by James Oswald
DCI Spence laughed, Brooks glowered, but the DCC sat a bit more upright. ‘A dragon? How so?’
‘He said he could hear its wings beating, which makes me think it was actually a helicopter, possibly with some kind of stealth technology. What the hell it was doing flying over the city in the dark I’ve no idea, but if it was throwing people out I doubt it would have bothered with flight plans.’
‘Stealth technology? Isn’t that a bit far-fetched?’ DCI Spence asked.
‘So we’re going with the dragon, then?’ McLean couldn’t help himself. ‘I’ll have Grumpy Bob stop by the zoo once he’s finished talking to the control tower at the airport.’
‘This is no joking matter, McLean. A man’s dead, and in highly irregular circumstances. We’ve got a major enquiry on our hands. Last thing we need is you not taking the job seriously.’ Unlike his boss Brooks, whose fat face tended to redden as he angered, blood draining from cheeks and forehead was a sure sign that Spence was about to lose his temper. The little tic about his left eye was another tell-tale. Both were clearly evident now.
‘I’m deadly serious, Mike. Reckon we should probably call in some experts on dragons, too. I think Tolkien’s dead, but I’m sure there’s some other fantasy writers out there who’d be happy to help.’
The tic worsened, his left eye narrowing as if he were trying to suppress a cheeky wink. For a moment McLean thought Spence might be about to have a stroke, then the DCC cut in.
‘You know the both of you are acting like schoolkids. No, Mike. You are. And Tony, you’re not much better. I don’t know what’s going on between the two of you, but park it or I’ll find a nice beat assignment for one or other of you over in Glasgow. Maybe even both of you.’
McLean kept his mouth shut, knowing better than to provoke Call-me-Stevie’s wrath. Spence had clearly missed that particular lesson.
‘Sir, do I need to point out that I am senior to Detective Inspector McLean? If he had any respect for the job, any respect for the chain of –’
‘Oh, do shut up, Mike. It’s not a pissing contest. You said it yourself, a man’s dead. He seems to have been killed in a very messy and public way. That means we’re going to have to work damned hard to solve this quickly and cleanly. If your ego can’t cope with McLean being in charge, I suggest you go and make yourself useful elsewhere.’
Spence sat back in his chair as if he’d been slapped, but not before shooting a look at McLean that suggested trouble in the near future. For his own part, McLean was trying to work out what the DCC’s angle was. He’d been played by Call-me-Stevie before, after all, and an innocent woman had died because of it.
‘You want me heading up the investigation, sir?’ he asked.
‘Yes, McLean. I do. No point anyone else going over the same ground.’ The DCC looked pointedly at Spence. ‘And besides, this has a whiff of the strange about it. I believe that’s your area of expertise.’
If McLean hadn’t known the DCC had a rubbish poker face, he might have thought it was meant as a joke. However, the look Robinson gave him was one of pure sincerity.
‘OK. But I’m going to get it in the neck when I get home.’ McLean paused for a moment, savouring the unusual taste of those words in his mouth. It was a very long time since there had been something, or someone, worth hurrying home at the end of the day for. ‘What about resources? We’re stretched pretty thin as it is, what with Carter back in uniform, half the detective sergeants gone and Kirsty here getting the boot up to DI.’
‘Acting DI.’ Brooks laid heavy emphasis on the first word, cutting into the conversation before the DCC could respond. ‘You can work with McLean on this one, Ritchie. You’ve got Grumpy Bob still, and DC Gregg. I’ll see if we can’t poach a couple of uniforms, too. There’s been a few applications come across my desk recently.’
‘Just keep an eye on the budget. We’re all having to tighten our belts.’ The DCC pushed his chair away from the table and stood up; meeting over on that happy note. McLean stood as well, keen to get out of the room before Spence started whining again.
‘There was just one other thing, sir,’ he said. ‘Not sure if it’s relevant to the case or just a coincidence. But the boy, the one who was there when the body fell into the trees, who thought it was a dragon.’
‘What about him? Thought you said he wasn’t exactly a reliable witness.’
‘What he thinks he saw or heard isn’t relevant, no, sir. But I was surprised when I found out he was Tommy Johnston’s son.’
‘Tommy Johnston? You sure?’ The DCC shook his head. ‘No, course you’re sure. You wouldn’t have said it otherwise. Bloody hell. I didn’t even know he had a son.’
‘Came as a surprise to me, too. But like I said, I don’t think it’s relevant. The boy’s just ten, so he can’t have known his dad. Just a weird coincidence.’
‘Aye, well. I hope you’re right, McLean. Last thing we need is that can of worms opened up again.’
The major incident room on the second floor had been rewired and given a lick of paint since last McLean had been in it. The carpet still bore the same stains, though, and the ceiling was missing a few acoustic tiles where extra network cables had been run. He had been expecting a bustle of noise and busyness, but when he pushed open the door there was hardly anyone about. A couple of technicians muttered under their breath as they fought to connect up a long line of elderly computers, and a lone detective constable was going from phone to phone, picking up the receiver and checking for a line. She turned as she heard the door open, smiled when she saw who had entered.
‘Heard you were back, sir. Is it true we’re hunting down dragons now?’
Once again, McLean was amazed at the speed with which gossip could spread across the city’s police force, although, on reflection, if anyone was going to know exactly what was happening when, where and with whom, then it would be DC Sandra Gregg. Once she started talking it was often difficult to get her to stop, but somehow she managed to be a good listener at the same time. It was a powerful combination in the interrogation room. He’d watched many a hardened criminal crumble under the onslaught of words, saying anything just to get the mindless chatter to stop, then finding themselves trapped by their own desperation.
‘Thought there might be a few more bodies in here. Grumpy Bob not back from the airport yet?’
‘Don’t think he’s even been, sir. Said he had to phone and make an appointment. Last I heard, he was negotiating with the duty sergeant over staffing. You know as well as I do how thin we’re all spread.’
‘Aye, well. I work best with a small team.’
‘There’s small and there’s ridiculous, sir.’ Gregg made a slow pirouette, taking in the whole of the room. ‘How are we meant to get anything done? We should be collating all the crime scene reports, going over the interviews, speaking to next of kin.’
‘Slow down a bit, Constable. We don’t even have an ID on the dead man yet.’ McLean held his hands up as if Gregg were running towards him and needed warding off. Then a worrying thought occurred to him. ‘We don’t have an ID, do we?’
‘Not that I’ve heard yet, sir. But a man’s dead.’
He checked his watch. Past lunchtime, but not by much. ‘Yes, a man is dead. And by our best reckoning he died sometime between half five and six this morning, so only about nine hours ago. There were no witnesses as such. Nothing more we can do until we’ve got an ID at the very least. So instead of fretting about the reports and checking the phones, why don’t you chase up the crime scene photographer and see if we can’t find some decent mug shots? Get an artist’s impression drawn up, though; he was too badly injured to release a photo to the public. Especially after he fell out of the tree.’
‘He fell?’ So there was a bit of gossip Gregg hadn’t picked up on.
‘On his head, yes. There was a safety airbag underneath, but it was still messy. Not much in the way of identifying features left, apparently.’
Gregg went pale, what was going
on in her imagination writ large across her face. McLean struggled to think of something to distract her, but was interrupted by his phone before he could come up with anything. A simple text message flickered across the screen, and he thumbed it away before slipping the handpiece back into his jacket pocket.
‘That’s Angus. He’s scheduled the post mortem for an hour’s time. Apparently, being dropped out of the sky by a dragon gets you bumped up the queue.’
‘You heading over there then, sir?’
McLean looked around the incident room, slowly coming to life as more officers filtered in. ‘You know me, can’t keep away from the place. It shouldn’t take long, though. Meantime, have a word with Sergeant Hwei, set up a press conference for teatime. God help us, but we’re going to need their help on this one.’
5
The walk to the city mortuary was one McLean had made far too often in his career. Not many detectives attended post mortems any more; you could get all the information you needed from the report usually, and it wasn’t exactly the most pleasant of experiences, watching the dead being opened up. Bad enough to have been killed, in an accident, by a jealous partner, in a blind rage or, more infrequently, in a cold and calculated execution; worse still to have all your most personal secrets revealed by the pathologist’s knife. And yet he couldn’t help but believe he owed it to these people. He was charged with finding the truth of what had happened to them, however extraordinary or banal. Not to witness their final examination in person felt like a betrayal.
His grandmother had been a pathologist, too. That helped. The smells of the mortuary didn’t turn his stomach in the same way they did those of other detectives. Sometimes he even found comfort in the whiff of formalin, the tang of antiseptic and the butcher’s shop dead-meat stench. They reminded him of childhood, in a slightly macabre way. Not that he would ever admit that to anyone. Not even his old friend Angus Cadwallader.
‘Good of you to come, Tony.’ The pathologist greeted him with a cheerier smile than he had managed early that morning. He was all togged up in his scrubs when the inspector arrived, and for once didn’t bother with the small talk. ‘Just waiting for Tom to come back from the loo and we can get started.’
As if on cue, the door to the examination theatre swung open and Dr Tom MacPhail came in. ‘Tony.’ He nodded a greeting, then hauled himself on to a small stool set up by the X-ray viewing light boxes on the back wall, ready to observe his boss at work and corroborate any findings.
‘Subject is male, Caucasian, approximately 170 to 180 centimetres tall. Impossible to give an exact height due to damage caused to the skull by a post-mortem fall from a tree.’ Cadwallader worked his way around the body, poking and prodding and peering close at times, speaking to the microphone that hung above the examination table. His assistant, Dr Sharp, stood close by, but not so close as to get in the way. She seemed to know exactly when to hand over each shiny steel instrument of torture or hold up a dish for some removed organ to be placed into. No need for words as they danced around each other like lovers. McLean found himself fascinated by the performance, barely paying attention to the examination itself, or the mess of the dead man’s injuries. It wasn’t until the pathologist stopped mid-sentence and bent down to the body again that he was pulled back into the reality of the situation.
‘Ah, now that is interesting.’
‘Interesting?’ McLean took a step forward, then stopped, unwilling to get too close.
‘Poor fellow suffered some horrible damage when he hit the tree. He’s got multiple lacerations from broken branches. They really ripped him up. I’ve seen less damage from car crashes.’
‘Is that what killed him?’
Cadwallader gave McLean a toothy grin. ‘Technically, I’d go with massive blood loss but, effectively, yes. He’s got at least two large punctures in his abdomen. The shock of hitting the branches might have killed him, but if it didn’t he would have bled out in seconds anyway. That’s not what’s interesting, though. Well, not from your point of view, I don’t think.’
‘What have you got, then?’
‘Two things, really. Come here.’ Cadwallader beckoned McLean forward, and he reluctantly complied. Closer up, it was easy to see the extent of the damage inflicted on the body. Enough to make him glad he’d missed lunch.
‘What am I looking at?’
‘There’s a couple of tattoos. Here and here.’ Cadwallader lifted a shattered arm and pointed to some dark swirls on the shoulder, then traced his finger across to the opposite chest, where more markings showed through the mess, broken up by rips in the flesh. ‘We’ll get them cleaned up and photographed. Might help in identification.’
McLean tried to get a better look without stepping any closer to the body, but the markings on the dead man’s skin were too indistinct. ‘Was that the two things, or just one?’
‘You know me too well, Tony. No, the tattoos were just one thing. The other is more puzzling. See here?’ Cadwallader pointed to the man’s sides. Unlike his arms and the front of his body, which were ripped and torn as if he had been set upon by a plague of hungry rats, his sides were only lightly scratched. Dark bruises mottled the pale skin, tingeing yellow at the edges.
‘These bruises are from something that happened to him before he died. Not long before, but at least a few minutes. Maybe half an hour. I’d say he’d been lying on the ground and been given a good kicking. Seen plenty of bodies with bruising like that. Too many, really.’
‘I can sense a but coming.’ McLean tilted his head sideways, the better to see what the pathologist was talking about. If he squinted, he could see a regular pattern to the bruises, not the amorphous mess more normally associated with a punishment beating.
‘Sadly, yes.’ Cadwallader leaned in close, pointing with his gore-smeared gloved hand. ‘There are distinct areas of discolouration, and the bruising is very uniform. It’s more like a ligature mark than an impact.’
‘You think he was tied up?’
‘Something like that, though it’s quite extensive for rope. More like he’s been crushed in something. Oh, and he shat himself.’
McLean looked up sharply, expecting a cheeky grin on Cadwallader’s face and not being disappointed. ‘ “Shat”? Is that a technical term?’
‘Not really, and it’s not unusual when someone’s terrified. Bowel sphincter loosens, stomach muscles contract and out it all comes.’
‘Charming,’ McLean said, but the image sparked a memory and he found himself looking at his hand. ‘The waste bag in your car, Angus. Where you chuck all your used overalls and gloves. You emptied that recently?’
Cadwallader stared at him, bemused, then over to his assistant. ‘Tracy?’ he asked, hopefully. Her shrug suggested the bag was probably still there.
‘I can go and check,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘My handkerchief. I used it to wipe something foul off my hand. It splattered on a tenement door in Marchmont Crescent, where the little boy who found this bloke lived. Thought it was local kids playing pranks with dog mess, but what if it was the victim’s?’
‘I was beginning to worry you’d not got the memo, sir. Can’t have a press conference without the chief investigating officer present.’
McLean tried to give DC Gregg a reassuring smile, but his heart wasn’t really in it. He’d gone back to the crime scene after witnessing the post mortem, hoping to find inspiration in the long walk from the Cowgate to the Meadows. Nothing had come of it except a long list of questions that wouldn’t be answered easily. Even more frustrating was the discovery that some helpful person had cleaned the muck from the tenement door, wall and railings. He’d need to find out if there had been a history of such vandalism in the area. It might simply have been a coincidence, same as it was probably a coincidence that the dead body had been found by Tommy Johnston’s son. He didn’t really believe in coincidences, though.
‘Everything set to go, then?’
‘Aye, we’re on at half four. That sh
ould give them plenty of time to get stuff out on the six o’clock news.’ Gregg produced a sheet of paper, fresh from the colour printer, and handed it over. ‘We’ve just got this through, too. I’m running off enough copies for everyone.’
McLean took the sheet and looked at the picture. Artist’s impressions were always a bit hit and miss, and this time there hadn’t been much in the way of detail to work with. He stared at the face of a late-middle-aged man, with short greying hair and featureless eyes. It could have been anyone’s dad, somewhere in that indeterminate decade between mid-fifties and mid-sixties. Bulky around the cheeks and chin. The artist had given up with the nose. Understandable, since falling into the tree canopy hadn’t left much to work with.
‘Ring any bells?’ Gregg asked, and the more McLean stared at it the more he felt that perhaps the image did. This wasn’t some random stranger but someone he had met. Had shaken hands with and looked in the eye.
‘I’ve a horrible feeling he might have been one of us once.’
‘One of us?’ Gregg asked.
‘A copper. Possibly even plain clothes, but before your time.’ McLean tilted the page back and forth, struggling for the memory. Then it came to him, a spreading sensation of cold in the pit of his stomach. ‘Oh fuck –’
‘They’re all ready and waiting, sir.’ Sergeant Dan Hwei, the station’s senior press liaison officer, popped his head around the door to the conference room, interrupting McLean as he stared at the picture with horrified fascination.
‘What? Oh. Right.’ McLean handed the page to DC Gregg, not quite ready to share his suspicion with the rest of the world. ‘Get on to the labs, will you? See if they can’t prioritize the DNA screening. I’ve a horrible feeling I know who this is, and I really want someone to prove me wrong.’
Something about a room filled with journalists always brought a chill to McLean’s heart. He understood the need for reporters, at least on an intellectual level, but faced with the reality of a mass of them congregated in one place, his first instinct was to run, his second to hide. It was childish, really, but then so was the behaviour of Brooks, Spence and Robinson, none of whom had deigned to turn up to the press conference. Ritchie and McIntyre at least had an excuse, having been called to HQ, but that didn’t make the lack of support any easier to deal with. Beside him there was only Sergeant Hwei and a couple of uniform constables who had strayed into the wrong room by mistake. Even Grumpy Bob had found somewhere else to be, but then that was his particular skill.
