by James Oswald
McLean went through to the back of the house again, noticing the door that opened on to the small courtyard and outbuildings beyond. Beside it, an open door revealed a downstairs toilet. He went in, shutting the door behind him and making a show of rattling the bolt closed so the constable would be in no doubt as to what he was doing in there. It was a small room, but it had a decent-sized window. After a moment’s study, he worked out it had just the one lock, a simple slider that held the two halves of the sash together. So much for all the state-of-the-art camera technology in the place. McLean unlocked the window, flushed the toilet and washed his hands. When he came out of the room Tennant was just walking out of the kitchen.
‘You done here, then?’ the detective superintendent asked.
‘Pretty much. A bit of a waste of time, but you know how it is.’
‘I for one can’t get out of here soon enough.’ Tennant slapped McLean on the shoulder. ‘But I know what you mean, Tony. Can’t get rid of that niggling feeling you’ve missed something, eh?’
‘Aye.’
They all walked out together. Tennant produced a heavy key of the sort favoured by Victorian jail-keepers and locked the front door. ‘That’s us. Over to the lawyers now.’ He tramped down the steps and climbed into the passenger seat of one of the squad cars.
‘I think I’ll go for a bit of a walk before heading back to the city,’ McLean said, as the constable who’d been following him around the house opened the door on the driver’s side. ‘Give my legs a bit of a stretch.’
Tennant gave him a look that was half-knowing, half-surprised. He tapped the heavy iron key against his thigh for a moment, then slipped it into his jacket pocket.
‘Good idea. There’s a great view from the top up there.’ He pointed in the direction of the hill at the back of the house. ‘Just don’t take too long. The nights drop quickly at this time of year.’
22
The trees at the back of the house were Scots pine, ancient and twisted and gnarly. Granny trees, he remembered them being called in his childhood. He’d never really understood why, except that they were old. The snow had settled in deep piles around the trunks, thinning where a path ran through towards the big hill beyond. It was smooth, though; no footprints to suggest anyone had been this way recently. McLean eyed the summit. From here it looked deceptively close, but who knew how many dips and foothills there were before he got to the top? A last look behind him to make sure no one at the house was following, and he set off into the wood.
The silence was almost total, just the squeaky crunch of his feet in the snow. He’d worn warm clothing, and as he climbed over a stile and stepped from the trees on to open ground, he could feel himself sweating already. There was no wind at all, and the sky was clear, a weak sun low in the southern sky making the white blanket gleam almost too bright. He squinted against it and waded on through the snow, following what looked like it might possibly be a path.
In the end it took almost an hour, but the view from the top of the hill was worth it. To the north, darkening with the dying day, the Tay Estuary opened up towards Dundee. Ribbons of light marked the A90 as it ran west towards Perth. Further west still, the snow-covered Grampian Mountains reared up like broken teeth, their topmost tips pink and orange as they caught the setting sun. South, McLean could see the Pentland Hills and Edinburgh itself, Salisbury Crags and the Castle Hill both obvious in the clear, crisp air despite being the best part of fifty miles away.
The climb had invigorated him, fresh air driving out the fug of the city. He’d hoped to have time to think about the case as he walked, but found that his mind had been delightfully blank. It was almost as if the further he went from Weatherly’s house, the weaker its hold on him became. Not completely broken, though. He knew he’d have to go back. Knew he’d have to uncover its secrets.
A glance at his watch told him it was time to get moving; the light would be almost gone by the time he reached his car, even if going downhill was always quicker. He retraced his steps, noticing how the sparkling light on the snow softened as the sun dipped below the horizon. Head down and mind a million miles away, it wasn’t until he reached the final field before dropping once more into the trees that he realized he wasn’t alone.
It started with a snort. A sort of cross between a sniff and a deep, rumbling belch. McLean stopped in his tracks, looked to the side and there, staring at him with a belligerent, quizzical expression, was the biggest bull he had ever seen, with thick horns jutting from its head and pointing forward at him. He couldn’t begin to imagine how he’d missed it before, nor how it had managed to creep up on him so silently. A rustling in the bushes, and it was joined by another, this one with more slender horns curved upwards and out. It lowered its head as if ready to charge, sniffed the snow. He glanced sideways, trying to gauge the distance to the fence and the trees without actually taking his eyes off the beasts. Now that he was paying attention, he could see that the snow had been kicked around by what must have been a massive herd of them.
For a moment he didn’t know what to do. This wasn’t something he’d been trained to deal with, wasn’t something he’d ever experienced. They were Highland cows, that much he could tell, but he wasn’t sure he’d ever been close to one before, if you didn’t count a slab of steak on a plate.
Another rustling in the gorse bush, lower down this time, and a calf poked its head around its mother’s side. Without the horns and a quarter the size of the bull, it looked harmless and curious. And very, very furry. Like an animated teddy bear. It was difficult to be scared of something so comical.
Moving as slowly as he could, so as not to provoke them, McLean shuffled sideways in the direction of the woods. The cattle followed him, the bull moving with a ponderous gait as its bulk swung from side to side. More appeared from behind the gorse bushes, no doubt eager to see what new thing was happening. If he didn’t speed up he’d be surrounded.
The whole herd was following him by the time he reached the stile and climbed over into the woods. He was fairly certain by then that they meant him no harm, but given the size of them and their sharp, pointy horns, he was glad to be out of the field anyway. As he picked his way through the darkening trees, he realized that he was breathing heavily, his heart pumping away as if he been sprinting. Stupid, really. It was just a herd of cows. Or a fold. Wasn’t that what they called it if it was Highlands? He’d read that somewhere. Perhaps he’d ask DC MacBride if he remembered.
Darkness had almost completely fallen by the time he returned to his car. Everyone else had gone, leaving just the dead façade of stone and ivy. The windows were lifeless eyes like those of the two little girls huddled together in the one bed. Like those of Morag Weatherly, startled by her husband’s final, fatal act.
McLean shook his head to dispel the image. It was just an empty house. Nothing dangerous in it now. Nothing to scare a grown man. He opened up the car, fetched out the envelope with its incriminating photographs, dug a torch from one of the cubbyholes in the boot. Would the moon be out later? He couldn’t remember seeing it recently, but then it wasn’t something you often noticed in the city.
Slamming the car boot shut, he set off around the back and made for the window he hoped was still unlocked. If not, his trip up the hill and adventure with the cows would have all been for naught.
He needn’t have worried about the window. Finding it in the dark wasn’t as easy as he’d hoped, but when he pushed at the glass, the sash slid upwards silently, well balanced by its counterweights. Clambering inside took a matter of moments. McLean paused before opening the door on to the back hallway, wondering whether there was some kind of alarm. But he’d seen the mess of the security system in the basement, and Tennant hadn’t set anything when they’d left earlier.
Knowing the house was empty didn’t make it any less oppressive. There was a feel to the place that the darkness only made worse. The rational part of him knew that it was just superstition, but he also knew people had died her
e, recently and violently. You’d have to be made of stone not to get just a little scared.
He managed to avoid most of the shin-high obstacles between the downstairs toilet and the stairs. A little evening light filtered in through the large window halfway up, an unexpected but not unwelcome sliver of moon rising over the trees. McLean’s eyes had more or less accustomed themselves to the gloom by the time he reached the door to the girls’ bedroom. He paused a moment, then went inside.
It was too dark to see anything much, so he finally relented and switched on the torch. Deep shadows sprung out of the general darkness, moving and twisting as he played the light this way and that. The bodies were gone, of course, and the beds had been stripped. Standard procedure for forensics, but it was doubtful they’d be processed now. Most likely someone would accidentally destroy them. That wasn’t what he was here for, though.
Popping the torch into his mouth to free both hands, he slid the photographs out of their envelope, shuffling through them until he found the one he was looking for. Several naked bodies had been caught in all their puffy, unflattering glory, engaged in an athletic collection of sexual acts over the two beds and the floorspace between. The shot was from above, and McLean swept the torch beam up, seeing the chunky security camera in the corner over the door. He stood underneath it, held the photograph up, tried to see the angle but it wouldn’t fit. The picture he was looking at had clearly been taken from a different place. He moved over to the foot of the bed, played the beam over the far wall to see if there were any marks from a different camera having been removed. Had he been looking in daylight, he might have missed it, but the torchlight reflected off the tiny lens, buried into the ornate cornicing.
A heavy wooden trunk guarded the end of one of the girls’ beds. He pulled it over to the wall, placed a child’s chair on top of it and climbed carefully up, all too aware of how he’d broken his leg just a few months earlier. Thinking of it brought a familiar ache that had been missing on his climb to the top of the hill. Perhaps that was all that he needed, a bit of regular walking. Not the mindless stretches and exercises the physiotherapist had given him.
Up close and with the bright torchlight to show up the imperfections, McLean could see where the camera had been inserted into the cornice. A casual glance would easily miss it though, along with the two others he spotted. He stepped carefully down to the floor, put the chair back where it had sat by a desk that would never be used again, dragged the chest over to the foot of the bed. One last sweep of the room with the torch brought only a deep sense of melancholy. Nothing he found in here could hope to change what had happened.
With the photographs to guide him, McLean was able to find twenty more hidden cameras around the upper floor of the house. Some were in the cornicing, others in light fittings, one pushed into an ornate carved scroll on the frame of a large oil painting. In the master bedroom, the wall was still stained with the blood and brains of Morag Weatherly. He tried not to picture her as he compared the scene with the photograph of Weatherly and three very young women sprawled across that same bed.
It took a while to find the back staircase leading up to the attic; Weatherly’s house was of an age to have supported quite a staff of servants, but it was also one whose original owners hadn’t liked the idea of them being obvious. He eventually located the door hidden in the wooden panelling at the far end of the corridor back past the girls’ bedroom. It opened on to a narrow passageway with tiny rooms to either side, pressed into storage use. Steps went both up and down, the latter no doubt leading to the scullery or the boot room. Upstairs opened out on to another narrow corridor with tiny servants’ rooms leading off it. Most had clearly not been used in ages, not even as a secret world for the girls to play in. One room had been pressed into a very different service, though.
It had a single window, looking out over the courtyard to the woods and the cows beyond, but that was largely obscured by a bank of monitors, all dead. Racks alongside each wall had obviously held surveillance equipment, hard drive recorders, Christ only knew what. Or maybe Special Branch knew what. Someone had been in and hastily removed everything, just like the equipment down in the basement. But why the two different sets? It was obvious, really. One for the security system; one to keep a discreet eye on the antics of more special guests. It didn’t take a genius to realize that the parties must have been fairly regular occurrences, but then he’d assumed that when he’d first seen the photographs.
McLean left the room as he found it. Out in the corridor, the moon was shining through high skylights now, giving more than enough light for him to navigate a safe path back down the stairs. He carried on past the first floor, finding himself in a small pantry just off the kitchen. Back out through the window in the downstairs toilet, and he crunched around the house in snow crusting in the freezing air. Overhead the moon had risen above the summit of the hill, less than half-full, but shedding more than enough light to give the night a magical feel. He took one last look at the house, satisfied that he’d seen as much as he’d ever need to. Far more than he’d ever wanted.
It wasn’t until he pulled on to the motorway, almost an hour after leaving the house, that McLean realized how tense he had been. Once more it seemed that distance lessened the effect of the place, as if it exerted some terrible gravity. He’d driven in silence for a while, checking his mirror for signs that he was being followed, even though he wasn’t sure who might be doing such a thing. He wouldn’t have put it past Jack Tennant to have left a patrol car at the end of the drive with instructions to let him know when the nosy Edinburgh copper left, but McLean had seen nothing obvious. With the roads still covered in snow, there wasn’t much traffic about either, which meant detecting a tail should have been easy.
With a clear road ahead, he finally switched on the radio, hoping for some soothing music. He got the news.
‘… funeral tomorrow of Andrew Weatherly, his wife Morag and two daughters Joanna and Margaret. Police have concluded their investigation into the tragedy and a report is being prepared for the Procurator Fiscal …’
McLean found the button that changed the station, tuning in to some soft rock so bland it was almost offensive. It was still better than being reminded of where he’d just been. Let alone the work that still needed to be done. And the funeral, of course. He hated the things, but he’d have to go. He wondered if anyone else from work would be there, or any of the blurred faces from the photographs in the boot of his car.
Home was a welcome sight, and Mrs McCutcheon’s cat greeting him at the back door even more so. It weaved in and out of his legs as he pushed through to the kitchen, then he saw why it wasn’t sitting on the table washing itself as it normally did when he arrived. Propped up against the sugar bowl so he couldn’t possibly miss it was another plain brown envelope.
‘Oh bloody hell.’ He snatched it up, inelegantly ripped the top open and pulled out more photographs. Just what he wanted to deal with. There was a hard case, too, containing a DVD. Just a cheap recordable of the sort you got in boxes of a hundred, all stacked up on a central spindle; it had nothing written on it at all apart from the manufacturer’s name.
The top photograph was notable only in as much as he recognized the face of the sweating gentleman in sexual congress with another sweating gentleman. Beyond that, McLean couldn’t be bothered looking. He slid the lot into the envelope and put it back where he’d found it.
‘Don’t know if you lot are watching or listening, but you can fuck right off. I’m not doing your dirty work for you.’
There was no answer, of course, and he doubted whoever it was behind the photographs had bothered to bug his house. They were just going to drip-feed his curiosity and see where it got them. Perhaps he could arrange for the envelope to fall into the hands of the press. But then Jo Dalgliesh would have a field day with it, and probably drag the police into the mess as well. Best to just leave well alone, add the photos to the pile and hope that whoever was sending them got t
he message.
The hallway was cold and dark as McLean walked over to the front door to fetch the mail. It reminded him too much of Weatherly’s house; smaller, but the layout was similar, the dark panelling and chequerboard floor tiles just the same. But then so were countless other houses in the city and all across the country. Scottish architecture could be less than adventurous at times. He shook off the feeling as he bent to pick up the small pile of letters. Flyers, junk mail, catalogues for old ladies’ clothing, and a cheap-looking postcard from somewhere in Eastern Europe. Too many consonants in the word to easily pronounce it.
He flipped the card over, recognized the spidery scrawl, but couldn’t read it in the near-darkness. Back in the kitchen he put the kettle on, and dumped the bulk of the post in the recycling bin before reading what Emma had to say.
Another one gone. We’re making progress but it’s hard. So much has changed since they were here. Heading to Poland in a week or so, but need to sort out a few things first. Give Mrs M’s cat a scratch from me. Love E XXX
That was it. He turned over the card in the vain hope there’d be more on the other side, but it was just a cheap photograph of a castle, the sky impossibly blue behind its high towers. Snow capped the mountains on which it was built, but in the foreground the picture was of flowers in bloom, a woman in some bizarre dress. He held it up to his nose, sniffing for any lingering smell of Emma, but all he got was damp cardboard and the porch floor.
He stood up as the kettle clattered to the boil, crossed the kitchen to the cork noteboard by the dresser and pinned the card alongside the previous one. Perhaps he should get a map of Europe, plot Emma’s progress by her correspondence. Pins and red cotton thread. But no, he had enough of that at work. If he was going to waste his time on anything, it would be puzzling out why he was being pushed into investigating Weatherly’s sordid past when it was obvious no good would come of it.