by James Oswald
‘Don’t get to drive out this way often, sir. It’s kind of pretty in the snow.’
McLean stared out of the windscreen at the narrow road, ragged hedges on either side. There were many words he could think of to describe this part of the Midlothian plain, but ‘pretty’ wasn’t one of them.
‘Thanks for picking me up,’ he said.
‘It’s no bother. I needed to get out of the station. Why were you all the way out here anyway?’ Harrison slowed for a blind corner, handling the car far more expertly in the snow than the idiots who blocked the M8 every time the weather turned bad. McLean held his hands over the air vent, heat turned up as high as it would go, and fought off the shivers that were still running through him.
‘You remember Jane Louise Dee?’
‘The tech billionaire? Aye.’ Harrison risked a sideways glance at him, and McLean could see the look in her eyes. ‘You thought she was involved in that mess with Bill Chalmers last winter, right? Only she was in New York or Silicon Valley or somewhere the whole time.’
‘So everyone says.’ McLean reluctantly pulled his hands away from the warmth and reached into his jacket for the envelope. ‘Well, this time she’s most definitely here, in Scotland. That was her in that limousine when you picked me up.’
Harrison said nothing for a moment, the thoughts tumbling all too obviously across her face. ‘And she what? Whisked you all the way out here without the opportunity to say no?’
‘Something like that. She seems to have the ear of the DCC, so pissing her off pisses him off. I hope he knows what he’s getting himself into.’
Another long pause before Harrison spoke again. ‘But why bring you all the way out here?’
‘To show that she can?’ McLean flapped the envelope against his leg, unsure whether or not to open it. ‘To give me this.’
‘What’s that?’ Harrison risked another sideways glance, then went back to concentrating on the road as the car slid on a patch of ice.
‘You drive, I’ll read, OK?’ McLean stared at the envelope a moment longer, then carefully unsealed it and pulled out the thin sheaf of papers inside. The front page was a bad photocopy of what looked like some kind of military report, chunks of text effectively redacted with black marker pen, the lines slightly off-level. Even so he could see that the information was useful. Flicking through the rest of it, he felt the chill seep into his guts as the implications of what he was reading sank in. It was tempting to ask Harrison to take him straight back to Saifre’s mansion and arrest her for withholding information relevant to their enquiries, messing with their investigation, something, anything. He knew it wouldn’t stick though, and of course she wasn’t there. Albert had driven her off somewhere else. More to the point he wanted to ask her why, and why now. What was in it for her to investigate this matter and then hand over her findings to the police? To him specifically? She was manipulating him towards something, and it had to be more valuable to her than to them.
40
‘You do realise what this means, Tony?’
Detective Chief Inspector Jo Dexter looked like she hadn’t slept since the last time McLean had spoken to her, several days earlier. Creases lined her face, and her eyes were crusted at the corners, red from repeated rubbing. Her hair hung in tired ringlets, and the smell of cigarettes hung about her like a curse. All this and more he had taken in without comment, waiting patiently as she read through Mrs Saifre’s report. Her shoulders, slumped with the weight of the world before she started, had sunk even further with each page turned.
‘And here’s me thought your first question would be where I got that.’
‘I’ll get to that in time. More importantly, this blows away six months of fucking hard work. Who else knows what’s here?’
‘You, me, the person who compiled it. Oh, and Jane Louise Dee.’
Dexter dropped the report onto her desk, rubbed at her eyes and then stared straight at him.
‘Jane Louise Dee? What the fuck’s this got to do with her?’
‘I have absolutely no idea. Don’t know why she’s so keen for us to deal with it either. That’s not normally her style.’
Dexter went to rub her eyes again, then stopped herself. She pulled open a couple of drawers, searching until she found a tiny bottle. The skill with which she stared at the ceiling, administered drops to each eye, rolled and blinked them, suggested to McLean this was something she had to do on a regular basis.
‘I could do without this stress. Plays havoc with them.’ She waved a hand in the general direction of her face. ‘Doctor says I should give up smoking, but days like these I think it’s the only thing keeps me going.’
McLean reached forward across the desk and teased out the last page of the report. It was taken up mostly by a poor quality black-and-white photograph of a dark-haired man with a wild beard. The rest of the report had more detailed information on a gang trafficking people into the country, some for prostitution, some for slave labour and some – the lucky ones who had presumably paid well enough at the outset – to simply be dumped somewhere and left to fend for themselves. How many of them had passed through the doors of House the Refugees, and other charities like it? How much did Sheila Begbie know about the journey her clients had made before they reached her?
‘What are we going to do about this?’ He tapped his finger against the photograph. ‘You got anything on this guy?’
‘Omar Mared. Sometimes goes by the name Ozzy Jones.’ Dexter shook her head. ‘I have diddly squat on this guy. Never heard of him until you brought this in. Never seen his face before, not that you can see much from that. And yet a lot of the other information in here is spot on. Stuff we’ve been trying to build a case with for months, and it’s all here. All inadmissible in court. Fuck.’
‘If you can find him though, that’d tie everything together, would it not? And most likely clue us up to how and why those two wee girls were killed. Maurice Jennings too.’
Dexter shuffled through the pages, more for show than anything. ‘Aye, that’d be nice. All wrapped up wi’ a bow on the top would be better still. Trafficking, drug dealing, modern-day slavery, living off the proceeds of immoral earnings? Even murder, if what this report says is true. Or the whole thing could be an elaborate set-up. I mean, who is this guy? Does he even exist? How could he be running all this stuff we know about, and yet we’ve never heard of him?’
‘That’s kind of what I was hoping you could tell me.’
Dexter paused a moment, her focus sliding past McLean and into the distance before snapping back, decision made. ‘I need to speak to my people. We’re going to have to do a half-dozen coordinated raids in the next twenty-four hours or a lot of hard work is going to be wasted. If your pal Dee has this information, others do too, and I can’t risk losing what we already have. Fuck.’
‘Not going to be getting much sleep, I take it.’
‘No. And I might have to borrow a few of your constables, too. This needs to be done hard and fast, or these people will just melt away.’ Dexter picked up the report and leafed sightlessly through the pages, muttering ‘Fuck’ under her breath every so often.
‘I’ll give you all the support I can. Seems only fair, considering.’ McLean stood up to leave.
‘You want a copy of this?’ Dexter flapped the loose pages of the report at him.
‘I suppose I ought to. Rather not have anything to do with Dee though.’
‘I can understand that. Nothing so annoying as someone trying to be helpful.’
‘That’s the thing though, Jo. She’s never helpful. Not without expecting some heavy price in return.’
He should have gone back to the major-incident room and checked in. After all, he’d been away from the station for most of the day and he was supposed to be in charge. For too many reasons to list, McLean couldn’t face the idea of walking into that room, the barrage o
f questions he’d have to deal with, so very few of them actually relevant to the investigation. This was why he’d never wanted to be promoted in the first place. He thought best on his feet, worked best with a small team of detectives he could depend on. Coordinating something as big as this made his head spin.
There were far better officers to deal with the day-to-day running of an incident room. At least that’s what he told himself as he took a route from Jo Dexter’s office that avoided it. Instead, he descended into the depths of the building, away from the concrete modernity and into the brick-vaulted Victorian basement. As he went, so the bustle of the station quietened, and his nervous tension with it. And when he stopped at the half-open door to the Cold Case Unit, McLean almost laughed at the thought that he’d be far happier working here with Duguid than upstairs calling the shots.
‘You going to lurk out there like a guilty schoolboy or come in and tell me what it is you want?’ The ex-detective superintendent’s gruff voice startled him – he’d not made so much noise in the corridor that anyone inside would have heard him. When he looked up, McLean saw the man standing by the filing cabinets at the opposite end of the room to his desk. From there, Duguid could see through the gap in the doorway, out into the corridor. How he’d known McLean was standing there was anybody’s guess.
‘A lot on my mind,’ McLean said by way of explanation as he stepped into the room. Grumpy Bob looked up from one of the other desks, doing his best impression of a man who’s just popped in for some information and hasn’t been down here in the darkness all day. Not at all.
‘Something you think we can help with, I’ve no doubt.’ Duguid slammed the filing-cabinet drawer closed and stalked back across the room, a slim folder in one long-fingered hand.
‘Depends on how busy you are. I’ve a name and a few photos. Could do with tracking a person down.’
‘Not a cold case then.’ Duguid didn’t try to hide the sneer from his voice. The bear was angry today, which probably meant whatever he had been working on had hit a brick wall. At least he’d not be too busy then.
‘I had an interesting meeting with a certain Jane Louise Dee this morning. Not something I expected or particularly enjoyed, I can assure you.’ McLean gave them the rundown on what had happened, and the report he’d left with DCI Dexter. Grumpy Bob’s face was as black as a collapsed coal mine, Duguid’s a scowl that could curdle milk.
‘I take it you mean Jane Louise Dee the IT billionaire. And you know her?’
‘Aye, we’re like this.’ McLean held up his hand, index and middle finger intertwined. ‘Ask Bob about the last time he took a bath.’
‘She’s . . . not what you might think.’ Grumpy Bob shifted in his seat like he had piles. ‘And I’d no’ trust her to keep an eye on my pint while I went to the cludgie.’
‘Thank you for that image, Bob,’ McLean said. ‘But it gets to the heart of it, I guess. She’s a bloody menace, sticking her nose where it’s not wanted. The thing is, she has the ear of the chief constable and every lickspittle politician in Holyrood. One phone call and she could probably have all of us out of a job. She’s also used to getting what she wants regardless of whether it’s legal or not. I know for a fact she was involved in that Bill Chalmers case last year, and yet soon as I started mentioning her name the whole thing got shut down.’
‘Thought you were off your head on laudanum when that was all going down.’ Duguid dropped into his seat and rested his arms on the desk in front of him, staring at McLean with a look that defied him to say it wasn’t so.
‘I’ll give you that. Doesn’t change the fact that she wants this man Mared found but for whatever reason can’t find him herself. She’s using us to do her dirty work, even if it helps us in the short run.’
‘So you want us to find him then,’ Grumpy Bob said. ‘Why not leave it to Jo and her team?’
‘She’s got her hands full dealing with the rest of the information Dee’s given us. Not best pleased at how it’s buggered up six months of undercover work, either. Reckon she’s going to have to move quickly on a lot of the operations this mysterious Omar Mared is meant to be controlling. Might be that the man himself slips through her fingers.’
‘You said Dexter’s never heard of him?’ Duguid asked. ‘What if he’s not the man in charge? What if he’s just some kind of enforcer?’
‘You’d still think he’d be on their radar, at the very least. And she wants him found, which almost makes me want to hide him away.’
‘What if he doesn’t exist at all?’ Grumpy Bob voiced the concern that had been niggling in the back of McLean’s mind since he’d first scanned the pages of Dee’s report a few hours earlier. ‘What if it’s all a distraction from something else? Divert our attention while she does her own business.’
‘That had crossed my mind, Bob, but it’s too elaborate even for her. There’s a reason why she wants us to investigate this person, and I don’t know what that is. Which is why I want you to look into him without raising any suspicions. Find out what you can without setting off any alarms. We can leave arresting him to Jo Dexter. What I want to know is why Dee wants him out of the picture.’
41
‘Heard you wanted to see me, Angus. Anything important?’
McLean had already pushed through the door into the small office directly off the examination theatre before he realised that the city pathologist was not alone. He was used to seeing Doctor Sharp, Cadwallader’s assistant, there, but now the two of them were joined by a third person. A young man with thin, sandy hair that jutted out from his head in a dishevelled mop, he leapt to his feet like a startled ferret.
‘Calm yourself, Donald. It’s only the chief inspector.’ Cadwallader stood, placed a fatherly hand on the young man’s shoulder and forced him back into his seat before approaching McLean. ‘Tony. What unusually good timing. I was just going over the details with Professor Christie here.’
‘Professor?’ McLean looked at the young man more closely, wondering how someone clearly not long out of school could have achieved such a lofty status.
‘Don’t start,’ Cadwallader said, then broke into a semblance of a smile. ‘We’re none of us getting any younger, right enough.’
The young man, Professor Christie, stood up again and turned to face McLean. He was all angles and thin limbs clad in what might be mistaken for running gear. Certainly not the fusty tweeds and leather elbow patches the term ‘professor’ conjured up.
‘Donald. Donald Christie.’ He held out a hand for McLean to shake. ‘You must be the detective in charge of the investigation.’
It didn’t matter that he didn’t say which investigation. McLean knew well enough. ‘And you must be from the Centre for Tropical Diseases. Am I right?’
Christie tilted his head slightly to one side in assent. ‘I’ve just been looking at the bodies Angus sent me samples from. Fascinating, and ever so slightly alarming.’
McLean’s gut clenched. ‘Do you know what killed them? Is it something contagious?’
‘I—’ the young man started to answer, but Cadwallader cut him short.
‘Let’s all sit down, shall we?’ He dragged an office chair from one of the other desks and twirled it around for McLean.
‘It’s a simple enough question, Angus. You asked me to come over, so what’s the story?’
Cadwallader slumped into his own chair and let out a long sigh. ‘It’s complicated. Always is when you’re involved, Tony. Young Donald here’s just the icing on the cake, so to speak.’
‘OK.’ McLean fought the urge to shout. ‘The bodies. What killed them?’
Nobody said anything for a moment, Professor Christie looking pointedly at Cadwallader as if asking for permission. Finally the pathologist nodded.
‘The two children,’ Christie said. ‘I think you know already they both died from organ failure. I’m not as much of an expert
as Angus here, but basically they shut down. Lungs, liver, kidney, then heart. There’s toxins that can do that, and horribly swiftly too. Not something we see in this part of the world. Well, not normally.’
‘Toxins?’ McLean asked. ‘So it is snake venom then, like Angus thought.’
‘Normally I’d say so, yes. Venom’s my speciality, and why Angus came to me in the first place. From what we can tell, the chemical signature in their bloodstream is . . .’ Christie shrugged. ‘. . . Well, it’s very similar to snake bite.’
‘Aye, Angus already mentioned that. What was it? Richard Burton’s viper or something?’
‘Burton’s carpet viper. Echis coloratus. Nasty wee thing found mostly in the Middle East, although there’s a couple of ophidiaria in the UK have breeding specimens.’
‘Breeding? Why on earth would you want to breed venomous snakes?’
‘I think you’ve answered your own question there, Tony.’ Cadwallader smiled at his joke, but it didn’t last. ‘There’s not much call for antivenin in the UK. We’re not exactly overrun with poisonous beasties here, thank Christ. But some of the compounds have medical properties, and some have attracted interest from the military. That’s kind of where we’re going with this.’
‘See, these three victims have all suffered much the same fate,’ Professor Christie cut in. ‘But normally you’d expect to see an injection site. Bite marks would be obvious. Usually on the hand or face, not many other places a snake can get you when you’re fully clothed. But then a snake wouldn’t last ten minutes in this weather.’
‘Not a snake then. So something else – someone else – injected them?’
‘Not injected, no.’ Cadwallader hauled himself out of his seat with a groan, crossed the room to the desk where Doctor Sharp was busy ignoring them all, and retrieved a stack of photographs. When he returned, McLean could see they showed limbs, waxy yellow skin, hands and feet. It wasn’t hard to tell which belonged to the two children and which to Maurice Jennings.
