Natural Causes

by James Oswald

  Yours in repentance,

  Jonas Carstairs.

  McLean stared at the sprawling handwriting for long minutes, occasionally turning the sheet over as if the information he needed might be on the other side. But Carstairs had not said what he really needed to know, had not named their commander. And what was that paragraph about his grandmother supposed to mean? How like a lawyer never to actually commit. Everything was hedged. It was almost more frustrating than if the letter hadn't existed at all. Here there was nothing more than vague hints, and the threat of another brutal murder.

  And then something clicked in his brain. Another murder. Doing the ritual again. A young girl just on the cusp of reaching womanhood. He knew why they had abducted Chloe Spiers. It was so obvious he could only kick himself for not seeing it before. Reaching for the phone, he was about to dial out when it rang in his hand.

  'McLean.' He barked the words impatiently, wanting to get the conversation over and done with. Time was running out. He needed answers and no vulture-faced lawyer was going to get in his way this time..

  'DC MacBride here, sir. I've just had a call from Saughton.'

  'Oh aye? I was just about to call them. We need to speak to McReadie urgently, Stuart. He knows who's taken Chloe Spiers, and I know what they're going to do to her.'

  'Ah. That might be difficult sir.'

  McLean's breath caught in his throat. 'Why?'

  'McReadie hanged himself in his cell this evening. He's dead.'

  ~~~~

  61

  McLean sat in the darkened video surveillance centre at Saughton prison, watched the video as a huge man entered the visitors room and sat down at the lone table. He was dressed casually; dark leather jacket and faded jeans, a T-shirt with some indecipherable logo on it. Out of context, McLean couldn't place him, but there was something very familiar about him.

  'I know that man. What's his name?'

  The prison officer who had escorted him through the building consulted a sheet of paper attached to a clipboard.

  'Signed in as Callum, J. Address in Joppa.'

  'Has anyone checked it out?' Alarm bells were going off in McLean's head, but the shrug he received by way of an answer was clear enough. He made a note of the name and address, then turned back to the screen in time to see McReadie ushered into the room. The burglar's reaction on seeing the big man was guarded, but not the terror McLean might have expected.

  'D'you get any audio with this?' he asked.

  The guard shook his head. 'Nah. There was a big stooshie about human rights a few years back. I'm surprised we're still allowed to lock them up.'

  McLean shook his head in agreement at the madness of it all, then returned to watching the screen. The two men talked for a few minutes, McReadie's body language getting increasingly agitated. Then all of a sudden he stopped still, dropped his hands calmly to his sides and stared at his visitor with an almost hypnotised gaze. After about thirty seconds, the big man got up and left. A guard came over and lead a very pliant McReadie away, then the tape ended.

  'About half an hour after that we were doing the usual round of cell checks and found him dead. He'd ripped his shirt into strips and used it to strangle himself.'

  'Strange. He didn't seem the suicidal type.'

  'No. We didn't have him on special monitoring or anything.' The guard looked anxious. Perhaps worried he might get into trouble. As far as McLean was concerned, McReadie had done the world a huge favour. But it would have been better if he'd spoken to them about Chloe's whereabouts and his mysterious employer beforehand. That left only one other person to talk to.

  *

  'I know what they're going to do to her, Mr Roberts. Do you?'

  Another hour had passed, another sixty minutes ticking down the time until it would be too late. If it wasn't already. McLean was back in the station, trying to sweat some answers out of a plainly terrified Christopher Roberts.

  'They're going to nail her hands and feet to the floor. They're going to rape her. Then they're going to take a knife and cut open her belly. Whilst she's still alive, they'll start removing her internal organs, one by one. There'll be six of them, and each one will get an organ for himself. Were you meant to be one of the six, Mr Roberts? Was Fergus McReadie? Only both of you are going to miss out on your chance at immortality, or whatever it was you sick bastards thought you could get out of it. You're in here with me, and Fergus is dead.'

  Roberts let out a small squeak of alarm at this news, but said nothing more.

  'Forensic results have come in. We know Chloe was in your car.' McLean lied. SOC and forensics were still working slow, even though Emma had been cleared. It would be a while before Dagwood could be persuaded to apologise, especially given that there really had been a leak. Longer still before someone got around to checking over Roberts' BMW. 'Where did you take her? Who did you take her to? Was it Callum?'

  That elicited some small response. Roberts' eye ticked nervously. 'How did he die?' he asked in a small, shaky voice.

  'What?'

  'Fergus. How did he die?'

  McLean leant on the table, his face close to Roberts'. 'He tore his shirt into strips, tied them round his neck in a noose, tied the other end to the top of the bunk in his cell and then used his own bodyweight to choke himself to death.'

  A light knock on the door interrupted them. McLean pushed himself away from the table. 'Come in.'

  DC MacBride poked his head through the open doorway. 'Some test results just in that I thought you might be interested in, sir.'

  'What is it, Stuart?'

  'Fingerprints from David Brown's neck, sir. They've got a fairly good match with your man Callum. Seems he's got form. Used to run with a gang of street thugs out of Trinity. But he dropped off the radar about ten years back. Nobody's seen him since.'

  'Well, he's back now. Thanks, constable.' McLean turned back to Roberts. It was time to try a different tack.

  'Look, Mr Roberts. We know you did this under duress. You're a lawyer, not a murderer. We can protect you, and we're already protecting your wife. But you've got to help us. If we don't find Chloe soon it'll be too late.'

  Roberts sat in his uncomfortable plastic chair and stared at the wall opposite. He wouldn't meet McLean's gaze and his face had turned a deathly white.

  'They got to Fergus. They must have done. I can't say anything. They'll know, and they'll kill me.'

  And Christopher Roberts would say no more.

  *

  'Put an APB out on Callum.'

  McLean sat in the tiny incident room with DC MacBride and Grumpy Bob, trying not to let his frustration at Roberts get the better of him. It bothered him that he couldn't place the big man, either. The name was familiar, but the prison CCTV footage didn't give a good enough view of his face. 'See if we can't get a decent photo of him too, eh?'

  It occurred to him that he was not meant to be part of the ongoing investigation into Chloe's disappearance. It was Grumpy Bob's case. But the old sergeant seemed quite happy to defer to him. Beside him, DC MacBride picked up his airwave set and started making calls, his soft voice filling the silence as McLean stared at the photographs pinned to the wall. The missing dead body and her preserved organs. Why would somebody steal those? What could they possibly want them for?

  'Christ I'm stupid.' McLean shot to his feet.

  'What?' Grumpy Bob looked up and DC MacBride ended his call.

  'It's so bloody obvious. I should have thought of it days ago.'

  'Thought of what?'

  'Where they've taken the dead body.' McLean pointed at the photos on the wall. 'Where they're going to kill Chloe.'

  ~~~~

  62

  The evening sky burned an angry red as they sped through the gates to Farquhar House. Tommy McAllister had wasted no time in removing his machinery from the site, but the house itself was still boarded up, broken blue and white police tape fluttering in the breeze. The lower windows looked like they'd not been touched since t
he last time he had been there, and the door was securely fixed with a large hasp and padlock.

  'Crowbar, I think. Can't hang around waiting for the keys.' McLean sent DC MacBride off to the car in search of a suitable jimmy whilst he and Grumpy Bob looked around for clues that anything was amiss. The ground was so churned up with the mess of a building site it was impossible to tell.

  The constable returned with a long tyre iron, and after a few moments of frantic levering, the hasp peeled away from the wooden door with a satisfying rip. Inside, the building smelled musty and unused, completely silent and dark as a grave. McLean switched on his torch and crossed the empty, cavernous hallway to the stairs leading down to the basement. The door had been closed and locked. He gave it a hearty kick and the woodworm-infested frame buckled in. Dust billowed up all around, making them cough, but he pressed on, down the stairs, moved by a terrible sense of urgency.

  The lights had gone from the basement, but the dark hole in the wall was still there. McLean shone his torch through it, and for an instant his heart stopped. A body lay spread-eagled in the centre of the hidden room, her hands and feet nailed to the wooden floor with shiny new nails. Her head was tilted back in an endless scream of agony and her stomach had been cut open, ribs glistening white in the torchlight. He flicked the beam up to the walls, and there were the six alcoves, their precious organs tucked away in preserving jars.

  Then a muffled sob reached his ears. He looked around, bringing the torch to bear on a second figure, huddled against the wall, chains around her ankles and wrists, twisting up to a shiny new hook in the plaster. She was still wearing her nineteen twenties flapper girl outfit, though somewhere along the line she had lost her cloche hat. Tears had run rivers of dark mascara down her cheeks and her wrists were red raw with struggling against her restraints. But she was alive. Chloe Spiers was alive.

  McLean clambered into the hidden room, feeling the temperature drop like it was a fridge. He shone the torch at his own face, letting her see who he was, then bent down to remove the duct tape that had been gagging her.

  'It's all right, Chloe. I'm a policeman. We're going to take you home.' She hugged her knees close to her chest, not saying anything as he undid her bonds. Every so often her eyes would sweep the dark room and the ill-defined hump in the middle. How long had she been locked up in here with that body? How much of it had she seen before they'd turned the lights off and left her alone with it?

  'Come on. Here.' He pulled her up, half carrying her out of the room to where the others were waiting.

  'He was going to cut me open. Like he did to her all those years ago. She told me. In the dark.' Chloe's voice was a pale simulacrum of her mother's, quietly trembling as she clung to him. The put-on South Fife accent driven away by fear.

  'It's all right, Chloe. No-one's going to hurt you now. You're safe.' McLean tried to think of soothing things to say as her words began to sink in. 'Who was going to hurt you, Chloe?'

  'The scarred man. He killed her. He wants to kill me.'

  And so it all began to make sense. If insanity could ever make sense.

  ~~~~

  63

  Back-up had arrived by the time they emerged from the house, McLean carrying Chloe, who clung to him as if her very life depended on it. It took some time to convince her to go with the paramedics; she only relented when he told her he was going to get the scarred man. They left Grumpy Bob behind to do the clear-up and take the credit when the superintendent arrived, since it was his investigation after all. DC MacBride drove, and it took long minutes to negotiate their way out of the narrow driveway as more and more police cars arrived.

  'Where're we going sir?' he asked as they finally made it onto the Dalry Road. McLean told him the address of the house not far from where his grandmother had lived. Where he'd been taken in a car chauffeured by a suited Jethro Callum. Not far from where the dead body of David Brown had been found. Did the property not even back onto that forgotten lane?

  'Head towards Grange. Better put the blue lights on.' He gave MacBride the directions then slumped back in the passenger seat and watched the evening traffic getting out of the way.

  'How did you guess, sir? That she'd be there?'

  'I had a letter from Jonas Carstairs. He confessed to the murder and named all the others we suspected. And he said there was a sixth man, just as we thought. He didn't name him though, which wasn't very helpful. But he did say that he was back in Edinburgh and would be trying to perform the ritual again. Where else would he do it?'

  'That's a bit of a leap, isn't it, sir?'

  'Not really. I should've seen it earlier. As soon as we ID'd Roberts as the man who picked Chloe up. He was acting for someone wanting to buy the old house. Someone prepared to pay over the odds for it. I just didn't know who. I concentrated on that, when I should have been asking why.'

  'And you know who now?'

  'The scarred man, Chloe said. I met a scarred man a few days ago. An old friend of my gran's. Said he was in town to sort out some unfinished business. Christ I can be thick at times. Gavin Wemyss. Jethro Callum is his chauffeur; more than that, I'd guess. And Roberts was acting for Wemyss Industries. I saw their logo on his papers at McAllister's. Just didn't recognise it until now.'

  They drove the rest of the way in tense silence. Closer to the house, MacBride turned off the flashing lights to avoid raising the alarm. McLean directed him towards the address down streets he had known all his life, past houses that had always been familiar to him, but which were now alien and menacing.

  'Pull over here.' He pointed to an open gateway. Light spilled out from several downstairs windows over the shiny Bentley parked by the porch. Approaching the house, McLean felt an uncharacteristic shudder of fear run through him, and then he saw that the front door was wide open. He stepped into the house, wanting to hurry, all his years of training urging him to be careful. The hall was dominated by a dark oak staircase that rose up towards the back of the house. Ornate panelled doors led off to either side, all closed except one.

  'Shouldn't we..?' MacBride started to say. McLean stopped him with a raised hand, then pointed towards the back of the house, indicating for him to look there first. He stepped quietly across the hall towards the open door, imagined he could hear the faintest of noises from the room beyond. Wet, unpleasant noises. Taking a deep breath, he pushed the door wide and stepped in.

  The private study was filled with surprisingly modern office furniture. A small desk near the door would have been where a secretary would work, but its typists chair was empty. Beyond it there was an open space with a couple of functional couches, a low table between them, and beyond that a large desk. Behind which sat Gavin Wemyss.

  He was naked from the waist up, his clothes neatly folded and placed over a low filing cabinet to one side. Lazy flies crawled over pale flesh and buzzed around the thick blood that hung from his fingertips, dry and dull. His scarred face was white, blind eyes staring in a final expression of terror. He'd been dead a while, his chest ripped open. If he had to guess, McLean would have said someone had removed his heart.

  A shadow of movement, and instinct kicked in. He ducked, twisting around as a huge man lunged at him. Jethro Callum held a hunting knife in one hand, and moved with a fluid grace quite at odds with his bulk. Never assume a big man will be slow. That was what they'd taught him in self-defence. McLean dodged the blade, moving in to parry the expected thrust. But instead of trying to fight, Callum stepped back, reaching up with the knife to his own neck.

  'Oh no you don't!' McLean leapt forward, knocked the knife out of Callum's hand. Together they crashed to the floor. McLean had the advantage of being on top, but his attacker was a good foot taller and probably half as heavy again. The muscles beneath his leather jacket were like rock, taut and straining. He didn't so much push McLean off as fling him bodily away before rolling over and reaching out for the knife.

  McLean pulled a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket, twisting them open as he
sprung forward. He slipped on something squelchy on the carpet, losing his balance and pitching onto Callum's back. They both crashed to the floor again, but this time McLean managed to get one cuff on. Callum reached out for the knife, fat fingers scraping at the bloody carpet in desperation. Using the cuff as leverage, McLean twisted the restrained hand up hard into the point between Callum's shoulder blades, kneeling on his neck and grinding his face into the carpet. And still the big man stretched for the knife, thrashing his legs and torso to try and dislodge the heavy weight of detective inspector on his back.

  There was no way that he could get control of Callum's other arm, and neither could he get to the knife before him. McLean looked around for something else to use as a weapon, eyes lighting on a china vase sitting on a small oak occasional table just in reach. He grabbed it, feeling an instant's regret as he recognised it as a very valuable Clarice Cliff, and brought it smashing down on Callum's head. The big man grunted, then relaxed onto the floor, unconscious. Footsteps clattered across the hall outside and McLean looked around to see DC MacBride appear in the doorway.

  'Thanks for the help,' he said.

  ~~~~

  64

  'Wemyss recruited him from a street gang over ten years ago, took him on as a personal bodyguard. He's been working for the old man in America all that time, which is how he dropped off our radar. And you'll never guess who one of his known associates was, back in the day.'

  'Donnie Murdo?'

  'In one. My guess is Murdo was working for Wemyss when he ran down Alison. Probably trying to take the heat off the search for Chloe until he'd finished with her. Christ, what a stupid, petty reason to kill someone.' Grumpy Bob kicked out at an innocent wastepaper basket, sending it and its contents flying in different directions.