The Gathering Dark

by James Oswald

  Eric Forrester lay in a mound of rubbish almost as if he’d been thrown into this little room and forgotten about. His eyes were closed, one arm splayed out and a loosened tourniquet still hanging from his bicep.

  ‘Dead?’ McLean almost didn’t want to ask as Duguid reached a finger in under the young man’s jaw, feeling for a pulse. The ex-detective superintendent prised open one of his eyes, yellowing and bloodshot, when he moved his hand away, the eye stayed open.

  ‘Judging by the smell, he’s been gone a day or two.’ He pulled out a phone and started tapping out the number, then stopped himself. ‘Probably best if you make the call. I really shouldn’t be here. Going to need an ambulance, and someone’s going to have to tell his father.’

  Darkness had long since fallen by the time McLean parked his car and trudged wearily to the back door. He didn’t want to think how late it was, or how tired and hungry he felt. The thought of a five o’clock start in the morning wasn’t exactly inspiring either, but there was no way he was going to miss the raid on Extech. That was his call, and he’d be the one to take the flak if it went tits up.

  It hadn’t taken long for the ambulance to arrive and whisk Eric Forrester away to the mortuary. What had taken longer was the clean-up afterwards. He’d sent Duguid off as soon as the first uniforms arrived on the scene, easier to gloss over the fact that the ex-detective superintendent had been there at all. The squad cars parked outside the house meant that none of the squatters had made a reappearance, only the young woman they had found in the kitchen had needed to be dealt with. McLean almost felt sorry for her, so clearly out of her depth as a team of police officers swept through the house and found more incriminating evidence than was necessary for a conviction. She was currently sleeping off the effects of whatever she’d been smoking in a cell in the station. Something for another team to deal with in the morning.

  At least the chief superintendent hadn’t turned up. Bad enough to have the news of your son’s death delivered over the phone. Bad enough to have it delivered at all. No one should outlive their children; that wasn’t how life was supposed to work.

  If there was one small mercy it was that the press didn’t seem to have found out about it yet. If they were lucky, then the story would stay out of the papers, since very few officers had seen the dead man being taken away, and McLean hadn’t told any of them who he was. Hopefully it would just be reported as a random drugs bust, maybe something about squatters taking over the city’s empty houses. Another senseless death due to overdose. Another young life tragically cut short. Better yet if it was not reported at all. News lost in the bigger story that would break when the discovery out in East Lothian hit the morning editions.

  The kitchen light was still on, Mrs McCutcheon’s cat staring up at him from the middle of the table. McLean ignored her and went to the fridge for a beer. Cold and refreshing, it went down far too easily, the alcohol fuzzing his already numb brain. He poked around for something to eat, even though it was late enough for bed.

  ‘Thought I heard a noise. You home, then?’

  Emma stood at the kitchen door, her hair tousled where she’d most likely been sleeping on the sofa. Still in her work clothes, he could see the swell of her belly more clearly now. How much longer to go?

  ‘We found the chief superintendent’s son, Eric.’ He didn’t remember taking it out of the fridge, but McLean found himself pouring a second bottle of beer into his empty glass. ‘He must have overdosed a couple of days ago.’

  Emma said nothing, just walked across the room and gave him a hug. He put down the bottle and glass, held her tightly to him for long moments. She smelled of warmth and mothballs, of this house he had grown up in.

  ‘Eww, you reek of chemicals.’ She pushed him away, wrinkling her nose against the stench. He’d been so preoccupied with his beer he’d momentarily blanked out the smell, but now it came back more powerful than before.

  ‘Sorry. I’ll get changed. Have a shower. It’s probably time I went to bed anyway. Got a very early start tomorrow.’ McLean started to walk towards the door that led through to the main house, but Emma stopped him with a firm hand to the chest.

  ‘Not in those clothes. Not after the headache I had last time.’ She pointed at the far door to the utility room and laundry. ‘Out there. Strip. Anything you think’s salvageable can go in the machine. Everything else in the bin.’

  50

  McLean woke with a start, rolling over and drawing his feet up to his chest in a reflex, defensive action as the nightmare released its slow hold on him. He stared into the semi-darkness trying to remember the details as if they were somehow important this time. There had been something, a face perhaps. A young man?

  The room was oppressively hot, sweat covering his body and soaking the sheets so it felt like he’d wet the bed. For a moment he was back at his hated boarding school, bewildered, lonely, frightened. Soon the bell would ring, waking them all for breakfast and another day of just barely surviving. Matron would find out, chastise him in front of everyone. Ridicule him. Shame him. None of the other boys wet the bed still. Not now they were seven. But he was still only six. And none of the other boys had lost both their parents to a plane crash. None of the other boys had left a home 500 miles away to be here.

  Slowly reality reasserted itself, seeping back into his consciousness as he moved from the nightmare to properly awake. He wasn’t the baby, not six years old any more. You could add another forty to that, more or less. He wasn’t a small child, and he hadn’t wet the bed. That was just anxiety playing on his mind, fuelled by the stinking chemical waste and the fact he’d not had a day off in over a week. He rolled around, slid his feet to the floor and sat upright, casting the thin duvet aside. The bedside clock told him it was ten to five and would soon be shouting at him to get up. He rubbed at his face with aching fingers, felt the damp of sweat on his skin. Hadn’t the nightmares gone? But then he’d breathed deep of that foul air again in the tunnel, ruined another suit. No wonder his brain was working overtime to deal with the damage.

  But there was that man, that face. What the hell was that about? He knew him, but from where? He’d seen him at the tunnel, only that was impossible. There’d been nobody but him, Harrison and Wishaw. And the man had been standing in the truck, his body coming out of the bonnet. That made no sense. Must have been the fumes. Some trick of the evening light.

  McLean sat for a while, trying to piece together the images from his dream as Emma snored and snorted in the bed beside him. He’d showered the night before, washing away the horror and sweat of the day, but he was so sticky now he needed to wash again. He took himself off to his old bathroom, through the room he had grown up in and which was being prepared for another generation now. Hot water and soap pummelled away the sweat and the last vestiges of chemical taint, but he still couldn’t rid himself of the nightmare, that strange face staring back at him, familiar and yet utterly unrecognizable.

  Two suits down in a week, he pulled out one of the tailor-made three-pieces and started to dress. There had been a time when his fellow officers had thought it funny to play pranks on him, jealous of his inherited wealth. Someone with more wit than brains had phoned a local tailor, highly respected in his trade, pretending to be McLean and asking if he might be measured up for a new suit at work. Unaware of the cruelty of police officers, the tailor had turned up as requested. As was ever the way with these things, the officer behind the prank had only thought of the embarrassment McLean might feel, and given no consideration to the time and effort of the tailor. McLean’s response had been to act as if it had been his idea all along, and two very fine dark-tweed suits had been the result. They fitted perfectly, even allowing for the inevitable expansion of his waistline, but they were far too good for police work. And yet two encounters with corrosive waste, two cheap suits in the bin, and he was left with little choice.

  ‘Job interview?’

  He looked around, seeing Emma awake and staring at him through
the growing dawn light. She sat up in their bed, naked and unashamed, the swell of her pregnancy more evident than before. That was their child growing inside her. The future, and a life change he still couldn’t come to terms with no matter what the shrink might tell him.

  ‘Run out of options.’ He smiled, then stood up, crossed the bedroom and sat down beside her. ‘It’s early. You should get some sleep. Both of you.’

  Emma punched him lightly on the arm. ‘I’m not an invalid, you know?’

  ‘Aye, I know. But you’ve a day off you lucky so and so. Make the most of it. Sleep in late, slob around in your jammies. I’ve a feeling it’s going to be a long one again.’

  Emma’s smile turned to a frown and he felt her stiffen beside him. ‘You work too hard, Tony. That’s going to change when the baby’s born, isn’t it?’

  He couldn’t be sure if it was a statement or a question, didn’t know how to answer it either way. He hugged her to him, breathed in her scent and felt her warmth through the prickly wool of his suit. A second kiss on the top of her head was all the assurance he had to offer.

  51

  ‘We’re all in place. I’ve got two teams of uniform officers and a half a dozen Health and Safety inspectors ready to go.’

  ‘That many?’

  ‘Aye, well, it’s a big site. Wouldn’t want anyone sloping off while we weren’t looking.’

  McLean sat in the front of a white Transit van beside DCI Jayne McIntyre. They were parked in a layby a quarter of a mile from the front gates to the Extech Energy biodigester site, and squinting through the trees he could just about make out the tops of the stainless-steel storage tanks. Almost six in the morning and the sun was already poking up over the top of the hills to the south of them, casting long shadows on the road.

  ‘No point hanging about then. Let’s get this done.’

  McLean climbed out of the Transit and went back to his Alfa. As predicted, DC Harrison had shown up for work bright and cheery, and now she sat in the driver’s seat. ‘We off then, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye. Take it slow, mind you. Don’t want to cause too much alarm.’

  Harrison did as she was told, driving the car slowly up the road and stopping at the closed barrier. A security guard looked up in surprise from the glass-fronted hut beside the entrance. Then his face widened into a smile of recognition. He put on his peaked cap, straightened his hi-vis jacket and stepped out of the booth, leaning down as Harrison dropped the window to greet him.

  ‘Morning, Bobby. How you doing?’

  ‘Detectives. Good morning.’ Bobby the security guard grinned at them, his face a mess of red spots still sore from where he’d shaved. Something he probably only had to do once a week. ‘This is a wee bit unexpected. I’ve nothing on the schedule about a visit.’

  ‘This is a somewhat unusual visit, Bobby.’ Harrison picked up the warrant that was sitting folded in the space between the two front seats. ‘You ever been served with a warrant before?’

  Bobby’s face could hardly have reddened any more than it already was, but his earlobes went a dark purple colour. ‘W-Warrant? Like, as in search warrant?’ His eyes strayed from the piece of paper in Harrison’s hand to the line of white Transit vans now waiting patiently behind the Alfa.

  ‘Very much like search warrant, Bobby. Signed by a judge and everything.’

  ‘I … I don’t know. What should I do? I have to call the office.’ Bobby the security guard turned away, but Harrison leaned out, grabbed his arm.

  ‘No, Bobby. You have to take this.’ She slapped the warrant into his hand. ‘You have to read it, and then you have to open the barrier so we don’t have to break it. Or Sergeant Gatford can open the barrier instead.’

  Bobby had been staring at his arm and the folded piece of paper in his hand, now he looked around again to his little glass-fronted booth. Police Sergeant Don Gatford gave him a smile and a little wave, then pressed the button to open the gates.

  ‘Thanks, Bobby.’ Harrison took back the warrant and slid the window back up again, gently eased the accelerator pedal and drove forward into the compound, leaving the open-mouthed security guard behind.

  ‘This is really quite intolerable.’

  McLean sat with DCI McIntyre and DC Harrison in the small conference room to the rear of Extech Energy’s admin building, drinking the fine coffee that had been brought to them by a worried receptionist. Claire Ferris had turned up at the office twenty minutes after they had raided the place, and now she was pacing back and forth in front of the window.

  ‘You don’t need to be here, Ms Ferris. I think we’ve explained that already?’ McIntyre sat at the head of the table, the warrant spread out in front of her. Unlike Bobby the easily duped security guard, Ferris had actually studied the document, made a few calls and then grudgingly admitted that it was in order.

  ‘What is it that you hope to find?’ she asked after another couple of circuits in front of the window. ‘We’re an environmental-waste-management company, a renewable-energy generator. We’re the good guys. The environment minister himself opened this site not a year ago.’

  ‘And yet a bulk liquid container filled on these premises spilled ten thousand litres of highly toxic and acidic waste on to a crowded bus stop in the city centre. Twenty people died.’ McIntyre spoke the facts calmly, in sharp contrast to Ms Ferris’s agitated movements. ‘That wasn’t … We didn’t … We can’t be held responsible for that truck crashing.’

  ‘No. Not the crash, that’s true. But the liquid? I think you know more about that than you’re letting on.’

  Ferris finally gave up her pacing, pulled out a chair and slumped into it. ‘Am I being interviewed now? Should I have a lawyer present?’

  McIntyre smiled, took a sip of her coffee. ‘That’s entirely up to you, Ms Ferris. Meantime we’ll just sit here and wait for the teams to finish searching the site, aye?’

  A silence fell over the room that McLean was quite happy not to upset. The coffee was good, his chair comfortable. A biscuit or two wouldn’t have gone amiss, but you couldn’t have everything. Outside the window, no longer obscured by Ferris’s pacing, he caught the occasional glimpse of a Health and Safety inspector, accompanied by one or two uniform officers as they criss-crossed the site, poking their noses into anything and everything. He was fairly confident they would find enough to justify the warrant, but every passing minute brought with it an element of uncomfortable doubt.

  ‘I need to make some phone calls.’ Ferris stood up suddenly, pulling out her mobile phone. ‘My boss –’

  ‘Actually, I wouldn’t mind a word with your boss myself,’ McIntyre interrupted. ‘Get him on the line, why don’t you? Or her. We never did quite get to the bottom of who owns this place, and the paper trail is extremely complicated.’

  ‘Maybe later.’ Ferris sat back down again.

  ‘Might I see your phone?’ McLean asked.

  ‘My phone?’ A flicker of worry flashed across Ferris’s face. ‘But it’s mine.’

  ‘Is it? Or is it a company phone? The warrant allows us to examine all company records and to search this facility. I rather think your phone is included in that remit, don’t you think?’

  Ferris paused a moment, biting her lip with uncertainty. Then she seemed to come to a decision, slid the tiny handset over. ‘Knock yourself out.’

  McLean picked it up. The screen was still on, but he was unfamiliar with the menus. He passed it to Harrison, who set about tapping and swiping like a teenager.

  ‘Here we go, sir. Recent calls. A couple to the US. One to the private line to our station, that’s interesting. Oh, and a call to a Mr Alan Lewis. Ring any bells?’

  ‘Well, well, well.’ He reached for the phone as Harrison passed it over, saw the name and number. Pieces of the puzzle started to slot into place, and the picture emerging was not a nice one. He opened his mouth to speak, but a knock at the door interrupted them all. It swung open before anyone could answer, and the gnarled face of Sergeant G
atford peered in through that gap.

  ‘Sir, ma’am. Think you might want to come and have a look at this.’

  ‘First I just thought it was because everything here’s so new, sir. Only on closer inspection it seems there’s rather more to it than that.’

  McLean stood in the open doorway to the storage shed at the back of the compound. It wasn’t very full, despite young Bobby the Plook’s assertion that all the maintenance kit was stored in there. A single off-road buggy, a bit like a pumped up golf cart, had been parked off to one side, and a metal container of the kind normally found being craned onto cargo ships or trundling up and down the motorway at sixty miles per hour had somehow been manoeuvred into one corner. Mostly it was just empty space.

  ‘Floor’s very clean.’ He stepped inside, following the young Health and Safety inspector, whose shoes squeaked on the spotless and shiny floor. Spotless that was, apart from a curious mark halfway between the entrance and the back wall.

  ‘That’s what I thought, sir. It’s been painted very recently. And there’s this.’ The young lad squatted down by the mark, took a penknife out of his pocket and used the blade to carefully scrape at the floor paint. It came away easily, and as he bent to look closer, McLean saw that the concrete below was stained and pitted. A chemical reek wafted up to his nose, a pale reminder of the stench of the truck crash.

  ‘Last time I saw something like this was at the big semiconductor plant out Dunfermline way. Idiot with a forklift managed to drop an IBC of hydrofluoric acid. They had to shut the place for a week to clean it up. Ring any bells?’