Cold as the Grave

by James Oswald

  ‘Doesn’t . . . ? Oh, yes. That. I rather thought it was plain as the day, but if your colleagues in the Sexual Crimes Unit can’t see it, then maybe not.’

  ‘I don’t really appreciate being toyed with. Wasting police time is a criminal offence, you know.’

  ‘So hostile, Tony. I’m just trying to be helpful.’

  ‘Like you were helpful with the Weatherly case and Rosskettle Hospital? Like you were helpful with Bill Chalmers and his little hipster opium den?’

  Saifre pouted, dropping herself into a soft leather sofa by the fire. She lifted one hand half off the cushion as if thinking about beckoning him over to join her, then dropped it down again.

  ‘I know you won’t believe it, but that wasn’t me. Well, not exactly. It’s complicated. I’m not interested in that sort of thing any more. I want to help people, the sick and the poor and the needy. That’s what the Dee Trust is all about.’

  McLean resisted the urge to scoff. He didn’t believe a word she was saying, of course, but he had also seen some of the work the Trust had done, and heard the praise sung in its name by some of his more senior colleagues. Praise sung. The thought brought a wry smile to his face.

  ‘What is it you really want, Saifre? What are you trying to buy with all your ill-gotten fortune? Call me a cynic, but I can’t believe it’s really just a change of heart.’ She’d have to have one to change, after all.

  ‘Can I be frank, Tony?’ Saifre asked the question of herself. ‘I think I can. Omar Mared. Ozzy Jones. You think he’s just a name, a bogeyman figure used to keep the city’s illegals in line. Trafficked prostitute getting uppity? Ozzy Jones beats her into a coma as a warning to the other girls. Gang labourers organising themselves to push back against the brutal conditions they’re being forced to live and work in? Omar Mared takes their children as hostage to their good behaviour. And if they don’t give them up willingly he does even worse. You think this is how it works, the same name used by all of the people running these despicable schemes. The trafficking and the work gangs and the child prostitution and all the other horrible things people are capable of doing to other people.’

  ‘And you’re going to tell me it isn’t so. That Omar Mared is actually a person.’

  Saifre tilted her head to one side, the ghost of a smile crinkling the edges of her claret-red lips. ‘Well, not a person as such. More a powerful spirit. An afrit, if you like.’

  ‘Don’t tell me. A djinn.’

  The smile blossomed more fully now, revealing perfect white teeth behind it. ‘That’s what I like about you, Tony. So much more educated than the average bumbling policeman. Yes, a djinn. A creature of Middle Eastern myth, you might say. But then so am I, if you think about it.’

  McLean didn’t want to. He would far rather live in a world where Mrs Saifre and her like didn’t exist. Where they were just greedy and ruthless, and not obsessed with making excuses for the way they were. God, the devil, demons and angels. Creatures of nightmare and myth. Weak justifications for the horrors men, and women, committed all by themselves. No supernatural influence needed. But there was information to be gleaned here, from this evil woman. Information that might save lives. As such, he would play her game, at least for now.

  ‘I’ve been hearing a lot about them of late. Djinns, afrits, genies. I thought the pantomime season was over, but clearly not.’ He waited until Saifre opened her mouth to speak before interrupting her. ‘So tell me, why are you so interested in this mythical being? Why do you want us to find Omar Mared?’

  ‘Are you kidding? Who wouldn’t want to find a real genie? I mean, think of the possibilities.’ Saifre leaned forward in her seat, elbows on her knees and hands under her chin like an excited teenager. Her enthusiasm filled the room like second-hand smoke at a college party. McLean steeled himself against it, trying not to inhale.

  ‘Possibilities?’

  ‘Imagine it, Tony. The power. The influence. What if you could have three wishes, guaranteed they would come true? What would you want?’ Saifre almost bounced as she asked the question, her eyes glinting in excitement. ‘How about your and Emma’s child born healthy? A happy family life together? Or maybe Kirsty Summers still alive and Donald Anderson nothing but an old antiquarian book dealer who sold you an ancient medical text you thought might make a fun present for a trainee doctor. Or perhaps you might cast your wish back further still. Make it so your parents never accepted that plane ride from their old friend, Toby Johnson.’

  McLean said nothing, unsure whether he could speak, even if he could get a word in edgeways. He knew that Saifre had an unhealthy obsession with him, but this was a level of detail that would do a stalker proud.

  ‘Now forget three wishes.’ Saifre’s tone changed as she spoke, her excitement turning to seriousness. ‘Imagine if you could have as many wishes as you wanted?’

  ‘Isn’t that what you’re supposed to ask for your first one?’ McLean found his voice at last. ‘Only it never works that way, does it? There’s always unforeseen consequences. And anyway, there’s no such thing as genies, and wishes are for fools.’

  The gleam in Saifre’s eyes blinked out as if someone had switched off a light inside her head. ‘So remorselessly logical. It really must be no fun being you.’

  McLean ignored the taunt. ‘So what you’re trying to tell me is Omar Mared really is a genie or djinn or afrit, or whatever name you want to call it. Some kind of half-arsed demon preying on the weak. Sounds like someone I need to put away for life, not cosy up to for favours.’

  ‘Oh, Tony. Tony, Tony, Tony.’ Saifre walked right up to him, so close her thin shift brushed against the fabric of his suit. He could feel the heat boiling off her body, the tension in her as she stood right before him. His memory told him that she was shorter than she seemed now, her head on a level with his, eyes as black as boiling tar and staring straight at him. For a terrible moment he thought she was going to try and kiss him, and he wondered how easily he would be able to resist this time. No postcard from Emma to lend him strength. Clenching his fists for moral support, he stood his ground. The moment seemed to last an eternity, although it was most likely less than a couple of seconds. Finally, she looked away.

  ‘The djinn are an ancient race. They existed long before mankind came along, and will outlive you all.’ She went back to the sofa and slumped into it. ‘They keep themselves to themselves, mostly. Human minds can’t really comprehend them, much the same as they can’t comprehend me and my kind unless we wear these mortal skins.’

  Something about the way Saifre spoke convinced McLean that she was completely serious. It shouldn’t have surprised him – it wasn’t as if you could do the things she did and not know yourself to be evil. As beguiling as it was to accept her for what she claimed to be, he couldn’t quite bring himself to take that final step though.

  ‘Sometimes, when the moon is in the right phase or the fates conspire to make it so, when a great storm sweeps the desert and breaks down the barriers between worlds, then the djinn slip into the realm of mankind. It’s not always happy when people cross their path, but sometimes they are in a mood to grant favours. Wishes, as you might have it. And so the myths have grown up around them over the millennia.’

  McLean let the story wash over him, all too aware of the parallels with what both Madame Jasmina at the circus and Professor Gobbo Charnley at the university had told him. At the back of his mind, his trained detective’s thinking asked the question, why? Why was she telling him this? What did she hope to gain from it?

  ‘You know the story of Aladdin, of course. The trapped genie, freed from its lamp, grants three wishes to the poor boy. That’s a morality tale as much as anything, but the truth behind it is far less pleasant. There’s a very good reason the genie was trapped in the first place, Tony. They might be able to bless people with favours that seem like wishes made true, but they also feed on the souls of men, suck t
hem dry and leave only withered husks behind.’

  A cold shiver ran down McLean’s back, despite the hellish heat of the drawing room. ‘When you say withered husks, you’re not being figurative, are you?’

  Saifre smiled, and somewhere a thousand hopes were crushed beneath jackboots. ‘Now you’re getting it.’

  The weather had improved slightly as McLean drove the back lanes of Midlothian towards the city, but snow still clung to the verges and drifted through gaps in the tattered hedges. After the stifling heat of Mrs Saifre’s living room, he’d turned the fans on high and opened all the vents in his Alfa, letting the temperature drop close to what it was outside. The cold helped to sharpen his thoughts, sluggish after too much time in her dread presence.

  She wasn’t the devil, and there wasn’t a rogue genie or afrit or djinn running loose in the city. It would be so easy to believe her, but then what? There was always a rational explanation, even if it involved other people believing in those things. All he had to do was find that explanation. Find out who was killing children, and how. And why Saifre was interested.

  What was it that she truly wanted? The Dee Trust had been going for years, but now it seemed to have attracted her full attention. Either that or she was using it to throw everyone off the scent of what she was really doing. Could it be as simple as muscling in on the Edinburgh gangland scene? Taking control of the people trafficking, prostitution and drugs? Well, she’d been involved in drugs before, even if he couldn’t prove it. For someone as wealthy and influential as Jane Louise Dee it all seemed rather low rent though.

  The jangling ringtone of his phone broke McLean’s train of thought as he approached Straiton and the dual carriageway. He thumbed the button on the steering wheel to accept the call.

  ‘McLean.’

  ‘You driving, Tony? Thought you’d be in the office by now.’ DCI Dexter’s voice sounded uncomfortably clear and close over the car’s expensive loudspeakers.

  ‘Slight detour, Jo. Should be there in half an hour or so.’ McLean slowed as the traffic backed up on the approach to IKEA and the Straiton retail park. ‘Maybe a little longer. You wanting something?’

  ‘Got someone you need to talk to, but she’ll wait until you get in. We’re still processing all the folk we arrested yesterday. Have you any idea how inconvenient it was you bringing me that intel on a Friday? Weekend overtime’s killing my budget.’

  ‘That’s when it was given to me, Jo. Don’t shoot the messenger, aye?’

  ‘Fair enough. Looks like we’re going to be keeping the courts busy for a while, mind.’

  ‘That’s a good thing, right?’ He couldn’t help but turn it into a question. This was a great outcome for Police Scotland, and would play well with the media. Teflon Steve would be happy, as would the Chief Constable. It was also exactly what Mrs Saifre wanted. Chaos in the city’s underworld.

  ‘Aye, well.’ Dexter didn’t make any more comment than that. ‘We’ve barely made a dent on processing it, and Immigration are all over us like a rash given the folk we’ve been rounding up. Not a lot of real names, either. But a few are coming up and too many of them are on the database of your favourite charity.’

  ‘The Dee Trust?’ For a moment McLean was confused by his earlier thoughts. He couldn’t think why Dexter would be looking into that, or indeed how she’d got access to their records. Then it dawned on him. ‘House the Refugees?’

  ‘Aye, them. Your man Lofty Blane’s been going through their books. Seems like housing’s not the only thing they’ve been doing.’

  53

  ‘I understand you have something you want to tell me.’

  McLean sat in interview room three, the one with no window and a heating system that was erratic at best. Across the marked Formica table from him, a young woman fidgeted nervously. She had the pale face and thin, angular features of an addict, but her eyes burned too bright for someone who regularly sought solace in a needle. They were the same vibrant green as Rahel’s, almost hypnotic when they stared at him. Fortunately she was more interested in her lap, the table top and her restless fingers.

  ‘I wish for, how you call it? Asylum? I trade you information. The one you seek.’

  Her accent was like Rahel’s too, something foreign mixed in with a few years of living in Edinburgh. According to DCI Dexter, she was one of nine sex workers, all foreign and most likely trafficked, found working in a nondescript suburban house in Carrick Knowe. Its proximity to Sighthill, where Akka Nour had been left for dead, was what had brought them to McLean’s attention. That and her hair. Shaved almost to the skin and covered with a long, raven black wig when she’d been arrested, it was as dark and red as that of the girl they had found in the Hermitage.

  ‘You told us your name is Mandy Cobane.’ McLean consulted the copy of the arrest sheet he had laid out in front of him. ‘That’s not your real name though, is it?’

  The young woman stopped fidgeting, crossed her arms and slumped back in her chair. ‘They tell me I am Mandy, so I am Mandy.’

  ‘Who tells you that? The men who brought you here from Syria? The men who killed Akka Nour?’

  McLean had been hoping the name would spark a reaction, and he wasn’t disappointed. The young woman lunged forward, slapping her hands down on the table, her face flushing in something that might have been anger, might have been fear. Was probably both. ‘Akka is dead? They kill her? This is why I must have asylum. Is not safe here. Is not safe back home.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to send you back home, wherever that might be.’ McLean flipped open the folder he had brought with him, a sheet of blank paper covering up the first of the photographs inside it. ‘It’s clear you knew Akka, so I can tell you that her child, Nala, is safe. She is with Rahel, her aunt. And they’re both being looked after by someone I trust implicitly.’

  He studied the young woman’s face as he spoke, seeing how his words affected her. ‘Now, I can call you Mandy, but we both know that’s not your name. And we both know it’s not a name you particularly like. So what should I call you?’

  For a while she said nothing, then the young woman finally turned that hypnotic green gaze on him, almost daring him to argue with her. ‘I am Aysha,’ she said. ‘Akka and Rahel are family. Nala too. I care for her sometimes, when they take her mother away. Only this time they take both of them.’

  ‘You were all brought over here together?’

  ‘No. I was here six months before Akka arrived. If I could, I would tell them to stay home. Better to die in the bombs than live like this here.’

  Given what had happened to them, McLean was inclined to agree. Life had not been kind to the people of Rahel’s town.

  ‘This won’t be easy, Aysha, but I want you to look at a couple of pictures. Two wee girls like Nala. I think you might know who they are, maybe who did this to them.’ He pulled out the first photograph, turned it around and laid it down in front of the young woman. Not the artist’s impression, this was the least horrific of the pictures taken after the girl had been cleaned up for the post-mortem. She stared at it for a long while, tears welling in her eyes and falling down her thin cheeks.

  ‘Mara was Ishtar’s little girl. She was born in the old country. Came over on the boats not more than a year ago.’ Aysha reached a shaking hand towards the photo, then withdrew, as if touching it was too painful. ‘Ishtar tried to run away, so they took little Mara from her. If she did as they told her, then she could have time with Mara once a week. If not, then it could be months.’

  McLean steeled himself against the heartlessness of the situation. Anger would do no good here, even though he could feel it growing. And with it a despair at the plight of these women and children. How sick was the world that it could do this to the weak and innocent? How hateful the men? How utterly soulless?

  ‘This Ishtar. Is she one of the other women in the house where we found you?’ he as
ked after a while.

  Aysha shook her head, her voice cracking as she spoke. ‘I not see Ishtar in many months. They not let us stay together too long. Always new faces, mix us up, move us around.’

  McLean picked up the first photograph and slid it back into his folder, then took the second out, staring at it a while. He knew before he put it down in front of her what the answer would be. The dead girl’s red hair and the shape of her face were echoed in the young woman in front of him.

  ‘We also found this one, a few days ago in the Hermitage.’

  This time Aysha reached out and touched the picture. She ran trembling fingers gently over the page as if stroking the dead child. She choked on her words, sobs racking her thin body. ‘I called her Elia, after my mother.’

  McLean almost stood up, meaning to walk around the table and give her a hug. He could feel the loss himself, the echo of what might have been, now no more than an empty hollowness in his gut. Was this why that small, guilt-ridden part of him had felt relief at Emma’s miscarriage? Knowing the heartache a child could bring? Was he really that selfish?

  ‘Why? Why would she . . . ?’ Aysha clutched the photograph to her, tears flowing freely now as she stared at McLean, her face a picture of purest anguish. Her grief was so fierce, he almost missed her words.

  ‘She?’

  ‘What background have we got on Sheila Begbie?’

  McLean wasn’t one to run indoors, or indeed outdoors unless strictly necessary. Nevertheless, he walked as quickly as he could to the major-incident room, then back to the CID in search of a detective constable. What if they’d been looking in the wrong place all along? Or, more correctly, what if the truth had been hiding in plain sight?