Cold as the Grave

by James Oswald

  ‘It’s ancient red Morrison.’ McLean leaned between the two detective constables and stared at the surprisingly clear image of Rahel, Emma, Doctor Wheeler and him in his tartan trews.

  ‘What?’ Harrison asked.

  ‘The trousers. My gran was Esther Morrison, so I can wear Morrison tartan if I want. It’s much nicer than McLean. That’s what you were arguing about, wasn’t it?’

  ‘I . . . We . . .’ Harrison started to protest, then gave up.

  ‘See. I told you it wasn’t McLean,’ Blane said.

  ‘Well, once we’ve all finished admiring my trews, can you explain why I’m in here looking at myself on hospital CCTV and not, for instance, in the incident room dealing with the ongoing murder investigation?’

  Blane straightened in his chair, adding a good ten inches to his seated height. ‘Sorry sir. This was just the reference point on the cameras for Seaton’s estimated time of death. I was looking at the various feeds and spotted you there.’ He reached for the controls and tapped at some keys until the image disappeared, replaced by a different corridor. This one was empty, save for a chair beside a door, in which a man sprawled asleep, dropped paperback book on the floor beside him.

  ‘This is the room Seaton was in. As you can see his guard wasn’t exactly paying attention.’

  ‘Has anyone spoken to the prison? We’ll need to interview him.’ McLean didn’t envy whoever that job fell to. Prison officers could get defensive at the best of times, and this was most likely a sacking offence. Still, a man had died in his custody.

  ‘Not yet, sir.’ Stringer stood on the other side of Blane, his head more or less level with his fellow detective constable despite the fact one was seated and the other standing. ‘Seems he called in sick this morning. Maybe understandable given the circumstances, see.’

  Blane tapped a button and the image spooled forward. Nothing moved for a few moments, and then another figure came into view, a person wearing a long, black coat. Male or female, McLean couldn’t be sure. The figure had black hair down past its shoulders, but something about it suggested masculinity. It might have been a glitch in the recording or just his imagination playing tricks, but the screen appeared to darken as the figure moved towards the centre of the picture, lines flickering across it like electronic interference. The figure stopped by the sleeping guard, held a hand out to his face, then withdrew it with a flourish of long fingers. A moment later the figure stepped past the chair, pushed open the door and disappeared inside.

  ‘I’ve run the video a dozen times, sir, and he doesn’t come out.’ Blane tapped a button, causing the image to leap into fast-forward, eating up minutes on the timestamp until a nurse appeared. He tapped the button again and it returned to normal speed. ‘We’ve spoken to the nurse on the phone. Name’s Edna Grayling. She’s coming in to give a formal statement tomorrow. She swears there was no one in the room when she entered. Seaton was dead when she found him.’

  McLean rubbed at his eyes, feeling the grit in them from a long day that was about to get longer. ‘Why is it always more complicated than it needs to be?’

  Nobody answered. Presumably that was above their pay grade.

  ‘You said “he”. What makes you think that’s a man?’

  Blane leaned forward and peered at the screen even though the figure was no longer showing. ‘I just assumed. First impression, you know?’

  ‘Aye, I thought that too, but is there any footage of him from the front? Anything showing his face?’

  ‘I’ve not had a chance to go over everything from the hospital yet, sir. Still wading through a lot of the feeds from Broughton Street too. Can’t help thinking they look very similar though. Height, build, black clothing. Something about the way they both move.’

  ‘Bring the video back up again, will you?’

  McLean waited while Blane fiddled with the controls, then watched as the black-clad figure walked up the corridor again. That same interference crackled across the screen, dimming the image and making it hard to see anything clearly. Still, now Blane had mentioned it, McLean had to admit there was a resemblance to the figure they suspected of attacking Maurice Jennings.

  ‘It just keeps getting better and better,’ he said. ‘We got anyone who can do gait analysis on the footage?’

  Blane swivelled in his seat and stared at McLean as if he’d just recited something in ancient Sumerian. ‘Gait analysis?’

  ‘You know, the pattern of their walking. Sure we used it on that case back in the summer.’

  ‘I know what it is, sir. Just surprised—’ The detective constable stopped himself from accusing his superior of being a technological naïf just in time. ‘We can get it analysed, yes. Have to send it out though. Might take a wee while to get an answer.’

  ‘Get on it then. And while you’re waiting see if you can’t find any more footage with this . . .’ McLean paused, but now it had been pointed out he couldn’t shake the certainty. ‘This man. We need to see his face, and better than the Broughton Street footage. We’ll also need to speak to everyone who was working at the hospital that night. Someone must have seen him. You can’t just walk in and wander where you like unchallenged.’

  Except that, whoever it was, that was exactly what they had done. And then vanished into thin air. Why did it all have to be so bloody complicated?

  McLean’s phone buzzed in his pocket, an occurrence unusual enough for him to fetch it out and peer at the screen. A text message from Angus Cadwallader.

  Something you need to see. Come ASAP.

  A last look at the black figure, paused with its hand reaching out for the sleeping guard’s face. McLean felt a shiver run down his spine. He had a horrible feeling he knew just what his old friend the pathologist was going to show him.

  ‘I’ve got to go.’ He checked his watch. Almost shift end, but then he was the one who controlled the budget now. ‘Set up those meetings with the hospital staff for tomorrow. I’ll sanction overtime on this if you want it, but don’t stay too late.’

  Cadwallader met him at the reception desk, the admin staff having knocked off for the day. McLean followed the pathologist through the darkened mortuary towards the main examination theatre, noting the quietness of the place. It wasn’t exactly loud at the best of times, but now it felt like someone had dropped a blanket over them, muffling even the squeak of his shoes on the polished linoleum floor.

  ‘I hope this is important, Angus. Emma’s not going to be best pleased if I don’t make it home before eight.’

  ‘Tracy too,’ Cadwallader said. ‘But I think you’ll find this is as good an excuse as they come.’

  They reached the examination theatre, and McLean saw that the table was empty, cleaned down and shiny under the artificial light. All the instruments of the pathologist’s trade had been tidied away, and the counter that ran the length of one wall was clear. Even the screens used to show X-rays were dark.

  ‘Your man Matthew Seaton. I wasn’t going to do him till tomorrow.’ Cadwallader led him past the table and across to the cold store. Stainless-steel doors hid those unfortunate subjects still awaiting his tender mercies. ‘I needed to check something before leaving though, so I just had a quick look.’

  The pathologist pulled open one door, slid out the shelf within to reveal the naked form of a dead man. McLean knew it was Matthew Seaton because Cadwallader had told him. He only vaguely remembered the man from his interview, but even so the cadaver laid out in front of him was not what he might have expected.

  ‘How is this possible?’

  ‘Do you know, those were my exact words when I saw this?’ The pathologist walked over to a nearby table and pulled a pair of latex gloves from an open box, snapping them on with a skill born of considerable practice. Returning to the body on its shelf, he lifted up one arm, turning it so that the hand splayed open, palm up.

  ‘I saw this man when he
came in – what? – six hours ago? That was less than eighteen hours after he’d been declared dead, and he was as pale as you’d expect someone born and raised in the Home Counties to be. He’s been in this drawer all the time, and now he looks like this.’

  Cadwallader laid the arm back down again, unrolling the white rubberised sheet that had partially covered Matthew Seaton’s naked body. His skin had taken on the colour of a beeswax candle, and the same unhealthy sheen. When the pathologist pressed gently on the man’s chest, the indentations made by his fingers remained in place as if he were made of some child’s moulding clay, not dead flesh and bone.

  ‘Exactly the same as Maurice Jennings, and the two wee girls.’ McLean said the words out loud, even though Cadwallader already knew and Seaton was past caring. ‘Well, that complicates things.’

  43

  ‘You really should have had something to eat you know, Tony. Your stomach sounds like an old man who’s lost his dentures.’

  McLean glanced swiftly sideways at the passenger seat of his Alfa, catching Emma’s smile in the glare of oncoming car headlights. He would have liked time to eat something, since breakfast had been considerably more than twelve hours ago, and toastily meagre with it.

  ‘There wasn’t time,’ he said.

  ‘And whose fault is that? Really. You’re your own worst enemy sometimes.’

  ‘Rose might have something.’ He concentrated for a while on navigating the snarl-up of traffic at the end of North Bridge. The sooner all the building work was done to replace New St Andrew’s House with yet more shopping malls the better. ‘And if she doesn’t, there’s a great little chipper I used to go to at the bottom of Leith Walk.’

  Emma said nothing to that, but McLean could sense the rolling of her eyes even as he kept his own on the road. He’d managed to get home before eight, as promised, but only by a couple of minutes. That had left no time for anything other than wait for her to grab her coat, lock the house and climb back into the car. She’d not said much during the journey across town, but even he couldn’t blame the low gurgling noise on the Alfa’s V6 engine for long.

  ‘Thank you for agreeing to do this,’ he said as he drove slowly along the street, looking for a parking space. As if anticipating his arrival, a van pulled out just ahead of him, leaving a gap more than big enough.

  ‘It’s OK. Rose helped me, so it seems only fair I help her back. And, besides, Rahel’s nice. Don’t think I could go through half the things she has and still be sane.’

  Car parked, they both climbed out into the cold night air. McLean looked up at the clouds overhead, low and thick and threatening more snow. It clung to the rough stone of the walls, clumped in slushy piles where the traffic had thrown it to the kerbside. Some of the cars here hadn’t moved in days, if the thick layer of white on top of them was anything to go by.

  ‘Besides’ – Emma’s words dragged his attention back to the reason they were there – ‘you’re never going to stop working all the hours, so if I want to see you I’m going to have to join in, right?’

  She smiled as she spoke, and her voice was light, cheerful even. But McLean couldn’t help wondering if there wasn’t a bitter truth in her joking.

  ‘I’m trying my best, Em. But you know what it’s like.’

  She shrugged. ‘Aye, I do. Wouldn’t stick around if I didn’t now, would I? Come on. Let’s find Rose’s place quickly. It’s bloody freezing out here.’

  Rose’s place turned out to be directly across the road from where they had parked. McLean couldn’t pretend to be surprised by that, although the house he saw was not at all what he’d been expecting. He’d been there before, of course, but only ever entered from Leith Walk itself, which actually presented the rear of the house, further obscured by the later addition of shops. He’d only seen a couple of rooms that Rose used for her medium and tarot-reading work too. Coming in from the front showed a far more substantial stone-built mid-terrace property, not much smaller than his own home. The city was full of these vast houses, built hundreds of years ago by wealthy merchants, their extensive gardens long since swallowed up by later development. Leith had been a prosperous port well before Glasgow grew into the city of Empire through its trade in sugar, tobacco and slaves, and that wealth showed in the buildings that remained, even if most of them had been subdivided or turned over to offices.

  Rahel met them at the door, opening it almost before McLean had pulled the old brass knob that jangled a slow bell somewhere deep within. She looked different, and it took him a while to realise that this was because she was wearing a long skirt and a pullover that might have been fashionable a decade before she was born.

  ‘You came. Is good.’ She stood to one side, letting them both into a wide parlour, closed the door behind them and then enveloped Emma in a warm hug, as if they were old friends reunited after years apart. McLean stood awkwardly to one side until they’d finished.

  ‘Rose is here, I take it?’

  ‘Yes. I show you the way.’ Rahel led them through into a large hall, stairs climbing up to two sets of landings underneath a wide glass cupola skylight. Lamps in sconces on the walls cast more shadow than light, and the overwhelming smell was of cat. McLean counted at least a dozen, staring at him from various vantage points as he and Emma followed the young woman up to the first floor. They entered what was undoubtedly a large sitting room, although it was so packed full of what could only be described as stuff that it was hard to tell just how large.

  ‘Tony, Emma. You came. How wonderful.’ Madame Rose would never leap or spring, but nevertheless she stood up with impressive alacrity and crossed the room to greet them. Emma got another hug, McLean was happy enough with a handshake.

  ‘We did,’ he said, then noticed the young girl Nala sitting cross-legged on a Persian rug in one of the few areas of clear floor in the room, not far from a fireplace crackling with a real wood fire. ‘I’m not so sure this is a good idea though.’

  ‘Pish and tosh, Tony. I know what the rules and regulations say. You have to have meetings with Social Services, set up an interview plan, submit it in triplicate, blah, blah, blah. Or, you and I and Rahel here can ask wee Nala to tell us what she saw.’

  Hearing her name, the girl gazed up at Madame Rose and smiled. McLean was fairly sure that was the first time he’d seen her look anything other than scared.

  ‘It’s all for a good reason, Rose. I can’t use anything she says in court against the people who were after her, or the people who hurt her mother. If word gets out I’ve spoken to her like this, then any case against them will collapse before it gets anywhere near a court. And I’ll likely be out of a job too.’

  ‘And if you drag her into the station, or back to that care home, and set up an interview the way you’re supposed to, she’ll tell you nothing.’

  ‘Aye, I know. Which is the only reason I’m here.’

  Madame Rose raised an eyebrow. ‘The only reason?’ She dismissed the question with a shake of her blue-rinsed hair. ‘It’s no matter. Shall we get started? Or would you like a cup of tea first?’

  After an hour, McLean was glad he’d accepted Madame Rose’s offer of tea. He’d been starving anyway, and the medium didn’t seem to mind him helping himself to more of her very fine chocolate cake than was perhaps polite. Watching him eat seemed to put Nala at ease, too, which gave him a good excuse. It wasn’t easy coaxing any kind of a story out of the young girl though. Her grasp of English was poor, and her native Aramaic not much better. Instead, she communicated in a strange hybrid that Rahel translated for them as best she could, and slowly, piece by piece, the dreadful tale began to emerge.

  ‘We came here when the war destroyed our town,’ Rahel explained after Nala had fallen silent again. ‘There were lots of us, to start with, but we were split up into smaller groups. Sometimes we would be locked away in a house for days, waiting for the right time to move on to the ne
xt place. That was when the men started to take interest in Akka.’

  ‘Akka. Mamma,’ Nala chipped in, then went back to her drawing. Rose had given her a sketch pad and a box of crayons in the hope that she might use them to help illustrate her story, but so far she had only covered page after page with random coloured scrawls even a trained child psychologist would find a challenge to interpret.

  ‘These men. They were the ones arranging your transport here, I take it?’ McLean recalled Mrs Saifre’s report. Right now Jo Dexter would be prepping for multiple raids across the city. With a little luck, the entire operation would be shut down. But what would rise up in its place? Something always did.

  Rahel’s face darkened, her green eyes narrowed in anger. For a moment McLean feared she might even spit on the floor, but she stopped herself, uttering some word he didn’t understand but which was clearly the foulest of insults.

  ‘I call them men, but they are worse than animals. Take what they want and kill you if you try to stop them.’

  ‘And one of them is . . .’ McLean nodded in Nala’s direction, not really wanting to voice the accusation in front of the girl.

  ‘I think is not likely.’ Rahel looked at her niece, who had bent down close to the paper and was hard at work on something that took all of her attention.

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘She is not like them. She is like her mother. Like my mother before . . .’ Rahel shook her head. ‘No. Little Nala came more than nine months after the journey. Her father is here.’

  ‘Any idea who he might be?’ McLean knew enough about the work Akka had been put to once she’d arrived in Edinburgh to understand that the girl’s father could be almost anyone. How many men had she been sold to? Had she been given any kind of protection?

  ‘I not know. I barely see Akka for years. Just hear things, you know? And sometimes men would bring Nala to us. Tell us to look after her. If we were lucky they even gave money to help. Maybe some food. But we are not lucky people.’