Dead Men's Bones

by James Oswald

  He nearly choked on a chunk of beef when he saw the postcard.

  It must have slipped in between the pages as the postman was tipping the whole delivery through the door. The only reason he didn’t immediately think it just part of the catalogue package was that it was so cheap, so obviously a holiday postcard, that he picked it up and turned it over. Saw his address, the tight-packed writing not immediately easy to read, the tiny little scrawled signature down in the bottom corner where the limited space for words had finally run out. A loopy ‘E’ followed by ‘XXX’. Just the sight of those letters sent a shiver down his spine.

  A movement to one side was the cat leaping up on to the table. It paid no heed to the remains of his curry, paced deliberately up to the card and rubbed its face against it, as if it were a person’s hand. Absentmindedly, McLean reached out and began scratching the cat behind its ears and soon the kitchen was filled with a contented purring. He squinted at the tiny, terrible handwriting and slowly pieced together what Emma had written.

  Followed trail across France. We’re making good progress but it’s early days. Mostly keeping spirits up, but there are days the burden is heavy. Lots of v. helpful people – pls say thanks to Rose for the contacts when U see him next. Thought you might like to know this is where DA first found the book. He’s at peace now. No idea how long this will take. Will keep in touch. E XXX

  McLean flipped over the card again, saw a series of badly taken photographs of a ruined monastery somewhere in the Pyrenees. That was something he didn’t really want to have to think about right now. Bad enough that Emma had left on her mad, strange quest. For a while, a short while, the house hadn’t been cold and empty. She’d been there, damaged but cheerful. And Jenny Nairn, too. There’d been food in the fridge and beer in the cellar. Happy days indeed.

  He slumped back in the kitchen chair, let the postcard fall to the table. Mrs McCutcheon’s cat started to bat it with a paw, as if it might somehow come to life and play. Soon enough it’d knock it to the floor and then lose interest. A glance up at the clock on the wall showed it was late. He could go to bed; it would certainly be more comfortable than the chair. But bed was upstairs in the cold, silent house. At least here he had some company.

  The card was just about to tip over the edge when he caught it up, earning an old-fashioned look from the cat. McLean scanned the words again, picturing Emma as he’d last seen her. He’d offered to go with her. No, he’d pleaded with her to let him come. But she’d been adamant that this was a task she needed to do alone. He couldn’t even quite understand why she needed to do it at all, or indeed what exactly it was she was doing, but the path she’d set out on was the only thing bringing her back to some semblance of sanity; of the old, bubbly and irrepressible Emma he’d fallen for. He’d let her go, reluctantly, in the hope that she’d get it out of her system, travel Europe on her own for a while. Maybe even further afield. But that was the key point; she was doing it alone.

  So who were the ‘we’ she kept referring to in the postcard?

  The answer was staring him in the face. Those few times in their all-too-short relationship Emma had left him a note, she’d always signed it Em. It had been another woman, a long time ago, who’d signed with the first letter of her name. Not an E at all, but a K.

  7

  ‘You know if you go digging too deep you’re going to find something nasty.’

  Grumpy Bob stood at the top end of the incident room, cradling a large mug with a Bugatti logo on it. The smell wafting from the surface of the coffee suggested it hadn’t been filled anywhere in the station. McLean knew better than to ask where the sergeant had got it from.

  ‘I rather get the impression that’s expected of me.’ He watched as DS Ritchie handed out assignments to the gaggle of constables drafted in to the investigation. It made a change to have a lot of manpower to play with, but he wasn’t stupid enough to think it could last. He wondered how long it would be before he was called up in front of Duguid to account for his progress, or lack of it. But of course it was the superintendent who had assigned him the case, and precisely so that he would dig deeper than necessary. That would be an interesting conundrum for him.

  ‘Politics is a right bugger.’ Grumpy Bob put his finger on the key fact.

  ‘Aye, and office politics is even worse. Still. I’ll do what I always do and sod the consequences.’

  Whatever Grumpy Bob’s response to that was going to be, it was cut short by the arrival of a breathless DC MacBride. He had a tablet computer of some description clutched in one hand; God alone knew where he’d got it from.

  ‘You look like you’ve run all the way from Fife, laddie.’ Grumpy Bob grinned, then took a sip of his coffee, long and slow in deliberate contrast.

  ‘Just got this in from the Weatherly house, sir. I think you should see it.’

  McLean looked at the tablet, puzzled as to how it had made its way down to Edinburgh, and why it wasn’t in a clear plastic evidence bag. MacBride paused a moment before realizing what the problem was.

  ‘Oh, sorry sir. Not this. It’s a video file you need to watch. Seems Mr Weatherly had a CCTV system in his house for security.’

  A large plasma screen had been set up in one of the smaller incident rooms. McLean gathered the detective sergeants assigned to the case together and took them through. Better if they all saw the video at once, though he had a sinking feeling he was going to have to watch it many times over anyway.

  The image was blurry, blown up to fill the large screen. It showed the view from four different cameras: one facing the front door from the far side of the hall by the staircase; one showing the living room; one taking in the landing; and a fourth showing the girls’ bedroom. As they appeared on the plasma screen, they were paused.

  ‘There’s other cameras, apparently.’ MacBride tapped and swiped at the screen of his tablet computer. ‘They all feed into a hard drive in the basement. Mr Weatherly was very security conscious.’

  ‘What time is this?’ McLean peered at the large screen, looking for some kind of clock. It must have been evening, as he could see the two girls in their individual beds asleep, ghostly in infra-red light. MacBride tapped his tablet again, and a timestamp appeared – 11:08PM.

  ‘This is the day before yesterday,’ MacBride said. ‘You know. When …’ He tapped the tablet again and the numbers started to climb.

  Weatherly appeared at the front door about fifteen seconds in. The cameras were fixed, so all they saw was him walking across the hall, dropping something that was probably car keys into a bowl on a low sideboard just before he moved out of shot.

  He reappeared a few minutes later carrying two glasses of milk. He looked straight at the camera as he began to climb the stairs, his face blank and unreadable. Moments later he appeared on another camera, on the landing, then went into the girls’ room. The camera went through a rapid white cycle as it adjusted from infra-red to normal recording automatically. Weatherly had turned on the lights, waking his daughters in the process. One of them sat up, stretched and rubbed at her eyes. The other huddled under her duvet as if cold. He must have spoken to them for a while, then he put the glasses of milk down on their bedside tables, and sat on the edge of the yawning daughter’s bed.

  McLean found himself willing the girl not to pick up the glass, not to drink. But this was all in the past now. These things had already happened. And sure enough the girls took their milk. Weatherly waited until they had both finished, then tucked them in before walking back out of the room. Just before he switched off the lights, he stared up at the camera, his face impossible to read.

  There must have been a blind spot in the landing camera, as the next time he appeared it was at the bottom of the stairs, crossing the hall. He disappeared from shot for a good five minutes, but they all watched the empty screen. No one asked MacBride to hit the fast-forward button.

  Weatherly finally reappeared, this time carrying his gun. There was no hesitation in his movements as he wa
lked upstairs, leaned the gun against the wall outside the girls’ bedroom and went in. This time they didn’t respond. They hadn’t moved at all since the image had switched from normal to infra-red view with the switching off of the lights. He didn’t turn them back on.

  Someone watching let out a low, quiet moan as Weatherly picked up a cushion from a chair at the end of one bed and used it to smother his first daughter. He held it over her face for a very long time before taking it away. His other daughter lay on her back, one arm on top of the covers. When he placed the cushion over her face, the hand flapped weakly; a final, useless, desperate struggle. She didn’t take long to die, but to the assembled detectives watching the video, it felt like a lifetime.

  And then Weatherly stood up. He placed the cushion back on the chair, pulled back the covers from one bed to reveal the still, prone form. Then he picked up the other child, cradling her against his chest as if he were protecting her, even though her head lolled against his shoulder like a drunken man. Or a dead child.

  He laid her out alongside her sister and then pulled the covers back up, so that only their heads poked out from the top. For a couple of moments he just stood, staring at them, shoulders hunched. Then he turned and walked out of the room without a backward glance.

  The rifle was still waiting on the landing. He took it up, working the bolt as he walked towards the master bedroom. Killing his wife took seconds, mercifully off-camera. Then he was walking back towards the stairs. Once more he looked up at the camera as he approached it; no surprise that he knew exactly where they all were.

  The final camera showed the back of his head as he stepped off the bottom of the stairs, strode quickly across the hall and out into the night. He left the front door open, like a man who’s just popped out to fetch something in from the car.

  ‘There’s nothing after that until the uniforms arrive about half an hour later.’ MacBride tapped the screen of his tablet and the big screen froze. McLean was going to have to ask him how he did that.

  Nobody said anything for a while. They all just stared at the screen, frozen in time, the two dead girls lying side by side in the bottom right-hand corner. McLean risked a glance across at DS Ritchie. She was pale, her eyes wide. She’d seen Morag Weatherly’s dead body, but not the girls. If the expression on her face now was anything to go by, that was probably no bad thing.

  McLean watched the sergeants leave the room, not chatting among themselves but reflecting quietly on the horrible thing they had all just seen.

  ‘Keep that video secure, will you, Constable? I don’t want it leaking out to the press or finding its way mysteriously on to the internet.’

  McLean ignored MacBride’s look of hurt at the accusation. The video would have to be shown to the rest of the investigating team eventually, but for now he wanted it kept to as few people as possible. Things had a nasty habit of turning up where they shouldn’t be, and at the worst possible time. The last thing he needed was the press running horror stories about the two girls before the investigation was over. Just as well there’d been no camera in the master bedroom. Unless there had been …

  ‘Was this all the footage? Or were there more cameras?’

  ‘Not sure, sir. This is all I’ve been sent so far, but given the set-up, I’d be surprised if there weren’t more. There’s bound to be external cameras as well.’ MacBride swiped his screen, bringing up a notepad app and tapping at a virtual keyboard. ‘I’ll get on to the forensic team and find out.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be heading out to the house again later today anyway. Need to get a better look at the place now they’ve moved the bodies.’

  ‘You not going to the PM on the body we found in the glen?’

  It took a while for McLean’s brain to catch up with the words. ‘That’s today?’

  ‘Scheduled for half two this afternoon. I sent you an email.’

  ‘Christ, just what I need. Weatherly and his family are scheduled for this morning. And after that video footage …’ McLean weighed up his options. A drive out to Fife and an afternoon spent wandering around that creepy old house, being scowled at by the forensics team who would really only just be getting started. Or he could stand in the cold mortuary examination theatre and watch a dead man being cut up, his innermost secrets revealed. It wasn’t much of a choice, really, but neither was it too hard to make.

  ‘Get in touch with the forensics team about those cameras, OK? I want all the tapes here, secure by the end of the day. We can review what’s on them later. I just don’t want them falling into the wrong hands.’

  He’d still have to go to Fife eventually. Maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day. But given the choice, the city mortuary was a far friendlier place to be.

  8

  ‘Subject is male, Caucasian, sixty-one years of age. In general good health, really. Maybe carrying a little more around the middle than he should, but nothing life-threatening.’

  McLean watched as the city pathologist Angus Cadwallader carried out his examination of Andrew Weatherly. He’d already performed autopsies on Morag Weatherly and the two girls, and that had been harrowing enough for a little flippancy to be understandable.

  ‘Body shows no signs of obvious interference.’ Cadwallader worked his way up the torso in a meticulous, thorough manner. ‘Nothing particularly untoward. No signs of drug use or recent injections. Ah, he has a tattoo.’

  ‘He does?’ McLean perked up at the news, having let his mind wander. There was still the investigation into the tattooed man to organize. Yet another post-mortem to attend, later in the day. As if he hadn’t seen enough dead bodies to last a lifetime and more.

  ‘Nothing exciting.’ Cadwallader beckoned McLean over, rolling the dead body slightly to expose the point where thigh turned to buttock. Left-hand side. Weatherly’s tattoo looked old and faded. The black ink deep under his skin showed a simple Celtic curl, slightly distorted by age. Probably something he’d done in his youth and regretted ever since, but not enough to go through the painful process of removal.

  ‘Pattern mean anything to you?’ McLean asked.

  ‘Ah, Tony. That’s your department, if I’m not wrong.’ Cadwallader bent over, peering more closely at the design for a moment. ‘But no. It doesn’t. Looks to have been done by a professional though.’

  Having moved in to see the tattoo, McLean found himself uncomfortably close as Cadwallader continued his external examination. Soon the scalpels and saws would come out, and then he’d make some excuse to leave. He probably didn’t even need to be here at all; Dr Peachey was acting as witness to the examination, and he could have sent Ritchie, or even MacBride if he was feeling cruel. The report would say Weatherly shot himself, death due to having his brains forcibly blown from the back of his skull and painted over a stone statue in his garden.

  ‘Ah now, this is interesting.’

  Cadwallader had moved to Weatherly’s head now, or as much of it as was left. The face was slack, barely recognizable as the man on all the news bulletins. Someone had closed his eyes, which was a relief. Cadwallader had picked up a magnifying glass from the tray of torture instruments beside the examination table, and was peering at Weatherly’s lips.

  ‘Interesting how?’

  ‘His lips are badly burnt. There’s blistering on upper and lower. Recent injury, but ante-mortem.’

  ‘Gun barrel?’

  ‘Well, that’s what I thought at first. Wouldn’t have thought it’d get that hot, though. And then there’s this.’ Cadwallader pointed to the small, black hole below Weatherly’s chin. ‘He pushed the gun up under there. Didn’t shove it in his mouth.’

  ‘Maybe he tried that first, after he’d shot his wife. It hurt him so he took it out again.’

  Cadwallader frowned as he mulled over the scenario. ‘Possible, I suppose. That would explain why the burns have formed blisters. Oh well. One for the report, I guess.’

  The pathologist went back to his examination, tutting and muttering at the mess to the back
of the head. When he reached for the scalpel, McLean took a step back.

  ‘Somewhere else you need to be, Tony?’ Cadwallader gave him a friendly smile.

  ‘Pretty much anywhere, really. But specifically, a waste of time with everyone’s favourite trick cyclist and then half an hour of physio for my leg. Got to come back here again later anyway. For the tattooed man. You’ll let me know if you find anything unusual?’

  ‘Don’t I always?’ The pathologist waved his scalpel in the air above Weatherly’s chest, searching for the best place to start his incision. McLean took the hint and fled.

  ‘Come in, Tony. How’s the leg?’

  Lunchtime and another pointless session with Professor Matt Hilton. McLean tried not to limp as he crossed the spacious room, though in truth his leg was stiffer than he liked to admit.

  ‘Sore. Almost as if it was broken in two places and hasn’t fully healed yet. Can we get on with this?’

  Hilton had been given his own office along with the fat retainer fee he was paid to assist with profiling criminals and counselling officers traumatized in the line of duty. It was considerably bigger than the shoebox McLean had at the back of the station, and had a nice view from the large window, too. For once, as he settled himself into a firm but comfortable armchair and eased his leg straight, McLean found himself grateful rather than jealous.

  ‘You make it sound like you find these sessions a chore.’ Hilton settled himself down behind his desk, leaned back in his own chair.

  ‘That’s because they are a chore. I’ve two new investigations starting up, and I’d much rather be overseeing them than sitting here talking about my feelings.’

  ‘Two?’ Hilton raised a surprised eyebrow, leaned forward and scribbled something on a pad lying open on the desk.