Cold as the Grave

by James Oswald

  ‘Sir?’ DC Harrison peered up at him through bleary eyes. She looked paler than usual, either coming down with one of the colds that had been doing the rounds or up late partying the night before.

  ‘Sheila Begbie. The woman we interviewed yesterday, remember? Runs that refugee charity on the Royal Mile?’

  Harrison sat up straighter. ‘Sorry, sir. A bit groggy this morning.’

  ‘It’s OK. We’ve all been through the wringer this past week. Just get me what we have on file, OK?’

  ‘Yes, sir. We should have her on the system from when you found the first wee girl. I’ll see what I can bring up.’ The detective constable covered her mouth to hide a belch as she tapped at her keyboard with the other hand. McLean wondered whether he should keep his distance. He usually managed to avoid catching the periodic lurgies that ripped through the building and disrupted the staffing rotas. More importantly though, he didn’t fancy being in the firing line should Harrison lose the battle she appeared to be fighting with her digestive system.

  ‘Rough night?’ he asked as she uncovered her mouth to use both hands on the keyboard.

  ‘What? Oh. No. More like dodgy kebab. Me and Manda went to see the circus again, only it was gone so we ended up going to the cinema. Picked up a kebab on the way home. They always say you need booze in your system when you eat those things. Should have had something a bit stronger than tea. Only, I knew I’d be working today.’

  McLean barely heard the last of Harrison’s words. ‘The circus is gone?’

  ‘Aye. Surprised me too. Just a wee sign stuck in the ground. Something about council permits and other nonsense. Can you believe it? Most popular attraction to hit the city in years, and the council tell them to bugger off.’ Harrison shook her head at the idiocy of it all. ‘Never seen a site so clean, either. If it wasn’t for the patches in the snow you’d not know they’d even been there.’

  Had he not noticed it this morning? For a moment McLean thought he was going mad, but then he remembered he’d followed Albert in the stretch limousine out of the city, then come back in from the south. He’d missed his normal drive through the Meadows.

  ‘Shame. I quite fancied seeing the show again myself. Emma loved it when we went.’ He’d also have liked the opportunity to talk to the enigmatic Madame Jasmina again.

  ‘That’s odd. Can’t seem to find any record of her.’

  ‘Record?’ For a moment McLean’s mind was still on the circus and the old fortune teller. Then he remembered what he’d asked Harrison to do for him in the first place.

  ‘We’ve nothing on the incident file. There should be background here, address and stuff like that.’ The detective constable grabbed the mouse and started twirling the little scroll wheel on top of it, her eyes flicking this way and that as she read the information on her screen. After a few minutes, she stopped, turned to face McLean, a look of confusion on her face.

  ‘I don’t understand. I filled out the initial data myself, but she’s not here. Not even her statements.’

  Almost as if she doesn’t exist. McLean felt the familiar cold in his gut as snippets of conversations with people he thought mad began to coalesce into something too horrible to contemplate.

  ‘Do a deep search for her. Social Services, council tax, all the stuff you can dig up. Find out who took her home after we interviewed her yesterday, too. We’re going to have to get her back in sharp.’ McLean glanced at his watch, irritated to find he’d lost a chunk of the morning to humouring Mrs Saifre’s whims, even if hers were some of those uncomfortable words.

  ‘On it, sir.’ Harrison stifled another belch, then reached for her notepad. ‘Should have something together in an hour or so. Will you be in your office?’

  An hour was tight for what he wanted to do, but then Harrison would have to be a miracle worker to get what he’d asked for in that time anyway. ‘No. I’ll find you when I get back. Right now I need to go and see if Peter Winterthorne’s woken up yet.’

  54

  He had been intending to go to the hospital, but McLean realised just how stupid that would have been before he made it as far as the ground floor and the back door to the car park. A quick call confirmed that there had been no change in Winterthorne’s condition, Nurse Robertson assuring him he’d be first to know if there was. He had barely sat down in his office when a knock on the open door revealed DC Blane, leading Professor Gobbo Charnley.

  ‘Gentleman to see you, sir. Thought it easier to bring him up, given the circumstances.’

  McLean stood again, motioning for them both to enter. The professor scuttled in, marvelling at the space.

  ‘This puts my tiny little office on George Square into perspective. That’s some view you’ve got there, Tony.’ He looked around at DC Blane. ‘Or should I call you Detective Chief Inspector?’

  ‘We’ve known each other since we were in short trousers. Tony’s fine. Come and have a seat. Not sure if the coffee machine’s on, but DC Blane can get you something if you’d like.’

  ‘No, no. I don’t need any more coffee just now. And I can see you’re busy. Won’t take up too much of your time.’

  ‘OK then. What have you got for me?’ McLean led the professor over to the conference table, pulling out a chair for him and settling down into another one.

  ‘The Arabic script I was sent yesterday for translation. I know it’s a bit irregular working on it over the weekend, but Sunday’s my least busy day, as it happens.’ Charnley popped open his leather satchel with awkward fingers, and pulled out a series of A4 colour prints. ‘I’d love a chance to see the original artefacts some time. I only have a few photographs. The books look especially interesting.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. Right now though, they’re possible evidence so we can’t let anyone interfere with them. Were you able to translate the script?’

  Charnley spread a sheaf of photographs out on the table in front of him. ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Sort of?’

  ‘It’s not classic Arabic, although the writing is close. The language is something more akin to Aramaic, but a dialect I’ve never encountered before. Either it’s very old or it’s something someone’s just made up. It’s pretty strange stuff.’

  ‘OK.’ McLean tried not to let too much doubt creep into his voice as he picked up one photograph showing the label on a flask. ‘What does this one say?’

  ‘That one? Number five.’ Charnley consulted a small notebook filled with handwriting that would do a GP proud. ‘The closest I can translate that to is “Essence”, although if the word is derived from the one I’m thinking of it might also be “Soul”.’

  McLean peered at the photograph, but this new insight made the flask no less mysterious. Hopefully the lab would have better luck identifying whatever liquid was inside.

  ‘And this one?’ He picked up another picture, with several lines of script on it.

  ‘That had me stumped, I have to admit. It seems to say “Water of Sleep” and some kind of warning. Sleep could be the wrong word though. It’s all very difficult to translate out of context.’

  ‘What about the books?’

  ‘Ah yes, the books.’ Charnley sat up a little straighter, pulling the relevant photographs towards him. ‘Quite fascinating. They’re incredibly rare alchemies, in the main.’

  ‘Alchemies?’

  ‘Potion books, if you like. Recipes for all manner of things. The alchemists were the first natural philosophers. They were trying to turn base metal into gold, which is a fool’s errand of course. But they laid the foundations of modern science too.’

  McLean let Charnley lecture him even though he knew his history of science well enough. The man was a professor after all. ‘So Winterthorne’s a bit of a modern-day alchemist then, is he?’

  ‘These are Peter’s?’ Charnley held up the photographs, his eyes wide as he leafed through them o
ne by one. ‘Oh my God.’

  ‘How does that change things?’ McLean asked.

  ‘Well, it’s just, he was always obsessed with the myths and legends of the Middle East. The goddess Atargatis fascinated him. Get a couple of drinks in him and he’d lecture you for hours about how she was the real inspiration for later incarnations of the devil. There’s some stuff about her here, but it’s mostly about her demons. The afrits or djinn.’

  Deep down, McLean had always known this would be coming. ‘So he believed in genies, then? Believed they really exist.’

  Charnley swallowed nervously, and looked around the office in the way a guilty suspect might in one of the interview rooms two storeys down. ‘He did, yes. And these books only confirm how far his delusion had gone.’

  ‘How so?’ McLean asked.

  ‘Well, I’ve only translated the pages you photographed, but from what I can tell they’re detailed accounts of how to control a djinn, should you encounter one.’

  ‘Control?’

  ‘Oh yes. See here?’ Charnley riffled through the photographs until he came up with one showing lines of unintelligible text. ‘This describes how one might bind a djinn to one’s will by trapping it in mortal flesh. And this one . . .’ He scrambled around until he found another equally alien page. ‘This one explains how you must let it feed every so often or risk it breaking free and wreaking havoc. It’s all nonsense of course, but these notes jotted in the margins here are in English. It looks very much like whoever wrote them thought he was truly in control of some supernatural force.’

  McLean said nothing, unsure quite how to process the information. He wanted Winterthorne simply to be mad, but he knew better than to think it could be quite that easy.

  ‘Poor old Peter.’ Charnley picked up the nearest photograph and stared at it before letting out that annoying low whistle once more. ‘He really did lose his marbles out in the desert.’

  ‘Lost his marbles?’ McLean stared past the professor and out through the window to where fresh snow had begun to fall. ‘I’m more worried about what he might have found.’

  ‘Lab results just came back on those flasks you found, sir. You’ll never guess what’s in them.’

  McLean had only gone into the major-incident room because he had to pass it on his way back from seeing Professor Charnley out. He’d barely stepped into the room before DC Stringer came bustling up, clutching a freshly printed sheet of paper.

  ‘Water?’ He meant it as a joke, but the look on the detective constable’s face suggested he’d hit the bullseye.

  ‘How did you know?’ Stringer handed him the sheet, a table showing that all the glass bottles had contained purified water and nothing else.

  ‘I didn’t.’ McLean studied the printout more closely, but there was no ambiguity about the results. No doubt whoever had got themselves geared up in full hazmat suit and locked themselves in a bio-secure lab to carry out the tests would have been a bit annoyed, but it lent strength to the professor’s summation of Winterthorne’s state of mind. Obsession turned to madness wasn’t so unusual, particularly when you considered the old man’s background. Creative, lots of drugs in his younger days, fascination with a period of history rich in mythology, major traumatic and life-changing incident. McLean could count the points off one by one and any psychologist would agree with him.

  It was just that he’d met Winterthorne, spoken to him. The man had been intense at times, a bit vacant at others, but McLean hadn’t got a sense of madness from him. Which either meant Winterthorne’s delusion was all-engulfing, or McLean’s finely honed detective’s instinct was faulty. Or both.

  ‘Is Harrison around? I asked her to do background on Sheila Begbie.’

  Stringer gave McLean a nervous look. ‘Is that what she’s doing? I heard her swearing at her computer earlier. Then she went off to find Lof— . . . DC Blane, sir.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll go see if I can find them in the CID room.’ McLean hurried out before someone else noticed he was in there, then used the sheet of paper as a prop to make it look like he was busy reading something until he arrived at his destination. Pieces of the puzzle were starting to fall together now, and while he didn’t much like the picture they were forming, he also didn’t want any unnecessary distractions to throw off his chain of thought.

  He found the two detective constables huddled together at the back of the CID room. Harrison looked like she was winning the war with her kebab, but the crease across her brow when she glanced up and saw him wasn’t the most welcoming. Blane hunched over like a timid giant, peering at his computer screen with an intensity more usually associated with young love.

  ‘Got anything for me?’ McLean asked it, even as he knew he wasn’t going to get the answer he wanted. Harrison stood up as he approached, clasping her hands together like a maid who really doesn’t want to tell the king his son’s run off with the washerwoman’s daughter.

  ‘We were about to come and see you, sir. It’s . . . Well, it’s complicated.’

  It always was. ‘How so?’

  ‘Would be easier if other folks worked weekends, but we’ve been going through the various databases we’ve access to here. Council tax, rates, the charity commission. It seems that Sheila Begbie doesn’t really exist.’

  Another piece of the puzzle, the picture ever clearer and yet at the same time just as impossible to understand. At least, not rationally. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘There are no medical records for her. She doesn’t have a passport. The address we have for her’s a wee tenement flat in Gorgie, but the council tax records show a couple of students living there. Land Registry says it belongs to Winterthorne, too.’

  ‘And the charity? House the Refugees?’

  ‘It’s registered, but to Winterthorne. He’s behind it all.’

  ‘So who was the woman we interviewed? Who called us about wee Nala when she found her?’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. Don’t know where she is, either. The mobile number we’ve got just keeps going to voicemail.’ Harrison held up her phone just in case McLean wasn’t sure what she meant. ‘It’s her voice, mind. On the message.’

  ‘Dig out the interview tapes, will you? Did we get video footage? If so, we can pull a photo from it and get her likeness out. We need to find her.’

  ‘That’s odd.’ DC Blane craned his neck, staring myopically at the computer screen as he spoke. Then he seemed to realise what he had done, leaning back and looking up at McLean. ‘Sorry, sir. Just doing a search on the name and this came up.’

  McLean walked around the desk until he could see what had caught the detective constable’s attention. He’d brought up a news report, and it didn’t take much reading to see that it was coverage of Winterthorne’s miraculous reappearance from the desert. There was even a photograph of him, looking considerably younger than the man he’d met so recently. An image taken before the crash, it showed Winterthorne flanked by three other people, his arm around one of them. A very familiar-looking woman.

  ‘What’s the date on this?’ He reached for the mouse to scroll up the screen, but Blane beat him to it.

  ‘Nineteen ninety-four, it says. Before I even went to school. The photo’s earlier still.’

  ‘That tallies with the story about the crash, but how the hell can that be Sheila Begbie?’

  Blane scrolled back down to the photograph, then past it a bit so he could read more of the text. ‘That’s not Sheila Begbie, sir. Apparently that’s Doctor Eileen Wentworth.’ He peered close at the screen again. ‘One of the other experts on the expedition, oh, and apparently Winterthorne’s wife.’

  ‘It certainly looks like her,’ Harrison said as she too stared at the image on the screen. At least she’d met Begbie. McLean couldn’t remember whether Blane had or not.

  ‘How did you find that photograph?’ he asked.

  ‘A name search on
“Sheila Begbie”, sir.’ Blane continued scrolling down through the text, reading it far faster than McLean could manage. ‘Ah, here we go. “Winterthorne arrived at Edinburgh Airport on Tuesday, accompanied by his personal assistant Miss Sheila Begbie. A small crowd of well-wishers turned out to greet him.” There’s no photo of her arriving, just him.’

  ‘Scroll back to the photo, will you?’ McLean waited while Blane brought it back, then expanded it to fill the entire screen. He leaned close, focusing on the faces, paying no heed to the background. There was no doubt in his mind at all. The woman Peter Winterthorne was holding tight with the grin of a happy man spread wide across his face was most certainly Sheila Begbie. But Sheila Begbie as she appeared today, not twenty-five years ago.

  A lone uniformed constable stood by the front door to Peter Winterthorne’s house when McLean arrived from the station with DC Harrison in tow. He was clearly frozen through, and while the detective chief inspector had little time or respect for PC, formerly DI, Carter, he still had some sympathy for the man. Nobody enjoyed an outdoor posting in this kind of weather.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be better off standing inside?’ he asked as the constable greeted him with ill-concealed hostility.

  ‘Crime scene manager said I had to be out here.’ Carter shivered, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, teeth chattering as he spoke. McLean found he didn’t have the energy to argue. He pushed open the door and stepped into the hall instead.

  ‘Did he really used to be a detective inspector?’ Harrison asked when the door was once more firmly closed. The office of House the Refugees was empty, the door locked, but the door to the stairs leading up to Winterthorne’s flat had been propped open.

  ‘Briefly, yes. That was before he falsified a crime scene report to make his own mistake look like it was mine. I’m surprised they didn’t sack him, but he’s found his niche now. Come on.’