Written in Bones: Inspector McLean 7

by James Oswald

  ‘So there’s nothing in Emma’s brain that’s causing these blackouts?’ McLean asked.

  ‘Nothing at all. In fact I’m astonished at how well she’s healed. If I didn’t know better, I’d say there was no way she could have suffered such a massive head trauma just three years ago.’

  ‘So what’s causing it?’ Emma’s question was so sudden, so unexpected, that McLean almost jumped out of his seat. ‘Why do I keep falling asleep? Why did I collapse in the middle of a crime scene? Have you any idea how embarrassing that is?’

  ‘Em. Please.’ McLean placed a hand on her shoulder. For a moment he thought she was going to push him away, but she calmed down, sunk back into her chair with weary resignation, and eventually reached up to place her own hand over his. She still didn’t look at him, though.

  ‘My best guess is something’s causing your blood pressure to drop off the chart.’ Dr Wheeler acted as if the angry outburst had never happened. No doubt she had suffered worse, for all that she was sworn to help people. ‘Like I said, my speciality is brains and there’s nothing wrong with yours. Not that I can see, anyway. I’ve sent some blood away for tests, and I’m going to refer you to one of my colleagues for further examination. Go home, the both of you. Get some rest. And don’t worry. We’ll find out what’s causing this.’

  ‘Good of you to drop by, McLean. Wouldn’t want to think you’d forgotten us.’

  The major incident room was quiet, most of the day shift gone home and the night crew snuck off for a quick brew in the canteen. McLean had managed to get Emma home, the questions still hanging unanswered in the back of his mind as they took the silent taxi ride across the city. She’d not been happy at all when he had explained that he had to go back to the station, and he’d almost called in to say he wasn’t going to be able to make the evening briefing at all. As it happened, the whole thing was over by the time he arrived anyway. Just the stragglers still in the room. And Detective Superintendent Brooks. Strange how no senior officers had turned up to any briefings since the investigation had opened, yet now he was late, there was the boss man waiting.

  ‘If I’d known you were coming, sir, I’d have …’ McLean didn’t finish the sentence, partly because he realized he was about to say something that would only make the situation worse, but mostly because Brooks being there had thrown him off balance.

  ‘Never mind. That young detective constable of yours managed to fill me in on the situation. Off chasing random hunches again, it would seem. Whatever happened to proper detective work?’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand, sir. How is following up a possible connection between Bill Chalmers and Malky Davison not proper detective work?’

  ‘Do I have to spell it out? Your young addict with the overdose worked for Chalmers. That’s your connection right there. No need to go pestering tattoo artists, or whatever you’ve been doing all day.’

  McLean opened his mouth, but the words didn’t come out. He was tired, worried about Emma, frustrated both at the lack of progress in the investigation and the lack of support from the senior detectives who had been so keen at the start. Perhaps it was no surprise it took his brain a while to catch on.

  ‘Look, the DCC’s given you a lot of responsibility heading up this investigation. It should be someone at least a pay grade higher, you know. And daily update reports to the chief constable himself, if it was up to me. But we’ve few enough DCIs as it is, and Mike’s …’ Brooks stopped mid-sentence, as if he couldn’t quite bring himself to say what Detective Chief Inspector Spence really was. He dispelled whatever thought it was with a shake of the head. ‘It’s no matter. He’ll pull it together. Always has done, always will. But the point is, McLean, this is all on you. No one’s going to pick up the pieces when you drop them, understand?’

  ‘What makes you think I’m going to drop anything, sir? We’ve barely begun our investigation and quite frankly I think things are going reasonably well. We identified the body inside a day. We’ve tracked down his last known movements. Soon as I get hold of the bank statements we’ll start looking into the financial side of things, and Forensics are working around the clock to process what scant evidence there is. If you’ve suggestions as to what else I could be doing, I’m all ears. Only this is the first time I’ve seen an officer more senior than an inspector in this room since the investigation began.’

  Anger flared in Brooks’ eyes. ‘If you were ever here –’

  ‘Don’t pretend you’ve not been avoiding us, sir. I’m not stupid and frankly I’m used to being handed the poisoned chalice. I get it. You worked with Chalmers, so did the DCC and half of the senior officers in Specialist Crime. There’s plenty of scope for embarrassment or worse to come out of this, so you’re all keeping a distance. And you know what? That’s fine. It leaves me to get on with the job without interference.’

  A terrible silence had descended on the major incident room, all eyes turned to watch the war of words. McLean realized he had clenched his fists by his sides and slowly released them, letting the tension flow out through his fingers as he did so. Brooks didn’t seem to have any such well-practised coping strategy.

  ‘Just get a grip on the investigation, man. There’s too much scattergun running around. No direction. You’re senior investigating officer and I expect you to behave like it. Send a sergeant or a constable to do the legwork. Your job is in here.’ Brooks looked around the room at the team, some of whom were staring with their mouths open. McLean couldn’t help thinking there were better ways to motivate people than shouting at their boss in front of them.

  ‘What are you lot looking at? Get on with your work.’ The detective superintendent growled his rebuke, but his rage had subsided now. He stalked out of the room, muttering under his breath. Something was worrying him, it was clear, but McLean was fairly sure it wasn’t the way the Chalmers investigation was being run.

  25

  ‘You got a moment, McLean?’

  Heading down to the canteen in search of some late shift detectives, McLean was so surprised by the tone of the request it took him a moment to realize it was aimed at him. He was used to that voice barking the command, ‘My office. Now!’ with the promise of having a strip torn off him whether he complied or not. Quiet reasonableness was not something he could easily equate with Detective Superintendent Duguid, retired or not.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Not here. Come with me.’

  McLean looked around the empty hallway, shrugged, and then followed Duguid down the back stairs and along the corridor to his lair. The Cold Case Unit was empty as ever, a single desk lamp throwing dark shadows into the corners. The detective superintendent slumped into his chair, running long fingers through his thinning hair before speaking.

  ‘You’re a magnet for all the weirdness and shit, you know that?’

  ‘Things are rarely as straightforward as people would like them to be, sir. I’m sorry if that makes me seem awkward.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a fucking idiot, McLean. It’s precisely your being awkward that makes you such a useful detective. That and the fact you’re so rich you don’t care if you get fired. Makes you hard to bribe, too.’

  ‘Hard? I’d have thought impossible.’

  ‘Oh, everyone has a price. And it’s not always money. Remember that when they come for you.’

  ‘They? I’m sorry, sir, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

  Duguid stared up at him for a moment, the lamplight casting his features in dark relief. He shook his head and reached for a folder lying on the desk in front of him, tossing it towards McLean with a neat twist so that it landed facing the right way. ‘No, I don’t suppose you do. That’s part of the problem, really. Tommy Johnston. Everything we have on him, which is to say pretty much bugger all.’

  McLean picked up the folder, flipped it open and began leafing through the sheets within. Most of the pages were glossy photographs of Johnston as he had been found in his car and later laid out on the mortuar
y slab. It was easy enough to see what had killed him; the tiny round dot in the middle of his forehead was a dead giveaway. The post mortem report at the end confirmed that, apart from having his brains forcibly removed through a hole the size of a fist in the back of his head, Tommy Johnston had been in surprisingly good shape for a man of his age and reputation. He had just one identifiable injury that had occurred not long before his death, a rough abrasion on the skin of his left shoulder in a circle about two inches in diameter. In the photographs it looked like a burn, although the report was disappointingly vague about it.

  ‘One of your friend Cadwallader’s, fortunately.’ Duguid had sat silently while McLean read through the very meagre documentation. Apart from the photographs and the PM report, there was only a very short forensic summary sheet based on the initial analysis of the car in situ. It had been found parked up in a passing place on a one-track no through road south-west of Biggar.

  ‘Fortunately?’ McLean asked.

  ‘He keeps copies of all his interesting cases. It’s probably against the rules, but he’s a bit like you in that respect.’ Duguid slumped back into his seat as he spoke. ‘That forensic report is all they could find in their files, and the photographs were on a back-up server no one remembered even existed until I asked the IT department if they could come up with anything for me.’

  ‘So this folder’s not from the archives then?’

  ‘I can see why they made you a detective now. That keen intellect and insight. No, of course it’s not from the fucking archives. There are no archives for the Tommy Johnston case. Nothing at all. The shelves are empty and there’s no record on the system that they were ever filled. It’s been wiped clean so comprehensively I’d have told you Tommy Johnston never existed if I’d not met the sanctimonious wee shite myself.’

  McLean said nothing as the implications of Duguid’s mini-rant sank in. He found a chair, sat down.

  ‘So you’ve pulled this all together in the past day or so?’ He held up the precious folder.

  ‘No need to sound so impressed. I used to be a policeman, remember?’

  McLean shook his head slowly. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean that. It’s just … How the fuck can someone delete an entire unsolved case like that? And it’s not even as if it happened all that long ago. What was it, ten years?’

  ‘Aye, ten years last summer. Back when our old friend Sergeant Needham was still in charge of the archives and Brooks was only just a DCI. It wasn’t our patch, but Johnston was an Edinburgh boy so we liaised with Strathclyde on the investigation. You know how well that went.’

  ‘So who was involved at this end? Can we speak to them?’

  ‘Well, Needy’s dead, as I think you know. The only other detective I remember being on the case was John Brooks, which probably means Mike Spence was part of the investigation, too. Funnily enough, both of them have been avoiding me since I started asking questions.’

  McLean opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. He disliked Brooks and had even less time for Spence, but that was a long way from accepting that they might be bent enough to cover up a murder.

  ‘I’ll go see Brooks first thing tomorrow. See if I can’t get a few Strathclyde names from him.’

  Duguid looked up from his desk, the light reflecting off his spectacles in sheets of white. ‘Not Brooks. Talk to Spence. And be subtle about it. Don’t go charging in there accusing him and his best buddy of being anything less than fine officers. Play it right and chances are it won’t come back to bite you later on.’

  ‘You really think –?’

  ‘The whole archive for the Johnston case. Gone. Like it never existed. That’s not an easy thing to pull off. Whoever did that won’t be too happy when they find out we’re poking our noses into things they thought were dealt with already.’

  Darkness filled the kitchen, and Mrs McCutcheon’s cat stared at him with hostile eyes as he flicked on the lights. McLean knew what the problem was; he had brought Emma back from the hospital, then gone to the station again rather than spending the evening with her. She’d most likely be in bed now, possibly having worried herself to sleep wondering whether she was going to be able to keep her job. Bed would probably be the best place for him too, but he headed for the library and its secret cabinet of whisky instead. He needed time to think, some quiet away from the rushing jumble of events.

  The house surrounded him with welcome familiarity, but there was a discordant note at its heart, as if it were sick. Something didn’t feel quite right. It wasn’t that the library light was still on, spilling out of an open door into the hall. The wrongness was on a different level that McLean couldn’t easily put into words. He pushed through into the room, heart in his throat as he took in the details. Emma lay on the sofa, draped with a heavy eiderdown. She was still wearing the hoodie and sweatpants combo he’d brought to the hospital for her. The bag of dirty clothing and other personal effects lay on the floor beneath her feet as if she’d not yet gone upstairs to unpack it. For a moment he wondered if she’d collapsed again, but then she stirred, struggled out from under the covers, yawning, stretching, eyes bleary.

  ‘Tony? What time is it?’

  McLean glanced at his watch, even though he knew it was late and that was all that mattered. ‘Gone eleven. You’d be more comfortable in bed, you know.’

  ‘Aye. I didn’t mean to fall asleep. Thought you’d be back earlier.’

  ‘Me too, but Brooks …’ He started to explain, realized it was a waste of time. ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘Not really, no.’ Emma sat up, drawing the eiderdown around her like an old lady’s lap blanket as she shivered at the cold. ‘Knowing you, you’ll have left for work at half six this morning, and now you don’t come home until eleven at night. Once or twice, I’d understand, but it’s every day. Do you ever stop?’

  ‘I –’

  ‘It was good, when you were on suspension. Just going in for the odd briefing or interviews and stuff. We had time to get to know each other again. But since this case started it’s like you’re a different person. Is this the real you, Tony? Was the other one a lie?’

  McLean didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure that he could. Emma wasn’t being entirely fair. Yes, he’d had three months of enforced leave just recently, but that meant there was a lot of catching up to do. And they were so short-staffed it was impossible to do the job in normal office hours. She was a forensic scientist, she knew that, surely? But of course that wasn’t really what she was talking about.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked eventually, knowing even as the words came out that they were the wrong ones.

  ‘How do you think? I collapsed on the job, so chances are I’m going to get fired. The doctor hasn’t got a clue what’s wrong with me, which is only slightly alarming. And my boyfriend would rather be looking at dead bodies than me. Yeah, I’m fine. Peachy.’

  McLean sat down on the sofa beside her, not really sure what to say. She shivered under the eiderdown again, her long grey hair shaking at the tips almost as if she were crying.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, took a breath to try to explain, then opted instead to put an arm around her shoulders and draw her close. Emma still reeked of the hospital, but there was a reassuring mothball-and-dust aroma from the eiderdown that was doing its best to overpower the smell. She leaned in to him and he could feel her sobs. Not shivering with the cold, but scared at what was happening to her. Duguid’s mention of Sergeant John Needham – Needy – had brought it all back to him; how Emma had ended up in a coma, how she had sustained major injury to her brain in the first place. But to think too hard about that was to invite madness in, so he held her a little more tightly and said nothing.

  26

  Early morning, after a better night’s sleep than he’d managed in a while, and McLean found himself looking out over a sea of expectant faces. Not the ocean of the initial investigation briefing – numbers had dwindled as both public and media interest had waned – but still a good pr
oportion of the station’s full complement of officers and support staff had dutifully shuffled into the major incident room at the allotted hour. He felt that he should have been bringing them news, filling them with enthusiasm and encouraging them to ever greater efforts. Instead, he had very little to say.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t need to stand here and tell you all this investigation is getting away from us. It’s gone a week now since Chalmers died and we’re no closer to finding out who killed him, even how he ended up in that tree.’ He glanced around, expecting to be interrupted, but there weren’t any officers more senior than a sergeant in the room, apart from Acting DI Ritchie, and she was busy consulting her mobile phone about something.

  ‘So, if anyone’s got any smart ideas, don’t be shy with them. In the meantime, we keep following up on those early phone calls and hope Forensics can come up with something. Questions?’

  The silence would have been welcome, were it not a reminder of how badly things were going. McLean didn’t let it last too long. ‘OK. Get to your work then.’

  The briefing broke up swiftly, most of the officers filing out of the room rather than heading to the workstations or looking for assignments. He watched them go, only slightly worried that they might have turned up just to put something on their work recording for the week. He much preferred working with a small team anyway.

  ‘Good pep talk there, Tony. Really motivational.’ Ritchie had finished whatever it was she had been doing with her phone.

  ‘Just telling it how it is. Unless something comes up soon, we’re going to be reassigning most of this staff to other work. Can’t justify this many bodies on an investigation that’s going nowhere.’

  ‘Aye, well. Those new detective constables have been busy with Sandy Gregg following up the calls to the hotline, and I saw one of them going over bank statements earlier. You never know, they might stumble on to a lead.’ Ritchie nodded towards the far side of the room, where DCs Harrison, Stringer and Blane were huddled together, trying to look interested as DC Gregg pointed at the city map pinned to the wall. He remembered then what they had been up to, plotting the calls from the public about the morning Chalmers had died. If they’d found something interesting he was sure they’d have told him, but it was probably worth a chat all the same. First though there was another problem he needed to look into.