by James Oswald
‘I’ll look into that, Mr Hussein. And I’ll be looking into what happened to Mr Seaton after he left your shared cell too. I’d be interested to know whose decision it was to put the two of you together in the first place, although I’ll be the first to admit that could just be the luck of the draw. Seems there’s been quite a bit of bad luck following you around recently though.’
Hussein dropped his massive hands back onto the table in front of him and lowered his head in a nod as slow as the mountain he resembled. ‘There is an ill wind blowing through this country, Chief Inspector. People like Mr Seaton feel at ease spouting their hatred and bigotry. Nobody criticises them, so they grow bolder day by day. You know this, I think?’
‘Give the hospital a call will you, Constable? No point heading over there if Mr Seaton’s already in the mortuary.’
McLean stepped out of Saughton Prison into the cold winter air with more questions than when he’d entered, not an hour earlier. There was something disturbing about Mostafa Hussein’s calm acceptance of his fate that made the injustice seem twice as deep. A better picture of what had happened wasn’t hard to see. Seaton had been put with the man-mountain because Hussein was a devout Muslim and represented everything he despised. The plan had been to rattle Seaton’s cage to the point where he’d open up about the gang he ran with, but there was always the possibility that might backfire. Hindsight was such a wonderful thing.
‘Body was transported over there a couple of hours ago,’ DC Stringer said as he slipped into the driver’s seat of the pool car and closed the door.
‘OK. Mortuary it is.’ McLean leaned back into his own seat, staring up at the slate-grey sky as Stringer drove out through the security gates and slowed into heavy traffic.
‘You think he’s telling the truth?’ he asked after they’d driven in silence for five minutes, progressing only slightly further than a drunk man could walk in the same time.
‘Hussein? I don’t know, sir. He was convincing though. I mean, he could have denied it, made something ridiculous up, refused even to speak to us. Instead he just accepted it all. Wasn’t quite what I was expecting, to be honest.’
‘Me neither. Still, his story should be easy enough to corroborate. The prison will have his Quran, so we can find out if any pages have been ripped out recently. Ask the guards if there were any on the floor when they came in. And we’ll see what Angus has to say about Seaton’s injuries, what actually killed him.’
‘It’s still manslaughter though, even if it was accidental. He shoved him, the guy died. And if Hussein’s here on fake papers then that’s not going to help him much.’
‘Aye, you’re right. Poor bastard. It’s not our problem though. Shouldn’t really be our incident to investigate either. Reckon we’ve both got better things to be doing.’ McLean stared at the long line of cars, delivery vans and buses snaking in towards the city centre. Somewhere up ahead an accident or some roadworks were doing their best to bring everything to a halt. He pointed to a side street just ahead of them as the car in front inched forward. ‘Turn here, OK?’
‘Sir?’ Stringer had the decency to do as he was told before asking why.
‘Not thinking straight. I guess it’s been that kind of day. They might have sent Seaton’s body to the mortuary already, but we still need to talk to the doctors who saw him when he was brought in. Maybe see if they X-rayed his skull too. Got to be better than sitting in traffic for an hour.’
Stringer nodded his understanding, taking a swift route to the hospital by the back roads over Corstorphine Hill and down towards the Western General. As usual there was nowhere to park once they’d arrived.
‘I’ll go see what I can find out.’ McLean unclipped his seatbelt and pushed open the passenger door as Stringer pulled the car into the kerbside.
‘You want me to wait here?’
‘No. Let’s not waste too much time on this, aye? You head back to the station. Get a statement from the prison and start on the report for the PF. I’ll fill in the blanks when I get back.’
37
McLean had spent many a wasted hour at the Western General Hospital. Tucked into the northern corner of Craiglieth, at the end of Ferry Road, it was where his grandmother had spent her final eighteen months, in a coma after her stroke. She’d never recovered, but he’d done his best to visit her most days. It helped that the old Lothian and Borders Police HQ was just down the road at Fettes Avenue, not that he’d ever been based there for more than a couple of weeks at a time.
It had been a while now since his gran had finally died, so he wasn’t too surprised that few of the nurses looked familiar and none of them nodded or smiled as he walked past them. Other things besides visiting the coma ward had brought him to the hospital more recently – the previous night’s impromptu visit was a case in point – but not with such regularity he expected to be recognised.
‘Detective Inspector. Tony. It’s been a while.’
There was, of course, always the exception. Approaching an admin desk at the end of the corridor leading to the neurological unit, McLean spotted an older nurse, who had been leaning against the counter and chatting to one of her colleagues. Jeannie Robertson had looked after his grandmother for most of her eighteen months in the hospital, and had even come to her funeral.
‘It has indeed.’ He returned her smile a little awkwardly, unsure of the protocol for greeting someone you both did and didn’t know well. ‘So long that it’s Chief Inspector now, not that I’m all that fussed about it.’
‘I’m sure it’s well deserved. But I’m guessing you’re not here for a wee chat. The poor fellow they brought in from Saughton gaol yesterday, I take it?’
‘Matthew Seaton, yes. Did you see him when he came in?’
Robertson shook her head. ‘No. I don’t work that unit, and I was on the early shift besides. You’ll need to speak to Doctor Wheeler.’
‘Actually, I saw her just last night. Please don’t tell me she’s back at work already.’ McLean recalled their meeting and the discussion about Akka Nour’s slim chances of recovery. Strange to think that while he’d been confirming her identity with Rahel, somewhere close by Matthew Seaton had been fighting for his life. Was that what the sudden emergency had been?
‘Not sure she ever goes home these days.’ Robertson let out a sigh. ‘Not the only one I know who works all hours though, Tony.’
‘I’m trying to be less of a workaholic, honestly.’ McLean felt the words sound hollow even to him. ‘I don’t suppose you know where Caroline is, do you?’
‘Caroline is it, now?’ Robertson raised a mocking eyebrow, her smile betraying the joke. Then she nodded towards the end of the corridor behind him. ‘That’ll be her just now.’
McLean turned to see the doctor walking slowly in his direction, her attention almost entirely on a man wearing hospital whites and walking beside her. She didn’t see him until she was almost at the admin desk.
‘Oh, Tony. We really must stop meeting like this.’ She handed a clipboard over to the nurse behind the desk, then turned to her colleague. ‘Malcolm, this is Detective Inspector – no, Detective Chief Inspector Tony McLean. Tony, this is Malcolm Anders. He’s our new resident neurosurgeon.’
‘Pleased to meet you.’ McLean shook the man’s hand, surprised to find it slightly damp, his grip limp. Most surgeons he’d met had grips like iron and tried to stare you down as if everything in life was a contest.
‘Are you here about the girl, Akka? Only there’s been no change yet. Malcolm’s been looking over her brain scans to see if there’s anything we can do, but I suspect it’s just going to be a waiting game.’
‘Actually, it was about Matthew Seaton. The man from Saughton who died last night?’
Something like anger flitted across Doctor Wheeler’s face, swiftly suppressed. She turned to her colleague once more. ‘I won’t be long, Malcolm. We can go
over Mrs Ogden’s X-rays when I get back, OK?’
The surgeon nodded, his face giving nothing away. ‘Nice to meet you . . . Tony,’ he said, the first time McLean had heard him speak. Clearly a man of few words, he wandered off without saying any more.
‘Walk with me.’ Doctor Wheeler set off at speed in the opposite direction to the neurosurgeon. McLean hurried to catch up, falling in beside her as she strode swiftly along the corridor.
‘Seaton. I take it his death’s not straightforward then.’
‘Too bloody right it’s not. The man should be back where he came from with nothing more than a headache to show for it.’
‘I thought he’d fractured his skull.’
Doctor Wheeler coughed out a hollow laugh. ‘There was barely a bruise. We X-rayed him, found nothing untoward. Not even a concussion. Not the first time I’ve seen an inmate fake a head injury just to get out for a wee while. No chance of him escaping, mind you. He was handcuffed to a prison officer most of the time.’
‘So why wasn’t he discharged? Sent back to Saughton?’
‘Procedures.’ Doctor Wheeler stopped walking just for long enough to look straight at McLean and roll her eyes. ‘We had to keep him in overnight for observation. They provided a guard and we shoved him in a secure room. I gave him a sedative and left him sleeping like a baby. To be honest, I’d forgotten all about him. It was only after we’d spoken about that poor young woman that my pager went off. One of the nurses had checked in to see he was OK, found him dead.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just, as you say, like that.’ Doctor Wheeler set off walking again, and once more McLean had to rush to catch up.
‘So what killed him? How did he die?’
‘Honestly? I’ve no idea, Tony. He had a slight bump to the head, sure. But it was nothing serious enough to warrant more than an ice pack. I can show you the X-rays. They’re fine. Christ, I must have looked at them a dozen times since it happened.’
‘Was he attacked, then? Did the guard see anything?’
Doctor Wheeler stopped again. ‘Ha. The guard? A herd of elephants could have got past him. Nurse tells me he was fast asleep when she stopped by to check on your man.’
One more to interview, and another complication he could have done without. There seemed to be a lot of buck-passing going on with regard to Matthew Seaton. McLean hadn’t much liked the man, but that didn’t mean his death could be swept under the carpet like this.
‘So you don’t know what killed him, but it’s unlikely it was the head injury he was brought here for. He’s at the mortuary now, right?’
‘Sent the body off a while back, yes.’ Doctor Wheeler stopped by a closed door, and when McLean looked he saw the familiar sign for the Ladies. ‘Go see Angus. He’ll tell you how the poor bugger died. It wasn’t for lack of care here though. I’m sure of that.’
‘If you’re looking for something on the fellow who died last night, I’ve not had a chance to get to him yet.’
McLean had barely put his head around the open office door before Cadwallader spoke. The pathologist wore a clean set of scrubs, ready for another examination, and a body awaited his attention, laid out under a white sheet on the stainless-steel table in the theatre.
‘Didn’t think you would have, Angus. I just thought I’d pop in and have a quick look at him. You got someone else ready to go?’
‘Aye. Maurice Jennings. You’ll not have got the message I was about to do him, then.’
McLean pulled out his phone and checked for messages. ‘Damn thing seems to be screening my calls. Still, I’m here now.’
‘Right enough. Your other chap’s in one of the cabinets if you really want a look.’ Cadwallader walked past him and started towards the cold store.
‘It’s OK, Angus. It can wait. Reckon Jennings is more important.’
‘You sure?’ The pathologist shrugged. ‘OK. Let’s get on then. Tracy?’
Doctor Sharp appeared from a small storeroom off the main examination theatre. McLean took that as his cue to step back and let them get on with their job. He tuned out for a while, letting his mind wander over the events at Saughton and the hospital, how Matthew Seaton’s death might play out with the press and the inevitable politicking that would accompany their coverage. It bothered him that Hussein was being set up, too. The man was a victim, not a criminal, and yet he was locked away, likely to be sent back to a country that would treat him even worse. No wonder the immigrant and refugee communities in the city were so scared, so easily manipulated.
‘Well, I think it’s fair to say he didn’t die of natural causes.’
Cadwallader’s words were louder than his normal dictation to the microphone, and directed at McLean himself. He looked up to find the examination almost completed.
‘You sure of that?’
‘Well, just look at him, Tony.’ The pathologist sighed, then gestured for McLean to move closer. Jennings was still part covered by a white sheet, preserving what little modesty he might have had left. It didn’t conceal the rough Y-shaped incision, now being stitched by Doctor Sharp, where his torso had been opened up and his organs removed for perusal.
‘What am I looking at?’ McLean asked from where he fully intended to remain standing, several feet from the body.
‘Well, his skin for one thing. You can see it most clearly on his face and hands, the bits exposed to the air when he died. But see how the rest of him is turning yellow now?’ Cadwallader picked up one of the cadaver’s arms, bending it slightly at the elbow so that the hand flopped open, palm upwards.
‘Is that not what normally happens?’ McLean had seen more than his fair share of dead bodies over a decades-long career as a detective. Some were fresh, but after a while they all started to look like mannequins, waxy and unreal. Quite literally lifeless.
‘Yes. Of course. Leave a body in the chiller for a week or two and you’ll end up with something like this. Maybe not the same colouration though, us Caucasians tend to go whiter, if anything. But there’s the thing. Mr Jennings here died less than twenty-four hours ago.’
‘I take it you know what he died of.’ McLean relented and took a step forward. Jennings’s bare skin had turned a dry custard colour he’d more normally associate with the drunk young women hauled into the station on a Saturday night, a spray-on tan as fake as a game show host.
‘What he died of, yes.’ Cadwallader placed the arm he had been holding up back down on the examination table. ‘Every single one of his major organs has failed, some quite catastrophically. Of course, the skin is an organ too, so you could say it’s all connected.’
‘But surely that would take days to kill a man? Longer. He’d know something was wrong, right?’
‘You’d think so. The state he was in when he died, it’s a miracle he could even walk.’
‘And yet he went to the pub. We’ve CCTV footage of him being attacked.’
Cadwallader snapped off the latex gloves he’d been wearing and dumped them into a nearby bin. He motioned for McLean to follow him into the office just off the examination theatre, leaving his long-suffering assistant to clean up. ‘Exactly. So whatever happened to him, it was very swift-acting. And it’s carried on acting since he died. Do you know how many things there are that can do that to a body?’
‘I’m rather hoping you’ll tell me, Angus. I assume you’ve got some theory?’
‘I have indeed, Tony. Here, have a look at this.’ The pathologist pulled a chair away from his desk and tapped at the keyboard half buried in papers, sample jars and other detritus, waking up his computer. McLean leaned in and stared at the screen. It showed what appeared to be a page from some scientific journal. The tiny text made his eyes ache, but the picture at the top of the screen was clear enough.
‘Snake venom?’
‘Not just any snake venom, Tony. This is rare stuff. I r
ead a paper a while back about Russian work on weaponising things like this during the Cold War, taking something already nasty and making it a hundred times worse. A hundred times quicker. Never thought I’d encounter anything like it here in Edinburgh.’
‘And this is what killed Jennings?’ McLean scanned what little of the text he could make out. ‘Echis coloratus, the Burton’s carpet viper? Isn’t it a little off its patch?’
‘That or something like it. Only much, much worse. And before you get too worried, no, I don’t think the city’s crawling with venomous snakes. They’d all be dead from the cold for one thing.’
McLean looked away from the screen, out through the glass wall of the office and towards the covered-up body. ‘This is what killed those wee girls too?’
‘I’m still waiting for test results, and I’m waiting to hear back from a friend at the Tropical Diseases Centre, but the symptoms are near-enough identical. Someone’s got access to a toxin that can kill in an instant.’
‘But who would do such a thing? Why?’
Cadwallader leaned against the desk, picked up one of the sample bottles and peered at it as if he couldn’t quite remember what it was. ‘That’s your job, I believe. What puzzles me more is how it was done.’
‘What do you mean?’
The pathologist put the bottle back down and pointed in the general direction of the examination table. ‘Here’s the thing, Tony. I’ve been over the body out there with a magnifying glass. Both the wee girls too. They’ve scuffs and scrapes as you might expect, but I can’t find anything resembling an injection mark. Not even a bite. These people have all been poisoned with something incredibly powerful and fast acting, but I can’t work out how.’
38
‘Detective Chief Inspector McLean?’
The walk from the mortuary to the station was a short one, and McLean had made it so many times now he couldn’t begin to count the number. Even so, it was unlike him to be so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn’t notice the car pulling in to the side of the road. Then again, it wasn’t every day he saw his old friend the pathologist quite so perplexed.
