‘Actually, I’m fine,’ she said, a note of incredulity in her voice as she raised her hand and stared at it as if it were something she had never seen before. ‘I’m absolutely fine.’
71
Gav doesn’t like the place. It reminds him too much of school. That ugly concrete with the pebbles splattered all over it to make it hard for the graffiti artists or something. He stays close to his mum as she walks up to the door and presses the bell. Doesn’t quite reach out to take her hand; he’s no’ five any more after all. Feels like it though, staring up the sheer wall towards the sky.
‘Aye?’ A bored woman’s voice, tinny through the intercom.
‘It’s Sheila Underhill. I’m here about Robert Wilkins?’
Gav looks back down at the door when he hears the name. How many days is it since the polis man came and took Bobby away? He’s hardly slept a wink, worried the truth will come out, that it was him who set fire to the heather that made the whole hill go up. Will they bang him up too?
The lock buzzes and Gav’s mum grabs his hand as she pushes it open. He’d complain, but now he’s scared. She’s got a bag over one shoulder that looks a lot like the one he had the last time they went on holiday. Before his dad ran off with Wendy the secretary.
‘Mum? Why’re we here?’ he asks, but she ignores him. She’s been ignoring him a lot these past few days. It’s good because he’s had all the time he wants on his Xbox, but she’s been on the phone too. Shouting sometimes. There was a polis man came round late one evening. Not the one who took Bobby away, mind. But Gav knows his mum’s keeping secrets from him.
A sour-faced old woman meets them inside. She looks like she’s sooking on a lemon, and her hair’s pulled back so tight her skin’s all stretched around her eyes. Gav tries not to stare, but she pays him no heed anyway, leads them down a long corridor that smells of boiled cabbage and wee. They stop at a door near the end. The old woman knocks once, then goes in before anyone answers. Gav wants to run back to the front door, out to his mum’s car, hide. They’re going to lock him up here like they locked up –
‘Bobby?’
His friend’s sitting on a cheap sofa on the far side of the room. He’s got an old Sega game or something, staring at it so hard his tongue’s poking out the side of his mouth. Gav had forgotten how stupid Bobby looked when he got like that, and seeing it now makes things a bit better.
‘Hey, Gav. Where you been?’ Bobby drops the game console onto the sofa, stands up. He looks almost as sour as the old woman, and he’s wearing the same clothes he had on when the polis man took him away, which might explain the rank smell in the room. How many days has it been? Have they even let him wash?
Gav’s mum’s let go of his hand, which is a good thing. He’d not want his mate to see him looking feart like that. She walks across the room to where Bobby’s standing, takes the bag off her shoulder and puts it on the floor.
‘Thought you might need a change of clothes, Bobby,’ she says, then unzips the bag and takes out a pair of Gav’s jeans, T-shirts, his favourite hoodie. ‘We’ll get you your own stuff soon as we can, but that’ll have to do for now.’
‘This is all Gav’s. I cannae wear this.’
‘Well, you can’t wear that. Not if you’re coming with us. You fair stink, Robert Wilkins.’
It takes Gav a moment to understand what his mum’s just said. Takes Bobby a bit longer. Then the grin spreads across his face, mad like the light in his eyes.
‘I’m coming wi’ you? They’s letting us go? Wicked.’
72
He was staring sightlessly over the stacks of paperwork, out through the glass window wall at the city beyond when the knock at his door distracted him. McLean looked around, a feeling of guilt stealing over him as if he was back at school. Seeing the DCC standing in the open doorway only added to it.
‘Sir.’ He started to stand, but Robinson waved for him to stay seated. He looked back down the corridor before stepping into the room. Made sure that the door was firmly closed before he spoke.
‘I want you to know that I’ve told them I’ll have no part of this.’
McLean stood up this time. Asked ‘Part of what, sir?’ even though he was fairly sure he already knew.
‘The cover-up. It’s started already. There were probably plans in place long before any of us knew what was going on. Before Renfrew even disappeared.’
‘I’m not surprised, to be honest. Something like that? People like that? Of course they’ve got it covered should anything go wrong. That’s why they dragged old Sawney back to Edinburgh and put his whole family to death.’
Robinson frowned in confusion. ‘Sawney?’
‘You know the story, sir. Sawney Bean. The infamous cannibal?’
‘Aye, but that’s just a story. And it all happened on the West Coast. Galloway, wasn’t it? Hundreds of years ago, and all made up anyways.’
Just a story of course. ‘He was a Lothian man, you know. But for whatever reason, he headed west, found himself a wife, spent all those years killing people and eating them. It was only bad luck that he was caught, but when he was they didn’t try him in Ayr or Dumfries. They dragged him and his whole family back home to Edinburgh. Put them all to death without a trial. Why do you think they would do that?’
Robinson’s confused frown had grown even deeper. He looked like a man who had thought he had come to terms with some bad news, only to find that it was much, much worse. McLean didn’t wait for an answer.
‘They’ve been sacrificing people up on those moors for centuries. Possibly millennia. Harriet’s – Professor Turner’s – team are finding more and more bones by the day. Ancient bones. The only way to keep something like that a secret for so long is to have powerful people in your circle. Time was that would have been the abbot of the local monastery, the landed gentry. Now it’s the rich industrialists and tech billionaires, and a few useful folk to make sure the secret stays that way. Some of them were up there in the cavern, but I’d bet it wasn’t all of them.’ McLean shook his head, worn down by the predictability of this meeting. ‘You’re being leaned on by the chief constable, sir. And he’s being leaned on by the politicians. They’re being prodded by the people in the shadows. The wealthy folk who really run the show. We’ll get a few unimportant heads for the block, a half-plausible explanation for what happened, a few folk bribed, a few blackmailed. They’ll find out Sandy Bayne and Sergeant Donaldson were cousins and string a story out of that. Bad from the start, a tragedy it took so long to find out, but now we know. And the whole sorry mess goes away. Except that it doesn’t.’
The DCC pulled a chair out from the conference table, slumped into it with a weary sigh. ‘I was a fairly easy-going person before I met you, Tony,’ he said. ‘All I wanted was a nice run-down to my retirement. Maybe a nod in the honours list one year.’ He stared off in the same direction McLean had been looking just minutes earlier, paused for a long while before speaking again. ‘Well, the retirement’s coming a bit sooner than I’d thought. End of the month, same as Grumpy Bob. Maybe we can both ride off into the sunset together, aye?’
It was meant as a joke, but McLean could hear the sadness in the DCC’s voice. He opened his mouth to say something, but Robinson stood up, waved him to silence as he headed to the door.
‘Just thought I’d let you know. You’re a good detective. Not so much with the politics. I can’t stop them from sweeping this all under the carpet. I’m sorry.’ And then without another word he left.
McLean sat back down again, forearms leaning on the desk. His wrists still ached from the chains, and if he shrugged his arms out of his shirt cuffs, he could see the red marks where they had chafed his skin. It didn’t surprise him at all that the events out at Woodhill Farm were going to be quietly glossed over. In many ways he could see the sense of it too. When powerful and influential people were caught doing outrageous things, it was
always everyone else who suffered. Lock up a couple of tech billionaires and who knew how many pension funds would suffer? And as for politicians, it seemed they could do pretty much whatever they wanted these days and the voting public wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow. Being a member of an ancient secret society that engaged in ritualistic cannibalism would probably gain more votes than it would lose.
It took him a while to realise that his unfocused gaze had come to rest on a small plastic package lying in between two stacks of folders. For a moment McLean could only stare at it in incomprehension, but then he recognised the clear plastic evidence bag, and inside it Anya Renfrew’s mobile phone. He reached forward and picked it up, unzipped the bag, pulled out the slim handset. Mike Simpson in the IT lab downstairs had unlocked it, and against all expectations there was still a charge in the battery when McLean clicked the button to switch it on. There was nothing to see on the screen that he hadn’t looked at before, but there was a clear signal.
He dialled the number from memory, wondering how it was that he knew it well enough to do that. It rang four times, no doubt the person at the other end debating whether or not to answer an unknown caller. One chance. He’d not leave a message.
‘Hello?’ A female voice, husky and in need of a cigarette. McLean almost hung up, but then he remembered the look on the DCC’s face.
‘Dalgliesh? Hi. It’s DCI McLean. Tony. Listen. You fancy meeting up for a coffee?’
If you loved BURY THEM DEEP why not try NOTHING TO HIDE, the latest book in James Oswald’s new Constance Fairchild series?
Suspended from duty after her last case ended in the high-profile arrest of one of Britain’s wealthiest men, DC Constance Fairchild is trying to stay away from the limelight. Fate has other ideas . . .
Coming home to her London flat, Constance stumbles across a young man, bloodied, mutilated and barely alive. She calls it in and is quickly thrown into the middle of a nationwide investigation . . . It seems that the victim is just the latest in a string of similar ritualistic attacks.
No matter that she is off-duty, no matter that there are those in the Met who would gladly see the back of her, Con can’t shake her innate determination to bring the monsters responsible for this brutality to justice.
Trouble always seems to find her, and even if she has nothing to hide, perhaps she has everything to lose . . .
Get your copy here
Bury Them Deep Page 41
