Natural Causes

by James Oswald

  'You wee shite. I'll fucking kill you.' The man is angry now, and the voices scream their joy. He strikes again, landing a blow that spurts blood from the man's nose. He feels a small moment of triumph through the agony of his wasted body.

  And then it is his face being pounded. A hand like a giant claw has him round the throat, squeezing the life out of him. He is lifted off his feet, thrown. He hits the ground with a wet slap and everything goes black. The pain is everywhere, rushing in to claim him. Warm wet, with a taste of bubbling iron that fills his throat and mouth. He can't breathe anymore, can't see, can't feel. He can only hear the triumphant cackle of the voices as they leave him to die.

  ~~~~

  51

  Mandy Cowie looked like the sort of girl who didn't agree with mornings. McLean had little experience of teenagers, at least not the kind who didn't hang out in bus shelters drinking Buckfast and hurling abuse at anyone who came near. Mandy was cleaner than the foul-mouthed queenies who bred in the tower blocks in Trinity and Craigmillar, but she was just as sullen as she sat across the kitchen table from him, staring at a bowl of soggy corn flakes.

  'You're not in any trouble, Mandy. Quite the opposite.' He guessed she was working on some genetically programmed inability to be helpful to the police. 'I'm not even here as a policeman. I'm here as a friend of Chloe's mum. She's worried sick that Chloe didn't come home last night. Have you any idea where she might have gone?'

  Mandy shifted nervously in her seat. Had she been in an interview room, McLean would have read that as meaning she knew something but didn't want to say. Here, he could only guess.

  'Did she have a boyfriend? Maybe they'd arranged to meet up.' He left the suggestion hanging in the silent air. Much to his irritation, Mandy's mum jumped into the gap.

  'It's OK, hen. You can talk to the inspector. He's no goin' tae lock youse up.'

  'Mrs Cowie, would it be possible to speak to your daughter alone for a minute?'

  She looked at him as if he were daft. Then grabbed her mug of coffee, slopping brown liquid onto the kitchen table.

  'Only a minute, mind. She's got work tae do.' And she shuffled out in her pink bunny slippers. McLean waited for a few moments after the door had closed, hearing a creak on the stairs. Mandy's eyes darted up to the ceiling, then back down to her uneaten cereal.

  'Look, Mandy. I'll be straight with you. If there's anything you know that might help us find Chloe you can tell me. I won't say a word of it to your parents, I promise. This isn't about you, it's about Chloe. We need to find her. And the longer she stays missing, the less chance we have.'

  The silence hung heavy in the air, spoiled only by the clumping noise upstairs as Mrs Cowie thumped around the bathroom. McLean tried to catch Mandy's eye, but she was fascinated by her cereal bowl. He was about to give up altogether when she finally spoke.

  'You'll no' tell mam?'

  'No, Mandy. You have my word. And I won't tell Chloe's mum either.'

  'There was this guy, right. She met him on the internet.'

  Oh Christ, here we go.

  'He seemed... I dunno. OK. He was into the whole comedy thing, dead excited when Chloe told him about the tickets to see Bill Bailey. Said he was going to be at the show too. Only he never turned up, did he.'

  'How were they supposed to meet?' McLean dredged his memory for the other girl's name. He'd be interviewing her next. 'Did he know you and Karen would be there too?'

  'I don't know what Chloe told him. I don't think she gave him her phone number; she's no' that stupid you know. But she gets them wild outfits from her mam's shop an' she was wearing one last night. Maybe she told him tae look out for the nineteen-twenties chick. She'd no've bin hard tae spot.'

  And easy to pick out on the street after the show. Walking home because it's not far, really, and the taxi money could go on something much more interesting.

  'Did this boy have a name?'

  'Yeah, he called himself Fergie. Don't know if that was his real name, though.'

  'How long had he been... how long had Chloe been talking to him?' McLean didn't understand the way internet chat rooms worked.

  'No' long. Couple days, maybe a week.'

  Such a short time to trust a stranger. Had he been so foolish when he was that age? McLean had to admit that he probably had been. But before the internet, when it was all about screwing up your courage to go and talk to a girl you fancied, things had been a lot more innocent. Kids today were more sophisticated, it was true, but they were just as naive as they had ever been. And Fergie. The name instantly brought to mind McReadie, though there must have been thousands of Ferguses and Fergusons across the city. He needed to think straight, not jump to conclusions based on wild speculation.

  'I need to know exactly what time you and Chloe split up last night, Mandy.' Only now did McLean pull out his notebook. 'Retrace your steps from the moment the show ended.'

  *

  Karen Beckwith told the same story, only it didn't take so much effort to get it out of her. McLean compared the two statements as he stood outside the Assembly Rooms on George Street, looking around at the daytime traffic and trying to imagine what it would have been like at eleven the night before. Around about then he and Emma had been sitting in the Guildford Arms, not five minutes walk away. Karen and Mandy had taken a cab home, walking with Chloe to the taxi rank in Castle Street. He followed their short route, looking up at the sides of the buildings and noting the positions of the security cameras. You couldn't do anything in the city centre without it being filmed by someone.

  From the taxi rank, there was only one sensible way to walk back to the shop: along Princes Street, over North and South Bridges and on up Clerk Street. It shouldn't have taken more than half an hour, and there were cameras for a good deal of the way. He knew what time Chloe had last been seen. He knew what she had been wearing. Now it was just a matter of reviewing the CCTV footage, and judging by the number of cameras, that was going to take while.

  *

  'Something here sir. Want to have a look?'

  McLean turned away from the flickering screens filled with blurred people jumping erratically along orange-tinted streets. DC MacBride sat at a nearby console, embarrassingly confident with the technology.

  'What've you got?' He rolled his chair across the carpet tiles until he could see the other screen. MacBride twisted the control knob counter-clockwise, speeding the recording back to eleven fifteen.

  'This is the taxi rank in Castle Street, sir.' He put the machine into normal speed play and pointed at the screen. Summertime and the Festival in full swing meant that the city centre streets were if anything busier than during the day. 'I think that's our three girls there.' He hit pause and pointed at three figures walking arm in arm. The one in the middle wore a straight-cut plaited skirt, sleeveless top and cloche hat. A familiar feather boa draped around her neck. Beside her, Karen and Mandy looked rather trashy in their tight jeans and T-shirts.

  'That's her,' McLean said. 'Can we see where she goes?'

  MacBride flicked the tape forward and they watched as the girls joined the queue at the taxi rank. Chloe waited until the other two had left, then set off down the hill towards Princes Street.

  'We have to switch cameras here.' MacBride did something with the confusing array of buttons on the console and the picture changed to a different angle. Chloe walked along the street, alone and confident in her stride. They followed her through two more cameras, and then she stopped as a black car slid along the street beside her.

  If he hadn't known better, he would have said it was a classic case of kerb crawling. Chloe bent down to the car window, obviously talking to whoever was driving. Her body language showed no sign of alarm, and after a couple of moments, she opened the door and got in. The car drove off in the direction of the North British Hotel.

  'Can we enhance that picture? Get a number for that car?' McLean asked.

  'Only in the movies. These aren't high resolution cameras and the lighti
ng's atrocious. There should be a better angle from another camera, but it fused last night, apparently.'

  'We might be able to track it. Black or dark blue BMW 3 Series. Does it turn up on any of the other cameras?'

  MacBride clicked buttons, watching the car turn off Princes Street onto The Mound. It appeared briefly in one more camera shot, then nothing. 'Coverage isn't so good away from the main city hotspots. We can try a sweep of the other cameras, extrapolating the time. See if it shows up.'

  'How long will that take?'

  'I don't know sir. We could get lucky, or it could take all day.'

  'OK. Make a start. See if you can't get a number from that image. Even a partial would help. Send it to Emma, she's good with photos.'

  McLean froze as he spoke the words. She was good with photos. She'd sorted out the crime scene images from the house in Sighthill, revealing the strange patterns he'd seen on the floor. And before that, there'd been something else on her computer monitor. Thumbnails of photos. Had she just been processing them for archiving, or was there something more sinister going on? MB. Em B. Emma Baird.

  'You all right sir? You look like someone's walked on your grave.' DC MacBride's pale, round face looked up at him in the semi-darkness of the video viewing room.

  'I think I know who might have been posting those crime scene images to the net.'

  But he hoped to Christ he was wrong.

  ~~~~

  52

  'Phone still not working, I take it?'

  Pete the Duty Sergeant greeted him with a grin as he hurried back into the station. McLean patted his pockets until he found the device, but couldn't remember whether he'd even bothered trying to charge it the night before. He'd been distracted, so the chances weren't good. True enough the phone was dead when he tried pressing any of its buttons.

  'What do you do to the poor things, curse them?' Pete shoved a thick pile of papers in his direction, nodding to the far side of the reception area as he did. 'Here's a stack of messages need dealing with, and that bloke over there's been asking for you by name. Says he's from Hoggett Scotia Asset Management. Looks like a banker to me.'

  Puzzled, McLean looked around, trying to remember where he'd heard the name before. Seeing Mr Masters sitting on one of the plain plastic benches didn't help. He looked like any of a thousand faceless suited businessmen: early forties greying hair; slight paunch that two games of squash a week was no longer enough to burn off; expensive leather briefcase full of electronic gadgets; wife and kids in the suburbs; mistress in an old town tenement.

  'Inspector McLean? Thankyou for seeing me.' Masters leapt to his feet before McLean was even halfway across the floor. Only then did the pieces of memory begin to slot into place.

  'Mr Masters. You were one of the witnesses to Peter Andrews' suicide.'

  Jonathan Masters winced at the mention of his former colleague's name. 'It's been a hard week at Hoggett Scotia, inspector. Andy was one of our top analysts. He'll be sorely missed.'

  A top analyst. Not A Great Guy, or The Life And Soul Of The Party. Not a friend.

  'I spoke to his father, Mr Masters. It seemed like he was a man with everything to live for until he discovered he had terminal cancer.'

  'That was a complete surprise. He never told any of us. Maybe if he had...' Mr Masters trailed off.

  'But I'm guessing you didn't come here to tell me about Peter Andrews, sir.'

  'Yes, of course. I'm sorry, inspector. It's been a hard week. But we seem to have lost a secretary. Sally Dent.'

  'Dent. Wasn't she a witnesses too?'

  'Yes, she was on reception. We gave her the rest of the day off. Well, it was the least we could do. We overlooked her not coming in the next day, and then it was the weekend. But she's not been back since the, well, since Andy... you know.'

  'You've tried to get in contact, I take it.' McLean felt a horrible sense of dejà vu crawling up from the back of his mind, like the shadow of a spider.

  'Of course. We phoned her home, but her mother thought she'd gone on a foreign trip. It's stupid really, she was meant to be going to Tokyo with one of our fund managers, but the whole thing was cancelled after...'

  'So you thought she was at home, and her mother thought she was abroad, and between the two of you, no-one knows where she's been since the day Peter Andrews killed himself.'

  'That's pretty much it, inspector.'

  Tell me about Sally Dent, Mr Masters,' McLean said. 'What does she look like?'

  'Oh, I can do better than that. Here.' Masters put his briefcase down on the plastic bench, flicking open the twin latches. McLean saw a tiny laptop computer, a palm handheld organiser, a GPS navigator and a slim mobile phone nestling in the soft leather interior before Masters pulled out an A4 sheet and closed the case back down again. 'Her personnel file.'

  He took the sheet, holding it up to the light so that he could get a better look at the printed photograph that stared uncomfortably out at him. What surprised him most when he saw the photograph was not that he recognised the woman, but that he had been expecting to see her face there. It was a prettier face in the picture, smiling and full of hope for the future. The last time he had seen her, she had been laid out on a stainless steel examination table in Angus Cadwallader's mortuary; the first time, broken and twisted, hair matted with blood, as she lay in the rubbish-strewn oil and gravel of the rail-bed in Waverly station.

  *

  'You really can't keep away Tony, can you? You know, you could re-train as a pathologist's assistant and then we could give up all this pretence.'

  Angus Cadwallader grinned from his office chair as McLean knocked on the open door. He'd left Masters in the public reception area fretting and looking at his watch. The quicker they got this done, the better.

  'It's tempting, Angus, but I know you've only got eyes for Tracy.'

  The grin wavered ever so slightly, and did the pathologist stiffen slightly? Interesting.

  'Yes, well. What can I do for you?'

  'The Jane Doe who jumped off Waverley Bridge last week. I think she might be a Sally Dent. Can we prep her for ID? I've got her boss upstairs.'

  'No problem. I'll get her wheeled out and give you a shout when she's ready.' The pathologist bustled out into the theatre and towards the bank of storage drawers, grabbing a stainless steel gurney as he went. McLean followed.

  'Did you send in the report on her yet?'

  'What? Oh, yes. I think so. Tracy usually emails them across as soon as they're done. Why?'

  'I haven't seen it, that's all.'

  'Ah, then you won't know about the plaques that were eating holes in her brain.'

  'The... What?' A cold shiver grew in the pit of McLean's stomach. Complications. There were always complications.

  'Creutzfeldt-Jakobs. Quite advanced. I suspect she'd been having fairly vivid hallucinations before she jumped. That was probably why she did it.' Cadwallader opened the drawer, revealing the pale, cleaned body of Sally Dent, the cuts on her face neatly sewn up, but still horribly disfiguring. He slid her across onto the gurney and covered her with a long white sheet. Together, they wheeled her to the identification room, where an anxious looking Jonathan Masters leapt to his feet as if someone had shouted at him.

  'Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr Masters. I should warn you she was quite badly injured before she died.'

  Masters went a green shade of white, nodding silently as he looked at the shrouded figure. Cadwallader turned back the sheet to reveal just the face. The banker looked down, and McLean could see the horror of recognition on his face. It was a look he'd seen all too many times before.

  'What happened to her?' Masters' voice was both high-pitched and croaking, but he hadn't collapsed like some men did. McLean had to give him that much.

  'She jumped off North Bridge.'

  'The suicide? I heard about that. But Sally... No... Sally wouldn't...'

  'She was suffering from a damaging neurological condition.' Cadwallader covered the battered fac
e up again. 'The chances are she didn't even know what she was doing.'

  'What about her mother?' Masters looked at McLean with pleading in his eyes. 'Who's going to explain this to her?'

  'It's all right, Mr Masters. I'll speak with Mrs Dent.' He took the businessman's arm, steered him out of the room. 'Are you going to be OK? Would you like me to arrange for someone to take you back to the office?'

  Masters seemed to recover his composure away from the dead body. He straightened his shoulders and looked at his watch again. 'No, I'm fine inspector, thank you. I'd better be getting back to the office. Oh God. Sally.' He shook his head.

  'This might seem like an insensitive question, Mr Masters, but was there anything going on between Miss Dent and Mr Andrews?'

  Masters looked at McLean with an expression that quite plainly said he thought the inspector insane. 'What do you mean?'

  'I just wondered if they had a relationship that went beyond the professional, sir. The two suicides in such quick succession.'

  Peter Andrews was gay, inspector. Didn't you know that?'

  *

  By the time McLean had escorted Jonathan Masters from the building and returned to the main examination theatre, Cadwallader had put the dead woman away in her cold cell and returned to his office. McLean looked in, realising for the first time that the ever-cheerful assistant was nowhere to be seen.

  'What've you done with Tracy?' he asked.

  'You keep your hands off my assistant, Tony.'

  McLean held his hands up as if surrendering. 'She's not my type, Angus.'

  'No, I heard you preferred SOC officers. Still, nobody's perfect.' Cadwallader laughed. 'Tracy's taken some samples to the lab. I let her out every once in a while. When you're not busy filling up my mortuary with bodies.'

  'Sorry about that.' McLean shrugged an apology. 'Tell me more about Sally Dent. There was something about her blood, I seem to remember.'