by James Oswald
‘About the Ben Stevenson investigation, sir. Something’s come up that … well … you have a greater knowledge of these things than I do.’
Duguid slumped down into his chair, slapping his hands against the desk to keep from tipping over backwards. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘This, sir. Was hoping you might be able to have a look at it.’ McLean reached forward with the slim folder he’d been partially concealing behind his back, held it up for Duguid to take. The detective superintendent eyed it suspiciously before finally conceding. He opened it up as he slumped back once more into his treacherous chair, pulled out the photographs nestling within.
‘This some kind of joke again?’ The growl was back, McLean noticed. That almost always happened when the subject came up.
‘Far from it. We found that mark on Stevenson’s notebook, and daubed on the cavern wall in his blood. I believe it’s the Masonic compass and set-square.’
‘Of course it’s the bloody Masonic compass and set-square. Any idiot could tell you that. Same as any idiot could have drawn it. Doesn’t mean the Masons are out there cutting people’s throats.’
McLean took a step back to avoid being burnt by Duguid’s sudden rage. It was always thus when his beloved Freemasons came up.
‘Did you ever write your name on the wall when you were a boy?’ McLean asked, then added, ‘Sir?’ The effect was as he’d hoped, calming the detective superintendent’s anger with bafflement.
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘I didn’t. Wrote other boys’ names a few times, to see if I could get them into trouble though. Never worked.’
‘No. You’ve lost me completely.’ Duguid shuffled the photographs back into their folder.
‘Would someone involved in Freemasonry paint the most recognisable symbol of their organisation in the blood of their victim at the crime scene?’
Duguid looked a little embarrassed. ‘Oh, I see.’
‘Exactly. This isn’t about the Masons. It’s about someone pretending to be something to do with them, or someone deliberately trying to send us off in the wrong direction. There’s plenty of you on the force, sir, but not many senior detectives, and not many at your level within the organisation. I’d appreciate your input on that.’ McLean nodded at the folder and its photographs.
‘DCI Brooks would have been able to help you with this. If you’d asked him.’
‘I know, sir. But I chose to ask you. Thought I might actually get somewhere that way.’
Duguid took the compliment, he had at least that much sense. ‘I’ll ask around, show it to some people. Looks phoney to me, but if your man Stevenson was a Lodge member I’ll find out.’
‘Thank you, sir. There was some writing on the wall, too. A mention of something called the Brotherhood. Capital B. Does that mean anything to you?’
McLean studied the detective superintendent’s face as he flicked through the photographs and came to the enhanced image of the writing. He was looking for any telltale flicker of recognition. There was nothing for a moment, then a weary shake of the head.
‘Sounds like utter bollocks to me. I mean it’s a male institution, no women in the order, but I’ve never heard of something referring to itself as “The Brotherhood”.’
‘Well, if you could ask around I’d be grateful. Not sure this will go anywhere, but we’ve precious few leads to work on.’
‘That bad?’
McLean looked past Duguid, through the window and out into the darkening city beyond. Another day gone, the trail to the killer that little bit colder. Who was he kidding? It had been stone cold the day they discovered the body.
‘Worse,’ he said, then turned and left.
‘Detective Inspector McLean?’
He had thought the street empty. It was certainly late enough as he walked out through the gates to the parking lot at the back of the station. He’d looked in vain for a squad car to cadge a lift from and was resigning himself to a long walk home, perhaps via a pub and a curry. Looking around, he saw a woman standing just a few feet away, no obvious shadows to explain how he’d missed her before.
‘Can I help you?’ As he asked the question, he realised he’d seen her somewhere before. It took a moment, then he placed her. Tapping away at a laptop computer in the site office around the back of his tenement building. She was short, slim, and with her severe, grey hair might have been thought frail were it not for the way she carried herself. Back straight, eyes clear as they fixed their gaze on him without the aid of spectacles, she exuded an inner strength quite at odds with her appearance.
‘Violet Grainger. I work with Joe and Jock McClymont.’ She held out a hand. McLean wasn’t surprised to find her grip firm, was surprised at how cold it was. She fixed him with the stare of someone who has heard about being friendly but hasn’t yet mastered the skill. ‘Wondered if I might have a word. About the development in East Preston Street.’
‘Not sure if there’s much more I can say.’ McLean released his grip, but Ms Grainger still clasped his hand, enveloping it with both of hers.
‘It means such a lot to them, you know. That site. They’ve put everything into it.’
‘Isn’t that a bit presumptuous? I mean, they don’t even own it all.’
Ms Grainger stared straight at him, her pale grey eyes unnerving in the half-light. It felt like he was trapped. A small animal in the headlights as the truck came bearing down on him. For an instant he knew the old fear, from his childhood. The monsters lurking under the bed, the troll in the attic, the ugly, half-formed creatures that roamed the graveyard beyond his garden in the hours of darkness. He knew them then, and would have done anything to escape them, escape that feeling.
‘Not yet, no. But they own most of it. You could sell them your share, you know. Take the money and walk away. Then everyone would be happy.’
McLean tugged his hand away from the old woman’s cold grasp. Something about her words, particularly that last one, rang hollow. Only one person would be happy in this arrangement and it wasn’t him. Neither was it Joe or Jock McClymont. He knew that as clearly as if it had been written across Ms Grainger’s face. Instead, a fleeting confusion filled her eyes, then she pulled herself together. Drew down a mask of blankness over her face, pursed her lips before speaking again.
‘But I can see you’re not a kindly man.’
Her petulance burst the surreal bubble that had surrounded the whole meeting. ‘I’ve made my position clear on the matter,’ McLean said. ‘My old flat, or as close to it as modern building regulations will allow. You can have the rest of the building for all I care, but that’s my price. Now if you’ll excuse me, Ms Grainger, it’s been a long day and I’d quite like to get home before it ends.’
He walked back towards the station. He’d call for a taxi if there were no squad cars heading out. Turning at the entrance, McLean looked back to where the old woman had been standing. The street was clear, straight in both directions for a hundred yards or more. But she was nowhere to be seen.
14
Mrs McCutcheon’s cat stared up at him from its favoured place in the middle of the kitchen table as McLean let himself in through the back door. Another long, frustrating day and all he really wanted to do was crack open a beer, order a pizza and put his feet up.
‘You and I need to have a chat about hygiene sometime soon.’ He dumped his folder down on the table, getting nothing more than a suspicious stare from the cat in return. He couldn’t bring himself to shoo it out of the way. It wasn’t as if he spent a lot of time preparing food at the table. Or eating at it, for that matter. It was nice just to have someone to talk to when he got home, really. And Mrs McCutcheon’s cat was a good listener.
The heat of the day was dissipating quickly, evening fading to night, but the air in the hall was still and humid, cooked by a long day under the sun. He would have liked to have left windows open, let the place ventilate properly during the day, but with just the cat to
keep an eye on things, McLean knew that was a bad idea. If the local community support team found out how lax his security was, they’d give him hell. Or worse, use him as an example to all the other officers. There was an alarm system, of course, but the house had been built at a time when there was always someone at home, and burglary was very much a minority sport. It wasn’t an easy place to make totally secure.
A little pile of flyers, catalogues and brown envelopes lay on the mat. He scanned them from a distance, hoping to see the slim form of a cheap postcard. McLean couldn’t help it, every day was the same. It was over a year now since Emma had left, gone off on her mad quest. At first the postcards had been fairly regular, the places she sent them from at least vaguely familiar. More recently though, they had become sporadic, sometimes two in a week or even on the same day, then months of nothing at all. The last one had shown a picture of a stone fort in Ethiopia, and had travelled to Edinburgh through at least six different countries if the blurred franking marks obscuring most of her words were anything to go by. He’d pinned it up with all the others, on a large map of the world taped to the dining room wall, charting her progress in the hope that she might head back towards home soon. But if anything she was getting further and further away, and as the months rolled past, so his memory of her shifted from something urgent and vital to yet another sad loss. One of so many it was hard to care about any of them any more.
Crouching, he scooped up the pile of mail, flicking through it swiftly as he stood up again. Nothing immediately of interest, he was turning back to the hall and the kitchen, thoughts of that beer and pizza at the forefront of his mind, when the doorbell rang.
It wasn’t a foreign sound, but he heard it so infrequently these days that it took McLean a moment to realise what it was. He shoved the post down on the old wooden chest to one side of the porch, then set about the task of unbolting and unlocking the door. Finally it swung open, let in a waft of cooling evening air and revealed a large figure on the doorstep. He couldn’t have said who he was expecting to see, since he’d not been expecting anyone and hadn’t received any visitors in weeks. Of all the possibilities though, this was quite a long way down the list.
‘Madame Rose?’ McLean looked up into the large face of the transvestite medium, esoteric antiquarian bookseller and part-time fortune teller. ‘Umm … Hello.’
‘Oh, Inspector.’ Madame Rose clutched a large hand to her bosom in a gesture of well-timed theatricality. ‘I’m so sorry to bother you. But I couldn’t think who else to turn to.’
‘It’s been a nightmare. You just wouldn’t believe the trouble I’ve had.’
Back in the kitchen and McLean was busying himself with the making of tea. Madame Rose had settled into a chair at the kitchen table and almost immediately Mrs McCutcheon’s cat had leapt into her lap. The medium looked haggard, there was no other way McLean could describe her. Normally tweedy to the point of ridiculousness, done up like the most old-fashioned of Morningside grandes dames, now she clasped a slightly tatty old overcoat around her as if the summer heat were no more than a memory. Her hair was a mess, grey the dominant colour, but it was her face that was the most shocking.
‘Trouble?’ McLean asked, trying hard not to stare. How long had it been since last he’d seen her? Around about the time Emma had left, at Jenny Nairn’s funeral. She’d been sombre then, but larger than life. Now for all her great size, she seemed small. She’d lost weight, noticeably, and where once her skin had been a flawless mask of foundation and rouge, now she wore barely any make-up at all. She even sported a dark hint of stubble around her chin.
‘I’ve always tried hard not to be judgemental.’ Madame Rose scratched at the side of her nose with a fingernail rimmed with dark grime. She let out a little laugh. ‘Could hardly be, could I? Not the way I am. Live and let live, that’s always been my motto. Shame I can’t say the same about other people.’
‘Who’s been giving you grief?’ McLean fished teabags out of the two mugs, poured in milk and carried them over to the table. It was perhaps more telling than anything that Madame Rose didn’t make any comment about the lack of teapot, loose-leaf tea, proper cups with saucers. She just cupped the mug between both hands and lifted it to her mouth.
‘Who hasn’t?’ she said after taking a long sip. ‘I had to close the shop, you know. Regular customers who’d been coming for years. They were getting shouted at in the street. Old Mr Jeffries was shaking with fear the last time he came for a reading. Took him almost an hour to calm down. I offered to walk him out, but he didn’t want to be seen with me in public. He’s been coming to the shop for twenty years.’
McLean leaned back against the Aga, cradling his own mug of tea un-drunk. Any minute now he expected Madame Rose to break down in tears.
‘You’ve still not told me who they are. I take it they’ve a problem with what you do, who you are?’
‘I really don’t know what their problem is. If I’m being honest, I’m not really sure who they are, either. That’s a large part of the problem. Oh the people doing it are Neds, mostly, I guess. I’m no stranger to a half-brick through the window. Worse shoved through the letterbox sometimes. Do you know how long I’ve lived in that house, Inspector?’
McLean recalled a room, larger than he’d expected to find at the back of a Leith Walk shop front, filled from floor to ceiling with antiquarian books, esoteric objects, things that could only really be described as ‘things’, and cats. Lots of cats. Curiously he didn’t recall it smelling much of anything. ‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Before you were born, that’s for certain.’ Madame Rose took another long drink of tea.
‘I’m really not sure—’
‘What I’m saying, Inspector, is that I’ve lived in this city, in that particular part of this city, for a very long time. By and large people have been at the very least civil. Not much outward hostility, even given my … condition. Oh, there’s been the odd person who’d have a go. There’s always bullies, wherever you are. But mostly I’ve been left to live my life the way I chose.’
‘So what’s changed?’
Madame Rose looked at him for a moment before answering. McLean could see the lines around her eyes and mouth, the skeletal nature of her neck. He’d never really considered her age, but it was possible she could be in her sixties, he supposed. Older, even. Still, to have lived in the city so long?
‘Everything, Inspector. And nothing. Things have been getting steadily worse since the eighties. But now it’s like the bullies are being organised. Like there’s an invisible hand behind their actions. They’re hounding me out of my house and home. Driving away my livelihood. They even killed one of my cats.’
At these words, Mrs McCutcheon’s cat, which had been curled up in Madame Rose’s lap, purring gently, stood up and nudged the medium’s hand. Without thinking, she began to scratch its ears.
‘Have you been to the police?’ McLean asked.
‘Of course. But what can they do? It’s never the same faces I see outside the window. That’s if I see anyone at all.’
‘But you said you thought they were being organised. I’m not saying you’re wrong, but if you’ve not seen them, how do you know?’
Something of Madame Rose’s former slightly imperious self came to the fore as she drew herself upright and stuck out her faux bosom so that Mrs McCutcheon’s cat was almost trapped beneath it. ‘I’d have thought of all people you would have understood. The likes of you and I, we deal in intangibles, gut feelings.’ She swirled her mug, put it down on the table with a solid thunk. ‘The portent in the tea leaves.’
‘But you must have some idea—’
‘If I knew who it was, I’d put an end to it. I am not without resources, my protections. This isn’t the first time my place in the city has been challenged, though I have to admit I’ve not seen such a sophisticated attack in many a year.’ Madame Rose stared back at him with some of her old vigour returning. Despite appearing less like a dowdy spinster and m
ore like a man dressed badly in drag, McLean found himself referring to the medium as ‘her’, thinking of her as the gender she so obviously felt happiest being. She’d helped him, possibly helped Emma too, though that seemed to be a work in progress. And now something had upset her so much she had to come to him in return.
‘I’ll look into it. Can’t promise anything, but if someone’s organising a hate campaign, well, we have laws against that these days.’
Madame Rose’s smile almost split her head in two. ‘Thank you, Inspector. Tony. You have no idea how much that means to me.’ She lifted Mrs McCutcheon’s cat off her lap, placed it carefully on the table in front of her, stroked it once, left her ample hand resting on its head. ‘There was one other thing.’
‘Go on.’
‘I’m not looking for a place to stay. They’ll not drive me out of my home that easily.’
‘But?’ McLean held Madame Rose’s gaze, almost certain he knew what he was going to be asked next.
‘Just for a little while, maybe a month until I’ve dealt with this … delicate situation … I was wondering if you might have space in this lovely home of yours for one or two more cats?’
15
It never ceases to amaze and amuse me how easy it is to fool people. They hear what they want to hear, see what they want to see, and if you know what that is then the rest is child’s play.
Child’s play. I allow myself a small smirk of amusement at the realisation of just how appropriate that is. I am in the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, after all. The Sick Kids, as it’s universally known. Not as easy to get into as you might think, which is a good thing, I suppose. No problem if you know how. If you’ve spent as much time here as I have.
He’s here, though. Jim. He consults in the oncology ward two days a week, often more if he allows himself to get too attached to a case. I’ve been watching him a few weeks now, noting the simple patterns to his life, working out where his strings are and how to pull them. Today is a special day. Today I bring him one step closer to apotheosis.
