-conditioned labs of the forensic services across town. Dr Cairns had been passing the reception desk when he’d arrived. She had taken him straight through to the room with all the computers in it, where the photographic image manipulation was done. He couldn’t help looking over at the desk where Emma had worked, pleased to see that no one else seemed to be using it. The last he had heard, she was somewhere in North Africa, but he hoped that she would come home soon. Seemingly the forensic service hoped so too.

  ‘You wanted to see the photos from the cave.’ Dr Cairns broke through McLean’s distraction. He dragged his gaze from the empty desk back to her, catching the merest hint of a grin on her normally taciturn face.

  ‘I did, yes.’

  ‘Well Benny’s been running them through the image analysis software. Reckon we’ve got something that makes a bit of sense now.’

  Dr Cairns led McLean across the room, past a half-dozen casually dressed technicians hunched over computer stations, each of which probably cost more than the entire IT budget for his station. They all had enormous flat screens, two or three per operator, and he couldn’t help but feel a twitch of jealousy even though he had no real need for anything more sophisticated than a laptop that actually talked to the network.

  ‘You got the Gilmerton Cove file up, Benny?’ Dr Cairns pitched her words loud to the scruffy fellow sitting in front of the largest screen in the whole room. Earphone cables snaked away from his long, ginger and slightly greasy hair, and he peered through spectacles so thick McLean had to consider that they’d given him the big monitor because he couldn’t see anything smaller. His ears must have worked though, as he reached up, unplugged his earphones and turned to his boss, eyes flicking a quick glance in McLean’s direction without any hint of alarm.

  ‘Just finished it now.’ Benny tucked his earphones carefully into the top pocket of his shirt before reaching for the mouse and clicking up a screen full of thumbnail images. ‘You want me to print it out?’

  ‘And waste our budget on ink? No, you can email the whole file over to the incident room. Let them pick up the tab. Come on, shoo.’ Dr Cairns flicked her hands at the technician until he slid, reluctantly, off his stool. Standing, McLean could see that he was at least as tall as Karl, shoulders and back hunched in the habitual pose of a man who doesn’t really enjoy standing out in a crowd. Dr Cairns scrabbled up on to the vacated stool, and grabbed at the mouse in a lunge that nearly saw her topple to the floor.

  ‘Bloody hell. D’you no’ get altitude sickness up here, Benny?’ she said, before clicking through a series of images too quickly for McLean to see. Finally she stopped and he peered close, trying to make something out through the pixellation. The overall impression was blue. Early Impressionist.

  ‘What am I supposed to be looking at?’

  ‘This is your cave wall. Blood reflects a narrow band of the light spectrum, so we’ve run a filter to cut out everything else. See?’ Dr Cairns clicked once more and the scene changed. It was a bit like one of those old parlour magic tricks McLean remembered from when he was a boy. The blue deepened, but a series of lines, letters and words leapt out at him in glowing yellow.

  ‘Is this the pattern, then? What was written in Stevenson’s blood?’

  ‘Written?’ Dr Cairns turned on the stool, lifting a single eyebrow in his direction. ‘You ever tried to write in blood on a sandstone wall?’

  ‘Not recently, no.’

  ‘Well, it’s not easy. Let me tell you that. Our man here’s tried to write some words. You can see them here.’ Dr Cairns highlighted an area of the screen, then zoomed in on it. The lines looped around each other in a way that at a casual glance might look like letters, but the more McLean stared, the less he could see.

  ‘I don’t …’ he began.

  ‘Perhaps it’ll make more sense if I do this.’ A couple more clicks and the image shifted, widened out, stretched. ‘See?’

  McLean tilted his head, just about seeing the letters now. ‘Does that …?’

  ‘ “Seek not Baphomet and the Brotherhood, for all are brothers in death.” Isn’t it charming how misogynous these secret societies are?’

  ‘The Brotherhood? Never heard of it. Baphomet sounds familiar. Can’t think where, though.’

  ‘Me neither.’ Dr Cairns shrugged, then clicked the mouse a couple of times to bring up a new image. ‘Might have something t
o do with this, though.’

  McLean peered again at the large screen, unsure what he was looking at for a moment. And then he saw it. Not words any more, now the lines formed a pattern, a drawing, roughly sketched out over ten feet or more of cave wall.

  ‘You managed to do anything with that notebook we found?’ McLean asked. In response, Dr Cairns turned and gave him a teacher’s best smile.

  ‘Top marks for the detective. And before you ask, no, it’s still drying out. We won’t be able to do anything with it for at least a week.’ She clicked the mouse again and the screen split into two images. One side showed what had been there before, the other a photograph of a very soggy notebook in an evidence bag. The pattern drawn on the wall with Ben Stevenson’s blood was hard to make out – impossible without the aid of many thousands of pounds’ worth of computing and image processing equipment – but it was undeniably the same as that scrawled in biro on the front of the notebook. The Masonic compass and set-square.

  A pile of empty boxes stood outside the office on the top floor, waiting to be filled with the detritus of Detective Superintendent Duguid’s mercifully brief stint in charge. No one manned the desk beside the open door, so McLean rapped on the jamb, peered inside.

  ‘Hello?’

  There was no reply, so he stepped inside, looked around. The desk was strewn with reports and folders piled almost as haphazardly as in his own office. The large executive chair on the other side was empty, though. He was about to turn and leave – the old schoolboy fear of being caught in the master’s study alone never really left you after the first thrashing – when a cough behind him suggested it was already too late.

  ‘What do you want, McLean?’ Duguid pushed past him on his way to the chair, trailing a waft of stale tobacco. A lot of the hardened smokers were using e-cigarettes these days, at least until someone in HQ found out and put a stop to them vaping indoors, but Duguid had always been a high-tar, twenty-a-day man. Nothing was going to stop him now, least of all technology.