by James Oswald
‘Stop! What do you think you’re doing?’
The voice grabbed hold of him like a vice, forcing him to its will. McLean fought back, kept his arm tight around the pilot’s neck. He glanced around to see Mrs Saifre tugging at the restraints that held her to the seat, a look of fear and uncertainty in her eyes that was all the encouragement he needed. The helicopter tilted violently, throwing her to one side. McLean lost his grip, and fell against the door. The impact drove the wind out of his lungs and he felt something snap as the pain threatened to overwhelm him.
And then the door gave way, swinging open on to the void.
47
Cold air, flashing lights, falling. The wind whipped tears from his eyes as he tumbled head over arse over head over arse. He tried to spread his arms, for all the good it would do him; if you’re already falling, might as well try to learn how to fly. How high had they climbed? Were they over trees? Would he hit the road, or maybe smash through the roof of Corscaidin Hall? For an instant, he wondered if this was how Bill Chalmers had felt in his last few seconds, panicked and terrified and so, so sorry for all the things he had done wrong in his life. He thought of Emma, and at the same moment something impossibly bright blossomed in the night sky, lighting up the underside of the clouds, reflecting off the million million snowflakes as they tumbled their lazy way to the ground. He had just enough time to hear the roar of an explosion like a distant dream of a thing, and then the ground engulfed him.
Motion, noise, terror. He was enveloped in darkness, soft, cold hands dragging at him, pulling at his clothes. His fall slowed as if he were running through icy water. Arms wide, face to the distant sky, he came to a stop with far less of a jolt than he had been expecting. Enough still to snap his head backwards until it collided with something solid.
And everything went black.
The cold woke him first. Or was it the panting sound, the frantic digging of paws and desperate barks? McLean couldn’t feel his arms or legs. There was only cold. Freezing cold. It covered him completely, smothered his face and seeped into his mouth, his nose. He coughed, and the barking increased in its frenzy. Something soft and warm and wet nuzzled his face, bringing with it an odour of damp dog.
‘What is it, Jess?’ A voice he didn’t recognize called in the distance as he tried to summon the strength to fight off the pack of wolves that were trying to eat him. Nothing made sense. Was he dead? Was this hell?
‘Over here. I think she’s found something.’ The voice was closer now, and the beast on top of him whined. Another wet, warm slap on his face and McLean risked prising apart his eyelids. It was too dark to see, and then flickering lights outlined the shape of a massive maw, whiskers right in his face. Hot breath, smelling of fish and tooth decay, warmed his frozen skin as the beast began to lick him with renewed fervour, digging away at his chest and side.
‘Come away now, Jess. What’ve you got there, eh?’
‘Christ, I think it’s a man. Is he alive?’
McLean screwed his eyes shut as the lights shone more brightly, torches directed at his face. The dog gave him one more lick, and then was gone. The weight off his chest fooled him into thinking he could move, but when he tried to sit up, nothing worked. He couldn’t feel his feet or hands. Just cold that was turning warm now, and a small part of him knew that was a very bad sign.
The rest of him no longer cared.
‘It’s Tony. Quick.’
More movement, and then he felt someone kneeling beside him. McLean recognized the voice, but that wasn’t possible. She was in Edinburgh, surely. Not out here in the snow.
‘Emma?’ The word came out as little more than a feeble moan, and at the same time he felt someone else slide down on his other side. He cracked open his eyes again, tensed against the brightness he knew would be waiting. Two faces peered down at him, lit by the reflection of their torches in the snow that seemed to tower above them all. ‘Kirsty?’
A soft but insistent electronic beep broke through the dreams of rest and warmth and Kirsty’s flame-red hair on a summer morning. McLean struggled into consciousness and immediately wished he hadn’t.
Everything hurt. He was lying on his back and while the bed in which he lay was soft, it wasn’t soft enough to ease the pain. His head pounded in time with the beep and his heart. His arms were heavier than lead, his legs aching as if he’d walked the Highland Way without stopping to eat or drink or sleep. But they were nothing compared to the pain in his chest and back. The only solace he could take was that if it hurt that bad, he must be still alive.
‘I think he’s awake now.’
He knew that voice, but it took a long time to place it. McLean tried to roll on to his side, almost screamed in agony, and decided that on his back would do for now. He blinked open his eyes to the familiar sight of hospital ceiling tiles and the tired, worried face of Dr Caroline Wheeler.
‘Thought we’d lost you there, Tony,’ she said, cracking a smile that was the best thing he had ever seen.
‘Where … What …?’ His voice was an alien thing, dry and feeble.
‘Don’t try to speak. You’ve a fair bit of healing to do yet.’ Dr Wheeler’s head withdrew from his field of vision and McLean found he didn’t have the energy to move. A moment later the familiar face of Acting DI Ritchie replaced it.
‘You’re a fucking idiot, you know that, Tony?’
‘I … What?’
‘Going out to Chalmers’ house on your own. We’re supposed to be a team, aye?’
‘Sorry.’ He swallowed hard against a throat as dry as a Wee Free Minister’s Sunday sermon.
‘Good thing Emma’s as pig-headed as you are. The two of you are clearly suited to each other.’
‘Em?’ McLean frowned at the ceiling. He’d seen her, hadn’t he? Out in the snow. But she was meant to be in here, waiting for the experts to decide what was wrong with her.
‘Aye. She discharged herself. Went home expecting to find you there. I got your text about the same time as she called to see if I knew where you were.’
‘And you both came out to find me?’ McLean tried to lift his hand, but the movement sent a jabbing pain down his side that made him wince. A spasm washed through him on a wave of agony. He thought he might have heard a voice say, ‘Oh shit, here we go.’ And then the darkness welcomed him again.
The next time he woke, the pain had dulled down to no more than a horrible ache. When he coughed it was just unpleasant, not life-threatening, and the noise sparked motion across the room. McLean found it easier to move his head without the world exploding around him, even if he was still bone-weary.
‘I was beginning to think you’d never wake up.’
He struggled to focus on the voice, eyes gummed and blurry. Blinking helped a bit, but it wasn’t until she stood up and walked across the room that McLean was able to see DCI McIntyre properly. She looked exhausted, her face lined, dark suit crumpled. Had she always been that grey? He couldn’t remember noticing it before.
‘How …’ He coughed as the word forced itself out through a throat as dry as a dead camel. ‘How long have I been asleep this time?’
‘Forty-eight hours, give or take.’ McIntyre looked at her watch. ‘And it’s been fun, too.’
‘Fun?’
‘Aye, fun. Thought the EU referendum was a balls-up, but Edinburgh SCD could teach them a thing or two.’
McLean frowned, too weary to push for answers. He let his head relax into the soft pillows.
‘Brooks has been arrested. The DCC’s under investigation. The military are all over that helicopter crash in Fife. You surely know how to make a mess, Tony.’
The helicopter crash. He remembered now, grabbing the pilot by the neck, everything tilting sideways, falling. ‘What the hell happened?’
‘We were kind of hoping you might be able to tell us that. Ritchie got your text, so we knew where you were. And thanks to DC Harrison, we even managed to work out what it meant. She’s a good one. Reminds me of another
young DC, oh, a couple of decades ago.’
‘Poor girl. I hope she doesn’t turn out to be quite such an idiot.’
‘That would be difficult. Didn’t realize how stupid you could be, to be honest. Though in your defence you’d been drugged with some particularly powerful opiate, so there’s that.’ McIntyre pulled up a chair, sat down beside the bed. ‘And you did solve the Chalmers case. Ha, and to think you even suggested it might be some kind of helicopter with stealth tech right at the beginning. That stuff’s so classified they’ve cordoned off the entire estate.’
‘Brooks. You said he’d been arrested? And the DCC?’
‘That’s all Charles’ work, not mine. Seems he took exception to them closing down his beloved CCU. He found some of the old Johnston case files. In your office, as it happens. Buried under about a decade’s worth of junk. Seriously, Tony, that place is a pigsty. How do you get anything done in there?’
McIntyre’s smile gave the lie to her criticism, but McLean knew there was a truth in what she said.
‘Most of the files are still missing though. Someone cleared the archive, just didn’t know what was stashed away in that office. But it was enough to point the finger at John. Mike Spence was involved, too. And Needy. That’s how they wiped everything. Others must have known and turned a blind eye. Professional Standards have picked it up now. What a fucking mess.’
McLean stared at the ceiling, hoping to find answers in the random patterns of stains on the tiles.
‘It’s what she wanted all along,’ he said after a while.
‘What who wanted?’
‘Mrs Saifre. Jane Louise Dee. Whatever you want to call her. She killed Chalmers, Christ only knows why. Not for the money or the drugs. Maybe for the leverage it gave her. She dropped him where she did as a message to the people who knew about Johnston. That’s where it went wrong. He was meant to land on Johnston’s doorstep, not in the tree. Maybe Chalmers learned how to fly on the way down.’
McIntyre looked at him as if he was mad. ‘Save it for the debriefing. There’s some spook from MI6 or somewhere equally vague wanting to speak to you. You’ll need all your strength to get through that.’
McLean groaned at the thought of dealing with the Secret Service. He’d run in with them before, and it hadn’t gone well. That had been Mrs Saifre’s fault as well. Too much to hope the crash had killed her.
‘How did I get here? How did I survive? I fell out of a helicopter for fuck’s sake.’
‘The gods must have been smiling on you.’ McIntyre grinned as if she was one of them. ‘When Kirsty and Emma turned up half the airfield was on fire from the crashed chopper. Local farmer came out to see what all the noise was about. His dog found you a ways off in a deep snowdrift. Way I heard it you couldn’t have picked a better place to land. A few yards either side and you’d have ended up like poor old Bill Chalmers.’
48
Utter helplessness didn’t sit well with him. McLean was used to getting on with things, not spending time lying on his back and staring at the ceiling until he fell asleep. His cracked ribs made breathing difficult, moving impossible without a great deal of pain. And above all else, he felt as weak as a newborn. His strength was returning slowly, he’d managed to eat something and could lift the glass of water by his bedside now, but the thought of standing, walking, dealing with people, left him exhausted.
His only visitors were police, which was perhaps unsurprising, as he didn’t have many friends outside of work. Emma dropped by, her hugs making him wince, her anger at his stupidity more so. She’d left tearful but mollified, promising to return every day until they released him, but he didn’t plan on staying any longer than necessary. Just enough time to get his strength back, his thoughts straight.
Duguid’s visit was something of a surprise, although after his briefing from McIntyre, McLean had been expecting some kind of contact. Like pretty much everyone else, he’d called McLean a fucking idiot, but there’d been a glint of approval in the retired detective superintendent’s eyes. Perhaps the fact that he was more or less full-time as a consultant to Specialist Crime Division while it picked up the pieces of its Edinburgh operations helped. Detective Inspector Ritchie was no longer acting, either. Her position had been made permanent. Now all they needed was to poach some more seasoned detectives from other regions and hope no one committed any serious crimes while they rebuilt the team.
‘You’ve a nasty habit of upsetting the apple cart, Inspector.’
McLean must have been half dozing, as he hadn’t heard the door open. He looked down from the ceiling to see a man standing at the end of his bed. Average height, average build, wearing an average suit and with a face it would be very easy to forget. He held a brown A4 envelope in one hand and pinched the bridge of his nose with the other.
‘I did wonder when you might turn up.’ McLean grimaced away the pain as he hauled himself upright against the pillows. The last time he had seen this forgettable fellow was a couple of years back, when the Andrew Weatherly case had opened up a can of worms. Funny how he appeared again now. Must be sensitive to the smell of scandal.
‘I had thought I might wait until you went home, meet you there and try some more of your fine collection of malt whiskies. But I wouldn’t want to upset that nice girlfriend of yours.’
‘I take it this is about Mrs Saifre. You want to know what happened.’
‘We know what happened, Inspector. Probably more so than you do. I just thought you’d appreciate a little update. Since you’ve done us all a bit of a favour.’
‘I have?’
‘Oh yes. That little operation of Chalmers’, supplying designer drugs to the rich and powerful. He was getting too much influence over key players. The last thing we needed was Mrs Saifre coming in and taking it all over.’
McLean tried to suppress his mirthless smile. ‘You’ve got it all wrong. She was in charge from the start. I’ll take the thanks though. Everyone else tells me I’m an idiot.’
‘Oh you are, Inspector. I know you went out to that house alone because you didn’t want to get any of your team in trouble, but that doesn’t make it any less stupid for being noble. You’re a loner in a team game, but you’re also one of the few people we can trust to do the right thing. And if you’re right about Saifre, then you’ve done us all more of a favour than we thought.’
‘Is she dead?’ McLean asked.
‘Dead? Why would she be?’
‘Because she was in that helicopter when it crashed. Or are you denying it even existed? I understand it’s all hush-hush secret technology.’
A puzzled frown spread across the man’s face. ‘There’s no way she could have been in that helicopter. She’s in New York. Trust me, if she’d come back to Scotland, we’d know about it. We only recovered one body from the crash, and I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell the world about the helicopter. It’s very secret technology and there are a lot of red faces in defence research right now.’
‘Let me guess, though. One of her companies was involved in developing the thing.’
‘I really can’t comment.’ The man dropped the envelope on to the bed. ‘I lied, by the way.’
‘You did?’
‘Yes. The last time we met I said you wouldn’t see me again. I won’t say it this time, but the sentiment’s there. Goodbye, Inspector.’ The man nodded once, then turned and left without another word.
McLean stared at the envelope sitting on the blanket at the end of the bed. Trust bloody MI-whatever-it-was to be so cryptic and shadowy, but worse yet, the average man had left his little prize just out of easy reach. Bending over with cracked ribs was a non-starter, but there was no way he was going to let someone else get a hold of whatever was in there before he did.
They’d given him some industrial-strength painkillers, so it wasn’t so much agony as a lack of mobility that hindered him. Still, McLean managed to inch himself up into more of a sitting position, then swivel his battered legs around and finally l
ower himself to the floor. On balance, he thought he preferred not falling from a helicopter into a snowdrift, but once the room had stopped swaying like a boat in a storm he felt reasonably confident to take the two small, shuffling steps to the end of the bed.
The envelope was thicker than the last one the spook had given him. That had contained photographs of Mrs Saifre’s Edinburgh house up for sale, her leaving in a chauffeur-driven Rolls, boarding a private jet and departing for the USA. This time it was a copy of a confidential Security Services report into the investigation of the murder of Tommy Johnston. Flicking through it, he felt a certain sympathy for Detective Superintendent Brooks. They had fairly swiftly identified the most likely killer, a professional hit man who had served time with Bill Chalmers. The motive was obvious to someone with all the facts, too. Johnston had tried to muscle in on Chalmers’ little drug operation, threatened to go public with the names of some of his more influential customers. The list of names in the file was marked ‘incomplete’, but still it caused McLean to raise first one eyebrow and then both. Some of the more idiotic decisions of the top brass made a lot more sense in the light of it. And there at the bottom was Detective Inspector Mike Spence. The date on the report was ten years earlier, so Spence would not long have been promoted, and already he’d been corrupted. Brooks would have known, Robinson should have known, but they’d decided to hide his addiction rather than face up to it. Or if he was being charitable, they’d pulled together to protect one of their own. And so they’d become corrupted too. Had they known what Chalmers was up to? Tolerated it because he had been a detective and was now doing good works?
The twinge of pain that stabbed through his chest was almost lost in the surge of anger that coursed through him as he scrunched the report into a creased mess. It wasn’t that long since he’d been hauled over the coals, faced suspension and possible charges on a falsified blood test that suggested he had a long-standing drug problem. And yet all the time that was happening, Mike bloody Spence had been trotting off to Bill Chalmers’ hipster opium den for his regular fix. Irony wasn’t a strong enough word.
