Prayer for the Dead

by James Oswald

  ‘You already killed one of my friends. Got few enough of them as it is. Damned if I’m going to lose another.’

  71

  He sat on the edge of a stone sarcophagus, unsure if that was even the right word for it, as a paramedic wound a pure white bandage around his hand. McLean wasn’t quite sure if he was in shock or just working his way through the latter stages of mild concussion. Either way, the world had a surreal tinge to it that made some things indistinct whilst bringing others into sharp relief. It was fully dark now, the street lamps surrounded by their individual insect tribes. The trees rustled in a warm breeze and the night air brought sharp smells.

  ‘Here, drink this.’ A smiling, worried face hoved into view, bearing a mug of steaming tea. McLean took it, nodding gratefully before realising that it had been given to him by Mary Currie.

  ‘How’s DS … Kirsty?’ he asked.

  ‘She’ll be fine once the cuts heal. They’re only superficial. Going to need a new jacket, mind you.’ The minister sunk down on to the stone beside him. She smelled of old classrooms, he realised. Not those where he’d been humiliated in front of his peers by inadequate teachers, but the warm, dusty, sun-filled classrooms where he’d semi-dozed and listened to wonderful stories of Roman history, Celtic warriors and adventurous ancient Greeks. The classrooms where he’d discovered poetry and realised that God was a lie. The thought brought an ironic smile to his lips.

  ‘Norman. How terrible. And Daniel.’ Mary Currie sounded like she was in shock herself. She probably was, and yet she’d still made tea for the ever-growing number of police descending on her church. The crime scene.

  ‘He’s not Norman. Norman died when he was six years old.’

  Mary’s face wrinkled in puzzlement. ‘But he lives in the house. His parents …’

  McLean shook his head, winced in pain. ‘I don’t know. Smacked my head on a pew in there. Things will probably make more sense in the morning.’

  The minister said nothing more for a while. Then nodded towards the church door, wide open and with a young uniform constable standing guard outside.

  ‘Is he … Daniel?’

  As if to answer his question, a commotion from the church door spilled several paramedics and a couple of uniform officers out into the night, wheeling a gurney. One of the paramedics was holding a saline bag up high as they bustled past. Not something you did for a dead man.

  ‘He was alive when we found him. Poor bastard. Going to take some healing. Mental as well as physical.’

  ‘I’d better go with him. To the hospital.’ Mary Currie stood up again, too swiftly. She swayed slightly, putting a hand on McLean’s shoulder to steady herself. The contact was a reassurance, and it eased away the last of the fog from his brain.

  ‘I’ll make sure there’s a constable on the rectory door.’ He looked around at the bustle. ‘Not that I think anyone’s going to try and break in with this lot here.’

  ‘Thank you, Tony. You’re a good man.’ She gave him a weak smile and trotted off after the paramedics.

  ‘So everyone tells me,’ he said, but no one heard him.

  Detective Superintendent Duguid arrived long after the commotion had died down. His thinning hair was awry, and he had the look about him of a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. McLean spotted him climbing out of his car and going to speak to DCI Brooks, which meant he could duck out of sight behind an ornate carved headstone before he was seen.

  ‘Going somewhere, Inspector?’

  Jo Dalgliesh was leaning against the headstone, an unlit cigarette in her mouth. As press, she should technically have been ushered back past the crime-scene tape that surrounded the church and graveyard. DC MacBride must have said something, as all the policemen milling around were studiously ignoring her.

  ‘Keeping away from the boss, if I’m being honest. Not sure I can cope with a debriefing right now.’

  ‘Know how you feel. Going to be interesting breaking this one to the office.’

  ‘There’ll be a prize or two in it for you, I’d have thought.’

  ‘Aye. Mebbe. Ben died chasing this though. Feels a bit … I dunno.’

  ‘Is that a conscience I see growing?’

  ‘Fuck off, aye?’

  McLean risked a glance around the headstone, saw Duguid and Brooks in deep discussion, DI Spence hanging around them like a needy spaniel. They didn’t appear to be looking for him, which was all the encouragement he needed.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said to the reporter, then strode off towards the church and the shadows. She took a moment to catch up, taken by surprise. ‘Where we going?’

  ‘To find MacBride, maybe Ritchie if she’s not gone off to the hospital with her boyfriend.’

  That raised an eyebrow. ‘Thought there was something more going on there than just devotion to duty. Why’d you need my help? Thought you couldn’t stand the sight of me.’

  ‘My house is just over the road.’ McLean nodded in the general direction, then winced as the lump on the back of his head throbbed its disapproval. ‘Don’t know about anyone else, but I reckon I could do with a large dram. Figure I owe you one too. You probably saved my life back there, even if I did ask you to stay in the house with the minister.’

  ‘Probably?’ Dalgliesh pulled the cigarette out of her mouth, stopped walking for a moment as if insulted. Then she shook her head. ‘Aye, probably’s right enough. Probably.’

  72

  ‘He still claiming to be Norman Bale?’

  McLean stood in the observation room looking into interview room one. Through the one-way glass, the man who might be Norman Bale sat silently at the table, staring into the middle distance. Detective Superintendent Duguid held a long-fingered hand up to the glass as if he wanted to reach out and pluck the man’s head off.

  ‘That’s his story and he’s sticking to it. We couldn’t find any ID on him, but forensics put him all over the Bales’ house. He’s been living there a while now. Mary … the minister’s known him as Norman for at least five years. He’s a regular at the church, every Sunday without fail.’

  ‘So it could be him,’ Duguid said.

  McLean squinted through the glass at that thin, pale face. Tried to square it with the boy he’d known all those years ago. It was possible, he supposed. But how was it possible?

  ‘We’ve checked the hospital records. Norman Bale was admitted to the Sick Kids with leukaemia when he was six years old. He died shortly afterwards, according to the death certificate.’

  ‘And yet here he is.’ Duguid leaned against the glass, then backed off when the man at the interview table looked up at him.

  ‘His folks packed up and went to Africa not long after he died. Norman, that is. The real Norman. Left that old house empty for a good few years. Some kind of missionary work. My gran was very sceptical about it.’

  ‘She was sceptical about pretty much everything, if I remember right. Religion more than most.’

  McLean looked at Duguid in surprise. Of course the detective superintendent would have known his grandmother; she’d been a consultant pathologist at the city mortuary long into her retirement. Called in to comment on the more bizarre cases the city occasionally threw up. He just couldn’t remember Duguid ever having mentioned her before.

  ‘Strange, now you mention her. She never said anything about Norman to me. Or his parents, but she’d have known when they came back to Edinburgh.’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t really matter. Norman Bale or someone else. Odds on he killed them, creepy wee fuck that he is. The other three as well.’

  ‘I’ve a nasty feeling that’s just the start of it.’

  ‘What?’ Duguid’s face drained of colour.

  ‘Bale’s parents have been dead at least five years. That’s when they were supposed to have been buried. Ben Stevenson was killed just over eight weeks ago. You honestly think he’s been doing nothing all that time? I’d be digging up the unsolved case files, missing persons, that sort of thing.’

>   If anything, Duguid went even paler. ‘Don’t fucking complicate things, McLean. Leave that to the cold case boys. Just get a confession out of him.’

  McLean looked away from the detective superintendent, back to the interview room through the glass. Norman, or not Norman, was staring straight at him now, a slight frown on his face that sent a shiver down McLean’s spine.

  ‘Somehow I don’t think that’s going to be a problem, sir.’

  There was something unnerving about his calmness. That was the thing that struck McLean most as he took his seat in the interview room. A duty solicitor sat beside the man claiming to be Norman Bale, his chair a little further away from the accused than was perhaps polite. Another chair was still tucked under the table, Grumpy Bob having decided that he preferred to stand by the door. No one had complained so far.

  ‘You say your name is Norman Bale. That you’re the only child of Colin and Ina Bale. And yet our records show the real Norman Bale died when he was six years old.’

  ‘Records. You know as well as I do how easy it is to fake those, Tony.’

  McLean met that staring gaze, still trying to reconcile it with the boy he’d known all those years ago. Norman had called him Tony just that way, but he still couldn’t accept that this was indeed his old friend. If it was, then his grandmother had lied to him. That opened up an even nastier can of worms.

  ‘So you’re telling me your death was faked.’

  ‘Oh no. I died. God took me to his bosom. Medical science failed. But the Lord had plans for me, and so I was reborn.’

  ‘Straight away? Or did you spend some time in heaven before returning to this mortal plane?’

  ‘Time has no meaning there. It is just one endless moment of perfect bliss. You’d know that, Tony. If you just believed.’

  Bale, or not Bale, flicked his eyes to the right, looking briefly up as Grumpy Bob pulled the chair out from under the table and sat down. McLean paid the detective sergeant no heed, taking the time to study the man sitting opposite. For a moment he’d been uncertain, but in that one look he’d finally accepted that this wasn’t Norman Bale. Who he was would be a question for another investigation, another detective and maybe a team of psychologists. He was probably someone the Bales had taken in, a lodger or just a charity case. They had always been good people that way. Whoever this person was, he had insinuated himself into their lives, and maybe they had encouraged him. Maybe they, too, had seen something of their dead son in his eyes. Fooled themselves that he had returned.

  ‘OK. Let’s accept you are who you say you are. For now, at least. So tell me. Did you kill your parents, Norman?’

  Grumpy Bob flipped open his notebook and pretended to take notes, even though the whole interview was being recorded. DS Ritchie had wanted to attend, but she wasn’t long out of hospital, still on antibiotics for her cuts. And her relationship with Daniel meant she had been taken off the case. McLean wished he could beg the same favour.

  ‘I would advise you not to answer that, Norman.’ The duty solicitor’s enthusiasm was almost too feeble to measure. He appeared to have written this one off as an insanity plea already.

  ‘They were the first. The first time God showed me what my purpose in life was to be. After he sent me back to them.’ Norman’s voice was calm, matter of fact. As if he understood perfectly the situation he was in, accepted it as just another day.

  ‘Why did you kill them?’

  ‘They were such good people. You met them, you must have known. They prayed every day, went to church on Sunday, gave money to the poor, time to charities. Their whole lives were dedicated to His service. It was only a matter of time before their souls became pure. When they did, I knew at once what had to be done. A pure soul cannot survive long in this world without becoming corrupted, after all.’

  ‘So you killed them to save their souls?’ McLean didn’t try to hide the element of doubt in his voice.

  ‘It’s funny, really.’ Norman smiled like a shark, turning to the duty solicitor. ‘You have no hope. Your soul is a dirty thing. It will burn in eternal hellfire. You,’ he nodded at Grumpy Bob, ‘you’ll be judged at the end. Saint Peter will have his scales ready for you. I truly hope you won’t be found wanting. But you,’ and now he turned his gaze back to McLean, ‘you are so close, even though you don’t know it, won’t admit that you even have a soul at all. You are like Ben and Jim, Daniel and all the others, just needing that little push. You were to be my next project.’

  ‘Were to be?’ McLean suppressed the shudder that wanted to run through him. The way Bale spoke, the way he acted, suggested he thought of his current situation as nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

  ‘God has other plans for me.’ He shrugged. ‘And for you.’

  The electronic warbling of his phone was a welcome distraction from the enormous pile of paperwork threatening to bury him. They might have caught Bale, or whoever he really was, but three major incident enquiries still had to be wound up, overtime accounted for, staff rosters reorganised. The clean-up was always messy.

  ‘McLean.’ He cradled the phone in the crook of his shoulder, needing both hands to shore up a particularly precarious stack of report folders.

  ‘Seems I owe you an apology, Inspector.’

  ‘Who is this … ah, Chief Superintendent.’ McLean took a moment to recognise the voice of Tim Chambers. ‘Is there something I can help you with?’

  ‘Oh, you have already. Ms Violet Grainger, to be precise.’

  ‘You found her?’

  ‘In London, yes. Holed up in the Savoy, of all places. I wanted to let you know. And to thank you for putting us on to her. All those months and years wasted chasing up the two McClymonts and we never got anywhere. Soon as we started looking at the secretary though, the whole thing fell apart.’

  ‘The whole thing? I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about, sir.’

  ‘Really?’ Chambers sounded sceptical. ‘Oh well. It’ll all come out at the trial. Good a piece of misdirection as I’ve ever seen. No wonder we couldn’t pin anything on father and son. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if they didn’t know half of what was going on themselves. Except that young Joe was the wizard with the cars. His old man probably didn’t have a clue what they were doing though.’

  ‘So what were they doing?’ McLean steadied the folders, picked up a pen and scribbled on a notepad to check whether it worked or not.

  ‘Stealing top-end motors. Giving them a new identity. Shipping some of them overseas. That was one half of it. The other half was a very slick drugs operation. All the proceeds went through the development company. Our forensic accountants are salivating over the details right now, and trust me it takes a lot to get them excited.’

  McLean didn’t doubt it. The very idea of forensic accountancy made him feel thirsty.

  ‘Just wanted to thank you, really,’ Chambers continued. ‘If you hadn’t put us on to the secretary, we’d have had to tuck this one away as unsolved. Hate having to do that.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad I was a help.’ McLean wasn’t sure that he had been, but he’d take the compliment anyway.

  ‘Yes, well. If you ever get bored of Edinburgh, give us a shout. Could use a few more detectives who can think outside the box.’

  ‘Umm … thanks. I’ll bear it in mind,’ McLean said, but Chambers had already hung up.

  Scaffolding clung to the building facades like metal ivy, yellow and black safety tape wound around it in a parody of flowers. The remains of the burnt-out shops had been bulldozed, leaving just the street door and staircase up to Madame Rose’s house. It looked strangely out of place, a gimcrack addition to the building now that the structures to either side were gone.

  A month on since she had left his house, taking her cats with her, and McLean had seen and heard nothing from his guest. He still had her letter with its strangely cryptic ending, and he couldn’t stop dwelling on the improbable set of coincidences that had led to the discovery of Jim Whitely
’s body and the capture of the man claiming to be Norman Bale. If they hadn’t been investigating the McClymonts, they would still be struggling to make any headway in the Ben Stevenson case, digging deep into the unhappy life of Maureen Shenks. They were all tragic deaths, but hers was the most depressing. Killed simply because she was in the way. Dumped like garbage.

  He was with the psychologists now, Norman. Or not Norman. Happy to talk to anyone, it seemed. Some of the senior detectives were worried he was going to get away with an insanity plea, but McLean wasn’t much bothered. It was enough that he’d been caught. There wasn’t really any doubt that the man was insane, whoever he was. Perhaps spending the rest of his life in a secure psychiatric home was the best thing for him.

  Shaking his head at the thought, McLean tried the door. It was locked, and a sign in the window said ‘Closed during building works. Regular customers please call.’ He pulled his phone out to make a note of the number, but movement in the corner of his eye dragged his attention away for a moment. He couldn’t see what it was at first, then noticed a single cat standing in one of the upper floor windows. It stared at him, blinked lazily, then jumped down from its perch, disappearing into the dark room beyond. McLean stood for a while, waiting to see if it would come back.

  ‘Load of old rubbish that is, fortune telling. Don’t waste your money on it, dear.’

  He turned to see a little old lady wheeling a tartan shopping trolley down the pavement. She nodded at him as she passed, and before he could say anything she was gone. He still had his phone in his hand, ready to take down the number. There was no need though, he realised. And nothing to be gained from asking the questions he really didn’t want to ask. He clicked off the phone and slipped it back into his pocket, began the long walk back to the station.

  Acknowledgements

  The arcane process of writing is a solitary thing, but every finished book is a team effort. I am very lucky to have a great crew behind me, polishing my grubby little words until they shine. A huge thanks to Alex and all the team at Michael Joseph for making these books as good as they can be. Thanks, too, to Katya and the publicity team who do such a brilliant job of telling the world all about me.