He was breathing.
He was alive.
Logan turned to Steel. ‘He’s still alive!’
‘Please, please, please, please, please …’
Steel must have finally found the plug, because the light inside ‘THE DEVIL MAKES WORK’ died, leaving its occupant in darkness.
‘You have to let me out!’
She picked her way past the pool of blood on the floor and peered into ‘JUDAS’. Blinked. Shook her head. ‘Holy mother of …’
‘Please!’
Logan looked across the room to ‘THE DEVIL MAKES WORK’, down at the wheel brace in his hands, then marched over there and rammed the metal rod between the chain and the freezer, turning it like a ship’s wheel, tightening the chain. It pulled the lid shut, sealing in Professor Wilson’s sobs.
Come on …
He leaned into it, pushing, twisting, teeth gritting, the muscles in his arms screaming at him, the scar tissue across his stomach joining in. Getting louder. Another heave, putting all his weight into it. Still nothing.
He glanced at Steel. ‘Little … help?’
She grabbed one end and he took the other, the pair of them straining and straining and straining until between them they’d managed to bend the wheel brace.
‘Buggering flaps of sharny shite!’ Steel staggered off a couple of paces, panting.
More thumping from inside the chest freezer as Professor Wilson started screaming again – but the lid remained securely closed, held there by the tightened chain.
She wiped a hand across her forehead and pointed at ‘THREE MONKEYS’. ‘We not going to open that one?’
Three Monkeys: that had to be Councillor Lansdale. Missing for the longest. And Mhari hadn’t bothered to put a chain on his chest freezer. Yeah, no prizes for guessing what they’d find in there.
Logan huffed out a breath. ‘Suppose we’d better.’
He unwound the wheel brace from the chain around ‘THE DEVIL MAKES WORK’.
Professor Wilson must’ve found a last reserve of panicked energy, because the lid bounced up again. ‘GET ME OUT OF HERE! I DEMAND YOU GET ME OUT OF HERE!’ Screaming and crying. ‘PLEASE!’
Steel grimaced at Logan. ‘He never shuts up, does he?’
Logan raised the bent wheel brace and hammered the padlock off the last chest freezer. Raised the lid. Cold white light spilled out of ‘THREE MONKEYS’.
She stepped up beside him and stared down at the twisted, bloody shape at the bottom of the chest freezer. Lansdale: skin a pale candle-wax yellow, where it wasn’t bright red, all of it covered in a thin sheen of jagged frost, partially wrapped in the remains of a shower curtain.
Logan closed the lid.
43
The world exploded with light and noise as the Air Ambulance howled from the field behind the building. Its search beams swept across Renfield House as it turned, then they were gone, fading with the bellowing roar of the helicopter’s engines.
Logan watched it disappear.
Then shook his head and started back towards the front door.
The SE Transit was parked right outside, a line of white-suited figures making their way in and out of the building. Carrying things in blue plastic evidence crates. A diesel generator grumbled in the background, work lights blazing away behind the house’s broken windows.
PC Greeny’s patrol car was parked there too, its blue-and-whites casting flickering shadows in the brambles and ivy.
Steel scuffed her way through the front door and down the steps. Stuck her e-cigarette in her gob and her hands in her pockets as she lumped across the grass to Logan. Vaping up a storm. ‘Any news?’
‘They’re not hopeful.’
‘Aye …’ She nodded. Looked away. ‘And before you say anything: don’t. You never think it’s going to happen, do you? Not to people you know.’
‘Not even if those people are “dicks”?’
‘Oh, you can hope it happens, but see when it does?’ A shudder rippled its way through her. Then she jerked her head towards the house. ‘Still, could be worse, I suppose.’
A uniformed officer led a shuffling figure down the steps and over to the patrol car. Scott Meyrick, wrapped in a crinkly golden space blanket. Crying, head down, one hand covering his face as he was helped inside.
Steel puffed out a thick bank of strawberry fog. ‘Meyrick’s in shock, but he’ll keep till the regular ambulance gets here, long as Greeny remembers to crank up the car’s heater.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Shirley says Lansdale’s frozen to the bottom of the chest freezer. All that blood. They’ll have to cart the whole thing off to Aberdeen, if they can get a spare van with enough room.’
‘Meyrick say anything?’
‘Pfff … They attacked him in his house, battered him over the head. Next thing he knows, he’s waking up in a chest freezer – it’s chained shut, but they’ve left him enough slack to let air in. Then, about two, three hours ago he hears screaming. After that, Mhari padlocks the freezers and turns them on. Leaves him to die.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Yup.’ She pointed in a vague southward direction, where the helicopter had gone. ‘What about Wilson?’
‘Tough as old boots. He’ll live.’ Logan scrubbed a hand across his face. ‘You know who Hardie and the rest are going to blame, don’t you?’
‘Hardie? He’s one of them dicks we were talking about.’ She pulled the e-cigarette from her mouth and spat into the long grass. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’
Probably.
‘The fifth chest freezer, the empty one – “Wallace”?’
‘Aye: Mhari Powell’s no’ finished yet.’
A low throbbing hum infused Aberdeen Royal Infirmary’s High-Dependency Unit. The lights were dimmed, blanketing the ward in a sticky warm gloom that marked the boundary between the living and the not dead yet. The clinging on and fighting.
Hopefully.
Logan leaned against the corridor wall, looking in through the window to one of the darkened rooms.
They’d given King the hospital bed nearest the wall, not that he knew it. He lay there, still as a corpse, as a team of three nurses hooked him up to machines and bags. Wires and pipes and tubes everywhere. Most of the nails had been removed – replaced by blood-spotted gauze patches and the occasional section of fibreglass cast – but the ones in his head still glittered in the bedside light. Whatever antiseptic they’d swabbed him down with had left mottled orange-brown blotches on his pale skin, like a botched fake tan.
Logan checked his watch: five past three.
Four hours in surgery didn’t seem a lot, considering. Yet there King was. Still breathing.
‘Inspector McRae?’
Logan turned.
A woman stood in the middle of the corridor, in blood-smeared scrubs and hospital clogs, hairnet on her head, bags beneath her drooping eyes. Facemask dangling under her chin. A name badge with ‘MR KATE HILLS’ on it. ‘I’ve seen some things in my time, but this?’ She shook her head. ‘He’s lost a lot of blood. We’re pushing fluids. Will it make a difference?’ A shrug.
‘Is he going to …?’
She took off her hairnet and sagged even further. ‘The irony is, if it wasn’t for the chest freezer he’d probably be dead already. Yes, you’ve got an air-tight seal, but the cold lowers your metabolic rate so you don’t consume so much oxygen, and you don’t bleed out so fast. Which means more time for clotting to occur. But still.’ She reached into her pocket and pulled out a plastic box – about the size of a takeaway container. When she held it up to the light, the galvanised clout nails inside glimmered a dull red. ‘Seventy-five millimetres long, that’s about three inches in old money. You can cause a lot of internal damage with thirty of them.’ She handed it to him. ‘You’ll need to sign for that.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I don’t even want to touch the ones in his skull till he’s stronger. Assuming he survives the night.’
Logan raised his eyebrows at her
and she shrugged again.
‘Thirty / seventy. At best.’
The same chance they had of finding Mhari and Haiden at Ceanntràigh Cottage.
She gave Logan a pained smile. ‘To be honest, he’s lucky he made it this far.’
Scott Meyrick’s hospital room wasn’t as cluttered as King’s – no cortege of nurses fussing around, no bank of machinery to bleep and ping and flash warning lights. He was on his own, sitting up in his bed, with an IV in his arm. Eyes screwed shut, tears spilling down his cheeks, shoulders heaving as he sobbed.
A large gauze pad sat in the middle of his face, held there by a cordon of surgical tape. Red and yellow dots stained the pad’s centre, where his nose should have been.
Poor sod.
Logan settled on the edge of the bed. ‘How are you?’
Meyrick turned his face away, one hand coming up to hide the padding. His voice was strange – hollow, flat and thin. Jagged with crying. ‘They … turned … me into … a monster … I’m a monster!’
Logan put a hand on his leg through the covers. ‘The reconstructive surgeons are very good here. Some of the best in the country.’
‘I was going … to be on … Strictly.’
‘Did they say anything to you, Scott? When they grabbed you, or when you were in the … in the freezer? Anything at all?’
He dropped his hand and stared at Logan. ‘Look at me.’
‘Doesn’t matter how small a thing it was, anything you can tell us might help us catch her.’
‘LOOK AT ME!’ He grabbed at the gauze pad and ripped it down, exposing two narrow slits. Raw and bloody. All that was left of his nose. Mhari had carved it away, right down to the bone. ‘Look at me …’
Logan picked the gauze pad up from the scratchy NHS sheets and placed it over those two bloody slits again, smoothing the sticking strips down. Doing his best to sound as if he knew what he was talking about: ‘It’ll be OK. I know this all seems horrific and overwhelming, and that’s because it is. It will get better, though. You have to give it time.’
‘I was … I was … going to be … someone!’
Oh God.
He wrapped his arms around Scott Meyrick and held him as he sobbed.
What was it about the paintings lining the hospital corridors? You’d think, after all this time, they’d have lost their ability to dredge up the past, but every time he saw them it was the same. The boredom of limping up and down for months. The vague nausea that accompanied every gelatinous overcooked glob of beige cauliflower cheese. The tugging, nagging pain of stitches. And yet another vow never to get stabbed again.
He turned the corner into the Monitoring Ward – the paintings swapped for corkboards covered in memos, notices, and the odd thank you card.
A uniformed PC sat on a plastic chair, parked outside one of the private rooms. Small and dark-haired, the sleeves of her Police Scotland T-shirt stretched tight by huge biceps. She looked up from her celebrity gossip magazine as Logan approached, and smiled. ‘Guv, I heard you were back. How’s the stomach?’
‘Slightly less stabby.’ He pointed at the observation window behind her. ‘What about our friend, Professor Wilson?’
She grimaced. ‘DS Steel’s in with him now.’ Then lowered her magazine. ‘If I’d known I was going to be stuck here all shift I’d have brought a book.’
‘Has he said anything?’
‘Oh he’s said lots of things, mostly about how incompetent Police Scotland are and how he’s going to sue us for not rescuing him earlier.’
Of course he was. Because no one said thank you any more, did they? No, it was all lawsuits this and formal complaints that.
Logan looked in through the window – all the lights were on in the room, showing Steel, sitting in one of the visitors’ chairs with her feet up on the bed. Professor Wilson was slumped against the pillows, the stumps of his wrists covered in fresh bandages. Two IV lines hooked up to one arm.
Odd.
‘I thought there would be more … shouting.’
The constable nodded. ‘Oh, there was to start with, but she’s calmed him down somehow.’
‘Probably doubled the morphine going into his drip.’ The smile faded on Logan’s face. ‘You don’t think she’d do that, would she?’
‘With Steel, who can tell?’
He knocked on the glass and the Wrinkly Horror looked up. Nodded at him.
Two minutes later, the door opened and Steel slouched out, cracking a huge yawn. Then a shudder. And a sigh. ‘Pffff …’
Logan stepped in front of her. ‘Have you fiddled with Professor Wilson’s morphine?’
‘Course no’.’ Scuffing past. ‘But you’ll be happy to know he’s no’ threatening to sue us any more.’
Really?
She wandered off down the corridor.
He turned and looked through the window again. Professor Wilson sat there, with his stumps in his lap, face pinched, shoulders trembling as he cried. OK …
Logan hurried after her. ‘How did you manage that?’
‘You really don’t want to know. How’s Kingy?’
‘Not good.’
Another yawn. ‘Told you this whole thing was an utter disaster.’
The car park opposite the hospital’s main entrance was lit up like a very ugly Christmas present that had been wrapped by an undertaker.
According to Logan’s watch it wasn’t even twenty to four yet, but faint blue was already creeping into the dark violet sky. Marking the coming dawn.
A wee auld mannie sat hunched in his wheelchair, beneath the portico lights, sooking away on a roll-up, holding the smoke down as if it was more vital to his health than the oxygen tank he was hooked up to.
Steel stepped out into the night air, pulled out her e-cigarette and vaped up a cumulonimbus of watermelon steam. ‘You can’t blame yourself, you know that, don’t you?’
Logan leaned against one of the bollards. ‘Yes. But I still do.’
A sigh. ‘Yeah, me too.’ She had a good industrial-strength sniff. ‘Who do you think this “Wallace” is?’
‘Been wondering that myself.’ As if they didn’t have enough imponderables on this sodding case. ‘I’ll get Nightshift to go through the HOLMES data, see if anyone called Wallace has cropped up anywhere.’
‘Mind you, there wasn’t an actual “Judas”, was there? Maybe …’ She stopped, turned, and stared at the little old man. ‘What the hell you think you’re looking at, Grandad?’
The grey wrinkly chin came up. ‘Havin’ a fag.’
‘Aye, well sod off and do it somewhere else, this is police business.’
He scowled at her. ‘That’s no’—’
‘Go on, hop it. Before I do you for loitering with intent.’
He stubbed his cigarette out and grumbled away on his wheelchair. Muttering about fascists and living in a police state.
Logan raised an eyebrow. ‘Was that really necessary?’
‘He’s on an oxygen tank. Silly sod shouldn’t be smoking anyway.’ Steel took an extra hard drag on her e-cigarette as if to emphasise the point. Then blew it all out at Logan. ‘As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted, maybe “Wallace” represents an idea instead?’
Maybe.
‘Like “Three Monkeys”?’
‘Aye: ears, eyes, tongue; “Devil Makes Work” is hands; “Spite” is nose; “Judas” is thirty pieces of silver. Well, thirty galvanised seventy-five-mill clout nails, but it’s the thought that counts.’
‘So what the hell is “Wallace”?’
She frowned out at the pre-dawn light for a bit, puffing away at her personal storm cloud. Then shook her head. ‘Buggered if I know.’ Another huge yawn shuddered through her. ‘Lovely Roberta needs her bed. And maybe a nightcap.’ She jiggled one leg. ‘And I wouldn’t mind a wee, either.’
So much for that.
Logan patted her on the shoulder. ‘Go home, I’ll see you in the morning.’
‘What about you? You look like so
mething Mr Rumpole sicked up.’
Felt like it too.
‘Nah, I want to check in with the team first.’ He pointed away towards the car park. ‘Go on, away with you. I’ll get someone to run me back to HQ.’
‘Fair enoughski.’ She sauntered across the road, leaving a steam-train cloud of vapour in her wake.
Logan waited till she’d climbed the stairs and disappeared inside, then sighed. Turned around and went in search of a lift.
Their MIT office … well, Logan’s MIT office now – at least until the top brass came in at seven and assigned someone to replace DI King – was virtually empty. A couple of saggy-faced support staff hammered away at the HOLMES suite, adding in details from Ceanntràigh Cottage and Renfield House to the database.
The rest of Divisional Headquarters was like a mausoleum, though, not even the distant dubstep whub-whub-whub of a floor polisher to break the sepulchral silence.
Logan perched on the edge of a vacated desk and frowned up at the whiteboard nearest the door. The one he’d printed the word ‘WALLACE?’ on in big green letters.
Who, or what was ‘Wallace’?
One of the support staff got up from behind her desk, stretched, and slouched over to the laser printer as it burrrred and chugged. Picked a sheet of paper from the output tray. Handed it to Logan.
She didn’t do a very good job of stifling her yawn. ‘There’s no one called Wallace come up in the investigation – searched for first and last names, aliases, and addresses. Did every variant spelling and potential typo I could think of too. Sorry.’
Bugger it.
Logan nodded. ‘Thanks.’
She shrugged and went back to her computer, leaving him with the piece of paper that said exactly what she’d just told him, only in fewer words: ‘NO MATCH FOR “WALLACE” IN SYSTEM.’
He dumped it in the wastepaper basket and frowned up at the whiteboard again.
Wallace.
It wasn’t a random word, it couldn’t be. It meant something to Mhari Powell.
But what?
Maybe she meant William Wallace?
But he was a national Scottish hero. Three Monkeys, The Devil Makes Work, Spite, Judas – they were all pejoratives. Betrayals and punishments. No way she’d lump William Wallace in with that lot.
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