Cold as the Grave

by James Oswald

  ‘How did you end up at the sandwich factory?’ McLean asked, trying to find a different angle into a tricky subject. He needed to find the people Rahel had been living with, anyone who knew about the two dead girls. He also knew that trying to round up the refugees and illegal immigrants living in squats and slum tenements around the city would only drive them deeper underground. This was his best chance at cracking an impossible case, so no pressure then.

  ‘Akka got me papers. One time, when I had to look after Nala for many weeks. The men gave them to me. Told me to go see Mr Boag.’ Rahel managed to make the name sound like a curse, which in a way it was. ‘It is hard work there, and very bad pay. Always they threaten us. Keep working or you go to the detention centre. Do not complain or we will tell police where you are.’

  Police. McLean was all too aware in that one word how wide the gulf was between him and this young woman. ‘What about Billy? Did he not help you?’

  ‘Billy?’ Rahel smiled. ‘Billy is sweet, but he not know how we are treated. How we live. How we struggle to survive.’

  ‘He knew about Nala though. That’s how I found out in the first place.’

  Rahel’s smile hardened into a scowl. ‘He should not have done that. Learning to speak our language. Listening in on us like a spy.’

  ‘He likes you, Rahel. That’s why he did it. To impress you.’ Rose spoke the words, more effectively putting the young woman back at ease than if McLean had done so. He needed to tread a fine line to get useful information out of her, finer still to find out anything from Nala.

  ‘Your people, Rahel. The ones you came over from Syria with. Are they all still in Edinburgh? Do they all work at the sandwich factory?’

  Rahel’s head drooped, her chin almost to her chest. ‘Not many have papers. They find work where they can. Some have died. Is not easy in the winter when you have no place to live.’

  McLean recalled the hastily abandoned camp site in the Hermitage, snow on the ground, thinner where the makeshift tents had been removed. How could these people not reach out for help? What was it that kept them so terrified of the authorities? Did they really believe they’d be sent back to a war zone? Clearly they did.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘It shouldn’t be like this. You fled a war, you should be welcomed, given shelter, and instead you end up being exploited by the likes of Boag, and the scum who beat up your sister.’

  He’d not meant to sound quite so angry. Sitting next to him on Madame Rose’s ancient sofa, Emma reached out and laid a hand softly on his forearm. He could feel the warmth of her touch, an anchor against the rising frustration.

  ‘I need to know where they are, Rahel. I need to speak to them and find out who’s doing this. Who killed those two wee girls and why. If we can’t track them down and put a stop to it, then more people are going to die.’

  Rahel looked down at her hands, over to the fireplace, at Madame Rose and down at Nala. Anywhere but at McLean. He gave her the silence and time she needed. He knew better than to force the point any more than he already had, even as the urge to be getting on with things, moving forward, gnawed at him like an empty stomach. For a long while it was as if the world held its breath, just the gentle crackling of flames in the fire, the distant, monotonous tock of an old clock. Then, finally, Rahel shoved her hands into her lap, looked McLean straight in the eye and opened her mouth to speak.

  ‘Affit.’ Nala interrupted her, surprising all of them as she tore the page out of her sketchbook and held it up for them to see. ‘Affit. Look.’

  McLean half stood, then got down onto his knees and reached out a hand towards the paper. Nala looked at him suspiciously for a moment and then handed it over. The picture she had drawn was naive, as might be expected from a child of her years. Even so, he could easily understand the scene. A tall, narrow building, more like a tower than a house except that it had five sets of windows for five storeys. A set of steps leading up to the first floor from the road. Standing in front of it were the stick figures of two men, slightly apart but hands held out to shake. One was pale-faced, his top half a blaze of yellow with red dots that was a passable rendition of an overly flamboyant shirt McLean had seen recently. Peter Winterthorne’s hair was greyer than Nala had coloured it, but then she had only the crayons Madame Rose had given her to work with.

  The other figure stood taller than the old man, his body a mess of black scrawl that McLean took to be a long cloak. More black spiked out from his chin and cheeks, sprouting from the top of his round head in a childish rendition of a scraggly beard and hair, but it was his glowing red eyes that left a chill in the pit of his stomach.

  ‘Affit?’ McLean asked the little girl as he pointed at the demonic figure in the drawing.

  ‘Affit.’ Nala smiled, and nodded enthusiastically, then said something in her native tongue to Rahel. She let out a quiet gasp, and covered her mouth with one hand.

  ‘I think she means afrit, or demon.’ Madame Rose leaned forward in her chair and plucked the picture from McLean’s unresisting fingers. She peered at the image, then tugged at a slim chain around her neck to fetch a pair of half-moon spectacles from the depths of her cashmere jumper. ‘Otherwise known as a djinn or genie.’

  44

  Darkness painted the glass window wall of his office black as McLean sat at his desk early the next morning. Nala had presented him with her picture with all the seriousness of a young child. Now he stared at it, laid out in front of him, deep in thought. That the grey-haired man was Peter Winterthorne he had no doubt, which raised the question, who was the other figure? Did the old man know whoever was responsible for killing the wee girls and Maurice Jennings? Or was this just the wild imaginings of a five-year-old, traumatised by the kind of upbringing McLean couldn’t even begin to contemplate? And where did Sheila Begbie fit into it all? She’d sworn that she’d never seen Nala before, or either of the other two girls. She could have been lying, but then why call him when she found Nala hiding in her office?

  ‘Thought I saw your car out back. You got a minute, sir?’

  McLean dragged his gaze away from the picture to see Grumpy Bob standing in the doorway, clutching a suspicious brown folder under one arm. He stepped into the room and slid the folder onto the desk. ‘Going through the archives, looking at cold cases with Dagwood. Trying to find something that might tie in with your wee girls. We stumbled across this one. Not sure why it’s not been put on the system, except, well . . .’

  McLean turned Nala’s picture face down, took the folder and flipped it open. The dense text of an old-style case report blurred his vision. ‘You want to give me the executive summary?’

  Grumpy Bob shrugged. ‘Of course. There any coffee in that machine of yours?’ He walked over to the little counter at the far side of the office and poured himself a mug from the freshly brewed pot. McLean wasn’t quite sure how he felt about having a coffee maker in his office; it struck him as the sort of unnecessary perk that only served to emphasise the divide between ranks. He couldn’t deny that it was a lot more convenient than walking all the way to the canteen, and a lot more palatable than the vending machine one floor down. Nobody ever brought him cake, though.

  ‘Twenty-five years ago, there were a number of unexplained deaths in the city over a couple of months of winter. Don’t know if you remember it, sir. Would’ve been before you joined up, I think, but it was a cold one, and it lasted almost through to May. There was still snow in parts of the Pentlands in June.’

  ‘The unexplained deaths, Bob? The wee girls?’ McLean tried to get the detective sergeant back on track before he went full meteorologist on him.

  ‘Right enough. It’s all in there.’ Grumpy Bob waved at the report with his free hand. ‘Three young lads from Eastern Europe died. They’d been out Tayside way picking fruit in the summer, decided to stay when all their friends shipped back home.’

  ‘Twenty-five year
s ago?’ McLean racked his brain for memories of what he’d been up to then, found it harder to remember than he would have liked. ‘Were they even coming from Eastern Europe then? I thought the Berlin Wall didn’t collapse until eighty-nine . . . oh.’

  ‘Aye, life does that sometimes.’ Grumpy Bob sat back down again and slurped his coffee. ‘Germany unified at the end of ninety, and that was more than twenty-five years ago.’

  ‘Christ, it was, wasn’t it? When did we get so old, Bob?’

  ‘Don’t look at me, sir. I’m retiring at the end of the month, remember?’

  ‘OK, so these three young men. What’s their story?’

  ‘They were all living in a hostel in Bruntsfield, down towards Lochrin Basin. This was back before they closed the railway marshalling yards, knocked down all the old warehouses and tried to make it posh, mind. Nobody really paid much attention when they died. Three separate incidents, six weeks apart. Didn’t see any connection other than they were foreign. Probably why nobody much cared. The only thing that linked them was the hostel. That and what they all died from.’

  ‘Which was?’ McLean knew that Grumpy Bob would get to the point eventually, but he also knew there wasn’t much time left before the morning briefing. Best to chivvy him along.

  ‘It’s in the report there. Internal organ failure. The pathologist reckoned they’d all done some new kind of drug. Funny thing is, it made their skin go all waxy and yellow. Ring any bells?’

  McLean opened the folder again, leafing through the pages until he found the pathology reports. Not his grandmother this time, she’d have been close to retirement twenty-five years ago, if not actually gone. Not Cadwallader either, even though he would have started working at the City Mortuary by then. Someone called Doctor Mercer had examined all three dead bodies and declared them as probable drug overdoses, substance unknown.

  ‘Never heard of this pathologist. I’ll speak to Angus, see if he remembers them.’ He flicked back a couple of pages. ‘The hostel. I don’t suppose it’s still there.’

  Grumpy Bob shook his head. ‘Whole street’s gone, sir. Doubt the bloke who ran it would still be around either. He was in his sixties then.’

  McLean remembered his conversation with Madame Jasmina. The old fortune teller speaking of when last the circus had visited. Twenty-five years ago, the early nineties.

  ‘You ever find out more about those girls that went missing? Must have been round about the same time.’ He’d asked them to look into the symbols carved into the stone wall at the Hermitage, too, now he thought about it.

  ‘That’s what brought this up. And no, we didn’t. The files on the two who weren’t found are still open, but nobody’s looked into them in decades.’

  ‘And the third one? The one who ran away to the circus?’

  ‘Ishbel Monroe.’ Grumpy Bob leaned forward and teased the report away from where McLean had laid it out in front of himself, then flicked the pages until he found the one he was looking for. ‘Fifteen years old. She’d run away from a care home. Spent all her life in and out of fostering. Ended up in a place out Burdiehouse way.’

  ‘Fenton House?’

  ‘That’s the one.’ Grumpy Bob closed the folder and put it back on the desk. ‘You know it?’

  ‘I was there just yesterday. If it was anything back then like it is now, I’m not surprised she ran. Do we know where she is now?’

  Grumpy Bob shrugged. ‘She turned sixteen a month after they picked her up. State no longer had any responsibility for her. I’ve no idea where she went. Maybe back to the circus?’

  McLean glanced at his watch; only a few minutes before he needed to be at the morning briefing, and now his mind was full of this new information. Too many threads, not enough connections. Just the nagging feeling that it was all linked together, somehow. He stood up, reaching reflexively for the folder he’d been reading before Grumpy Bob interrupted him. It wasn’t important enough to take with him, and Nala’s picture he was keeping to himself. At least for now.

  ‘Make a few calls will you, Bob? See if you can’t find her, eh?’

  ‘As most of you will already have seen, some of our friends in the Fourth Estate have got it into their heads there’s a lethal contagious disease threatening the city.’

  McLean sat at the top table, looking out across the major-incident room and a colourful collection of plain-clothes and uniformed officers as the deputy chief constable ended the morning briefing with his customary summary and pep talk. It was one of those frustrating but necessary rituals he had learned the hard way not to try and hurry along or interrupt. Even so, he struggled not to fidget with impatience listening to the man. There was so much to do.

  ‘We’ll be having a full press conference in time for the lunchtime bulletins, of course. Drafting in some experts from the university to try and explain the situation. But in the meantime I can’t emphasise how important it is that none of you speak to anyone about this case who isn’t already in this room. If you’re asked anything, refer it up to your superiors. Detective Superintendent McIntyre will coordinate the media response, and I’m here for the duration too. If you’ve any worry, even the slightest concern that you might be saying something out of turn, then say nothing. OK?’

  A dull murmur of assent rumbled around the room like the threat of a distant storm. For a moment McLean thought Robinson was going to do the full unimpressed teacher routine and press for a more enthusiastic response, but instead he simply stared out over everyone’s heads for a moment before dismissing them all with ‘Good, then get to it, people.’

  McLean stood up as soon as the DCC had finished speaking, but there was no escaping the room in a hurry.

  ‘No sign of Ritchie?’ Robinson asked, gazing out over the room. There weren’t anything like as many officers present as might have been expected for a major incident.

  ‘She went out with Jo Dexter and the Vice team first thing, sir. That information your friend Mrs Saifre gave us had to be acted on quickly. Reckon we’ll be dealing with the fallout for a while.’

  ‘She’s no friend of mine, McLean. Bloody nuisance if you ask me, but we can’t ignore her. Too powerful, too well connected.’

  ‘And up to something, too. She’ll have known full well what we’d do with her information, mark my words. This isn’t anything like the end of it.’

  ‘How do you mean?’ Robinson asked.

  ‘Well think about it, sir. Sexual Crimes and the immigration team have been working for months on these sex traffickers, the pop-up brothels, and all the other rackets that go along with them. That report forced their hand. They’ve had to mount a dozen raids simultaneously. Mistakes are bound to happen when we do that, and people who ought to be locked up are going to slip through our fingers. And it’s going to make a big hole in the city’s sex industry.’

  ‘That’s a good thing, surely?’

  ‘Aye, it is. But someone always finds a way to fill the vacuum, don’t they. We’ll have more girls like Akka Nour trafficked in before the week’s out. New faces running the same show. And we won’t know who they are. Not for a while, anyway.’

  The DCC pinched the bridge of his nose, squeezed his eyes tight shut for a moment. ‘Did anyone ever tell you you’re a cynical bastard, McLean?’

  ‘Maybe once or twice. Doesn’t change the fact I’m right though. Saifre’s sown chaos and my bet is it’ll be her who most benefits from that.’

  ‘What’s next, then? Are we any closer to finding out who killed those wee girls? Do we even have a plan to catch whoever killed them?’

  McLean chose to ignore the sarcasm in Robinson’s voice. ‘As it happens, we do, sir. And there’s a number of people I need to speak to quite urgently. So if we’re done here . . .’

  The DCC let out a weary sigh. ‘You’re not going to get a sergeant to do it, are you, McLean.’ It wasn’t a question. ‘Go on then. G
et it done. But I want you back here for the press conference, OK? And find me a bone I can throw them so they don’t rip us all to shreds.’

  45

  The Sexual Crimes Unit having borrowed almost all of his team for their early-morning raids, McLean decided it would be just as easy for him to go and speak to Peter Winterthorne himself. He hadn’t made it far down towards the Royal Mile when a familiar-looking, low-slung coupé slowed and pulled into the kerb alongside him. He was all for ignoring it, but a sharp toot on the horn changed his mind. With luck, nobody from the station would be looking this way, anyway, and it would be warmer being driven to the office of House the Refugees than walking.

  ‘Hope you liked the positive angle I wrote on youse lot in the Tribune this morning,’ Jo Dalgliesh said as he dropped down into the passenger seat. ‘That’s one you owe me, I reckon, after what those numpties at the tabloids are printing.’

  McLean rubbed his hands together and blew on them, as much to give himself time to think as for the cold. ‘You’re all heart, Dalgliesh,’ he said eventually, adding, ‘Thank you’ when she continued to scowl at him.

  ‘Seatbelt.’ She scowled some more, and nodded her head towards the door pillar. McLean did as he was told, and only once he was properly clamped in did she indicate and pull back into the traffic. ‘Where you headed?’

  ‘If I’d known you were doing a taxi service I’d have called. I was just going to the Royal Mile. Not far.’

  ‘House the Refugees, I take it?’

  ‘I’ll not bother asking how you know that.’

  ‘It’s where you found that wee girl, right enough. Reckon I might be interested in having a word with Sheila MacNeil Begbie myself.’

  McLean was used to Dalgliesh’s offhand way of suggesting she knew more about something than he did. It had never occurred to him to ask if the woman running the refugee charity had a middle name, although someone must have written it down when she had given a formal statement. What were the chances the reporter had seen a copy of that? A lot higher than he would have liked.