by James Oswald
‘Who wants to . . . ?’ He glanced sideways at the car, a stretch limousine with blacked-out windows. Despite the salt and grime on the roads it was spotless and shiny. A heavy-set man in a too-tight black suit stared at him from the front seat, window wound down. ‘Let me guess. Jane Louise?’
The car stopped with scant regard for the rest of the traffic or the double yellow lines at the side of the road. McLean considered legging it back to the station; it was only a couple of hundred yards away after all. It would be undignified though, and he wasn’t as fit as he had once been. There was the small matter of his conversation with the deputy chief constable to consider too. If Teflon Steve had sold his soul to this devil, then McLean would have to tread carefully when dealing with her.
He waited while the bodyguard opened his door and climbed out, straightened his jacket, then walked to the door at the rear of the car. McLean half expected Mrs Saifre to be sitting in the back, Mafia boss style. Perhaps with some terrified petty criminal with her who she would execute in front of him just to show him that she could. When he saw that the car was empty, he was almost disappointed.
‘Mrs Saifre asks that you grant her an hour of your time.’ The bodyguard spoke with a cultured accent McLean had missed before. It sounded strange coming from a body that had clearly spent more hours in a gym than the classroom.
‘And if I refuse?’
The bodyguard simply tilted his head slightly in an expression that could have been taken as a threat or that he thought McLean an idiot for even suggesting it.
‘OK. But an hour is all she’s getting. And only because my boss told me I had to.’ He stepped into the back of the limousine and sank into a soft, deep seat. The nameless bodyguard closed the door on him, shutting out the noise of the city with impressive totality. The car rocked slightly as he climbed back into his own seat at the front, and McLean thought he might have felt the slightest of jolts. Then the car was pulling back into the traffic and they were off.
The first time McLean had crossed paths with Mrs Saifre she had bought a large house not far from his own. As far as he was aware, it had since been sold to a disgraced Russian oligarch, and was sitting empty while its owner languished in a gulag in Siberia. He expected to be taken to some expensive city centre hotel for his meeting, but as the opulent stretch limousine picked up speed down the Old Dalkieth Road towards Cameron Toll, it became apparent Saifre had other ideas. Out past the city bypass and he was fairly sure he wasn’t going to get back to the station in the allotted hour either.
McLean knew the area to the south-east of the city well enough from various investigations down the years. Even so, he was surprised when the limousine turned off a tiny road somewhere near Rosewell, through an ornate pair of wrought-iron gates and along a tree-lined drive. He had thought the countryside here was a mixture of plantation forestry and arable farmland, and yet someone had built an enormous mansion, perhaps a hundred and fifty years ago. Surrounded by snow-covered lawns and circled by the dark pine forestry all around it, the place could have been tucked away in the Highlands it was so secluded. That, presumably, was the point.
The car pulled to a gentle halt right outside the main entrance, deep in the shadow of a tall stone tower. McLean waited for the bodyguard to open the door for him, not wanting to know whether or not he’d been locked in for the journey.
‘Mrs Saifre will see you inside,’ he said in that oddly cultured voice, indicating the wide steps up to a black oak doorway already standing open. ‘We’ll be here to take you back to the city when you’re done.’
McLean climbed out of the car, feeling the chill in the air as the wind dropped off the Moorfoot Hills and flowed straight through him. He wanted nothing more than to hurry up the steps and get inside, where it would be warm, but instead he paused a moment, took out his phone. A couple of taps at the screen brought up the map function, pinpointing his position. He copied it into a text and pinged it off to the station with a request to be picked up in an hour. The bodyguard with the posh voice stood silently all the while, but McLean could sense the frustration boiling off him. He let the man stew, waiting for a response to his text.
‘Sorry about that,’ he said as the phone buzzed, the screen lighting up with the answer he wanted. Smiling, he shoved it back in his pocket. ‘Let’s go see what all this fuss is about then.’
‘Ah, Tony. You got my message. How delightful to see you again. So good of you to come.’
Mrs Saifre met him in a hallway almost as big as his house back in the city. Two enormous fireplaces blazed on opposite sides of the room, doing their best to chase away some of the deep winter chill. Even so, his breath steamed slightly as he spoke.
‘I wasn’t aware I had any choice in the matter. What do you want?’ McLean looked at his watch more for effect than from any desire to know the time. ‘The clock’s ticking.’
Saifre pouted like a teenager, and for a moment he almost forgot that she wasn’t the young woman she appeared to be. Jane Louise Dee was a product of the baby boom and the best plastic surgery he had ever seen. Either that or she bathed in the blood of virgins and refused to go out into the sun. Being evil incarnate was clearly good for the skin.
‘Come now, Tony. There’s no need to be rude. I’m here to help you, after all.’
‘Forgive me if I find that hard to believe.’
‘Nevertheless, it’s true.’ Saifre shrugged, tossing her shoulder-length hair around as if she wasn’t quite comfortable with it. ‘But let’s not talk about that here. This house is rather wonderful, and has a very interesting history behind it. But it’s perishing cold in the winter. Please, come through to the drawing room. It’s much warmer in there.’
Saifre turned away and set off across the hall without waiting to see if McLean was going to follow. Part of him felt like turning around, heading back out of the door and away. Experience told him it was better to get this unpleasantness over with as quickly as possible. And he couldn’t deny that his curiosity wasn’t piqued. Just important to keep his wits about him.
‘How many houses do you own then?’ he asked as he caught up with her halfway down a corridor wide enough to drive a coach and four along.
‘In my father’s house are many mansions.’ Saifre paused at a door, then pushed it open to reveal a large room beyond. ‘But this is the only one I own right now.’
‘Really? I thought you owned half of Manhattan, and there’s the old Dee family pile up in Fife.’ McLean stepped inside and was hit by a wall of heat, dry like the desert. Another log fire crackled enthusiastically in a hearth big enough to roast a whole ox, in stark contrast to the winter landscape outside the floor-to-ceiling French windows.
‘Corscaidin? Well, I suppose technically I own it. Haven’t been back there in years though. It’s an orphanage these days.’ Saifre shook her head, smiling at some joke only she knew. ‘Can’t call it that, of course. Not politically correct. It all amounts to the same thing though. Part of the Trust, like Inchmalcolm Tower and Fenton Hall. Society can be so cruel to its children. We do our best to pick up the pieces.’
McLean studied Saifre’s face for any sign that she was lying. He had a good eye for the normal tells, the facial tics and little mannerisms that gave people away. And yet the woman standing in front of him wasn’t normal. Not in any sense of the word. She could have been lying with her every breath and he wouldn’t be able to tell. Easier just to assume that she was, and then try to tease out the truth from what she said.
‘Drink?’ She broke eye contact and crossed the room to where an antique sideboard stood, not waiting for him to answer. McLean let her pour generous measures of whisky into two crystal tumblers even though he had no intention of drinking. It was far too early in the day for one thing, and he wasn’t about to start accepting hospitality from her for another.
‘What is it you want, Mrs Saifre?’
‘Why do you hav
e to be so formal all the time? Please, Tony, call me Jane Louise.’ She swayed her hips with a little too much exaggeration as she walked back towards him, one hand outstretched to pass him his drink. McLean took the tumbler, almost dropping it as her finger brushed his and a jolt of something far more powerful than static electricity shot between them. He took a step back, relieved when she didn’t immediately try to fill the gap that opened up between them. Something like puzzlement flickered briefly across her face.
‘If it’s all the same, I’ll stick to Mrs Saifre for now.’ McLean fought the urge to look at his finger, even though his mind was telling him it was no more than a blackened stump. ‘I find formal works best in this kind of situation. Now, if you could get to the point?’
Saifre dropped herself down into a leather sofa, gave the seat beside her a half-hearted pat by way of an invitation for McLean to join her. He could feel the allure of her as if it were a physical thing, but he knew it wasn’t real. She wasn’t real. Just a thorn in his side. The pain in his finger from her touch was receding now, but it gave him the focus he needed to resist her glamour.
‘OK. I can see you’re not going to play, so I’ll lay it out straight. You have a problem. Something – someone, I should say – has killed two young girls and possibly a man too. Here, in Edinburgh, in the past week. You’re no closer to understanding how it, he, has done this than you are to finding out who he is. What he is, I should say.’
McLean almost took a sip of the whisky. He could smell that it was good quality, heavily peated, just how he liked it. The glass was at his mouth when he noticed the look in Mrs Saifre’s eyes, fixed not on him but on his drink.
‘If you have information about crimes committed in the city, then withholding that information is a crime in itself.’ He pulled the glass away from his lips with more effort than it should have taken. Almost as if he were arm-wrestling an invisible opponent. Placing it down on the nearest table brought a small gasp of relief.
‘I’m not withholding anything, Tony. That’s exactly why you’re here, so I can tell you what I know.’
‘And what, exactly, is that?’ McLean paused a moment, then added: ‘And what do you want in return?’
‘So suspicious.’ Saifre stood up, placing her own barely touched glass of whisky down beside McLean’s, then walked to the fireplace, hips swaying in that exaggerated manner again. She took a slim brown envelope from the mantelpiece, brought it over and handed it to him. McLean was more careful in taking it than he had been with the glass, and he couldn’t help noticing that Mrs Saifre was too.
‘The Dee Trust looks after all sorts. Lately we’ve had a fair number of refugee children come to us. Syrians, North Africans, a few Iraqis and others from the Middle East. You’ll have noticed it’s not the most stable of places right now. They speak to us more freely than they do the police and other authorities, and a lot of them tell us about how they got here. There’s a recurrent theme to their stories, and a name that keeps cropping up time and again. All the details we’ve been able to find about him are in there.’ Saifre nodded at the envelope, and for a moment McLean was almost fooled by her act of concern. Then he remembered who he was talking to, how she had brought him here.
‘If you know who this person is, then why not deal with him yourself? It’s what you’ve done in the past.’
‘What can I say, Tony? After our last meeting, all that nastiness with poor old Andrew Weatherly and his family? Well, it made me think about myself and what I can do for society. The Dee Trust is a small part of that. Life has given me so much. It’s only fair I give something back.’
‘Forgive me if I take a bit more convincing.’ McLean waved the envelope like a fan. ‘But if this turns out to be useful, then you’ll have my thanks. Next time, though, maybe just send it to the station, or perhaps give us a call. All this being picked up by bodyguards and driven out to the countryside is a bit too cloak and dagger for my liking.’
‘Would you have come? If I’d asked nicely? Would you have even looked at that if I’d had Albert deliver it?’ Saifre stood a little too close for McLean’s comfort, her stare back to its more normal, penetrating manner. ‘Or would you have shoved it in a drawer, maybe even binned it? Just out of spite.’
He held her gaze for as long as he could, but it was like staring into the void. For a moment there was nothing but the two of them, no room, no country mansion, no Edinburgh, no Scotland. He was surrounded by darkness and the crackling heat of the flames in the fireplace, falling through blackness with no hope of a snowdrift to cushion the impact when he hit the ground.
And then a buzzing in his pocket broke the moment. Everything snapped back into place, including the scowl on Saifre’s face. McLean pulled out his phone, saw a text scrawled across the screen.
‘That’ll be my lift back to the city.’ He folded the envelope lengthways and slipped it into his inside jacket pocket. ‘I’ll see myself out.’
39
Ice-cold air chilled his lungs as McLean stepped out of Mrs Saifre’s house. The shiver that ran through him might have been due to the drop in temperature, or it might simply have been relief at being out of the woman’s presence. Woman. Yes, Saifre was certainly that, but she was something else besides. Something rotten and festering he wanted nothing to do with. And yet, like the proverbial bad penny, she just kept on turning up.
The folded envelope in his breast pocket pressed against his chest with an uncomfortable heat quite at odds with the winter chill all around him. Not that it was hot, particularly, so much as it represented something he’d been fighting hard to avoid. If it truly contained useful information, as part of him knew it would, then that would be a favour owed. Accepting it made him somehow beholden to her, and she knew it. He was tempted to take it out, rip it up and leave the tearings scattered over the stone steps, but even he could see just how melodramatic that would look. And Saifre wouldn’t have brought him all the way out here, given him this intelligence, if it weren’t in some way true. Overlooking it would be as bad as accepting it, and both were more manipulation than he cared for. Damn her.
‘You all done, sir?’
The bodyguard – Albert, McLean assumed – appeared as if from nowhere and hurried to the stretch limousine still parked in the snow-smeared gravel turning area in front of the house. By the time he’d reached the bottom of the stone steps, the well-spoken young man had already opened the passenger door and stood beside it expectantly.
‘Not necessary, thanks.’ McLean walked on past the car, feet crunching through the thin layer of snow that covered most of the surrounding landscape. Only the low stone walls and occasional leafless shrubs gave any clue as to where nature took over. That and the arrow-straight tyre tracks where the limousine had brought him here from the public road. In the far distance, over the tops of the trees that surrounded the parkland, he could see the Moorfoot Hills painted stark white. Here and there, rectangular strips of plantation woodland cut black scars in the landscape, and as he took them in, McLean realised that the clouds had begun to clear, a thin, weak sun breaking through.
He was halfway to the gates and slightly regretting his actions, when he heard the crunch of tyres on snow behind him. The limousine was quiet, its engine all but inaudible above the sighing of the wind in the trees, but then only the best was ever good enough for Mrs Saifre. As the car pulled up alongside him, he expected the driver’s window to wind down and the bodyguard-cum-chauffeur to try to convince him of the folly of walking all the way back to the city. Instead, the car inched slowly ahead of him, and then the rear passenger window opened.
‘Really, Tony. You can be quite childish sometimes. What would the deputy chief constable think of this?’
McLean stopped walking, and the limousine continued on for a few feet before coming to a halt. He waited until it had reversed back to where he stood, tempted to then carry on towards the entrance gates and the roa
d beyond. For all that he didn’t much care to share the same air as her, Saifre was right though. He was going out of his way to be awkward, to turn down anything she offered him, and Call-me-Stevie would almost certainly give him a bollocking for it when he got back to the station. Well, it wouldn’t be the first time.
‘I appreciate your offer, thank you.’ He bowed his head ever so slightly towards the open window and the pale-skinned woman sitting behind it. As if on cue the sound of an approaching car wafted over the trees from the direction of the road. ‘I find when I need to think, walking helps. The rhythm of feet on pavement, you see?’
Saifre stared at him as if he were mad, which was something she probably knew more about than him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement at the gates, a not-so-shiny silver-black shape against the whiteness.
‘Besides, I arranged my own transport back to the city.’
McLean set off once more towards the gates, unsurprised when the limousine kept pace with him all the way. His text had only asked that he be picked up, not how or by whom. Even so, he was disappointed to find DC Harrison behind the wheel of one of CID’s few remaining pool cars. He’d hoped it might have been Grumpy Bob, or even a squad car out of Dalkieth. He’d also not planned on Saifre following him all the way. The fewer people he brought to her attention the better. He stood by the passenger door, waiting for the limousine to move off. Instead it pulled to a halt alongside, sandwiching him between the two cars.
‘The new girl. Detective Constable Harrison, isn’t it? I’ve heard good things about her.’ Saifre’s smile could have frozen Gladhouse Reservoir solid. ‘Well. I can’t say it’s been fun, Tony. But then you never really were. Say hello to that lovely Emma from me.’
The empty smile and soulless eyes slowly disappeared as she wound up the passenger window, replaced by McLean’s own reflection in the blackened glass. And then with a silence so total it was as if he had gone deaf, the limousine slid forward, into the road and away.
