A Dark So Deadly

by Stuart MacBride

  ‘Honk the horn if you change your mind. I can stick the flashers on and we’ll be at CHI in ten, fifteen minutes tops.’

  ‘I told you, I’m fine. Now … sod off, you’re talking … all over the Chief Superintendent.’

  He climbed out. Closed the door. Stood there for a moment, as McAdams grimaced and rubbed at his stomach.

  Yeah, definitely not looking well.

  Callum turned and marched over to the horrible green van. ‘You Mrs Reid?’

  The woman gave a little start and yelp. ‘Argh, frightened the life out of me.’

  ‘This your van?’

  She stuck the last arrangement into the back and slid the side door shut. ‘Course it’s not my van. It’s Mrs Reid’s van. How could I afford a van?’

  Up close she was a lot younger than she’d looked from the car.

  ‘Are you the driver of this vehicle, then?’

  Her mouth slammed shut, then she turned and hurried out of the rain, huddling under the overhang outside the funeral director’s. ‘You’re the police, aren’t you? Sodding hell.’ She bit at her fingernails – already jagged and rough. ‘If this is about that bitch’s Porsche, I swear those dents were there before I parked next to her.’

  He pulled out his notebook. ‘Were you driving this van on Wednesday evening?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You sure?’

  Another fingernail disappeared. ‘Please don’t tell Mrs Reid, OK? I’m not meant to take the van home, but I was out on a late delivery and my boyfriend had his parents’ house to himself and we …’ Colour rushed up her cheeks. ‘Please don’t tell Mrs Reid. I’m on my last warning as it is and I need this job.’

  He clamped a pen between his thumb and the dirty fibreglass cast. ‘I’m going to need his name, his address, and his number.’

  A grey-haired woman emerged from the florist’s next door, wiping her hands on a stripy apron. ‘Is something wrong, Andrea?’

  She slapped on a smile. ‘No, Mrs Reid. This gentleman was just asking if we do funeral wreaths. I was giving him our number.’

  ‘Well don’t be long, that wedding’s at three and I want those pedestals all set up by two at the latest.’ She pursed her lips then nodded at Callum. ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ Before disappearing back inside.

  Callum produced his photographs again. No joy.

  Two vans down, one to go …

  53

  ‘Are you sure this is it?’

  Callum checked Voodoo’s printout again. ‘Postcode is right.’

  The registered address for Van Number Three, the grey Peugeot Bipper, wasn’t so much a house as a fire-blackened hulk slumped at the end of a track nearly halfway between Oldcastle and Auchterowan. Bordered on all sides by fields with a clump of woods in the middle distance. Its garden was a riot of weeds and grass, that looked as if it hadn’t seen a lawnmower for at least a decade. No neighbours.

  The damp undergrowth seeped cold moisture through Callum’s trousers. ‘Who’s going to buy a second-hand van and register it here?’

  McAdams howched, then spat a glob of yellowy-green into the rosebay willowherb. ‘Oldest trick in the book: clone someone’s number plates, or register your dodgy vehicle to someone else. Doesn’t matter if you’re speeding, or parking on double yellows, the police go after the registered keeper, not you.’

  Callum called control on his Airwave, ‘Brucie? Can I get a PNC check on a Paul Terence Jeffries, the Cloisters, by Auchterowan, OC25 8TX.’

  ‘Hud oan.’

  McAdams sniffed and leaned on the roof of the car. ‘At least it’s stopped raining.’

  Overhead, the sky was a looming mass of grey, darkening from dove to charcoal at the horizon.

  ‘Right, Paul Terence Jeffries: did a six-stretch in the eighties for raping a mother of two, with three other offences taken into consideration. Couple of speeding tickets, then nothing since the early nineties … Oh, and his house burned down.’

  Callum stood, looking at the soot-stained walls, blown-out windows, and partially collapsed roof. ‘You don’t say?’

  ‘I do say. And there’s no need to sound so sarcastic; it only happened Wednesday.’

  The same day Ashlee and Abby Gossard were abducted. No way that was a coincidence.

  ‘Thanks, Brucie.’ He hung up and put his phone away as McAdams fought through the weeds to the front door.

  Well, where the front door should have been – it was just a yawning black chasm now.

  McAdams disappeared inside.

  Silly sod.

  Callum followed him as far as the threshold. Stuck his head in. ‘Is that safe?’

  A smile. ‘I’m dying of bowel cancer. What’s the worst that can happen: the walls fall in and spare me six more weeks of chemo and a slow lingering death? I’ll take my chances.’ He wandered down the hall, stepped into another room and was gone.

  Just because he had nothing to lose, it didn’t mean Callum had to join him.

  It wasn’t safe. Half the roof was still up there, sagging and fire-blackened, ready to come crashing down at any moment. Bang! Crash! Squish! No more police officers.

  Callum groaned. Sighed. Then stepped over the threshold and into the burned-out house.

  It reeked of smoke – the sweet scent of charred wood mingling with the acrid tang of fried plastics and fabric.

  Every floorboard he stood on creaked …

  Urgh.

  McAdams reappeared at the end of the hallway, sauntering across and in through another door, hands in his pockets, whistling.

  Three more doors led off the hall, one hanging open, revealing what looked like a corridor, one through into a grubby bathroom, and one leading down into the depths of the earth.

  Callum peered into the partial gloom.

  Stone steps, littered with bits of charcoal.

  No chance.

  What if the ground floor collapsed while he was down there?

  McAdams appeared at his shoulder. ‘What have you found here? A dark stairway to Heaven? Or one down to Hell?’

  Deep breath.

  He took the first step, then the second, then the third.

  The floor above didn’t fall on his head. ‘You know, you can’t just chop a sentence into chunks and call it a haiku.’

  ‘Yes I can.’

  ‘That’s not poetry, it’s bad punctuation.’ Callum eased himself off the last stone step and onto a hard-packed dirt floor. ‘There’s a weird smell down here. Sort of sweet and tangy? Kind of herbal?’

  McAdams limped his way down the stairs. Did a slow catwalk turn. ‘Definitely what estate agents would call a “fixer-upper”.’

  The floor was littered with bits of wood from the floor above. Callum looked up, through the holes in the cellar ceiling and out to the heavy grey clouds. A faint wash of sunlight broke free, infiltrating the dark room, casting a warm golden glow onto the wall opposite.

  ‘Ah.’ McAdams sucked in a breath. ‘Do you see what I see, Constable MacGregor?’

  Three sets of chains were fixed to the stonework, each one with a rusty padlock making a noose on the free end. What looked like a melted plastic water bowl beside one of them. The burned frame of a metal bed, mattress gone, springs mottled by the heat, beneath another. An upended bucket by the third.

  A fourth chain lay in the corner, still attached to the ring-and-plate that must have fixed it to the wall at one point.

  McAdams pointed. ‘Do you want to say it, or will I?’

  Monaghan hadn’t been keeping Rottweilers down here, these were for people. So Dr McDonald was right: women are dirty, subhuman things that have to be trained like dogs. Chained up and beaten …

  The Peugeot Bipper was Monaghan’s van and this was his lair.

  Callum pulled out his phone and made the call.

  ‘Rather them than me.’ The Dog Officer sooked his teeth as a handful of Smurfs picked their way through The Cloisters’ burned
-out remains. He was a big man with a list to the left and hair poking out the neck of his black Police Scotland T-shirt. ‘Had a friend got trapped beneath somewhere like this for two days till they could dig him out. Lost his arm in that one, retired to Portugal.’

  McAdams sniffed. ‘All right for some.’

  ‘Nah: plagued with haemorrhoids. Big as a grapefruit.’ He swept a hairy hand up and out, indicating another bit of the huge, overgrown expanse of back garden. ‘Come on, Penguin, off you go, you lazy sod.’

  A black lab in a wee high-viz waistcoat snuffled away into the damp undergrowth, nose down, tail wagging.

  Callum turned, one hand held above his eyes like the bill of a baseball cap. A horrible little Fiat Panda was lurching its way down the track towards them, bringing a swirling cloud of grey-blue smoke with it. ‘Mother’s here.’

  That got a grunt from McAdams. ‘A pound will get you five, / That she’ll skin us both alive, / For delving in the cellar, / Of this terrible Jeffries fellar, / And risking both our instant deaths, / “Reproach” shall be her shibboleth.’

  The dog officer raised an eyebrow. ‘Just make that up, did you? Cause rhyming “cellar” with “fellar” isn’t exactly Wordsworth, is it?’

  ‘Everyone’s a critic.’

  Mother’s Panda came to a juddering halt behind the small collection of SEB Transit vans, gave one last vrooooom, then the gunshot retort of a backfire, and silence.

  ‘I’m just saying: resorting to doggerel in the middle stanza undermines the poetic integrity of the piece. That’s all.’ Dog Man stuck a hand against his chest. ‘For delving in the depths below, / Of this, our dark and deadly foe.’ A nod. ‘See? Much better.’ Then he cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘PENGUIN! WHERE THE SODDING HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING?’

  The black lab disappeared into a massive knot of brambles – five-foot high and covering at least a third of the garden.

  ‘Sodding dog’s a pain in my parliament, if you’ll pardon the French.’

  Mother climbed out, sleeves rolled up on her fleece, bare white arms semaphoring in the sunlight as she marched over to the nearest Smurf.

  McAdams stuck his hands in his pockets. ‘Save yourself, young Callum. Run away before she gets here. This will not be pretty.’

  The Dog Officer nodded. ‘A six-eight-six haiku. Very avant-garde. PENGUIN, I’M NOT TELLING YOU AGAIN! Stupid animal.’

  Rustling and crackling came from deep within the brambles, but that was it – no Labrador to be seen.

  The Smurf turned and pointed in their direction. And Mother was on her way.

  ‘PENGUIN!’ A shake of the head. ‘Tell you, we get all the rubbish dogs in O Division. Anything that can’t find its own tail: they send it here.’ Deep breath. ‘PENGUIN! OUT HERE NOW, YOU USELESS WEE SOD!’

  Mother rounded the corner of the blackened house, shoulders forward, hands curled into fists.

  McAdams stood up straight. ‘We who are about to die, salute you.’

  ‘PENGUIN!’

  ‘Andrew Thomas McAdams, what in God’s holy name do you think you were doing going down there? Are you insane?’

  He just shrugged.

  ‘PENGUIN, IF YOU’RE NOT OUT HERE BY THE TIME I COUNT TO FIVE, I’LL SKIN YOU AND WEAR YOU AS A POSING POUCH!’

  Callum stepped in. ‘If DS McAdams hadn’t put his neck on the line, we wouldn’t have found Monaghan and Jeffries’ dungeon.’

  ‘FOUR!’

  She turned her scowl on Callum instead. ‘And you! You should’ve kept him out of there, you know he’s not well!’

  ‘THREE!’

  ‘At least now we know Monaghan wasn’t working alone. There was no way he could prepare his victims at that tiny flat on Bellfield Road – he needed room to starve them before he gutted them and stuck them in the smoker. This is where he did it.’

  ‘TWO!’

  Mother thumped the Dog Officer on the arm. ‘Would you please stop doing that while I’m giving these idiots a bollocking?’

  ‘Cadaver dog, my fuzzy backside.’ He zipped up his Police Scotland fleece, hauled on a pair of leather gloves, then stomped towards the brambles. ‘PENGUIN!’ He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the barbed-wire mass. ‘AAARGH! SODDING SPIKY SONS-OF-A-BITCHING BRAMBLE … GAAAAAARGH!’

  Callum tried his best reasonable voice. ‘Dr McDonald thinks there’s still a chance to save Ashlee Gossard. Come on, it can’t be a coincidence, can it? Someone spots the fire here and calls nine-nine-nine at six twenty – an hour and a half later, Ashlee and her mum are being attacked and abducted from their home. And a van registered to this address is right there in the vicinity.’

  ‘I’M GOING TO KILL YOU, PENGUIN! YOU HEAR ME?’

  Mother stared up at the heavy lid of looming clouds for a moment, then sighed. ‘Andy, you know it was stupid going down there. What if the floor collapsed?’

  McAdams smiled. ‘There are worse things in life than death.’

  ‘PENGUIN! WHERE ARE YOU, YOU STUPID …’

  Callum pointed at the burned-out house. ‘Look at the timing: Brett Millar turns up at his parents’ house in Blackwall Hill, this place is set on fire, Ashlee and Abby Gossard get abducted.’ He held his hands out, like he was finishing a magic trick. ‘Millar got free and escaped – that’s why there’s a loose chain in the basement, pulled from the wall. Monaghan and Jeffries can’t risk him leading us back here, so they torch the house. Only now they don’t have anyone to mummify, so they go out and abduct themselves a pre-starved teenaged girl instead. Jeffries is still out there, and he’s going to kill her soon as he thinks she’s ready to become a god.’

  Mother shook her head. ‘Yes, well done. All very logical and exact. Only your Paul Terence Jeffries isn’t “out there” or anywhere else: he’s dead.’

  Oh …

  ‘HELLO?’

  ‘I got John and Dotty to go a-rummaging. The Cloisters belongs to an ecclesiastical trust. Jeffries was some sort of lay preacher, so not only did he live here rent-free – they paid him a wee stipend too. He stopped cashing the cheques, wouldn’t answer any letters, they couldn’t track him down anywhere, so they went to court and eventually had him declared dead. That was twenty years ago.’

  McAdams sniffed. ‘So who’s been staying here?’

  ‘That’s the trouble – they didn’t know they still owned it, till Dotty phoned and made them go through the files. Turns out they’ve been paying council tax on a derelict property for over two decades. Not the most efficient biscuits in the tin.’

  ‘HELLO, CAN YOU HEAR ME?’

  ‘Your hairy friend doesn’t shut up, does he?’ Mother shrugged her shoulders. ‘Anyway: even if Jeffries was still alive, he’d be in his seventies by now. Doesn’t sound very abducty, does it?’

  ‘So Monaghan knew Jeffries was dead, knew his house was abandoned, and registered the van to this address, in a dead man’s name, because he knew no one would ever check.’

  ‘I’M NOT KIDDING ABOUT HERE!’

  McAdams spat into the long grass. ‘The Dog Man is stuck. Inside the brambles’ clutches. Their thorns bind him tight.’

  Mother nodded. ‘Exactly. So we need to ask: how did Monaghan know? Does he have some connection with the ecclesiastical trust? How many other empty properties does he know about? Because one of those is where he left Ashlee and Abby Gossard before jumping in Kings River.’

  ‘ARE YOU BUGGERS DEAF OR WHAT? SOMEONE NEEDS TO GET IN HERE, NOW!’

  She scowled into the brambles. ‘Callum, I hate to ask, but can you go see what he’s yelling about?’

  Oh, lovely.

  Callum stayed where he was. ‘Maybe we should get this ecclesiastical trust to go through their financial records and find out what other empty properties they’ve forgotten about?’

  ‘SOON AS YOU LIKE!’

  Callum growled out a breath. Buttoned up his suit jacket. ‘ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT! God’s sake …’ The long gras
s was sodden with weeks of rain, making his trousers stick to his legs, soaking through his shoes and into his socks. Urgh …

  Dog Man had flattened a path into the brambles and he followed it. Dropped to his hands and knees and picked his way into the spiky mass of horrible bloody stabby jabby— ‘OW!’

  This stuff was worse than barbed wire. At least a million times sharper. And the bloody thorns came off and stuck in his good hand and they grabbed at his suit jacket and— ‘OW! AAAAARGH! I HATE BRAMBLES!’

  He battered at them with his filthy fibreglass cast, but they just bounced right back at him. Only now they were angry. ‘AAAAAARGH!’

  Another ten feet of horrible jaggy stabbing needle-jabbing horror and he emerged into a little hollow, ringed with the old yellow-grey corpses of long-dead brambles. Officer Hairy the Dog Man was sitting off to one side, but Penguin the useless cadaver dog was right in the middle, surrounded by what looked like burrows. Not tiny ones like you’d get with rabbits, but bigger. Maybe a fox, or a badger?

  Penguin was lying down, tail thumping against the earth – dry in here under the canopy of horrible spiky tendrils.

  Callum sat back on his thighs, still hunched over to avoid their spiny crown. ‘You better have a damn good reason for dragging me in here, ruining my suit, and look at my bloody hands!’ Literally – covered with scratches and puncture marks seeping red, peppered with dozens of tiny brown thorns. Even the fingertips of his bad hand were lacerated where they protruded from the cast.

  Dog Man pointed at a white rock poking out of the ground near one of Penguin’s front paws.

  Only it wasn’t really white at all, it was a sort of off-ivory colour, the size of a half-deflated football. The rock had holes in it, exposed where it poked out of the dirt: one roundish, one an arrow shape. Wait a minute, were those teeth?

  It was. It was a skull, lying on its side, one eye socket and half the nasal cavities exposed to the air, the rest buried beneath the ground. And it was definitely human.

  Maybe there was a good reason no one had heard from Paul Jeffries for over twenty years.

  — Father —

  “If there’s one thing I’ve noticed,” purred the Goblin Queen, “it’s that the people who pretend to be the bestest, and the nicest, are almost always the worstest and most horrible.”