by James Oswald
‘And you’ve tried calling him?’
‘He’s not answering his mobile. Don’t think they’ve got a working land line. I’d have gone round, but –’
‘It’s OK, Ruth. We’ve got this now.’ McLean put on his best reassuring voice, hoping it would help. ‘Why don’t you give Malky’s details to Sergeant Stephen here. We’ll send a squad car round to check, and then get someone to take you home. That OK, Kenny?’
‘Fine by me, sir. Always got time for Morningstar.’
McLean stood up, motioning for Tennant to stay as she went to do the same. ‘Stay here, Ruth. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ He turned to Harrison. ‘OK, Constable, you’re with me. Let’s go and see what’s missing.’
The damage and destruction seemed to get worse as they moved towards the back of the house. McLean recalled the corridor leading to Chalmers’ office as a clutter of stationery cabinets and piles of cardboard boxes. Now the boxes were tumbled about the floor, the cabinets wrenched open and their contents thrown out, as if by a toddler impatient to get to their favourite toys. They picked a careful route through the mess, entering the office to find its light already on. It hadn’t so much been searched as ransacked. Chairs lay on their backs, cushions slashed open and stuffing strewn all around. The photographs of Chalmers posing with the great and good had all been ripped from the walls. They lay in a pile in the middle of the room, snapped frames and broken glass speaking eloquently of a deep-rooted hatred for their subject. McLean looked for the picture of Dalgliesh and the other reporters that he had noticed before but if it was there, he couldn’t see it. Harrison made to step into the room, but he put up his arm, held her back.
‘Best not to upset too much before Forensics get here, aye?’ They’d have their work cut out making sense of it all in any case. Whoever had been through the room had pulled out the drawers of the desk, one by one, and turned them upside down over the surface before throwing them aside. McLean pulled out a pair of latex gloves, knowing he was going to get a bollocking from Jemima Cairns for messing up her nice tidy crime scene. He picked a way through the detritus and edged carefully around the desk until he could see the holes where the drawers had been. Scattered over the surface and all around the upturned chair was everything McLean had seen the last time he had been here. It was impossible to get any closer without disturbing things, but amongst all the broken pens, old CD-Roms and power adapters for long-forgotten equipment he could see no glint of shiny silver, no cigar cutter with its curious inscription.
As he crouched down on his haunches, he caught a whiff of something unpleasant, too. Blocked drains, or something similar. He’d smelled it before, at Chalmers’ house in Fife, so maybe it was something to do with the man himself. Then again, McLean hadn’t noticed it the first time he’d been here, sat in that chair, gone through those drawers.
‘What were you looking for?’ He thought he’d asked the question under his breath, but the words must have carried across the silent room.
‘Sir?’ Harrison still stood in the doorway, arms by her sides in an uncomfortable stance as if she thought her mere presence might somehow contaminate the crime scene. Fair point: neither of them should have been mucking about here before Forensics arrived.
‘Nothing. Just wondering what happened here, and where poor Malky Davison has got to.’ He stood up slowly, stepped carefully back to the door. ‘I’ve a horrible feeling it’s not anywhere good.’
The house was dark as McLean pulled up the drive and parked his car by the back door. A quick glance at his watch showed that it was the wrong side of midnight: another long day. Mrs McCutcheon’s cat stared up at him from her favourite winter spot in front of the Aga, blinking angrily as he flicked on the lights. She stood up, arched her back and then leapt on to the kitchen table, pausing only briefly to sniff at the plate of what looked like a healthy salad that Emma had left unfinished. Or perhaps barely started would be a more accurate description. For a moment McLean thought she might have left it out for him, but he dismissed the idea just as swiftly. He opened the fridge and pulled out the plate of cold pizza left over from the previous night, considered a beer to wash it down, then thought better of it. Bad enough to eat and then go straight to bed; drinking wouldn’t help at all. Not even a dram from the drinks cabinet hidden behind a secret panel in one of the library bookcases. He had to be in the station in just a few hours’ time for the morning briefing, after all.
Stifling a yawn, he sat down at the table and worked his way methodically through the pizza, not aware quite how hungry he had been until it was all gone and he found himself picking at Emma’s wilted salad. He slid both plates away, sat back in his chair and glanced up at the clock on the wall. There really weren’t enough hours left until he had to get up and go to work again, but his mind was still churning away, trying to make sense of the puzzle that was Bill Chalmers, his death and the events that had happened since. Maybe a dram and a few minutes of staring at the library wall would help.
Mrs McCutcheon’s cat gave him an evil glare as he went to scrape the remains of Emma’s salad into her bowl. She was right, of course. Lettuce, tomato and a few shavings of hard cheese were not a suitable meal for an obligate carnivore. Instead, he shoved them all in the bin before sliding the plates into the last spaces in the dishwasher. It hummed into life as he left the room and headed for the library.
Switching off the kitchen lights plunged him into total darkness. He didn’t mind. This was his home, the house where he had grown up. He knew it as well as he knew anything, the way it creaked and groaned, the smells, the exact number of steps it took to get from one end of the corridor to the other, where it opened on to the hall. He walked on silent feet, relaxed in a way he couldn’t be anywhere else. It was madness, keeping this house. Just him and Em rattling around in a place big enough for the most promiscuous of Victorian families. But he could never think of selling, moving. Where would he go?
Enough light filtered in through the library windows for McLean to be able to see his way to his favourite armchair. A table beside it held a lamp, and he flicked it on, blinking as the dull brightness shattered the dark. Something moved on the sofa, groaning as if it were in pain.
‘Em?’ McLean hurried over as the shadowy shapes resolved themselves into a person lying on their back, head bent at an awkward angle. The television wasn’t on, and the stereo was switched off. No hiss thunk of a record on the turntable left playing while she had fallen asleep. She hadn’t wrapped herself in a blanket either, despite the unlit fire and the chill in the air. It looked like she had simply collapsed.
‘Em?’ He knelt beside her, reached a hand to her hair and gently eased it away from her face. She was dressed for work: sensible shoes, jeans, thick, woolly jumper over a cotton blouse. He could see she was breathing, but that was scant reassurance given what she had been through. Memories flickered in his mind, of finding her in a very different place, years earlier. Naked and bruised, handcuffed to an old iron bedstead, unconscious. It had taken the best part of six months for her to wake from that trauma.
‘Em?’ He brushed her cheek with the back of his hand, feeling a coldness there where she should have been vibrant and warm. She stirred at his touch, her lips parting to emit another low, pained moan. It sounded almost like speech, but no language he had ever heard. Under her closed eyelids, he could see her eyes flicking this way and that, like those of a terrified child.
‘Em. Wake up.’ This time McLean placed a hand on Emma’s shoulder and shook her more firmly, willing her to wake. It took a long time, too long, but slowly the moaning quieted to nothing. Her eyes stilled, then slowly opened. A confused frown spread across her face.
‘Tony? Where am …? What …?’ She tried to move her head and sit up, then winced. ‘Ow.’
‘Careful. Think you must have cricked your neck.’ McLean reached an arm under Emma’s shoulder and helped ease her upright. She stretched gingerly, not risking another spasm, then looked around the librar
y with wide eyes.
‘How did I get in here?’ Emma started shivering. ‘Jesus, it’s cold. What time is it?’
‘Late.’
She looked around the darkened room, eyes wide so that the whites glowed in the lamplight. ‘I don’t even remember coming in here. I was in the kitchen, then …’
The words drifted away to nothing, but he could hear the tension in them, the worry. McLean put an arm around her shoulder and helped her up. She leaned into him, shivering more violently now. How long had she been lying there in the dark?
‘Let’s get you to bed, OK?’ He steered her towards the door, all thoughts of a late night dram gone, along with the tumbling thoughts of the day. There was just one overriding worry now. ‘And tomorrow we’ll see about getting you an appointment with Dr Wheeler.’
18
The ringing phone was a welcome relief from a morning spent wading through paperwork. Somewhere else in the building, the investigation into Bill Chalmers’ murder was chugging along, consuming resources without getting very far, overseen by Grumpy Bob and Acting DI Ritchie. McLean wanted to be in the action with them but, in truth, he knew there was none. The break-in at the offices of Morningstar so soon after the mews house suggested a line of enquiry that might be fruitful, but until Jemima Cairns had finished going over both scenes with her finest-toothed comb, they were stuck waiting.
‘McLean.’ He clamped the headset against his hunched shoulder, one hand closing the folder he had been working on while the other darted out to catch the pile it had come from to stop it tumbling to the floor.
‘Control here. You put a request out for any sightings of Malcolm Davison?’
‘Malcolm …’ McLean took a while to join the dots. ‘Malky. Aye. Have you found him?’ McLean’s excitement died almost as soon as it sparked; he wouldn’t have been getting the call from Control if they’d found Malky alive.
‘In a manner of speaking. Call’s just come in about an unidentified male found in an abandoned flat in Muirhouse. Drug addict. Looks like he’s OD’d. No’ sure if he’s your man, but the description fits.’
‘Muirhouse?’ McLean pictured the concrete tower blocks, grey and foggy. One of the city’s more spectacularly failed social experiments. An investigation had taken him out there just the year before. Another suspicious death, but not drugs that time. Or at least not any drugs the labs had been able to identify. ‘Anyone from Specialist Crime assigned to it?’
‘No’ yet. Reckon if it’s your man you’ll be wanting to look into it yourself.’
McLean weighed the options. If someone else started investigating and it turned out to be Malky after all, then he’d have to go over everything the other detective had already done, which would waste time and add to the pile of shift allocation forms stacking up on his desk. On the other hand, if he found himself a spare detective constable, headed over to the crime scene now and it turned out not to be Malky, then he would have wasted a morning better spent concentrating on Chalmers. Except that a morning away from the paperwork was never really wasted, was it?
‘Send me the details. I’ll head over straight away.’
The trip to Muirhouse was mercifully swift, DC Harrison proving to be as skilful a driver as she was at finding a pool car in the first place. She wasn’t too chatty either, which suited McLean just fine. He found it easier to think while moving, preferred to walk the streets in search of inspiration than sit at his desk and feel the weight of the bureaucracy crushing in on him. Sitting in a car was a good compromise; it would have taken all day to walk to the crime scene. As it was, light traffic meant the journey took little more than half an hour, and soon they were being shown through the police cordon and into a derelict council house, its windows boarded up in anticipation of redevelopment. Judging by the layers of graffiti and stinking piles of garbage in the mouldy hallway, the anticipation had been going on for quite some time.
‘Scene of Crime here?’ he asked of the uniform constable standing at the door. The young man nodded and pointed up the street a few paces. McLean almost didn’t recognize the forensics van. It was new, for one thing, and sported a strange logo on the rear doors. If it hadn’t been for the familiar sight of Dr Cairns in a full white body suit, he might have thought it was a council van or something from one of the utility companies. She greeted him with a surly scowl as he approached.
‘You’ll need a suit if you’re going in,’ she said, opening up the back of the van as he approached. She brought out a plastic-wrapped overall and a clipboard. ‘And you’ll have to sign for it, too.’
McLean raised an eyebrow. ‘Sign?’
‘Aye. Everything’s got to be accounted for.’ Cairns grimaced. ‘Welcome to the private sector.’
‘Private …? I thought it was meant to be a public–private partnership.’ McLean recalled a meeting, a couple of incomprehensible memos. Something to do with cost-cutting and rationalization and an empty assurance that nothing would really change. Was this what Emma had been moaning about?
‘Don’t get me started, OK?’ Cairns waggled the clipboard at him, so he signed it. The paper overalls were no more comfortable than before, and he managed to rip the seam on one leg pulling it on. So the cost-cutting had started early.
‘Where’s the body?’ he asked, as the forensic scientist continued scribbling away at her clipboard.
‘First floor.’ Cairns paused for long enough to point in the direction of one of the windows. Above ground level they hadn’t been boarded up and the glass reflected grey clouds. A cold wind blowing in off the Forth made McLean glad of the thin extra layer as he trudged back to the house, where DC Harrison was still chatting with the uniform constable.
‘You stay here. Get all the details down for the report.’ He stepped into the hallway, nose wrinkling at the stench. Stone steps led up to the first-floor flats, bounded on one side by an iron handrail he wouldn’t want to touch even with gloved hands. ‘I’ll go see if this really is our man.’
He needn’t have worried. Surrounded by the city pathologist, his assistant, a crime scene photographer and another white-suited technician, Malcolm ‘Malky’ Davison didn’t look all that different from the last time McLean had seen him, except that he was lying on his back and staring at the ceiling with dead eyes rather than handing him a cup of coffee. His face was still the colour of sun-bleached cardboard, a sallow sepia tint flecked with dark pockmarks. His mouth hung slightly open, revealing the jagged brown teeth of an addict, and his eyes were bloodshot and yellow. Lank hair splayed out on the cushion behind his head as if he were posing for some alternative fashion magazine, an image not helped by the way his right arm reached behind him, crooked at the elbow. Peering closer, McLean saw the left arm lying straight, a tell-tale tourniquet hanging around the scrawny bicep where it had been loosened once the vein had been found.
‘Not much more we can do with him here.’ Angus Cadwallader pushed himself back from the body, struggling off his knees and into a standing position with much groaning and creaking of joints. Only once he had steadied himself against the wall did he turn and notice McLean standing behind him. ‘Oh, Tony. What a pleasant surprise.’
McLean was about to come back with a quip of his own when he noticed the crime scene photographer look up at him. She was wearing the full white bunny suit, complete with overboots and hood, which was probably why he hadn’t recognized her before. He felt a bit of an idiot all the same.
‘Emma? Is that you?’
She smiled, then stuck her tongue out at him before holding up the camera and taking a couple of pictures of his face. McLean opened his mouth to comment, concerned after the way he had found her the night before. This wasn’t the time, though, or the place. He switched his attention to the pathologist as Cadwallader helped his assistant up from the floor.
‘What’s the story, Angus?’
‘He’s dead. Looks like an overdose. We’ll know better once I’ve got him back to the mortuary.’
‘How long,
roughly?’
Cadwallader let out a weary sigh. ‘You always ask. His core temperature’s the same as the room and he’s past rigor mortis, so more than a few hours at least. I’ll get you a better idea as soon as I can schedule him for a PM. I take it he’s not just some poor unfortunate junkie, then?’
‘He was, but that was a while back. I was told he’d long since quit the habit. Name’s Malky Davison. He works – worked I should say – for Morningstar. I met him just a couple of days ago. He made me a nice cup of coffee.’
Cadwallader looked once more at the dead body, nodded his head. ‘Morningstar. I see. Well, I guess that would explain why a detective inspector would turn up to a place like this. I’ll see if I can’t get him to the head of the queue.’
‘Thanks, Angus. I’ve a horrible feeling this is going to get messy.’
‘Doesn’t it always when you’re involved, Tony?’ Cadwallader’s smile was genuine, but the sentiment rang too true for McLean to appreciate the joke. He shook his head gently and stepped aside so that the pathologist and his assistant could make good their escape.
‘This how he was found?’ he asked.
Emma was busy taking photographs, but she turned to face him at the question. ‘It’s how he was when I got here, for sure. No one from Forensics has moved him.’
McLean crouched down beside the body, seeing the all too familiar signs of overdose. Malky had kept his gear in a little zip-up wash bag, not unlike the one McLean had been given by his grandmother when he first went off to boarding school and which he was still using almost forty years later. It lay beside him, edges frayed, the apparatus of his drug-taking neatly arranged. By all accounts, this was a simple case; easy to guess why the reformed addict had slipped off the wagon, too. The high-profile death of his employer, sudden close scrutiny by the press and the police. That was enough surely to send someone back to their old, bad habits. So why did it all seem so wrong? So … staged.
