A Deviant Breed (DCI Alec Dunbar series)

by Stephen Coill

  She looked through the glass partition at Dunbar, relaxed but seemingly transfixed by his monitor screen. This was why Molineux and Watt had taken him off light duties. He was the only cop in the city who was likely to solve the case – and a Patsy on which they could lay the blame if he did not.

  8

  ‘Yes, I could imagine you swanning around in a wig and silks.’

  ‘I said, QC not Drag Queen.’

  ‘I was thinking more of the sharp suits, the watch chain, the house – they don’t say Detective Chief Inspector to me.’

  ‘I’m no’a kept mon, Briony,’ he shot back defensively.

  ‘I’m not suggesting you are, sir.’

  Dunbar didn’t seem convinced. ‘I’m not!’

  A touchy response; it seemed his wife’s success does rankle.

  ‘Aye, well, I did fancy myself as a QC and as for the suits – my brother-in-law’s a master tailor by trade. Glaswegian of Italian descent, he got me hooked on classic handmade clothing in my late teens.’

  ‘The guy you told Archie English about?’

  ‘Always admired his sense of style – if not the man.’

  ‘You don’t get on?’

  ‘I appreciate his skill; he appreciates my custom. ’

  Tyler eyed him curiously, more family discord. She began to wonder if there was anyone in his family he did get on with. She decided not to pursue it.

  ‘Is that why you gave him his name?’

  Dunbar allowed himself a brief but wicked grin.

  ‘And the pocket watch?’

  He glanced at her. ‘If ye must know, I got sick o’ losing watches in fights with drunks and deadbeats. So, early on in my career I bought a pocket watch. I wore it on a black cord, hooked to my belt when I was in uniform. When I got onto CID, I bought a chain for it. And believe you me – I’ve had my fair share o’ stick about.’

  ‘Don’t worry, sir, I won’t pull your chain.,’ she teased. ‘Why Durham?’

  Dunbar hesitated. ‘Are you familiar with the writings of F. E. Smith?’ Tyler shook her head. ‘Lord Birkenhead, barrister, MP, sage and wit. He’s said to have been a huge influence on the young Winston.’ Still she eyed him blankly. ‘Well it was discovering some brilliant quotes o’ his, and books about him that got me interested in the law. Him, and John Mortimer’s ‘Rumpole of the Bailey’ novels finally convinced me that the law was for me.’

  ‘Ahh, now him, I have heard of, but again haven’t read.’

  ‘You should! Anyway I harboured a boyish dream of emulating my legal heroes, real and fictional, at The Old Bailey, and to do that needed to study English law. So I crossed the border and went to an English university but wanted to stay as close to home as I could.’

  ‘Aww, mummy’s cooking?’

  ‘That and Jed-Forest – I played rugby. I loved it – still love it!’

  There was a brief pause while they were both lost in their thoughts until Tyler said, ‘But!?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘There has to be a but – otherwise we wouldn’t be here right now.’

  He glanced at her. ‘My coming-of-age got in the way. I’d just turned twenty.’

  ‘Your coming-of-age? Don’t you mean –’

  ‘It emerged through the fog of a killer hangover when my girlfriend told me she was four months pregnant.’ He glanced at her again. She was obviously surprised. The office gossips had not got around to tales of Mad Maggie then. That was how Maggie had become known at the nick. She would phone up and berate whoever answered the phone. Then accuse them of covering up for her errant husband if they dared to deny knowledge of his whereabouts.

  ‘Best cure for a hangover I know – but I wouldn’t recommend it,’ he added ruefully.

  ‘Blimey!’

  ‘Not the word I used.’ He fell silent again.

  To ask might be an intrusion too far but Tyler wanted to get to know him and, she kept telling herself, it was purely professional curiosity.

  ***

  To paraphrase his sisters’ reaction: “Are you mad!? Throwing away a legal career before it had even started, for some slapper of a barmaid who can’t keep her knickers on.” Indeed, it was a relationship that, if he had listened to their many detractors, was doomed from the start. On reflection, perhaps they had all been right. At the time his parents bore the disappointing news with resigned stoicism, Maggie’s, with seething bitterness that was barely assuaged by his abandonment of his studies to join the Lothian and Borders Police, so as to provide for his new family. That move came more easily than any of them realised at the time. In his first year at university Dunbar had secured an internship with Durham Constabulary to learn about their graduate entry scheme and assist him with his dissertation on crime pattern analysis. They in turn hoped to hook a promising law graduate and the ruse worked – in a way. He became fascinated by the methodology and process involved in the detection of crimes and began to foster the idea of abandoning his ambition of being a QC to pursue a career in the police and becoming a detective, but not in Durham – on the mean streets of Glasgow. So moving to Edinburgh to marry his pregnant girlfriend and chase a similar dream came as no great hardship, even if the circumstances were less than auspicious.

  ***

  ‘It must have been hard for you, having the dream shattered like –’

  ‘Not really. I’d been fancying joining up after my degree anyway.’

  ‘I was going to say losing her that way and after sacrificing your studies and ambitions, all the –’

  ‘It would have happened one day,’ he cut in, eager to get her off the subject. ‘The day she announced she was pregnant probably – had I not told her I would jack uni and marry her.’

  ‘All the same I – I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have –’

  ‘Long time ago, forget it. Grief’s wasted on the dead and too cruel to bear. I let go of it some time back.’

  Tyler looked away and screwed her face up. Too new an acquaintance, too deep a wound. – Stupid, stupid! – She chided silently.

  Dunbar noticed her discomfort. He had not being exactly honest with her – or himself. The memories still stung, and her enquiry had been sensitive and well meaning. ‘Tried denial, and drink, they don’t work.’ He offered in an effort to ease her discomfort. ‘One results in heartache the other in headaches,’ he continued with a world weary smile. She turned to face him. He shrugged. ‘Anyway, I left uni and joined this outfit. And the rest as they say –’

  ‘Speaking of which – I’ve been reading Archie’s manuscript.’

  Dunbar was glad of the change of subject. ‘Really?’ He looked relieved. ‘I was hoping you would – so that I didn’t have to. I admire your dedication, Inspector.’

  ‘It’s bloody hard going. Don’t know how accurate it all is but Professor Geary has a copy that she has dipped in and out of. As she said, not the finest piece of prose but full of interesting insights and snippets. He describes the brutality, savagery and alleged cannibalism with matter-of-fact detachment – no hint of sensationalism.’

  ‘He is detached. I think it’s all to do with his condition. If indeed he has one. Has anybody confirmed that he is a sufferer?’

  Tyler shook her head. ‘Maybe we should get a criminal psychologist in on one of our chats with him.’

  ‘We will if need be but not at this stage. We are going to have to consider a criminal profiler though –Terry Watt’s flagged it up.’ He eyed her knowingly. ‘That box hasn’t been ticked yet and now that the budget’s less of an issue, why not? – Anything else?’

  ‘Oh, yeah annnd – the militia which assaulted Morag’s Pele, according to Archie was led by a Captain Walter Farish.’

  ‘Aww nooo!’ He groaned. ‘Please tell me he’s not one o’ Wilson Farish’s ancestors.’

  ‘Hoping Archie will clear that up.’ She smiled. It was the first time she had felt that she was actually a step, or at least half a step ahead of Dunbar in the investigation. ‘And did you know the drinking of h
uman blood was quite common practice right up into the early nineteenth century?’

  ‘Rings a vague – distant bell. Probably saw something about it on the telly.’

  ‘It was believed that it imbued the recipient with the donor’s energy. And where do you draw the most flow from?’

  ‘The jugular.’

  ‘Precisely, hang the body upside down and cut. Keep cutting and the head comes off.

  ‘Are we vampire hunters now?’ He tried but failed to control a smirk.

  ‘I’m just saying, what if some crazy bastard has taken up the practice? Annnd, it’s not a great leap from that to eating flesh, as Morag’s Clan were reputed to do. Is our killer feasting on the bodies and removing the heads as tokens?’

  Dunbar glanced her way again. How he hoped not. The shrinks and profiler would have a field day with his investigation if that turned out to be the case.

  ***

  Archie turned his TV and Nicola Sturgeon off mid-flow and invited them to sit. He seemed pleased by their visit.

  ‘You’d think after their failure to win independence this nationalistic fervour might have subsided, but no – such a lot of nonsense.’

  ‘I take it you were a No voter then?’

  ‘You cannae be a true Borderer and a nationalist.’

  ‘You can’t?’ Dunbar asked.

  ‘Of course not – tis a canny breed that did spread their seed ‘tween Solway an’ Tweed.’ Archie stared at them clearly waiting for a response.

  ‘Robbie Burns?’ Tyler enquired.

  ‘Archibald Fraser English,’ he answered with a titter. ‘And ours is a region that has always been influenced by the ebb and flow o’ power’s tide. Scottish Kings – English Kings – and Queens, we’ve fought or served most o’ them. However, the allegiance of the Reivers was first and foremost with the clan, but they were canny allies who tended to side with the likely victor. Hence, after the Jacobite fiasco, my Inglis ancestors changed their name. What better way to demonstrate one’s fealty than adopt the name of one’s conquerors? The English!’

  That last part Tyler recognised. He was quoting from his own manuscript. She reached into her document case, got it out and wafted it at him. ‘I’m almost halfway through the manuscript –’ she began to say.

  Archie’s fixed gaze whipped from Dunbar to her. ‘And!?’

  ‘I’ve found it – illuminating.’

  ‘I will be accrediting the likes of George MacDonald Fraser,’ he enthused, then added, ‘no relation,’ he chortled. ‘I was named after my Granda, who in turn was given his mother’s maiden name.’

  Dunbar feigned interest but Tyler did a more convincing job.

  ‘I leant heavily on George MacDonald Fraser’s work and that of other authors and historians early on in my search. Have you read The Steel Bonnets?’

  ‘No I haven’t.’

  ‘Oh but you should, I –’

  ‘We’re not really interested in what happened around here three hundred years or more ago, Mr English,’ Dunbar cut in before Archie could go off at another tangent. ‘We just want to know who chopped those heads off and buried them up there.’

  Archie cocked his head. ‘Ah, but what if – it is about the past.’

  More like it, Dunbar thought. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Maybe the witch is back.’

  ‘The witch? You mean Morag?’

  Archie reacted with wide-eyed glee and shrugged.

  ‘Her ghost?’ Tyler asked.

  ‘You think she’s back from the dead?’ Dunbar pressed.

  Archie cocked his head again then pulled a silly face. ‘Maybe; I sometimes get the feeling she is watching me or watching over me perhaps. Making sure I tell the world the truth.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as witches, not now, not then.’ Dunbar said.

  ‘It matters not what I believe or you, Chief Inspector. It is what her persecutors believed and possibly what she believed herself to be. And for a craft that is considered hokum by many, it is still widely practised and believed in the world over. So one has to ask, is it real or the fancy of deluded or deranged minds?’

  ‘I’d go with deranged or simple minds every time,’ Dunbar sneered.

  That answer seemed to irritate Archie English. ‘If – she did evoke dark powers, perhaps they’re at work again. Have you heard the expression, eternal recurrence?’

  ‘Past lives?’ Tyler responded.

  ‘Past and present, Inspector. There are those who believe in reincarnation and some who believe in eternal recurrence. I got sidetracked by that theory, when studying sixteenth and seventeenth century witch trials in order to understand the attitude of Morag’s enemies better. She is said to have cursed them with her dying breath and threatened to revisit them and exact her revenge from beyond the grave, which led me to do some research into that field. To this day there are those, including me, who will not bathe in or drink from Spinney Burn on account o’ it.’

  ‘Her curse?’

  ‘Aye! The burn rises on the moor above and flows through Braur Glen.’

  ‘The one that cuts the glen at the falls,’ Dunbar asked.

  ‘The very same, and the blood of Inglis Clan was carried into this valley by its course and her curse with it; according to the superstitious hereabouts, and many are. Aye, to drink or bathe in Spinney Burn is to imbibe their corruption and take on their sin, their vice, their evil ways.’

  ‘Fascinating,’ Dunbar offered sarcastically.

  ‘Isn’t it though? As is eternal recurrence; a life relived over and over again, hence so many of us experience déjà vu. Y’know, that strange feeling that we’ve been somewhere before or had a conversation that we know we have not. I must admit, when I finally established the site of Obag’s Holm, I had that very same feeling.’

  ‘But you said that you’re not of that Inglis clan.’

  ‘Ah, but – I have Inglis blood no change of patronymic can alter that. Just because some of my clan wished to disassociate themselves from that branch of the family does not change the fact at some point in the distant past our family lines conjoined. We are who we are.’

  Dunbar eyed the Humes and Inglis crests on his wall. ‘But by having both of their coats-of-arms up there you’re honouring the old enemy, the Humes.’

  ‘I am; as through my grandmother I am of that bloodline also.’

  Dunbar eyed Tyler who simply raised her eyebrows. She felt her theory gaining momentum.

  ‘Inspector Tyler was telling me about Captain Farish,’ Dunbar said, changing tack.

  ‘Ah yes, the pious parliamentarian veteran. Walter Farish, was a gentleman farmer from Wooler and a Captain of the Northumberland Militia; chaste, abstinent and God-fearing. Pure of heart and yet a radicalised idealist spurred on by religious fervour. He and his band of bloodthirsty religious zealots were only too happy to ride with Laird Hume. This – is what Cromwell unleashed on his enemies and what the Humes Clan harnessed to rid the Borders of the scourge that was Morag Inglis and her kin.’ He was directly quoting again. He knew his manuscript word for word.

  ‘Is Wilson Farish a descendant of the Captain?’ Dunbar asked.

  Archie snorted dismissively. ‘Several relatives removed but, aye of that family. We traced his stock to Arthur Farish of Alnwick. Wilson grew up in that neighbourhood. When he moved in and began to hear my grandma’s stories of Morag he got interested. Lo and behold, when we got around to checking his family tree there was the tentative link. He was delighted,’ Archie’s tone took a sour turn. ‘Arthur also fought for the Parliamentarians but it seems that he’d had his fill of killing by the time King Charles lost his head. He didn’t share his distant cousin’s piety or zeal, nor did he join the local militia.’

  ‘Lost his head,’ Dunbar repeated, searching the man’s face for a reaction.

  ‘There was a lot of it about back then,’ Archie responded matter-of-factly.

  ‘Still is, it seems. So who would you have sided with in that war?’

>   ‘I’m not a royalist, Chief Inspector. Their only interest in the likes of us would be in our suitability as servants. The current crop aren’t even natives of this island. We should have stuck with the Stuarts. Ach, it’s all politics – aristocrats just do it in fancier costumes.’

  ‘Having done all this research, field work and writing, how do you feel about Morag’s fate, Archie?’ Tyler asked.

  ‘She was entitled to a trial like anyone else. Instead she got Jedward justice.’

  ‘Sorry?’ Tyler responded.

  ‘Nothing to do with hideous children’s TV personalities,’ he tittered. ‘Jedburgh – your home town, Chief Inspector was once known as Jedward.’

  ‘How did you know I was from Jedburgh?’

  Archie smirked. ‘Oh come on. You’re looking at me, so I felt entitled to look at you. The internet has revolutionised access to information – I’d still be struggling with the family histories were it not for the internet.’ Dunbar and Tyler exchanged another look. ‘You aren’t without your own murky shadows either,’ he added with a sneer. Dunbar bristled, Tyler flashed a cautionary look. ‘As I was saying, Jedward – now Jedburgh, was a place renowned for the dispensing of summary justice, Jedward justice as it became known.’

  ‘Really?’ Tyler asked eyeing her boss.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Archie confirmed.

  Dunbar bobbed his head in agreement, having reined in his temper. He recalled first hearing of it at primary school but resented receiving a lecture about it from a potential suspect. Suspect? Had he just elevated Archie English to a suspect after his firm rejection of Tyler’s theory? He sighed, ‘I was convinced it was a tenet of Miss Carmichael’s philosophy.’

  ‘Who?’ Archie asked.

  ‘My primary head teacher. We called her Scar-Michael – a very scary woman.’

  ‘When did you first visit Braur Glen, Archie?’ Tyler asked.

  He pressed his right index finger to his lip. ‘Let me see – well, in the course of my life, probably about aged seven or eight with Grandma and a couple of times without grandpa’s knowledge of course. And once with Wilson when started taking a more active interest in the story, however, during my search for Obag’s Holm, about nine years ago I made at least two more visits. I have to confess, it didn’t strike me as very promising back then. Never helps when you’re looking in the wrong place. How was I to know that the farmers had diverted the burn and cut another track to give better access for their livestock? They’d obscured the old Reivers’ route to and from the glen? As a result I didn’t revisit for a while.