A Dark So Deadly

by Stuart MacBride

  Mark was probably up for a medal. Or beatification.

  Callum had a bite of brownie, sickeningly sweet, and washed it down with hot tea.

  Franklin cracked a chunk off her shortbread. ‘His work’s hosting a dinner dance for charity Friday night, and apparently I’m being unreasonable because I can’t tell him if I’ll be there or not. Doesn’t matter that I’m working a mass murder, no, the important thing is making him look good in front of his bosses.’

  ‘Actually, a mass murder is when you kill four or more people in the same location without much of a gap between …’ He cleared his throat. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘You’re all the bloody same, aren’t you?’

  ‘Sadly.’ A slurp of tea. ‘What’s he do, this Mark of yours?’

  ‘Investment banking.’

  And all sympathy for the guy died right there.

  She finished her shortbread. ‘It’s not my fault I got transferred to Oldcastle, is it? I mean, it’s not like I can commute here from Edinburgh. I’d have to get the five-thirty train every morning and I still wouldn’t be here in time for a seven o’clock start.’

  Callum balanced his tea on the dashboard and pulled out his notebook. Flicked through it. ‘Mother wants us to drop in on Ben Harrington’s parents and give them the bad news. Here we go: sixteen Brookmyre Crescent, Blackwall Hill. About five minutes away.’

  ‘And I am not giving up my career, just to play house in a flat in Portobello.’ She bared her teeth, nearly as white as the dental receptionist’s only with bits of chocolate stuck between them.

  ‘I can drive, if you like?’

  ‘Why do men have to be such selfish scumbags?’

  A young mother slouched past the car, face slumped in permanent disappointment, pushing a buggy with a screaming toddler in it. Rain trickled from the straggly ends of her lank hair.

  Callum had another bite of brownie. Kept his mouth shut.

  Franklin sighed. Threw back the last of her tea. Then started the car. ‘All I ever wanted to be was a police officer. I’m not resigning. Wouldn’t give Superintendent Neil Sodding Sexual-Harassment Lambert the satisfaction.’

  OK, at least this was safer ground than interfering in her relationship. ‘So go to Professional Standards, make a formal complaint.’

  ‘I did. Why do you think they transferred me?’ She took them out of the car park. ‘Which way?’

  ‘Left, then right onto McAskill Road.’

  ‘And yes, I shouldn’t have hit him. I know.’ The scowl deepened. ‘Dirty, slimy, sleazy little prick got his complaint in first. Who are they going to believe, a black woman PC, or a white middle-aged male superintendent? Because you can bet it’s not the woman.’

  A lot of the shops around the centre had ‘To Let’ signs in the window, one advertising a closing down sale. One had its frontage all boarded up and a notice thanking customers for sodding off to Amazon instead of buying their books in a real bookshop.

  ‘That’s McAskill Road: take a right.’

  She did. ‘It’s never the woman.’

  The road dipped below a railway bridge, the inside scrawled with graffiti tags. A couple of older men huddled in a recess between the supports, sharing a cigarette and a litre bottle of supermarket blended whisky.

  North of the line, Blackwall Hill broke out in coiled housing developments, little cul-de-sacs, and sweeping curved streets.

  ‘Take Caldwell.’ Callum pointed at the junction up ahead, past the pedestrian crossing. ‘You want to deliver the death message?’

  ‘Why, because I’m a woman?’

  ‘On second thoughts, maybe a bit of compassion is in order. I’ll do it. You can make the tea.’ He held up a hand. ‘And before you start, it’s got nothing to do with “being a woman”. You either deliver the death message and sit with them while they grieve, or you make the tea. One or the other. Turn right here.’

  That took them onto a wide road with bungalows on either side, that bowed away to the left following the contours of the hill.

  Franklin pursed her lips. ‘Fine. You make the tea.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  It was a weird world when someone thought making four cups of tea was worse than telling a parent that their only child had been murdered. ‘Brookmyre Crescent. That’s us right there.’

  She slowed for the junction, taking them into a dead-end road that cupped twenty or thirty houses in its coiled embrace. Some semidetached, some standing on their own. Most had been extended up into their attics, a few with converted garages, lots of lock-block driveways, wheelie bins arrayed on the pavements like guardsmen ready for inspection.

  ‘Number sixteen: the one with the dark-blue door and hideous garden ornaments.’

  Franklin parked outside it as the rain faded to a misty drizzle.

  ‘Right, the mother’s name is Christine, father is Tony. No brothers or sisters.’

  She nodded. ‘Christine. Tony.’ Then undid her seatbelt. ‘Let’s do this.’

  Callum followed her out into the damp afternoon gloom.

  Number 16 was on the downhill side: a detached bungalow conversion with a room above the garage and dormer windows on the upper floor. Ivy growing up the wall around the door. A wooden wishing well sat in the middle of a gravel lawn, surrounded by gnomes in various rustic poses, and angry tufts of pampas grass.

  Classy.

  The gap between the house and next door’s leylandii hedge was like a little picture postcard, looking down Blackwall Hill, across the river, and up to Castle Hill on the other side. A shaft of sunlight had made it through the heavy lid of slate-coloured cloud, turning the castle and its granite perch a warm shade of honeyed gold, all rendered in soft-focus by the drizzle.

  Probably worth a fortune with a view like that.

  Franklin leaned on the bell. ‘Bet they’re not even in.’

  ‘Look, if you’d rather do the teas than deliver the death message, that’s OK.’

  ‘No, you idiot. There’s no car in the driveway. Family living somewhere like this? They’ve got more than one car.’

  ‘Maybe it’s in the garage?’

  She tried the bell again. ‘You’ve never had a garage, have you? It’s not for keeping your car in, it’s for storing all the crap you moved out of the last house and haven’t taken out of the boxes six years later.’

  No answer from inside.

  ‘You might be right.’ He checked his watch – 15:40. ‘Better give it another ten minutes, though. Just to be safe.’

  Franklin hunched her shoulders and turned her back on the drizzle. ‘I’m not standing here, in the rain, for ten minutes.’

  ‘So we wait in the car. At least it’ll be—’ His phone burst into life, belting out its anonymous ringtone. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is that DC MacGregor, I hope so, this is the number he wrote on his business card and I mean he should know what his own mobile number is shouldn’t he, mind you I suppose most people don’t do they, after all, they don’t phone themselves, so why would they remember it?’ All done in a single breath.

  ‘Dr McDonald. What can I do for you?’ He followed Franklin back down the driveway.

  ‘Psilocybe semilanceata.’

  OK …

  ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

  ‘Liberty Cap mushrooms, AKA: magic mushrooms, AKA: shroooooms. We’re halfway through Benjamin Harrington’s post mortem and his stomach’s full of them, well, not full-full, but there’s quite a lot of them and they’ve not dissolved all that much because he must’ve died not long after taking them, which isn’t surprising because it’s still a lot of mushrooms to take in one go, but there’s heaps of herbs and things in there as well, only they’re going to take a lot longer to identify than the mushrooms, because magic mushrooms always look like magic mushrooms, don’t they?’

  Callum settled into the passenger seat. Clunked the door shut. ‘Did he eat enough to kill
him?’

  ‘I don’t think you can overdose on magic mushrooms, they’ve got an emetic effect, so you’re more likely to vomit them up if you take too many, well, I suppose you could choke on your own sick, but that’s not actually overdosing, is it? Anyway, they’re running toxicology on the tissue samples from the two mummies to see if they’ve got any psilocybin in them, did you know they’ve got their own mass spectrometer here, it’s amazing, I’ve never seen a mortuary with these kinds of facilities before, but Dr Jenkins says they were spending so much money sending samples away for testing that it made a lot more sense getting—’

  ‘Doctor!’ A bit rude, but at least it stopped her. ‘There’s a bong in the flat where the body was found – the shrooms might be Ben’s. He takes too many, dies, Glen and Brett are too stoned to help so they panic and board him up in the bathroom then do a runner.’

  Franklin frowned across the car at him, mouthing the word, ‘What?’

  ‘That’s why they’re rushing through the tox screen on the mummies, if there’s psilocybin in the tissue samples, then we’ve got a link, and that’s exciting, but I’d still like to see the flat if I can, can I?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s fine, SOCOs have finished with it anyway.’

  ‘OK, I’ll see you there, when’s good, is now good?’

  ‘Erm … No. We’ve got to tell Ben Harrington’s parents that he’s dead. And you’re in the middle of a post mortem, remember?’

  Franklin’s phone launched into what sounded like Gilbert and Sullivan’s ode about policemen being a poor put-upon bunch of sods. ‘Yes? … What, now?’

  ‘Oh … Right, well, if you can give me a call when you’ve done that, that’ll be great and we can get on with the geographical side of things and I suppose it won’t hurt to spend a little time dealing with the severed feet case, and did I tell you we post mortemed the other mummy?’

  ‘Is that the one from the tip, or the car?’

  ‘The tip, and I think I know why it was thrown away.’

  Franklin started the car again. ‘Yeah, we’ll be there soon as we can.’

  Silence from the phone.

  ‘Dr McDonald?’

  ‘Sorry, dropped my chocolate biscuit. The mummy from the car was eviscerated and the internal organs preserved separately then stitched back inside. The body in the tip wasn’t so lucky. He tried to preserve it whole, and mummification only works if you can dry out the remains faster than the microbes inside can decompose it.’

  The gears made complaining grinding noises as Franklin performed a hurried three-point turn. She stuffed her mobile into a pocket. ‘Put your seatbelt on.’

  He covered the mouthpiece. ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘Someone’s just broken into Brett Millar’s house.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Now. Right now. Neighbour just called it in.’

  ‘—abdominal cavity is full of slippery moist organs and they go off incredibly quickly if you don’t preserve them, that’s why undertakers inject everything with preserving fluid when you die, because otherwise you’d probably burst during the eulogies, and that wouldn’t be very nice for the mourners, would it?’

  ‘Any idea who broke in? Did the neighbour recognise them?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  ‘So my educated guess is that Paddington is one hundred percent committed to the end result. He’s venerating these bodies by mummifying them, but they have to be perfect. This one wasn’t, so he disposed of it and started again. That also means he’s learning.’

  Franklin put her foot down, sending pantile boxes whizzing past the car windows. ‘Where am I going, and how do we put on the blues-and-twos in this thing?’

  Callum pulled out his notebook and flipped it open, bracing his knees against the door and the dashboard. ‘Walderswell Court. Right at the end, then left.’ He reached out and poked a switch, setting the sirens wailing and the lights flashing.

  ‘DC MacGregor?’

  ‘Still here, Doc.’

  ‘Please don’t call me “Doc” it always makes me feel like I’m meant to be one of the seven dwarfs and I know I’m not the tallest person in the world, but I like to think I’m a bit bigger than that, and if you think about it—’

  ‘OK, OK, sorry. Not Doc. You’re definitely not one of the seven dwarfs.’ After all, Snow White’s roll call didn’t go: Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Doc, Sneezy, Happy, Bashful, and Bug-Eyed Crazy Weirdo Person.

  ‘You can call me Alice, if you like, or do you prefer to keep things on a formal footing, sometimes that’s better in a work evironment, isn’t it, or does it just make me seem all distant and aloof, which would be bad, because I think we should operate as a team and—’

  ‘No, that would be great. Alice it is.’ He grabbed the handle above the door as Franklin threw them around the corner past another long sweeping row of houses. ‘Go right at the end and it’s second on the left.’ Back to the phone. ‘Was there anything else, Alice? Only we’re wheeching across town trying to get to a break-in before the thieving scumbag legs it.’

  ‘Oh, right. Sorry. That explains the sirens and things in the background, doesn’t it? I’ll let you go.’ She hung up.

  ‘Yup. Three hundred and sixty degrees of weird.’ He put his phone away as the pool car screeched around the corner and into an older, less gentrified bit of Blackwall Hill. No more lock-block driveways and formation gnomes. No more attic conversions. Just street after street of identical semidetached bungalows, bristling with satellite dishes.

  Franklin waved a hand across the car. ‘Kill the siren!’

  He clicked the button and she hit the brakes, just before the corner, swinging around onto Walderswell Court at a sensible thirty miles per hour. The police vehicular equivalent of whistling a casual tune to kid on you’re not up to something.

  The houses here were just a bit smaller than the ones on the road outside, jammed in just a bit tighter too. Number 32 was down the far end, next to a building plot. From the signage fixed to the site fencing, someone was chucking up two blocks of ‘LUXURY STARTER FLATS!!!’ where a pair of wee bungalows used to be.

  Yeah, good luck selling those, stuck on the border between Blackwall Hill and Kingsmeath. You could see the dual carriageway from here … Wonder if that was where Brett and his mates got the idea to do up their flat on Customs Street?

  Franklin coasted the last twenty feet, engine idling. ‘How can we be first on the scene?’

  ‘You drive like a maniac, what do you expect?’ Callum popped open the glove compartment and took out the box of nitrile gloves, pulling two from the slot in the top like rubbery blue tissues. Tossed the box across to Franklin. ‘Well, come on then.’

  He climbed out into the drizzle and snapped his gloves on. Pulled out his pepper spray.

  Across the road, a little old man peered out from between a pair of net curtains. Walking stick in one hand, phone in the other. That would be their informant.

  Callum half crouched, half ran across the pavement and up the driveway to Brett Millar’s house. No sign of forced entry on the front door. The handle was cold in his fingers … and it wouldn’t budge. Locked.

  Franklin flattened herself on the other side of the door, extendable baton extended. ‘Well?’

  ‘Doesn’t look like he got in the front way.’

  She nodded at the other side of the road. ‘Then how did Nosey Norman see it to call it in?’

  Good point.

  Callum pointed. ‘Round the side.’

  A six-foot wooden fence marked the boundary between number 32 and the building site, leaving just enough space for a narrow gravel path and a full-height gate. It was hanging off its hinges.

  On the other side, a bush was flattened, as if someone had fallen into it. A smear of blood on the harling, probably left by sticking their hand out to break their fall. Oh yeah, this one was a master criminal. With any luck they’d be in the kitchen making themselves a baco
n buttie.

  Round the back.

  The kitchen door was wide open, the glass in the bottom section smashed into regular safety-sized cubes.

  Franklin held up a fist, then stuck one finger up and swept it in the direction of the back door. Clenched her fist again.

  Callum stared at her. ‘Are you off your head? This isn’t the A-Team.’

  A sigh, then she slipped in through the broken door, bent almost double.

  God help us.

  He followed her inside.

  The kitchen was ground zero for a whirlwind of tins and smashed mugs, jagged shards of plate covering the lino floor, blood-spatters of tomato ketchup on the tiles above the cooker. A shattered jar of mayonnaise lying spent against the dented fridge.

  Callum crunched through a drift of Special K. ‘Wow. Someone’s behind on their housework.’

  Franklin did the ridiculous SWAT team signs again, then crouched her way out into the hall.

  He wandered after her.

  The hallway was a mess of thrown coats and hurled boots, the plasterboard dented where they’d hit the walls. Franklin did a slow three-sixty, then froze and pointed down the hall. Four doors: three shut, one wide open – bangs and crashes thumping out of it. Then a computer monitor bounced off the hall carpet, the display a spider’s web of fractured glass.

  She crept down the hall, baton raised and ready.

  It would be a druggie, off his proverbials on coke, or crack, or jellies, or smack. Sees the house is empty and bingo – tries his hand at a bit of DIY Bargain Hunt …

  Or maybe it was someone who knew Brett, Ben, and Glen? Someone who knew they might have a stash lying about. Or, going by the destruction, someone they owed money to.

  Callum flicked the safety cap off his pepper spray. ‘Shall we dance?’

  Franklin raised an eyebrow. Looked at him for a moment, then smiled a nasty smile. ‘Foxtrot or tango?’

  Good. He smiled back. ‘Let’s see where the music takes us.’

  She barged in through the open door. ‘POLICE! ON YOUR KNEES, NOW!’

  He thumped through less than a breath behind her, into the heart of a disaster. The wardrobe doors were ripped off their hinges, clothes everywhere; a computer desk smashed almost beyond recognition; single bed overturned, the slats cracked and splintered like broken ribs; a disembowelled games console, spilling its electronic innards across the floor; posters torn from the wall.