The Gathering Dark

by James Oswald

  McLean looked up from his desk to see DC Harrison standing in the open doorway. He’d asked her to arrange a meeting with the financier while he caught up with developments out at Extech Energy. Mostly that seemed to be the Organised Crime team asking stupid questions as they took over the investigation. It was frustrating, but important they get the handover right, otherwise something would come back to bite him sooner or later. At least he’d left Grumpy Bob in charge.

  ‘Umm … Isn’t that what a PA’s meant to be for?’

  ‘Funny you should say that, sir. She was very put out when I suggested the same thing.’

  ‘Aye, well. Nobody likes a critic. You get a home address for him?’

  ‘Two, actually.’ Harrison entered the room and handed him a slip of paper. ‘He’s got a place in the New Town and a lodge up in Perthshire. According to Hayley the PA he might be at either of them. Or on his way to London, New York, Tokyo, Sydney … I get the feeling she was giving me the runaround, but you never know when you’re dealing with someone worth billions.’

  McLean was about to say, ‘How the other half live, eh?’, then remembered his own house across town. Not quite the same league as Lewis, it was true, but he was certainly closer to the 1 per cent than the 99. He scanned the two addresses, trying to work out where they were. The New Town house was just around the corner from the place where they had found Eric Forrester’s body, another very desirable part of town favoured by people who spent as much time in other countries as they did in Edinburgh. The second address, if his geography was right, would be of great interest to DI Ritchie. She’d probably spent many hours sitting in a crumbling bothy on Lewis’s Perthshire estate, waiting patiently for her gang of gun runners to pass through. It might have been a coincidence, but then he didn’t really believe in coincidences.

  ‘Have you tried his mobile?’ McLean asked.

  ‘Going straight to message.’ Harrison paused a moment, checked her watch. ‘I could track it, I suppose, but that takes a mountain of paperwork. Probably an hour or two, and that’s only if he’s got it switched on right now.’

  ‘Get on it anyway. And while you’re at it get someone to speak to Border Control, just in case he tries to leave the country.’

  ‘You want us to stop him at immigration?’ Harrison’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. ‘Do we have sufficient cause to do that?’

  ‘Probably not.’ McLean shook his head, handed back the page of addresses to Harrison as he stood up. ‘Technically it’s not our job even to find him any more. That’s Organised Crime’s investigation. It’d be nice to know if he’s left the country, though. Keep me up to date on that mobile-phone search, won’t you?’

  ‘Where are you going, sir?’ Harrison asked. ‘So I can find you if I get an update?’

  ‘To the canteen, Constable. Breakfast was a very long time ago. I have a date with a mug of tea, some sandwiches and a very large slice of cake.’

  The text message came in before he had made it twenty feet, let alone the canteen, his large mug of tea and an even larger slice of cake. McLean fished his phone out of his pocket, thumbed the screen until it revealed the words.

  Got something you might find interesting. Here until seven, maybe eight. Angus.

  The clock on his phone told him it was just gone half past two, even if it felt like much later. Halfway down the stairs, he looked around, up the stairwell and then down. There was nobody about and nothing so urgent that it couldn’t wait an hour or so. Harrison would be that long getting results from the phone company, even if they were playing nice. If not, it could be tomorrow before they could find out where Alan Lewis was. A walk down to the Cowgate and the city mortuary might even give him a chance to collect his thoughts. He tapped out a quick ‘on my way just now’ message by way of a reply, then carried on down the stairs and out the back door.

  Too short a distance to really get into his stride, but McLean nonetheless relished the freedom that walking gave him. It would have been better had the afternoon not been stifling hot, still air smothering the city with fumes. The heat hit him the moment he stepped on to the tacky tarmac of the car park, and not for the first time he rued the decision that morning to wear a tweed suit. By the time he reached the front door to the city mortuary the sweat had started trickling down his back, pooling in uncomfortable places.

  At least it was cooler inside, and quiet as it ever was. McLean nodded to the receptionist, who buzzed him through to the business side of the building without any fuss. He stood awhile in the corridor leading to the examination theatre just enjoying the chill draught from the air conditioning. Maybe walking hadn’t been such a good idea after all. It had been too hot to think.

  Angus was in the middle of another post-mortem examination, so McLean aimed for the observation gallery and the corner of it where you could sit without seeing what was going on. Obviously not a tricky case: the job was done in just a few swift minutes, the pathologist snapping off his latex gloves as he made his way back to his office.

  ‘Thought I saw you lurking upstairs,’ Cadwallader said a minute or two later. He still wore his scrubs, spattered with something McLean didn’t want to think too hard about right now.

  ‘You said you had something I might find interesting.’

  ‘Yes, well. Give me a minute.’ The pathologist stripped off his dirty scrubs, revealing a surprisingly thin and fit body for a man of his age. McLean maintained eye contact as his old friend fetched a fresh set of overalls and pulled them on. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen those grey underpants and black socks.

  ‘Sorry about that. Quite a busy schedule this afternoon and Tom’s off sick. Or more likely overdid it last night. Still, we’ve all been there. Come.’ Cadwallader slid past McLean, motioning with one arm for him to follow. ‘Your lad from the crash. The one who we thought was the drug addict but it turned out wasn’t.’

  ‘What about him? You’ve got an ID?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ The pathologist led McLean past the cold store to a small room that was inhabited mostly by cardboard boxes. A desk at the far end held a computer screen, keyboard and mouse. Cadwallader pulled out the chair and dropped himself down into it, flexing his fingers before attacking the keys.

  ‘University pinged this over an hour or so ago. They’ve done the two women, too, but I’m told you’ve already identified them. It’s a bit rough and unfinished but this is what your unidentified dead man probably looked like.’

  Cadwallader reached for the mouse as the screen lit up. A couple of clicks revealed an image of a man’s head, side on. They hadn’t tried to put any hair on it, which was what confused McLean at first. The features looked almost feminine, slim nose and angular cheekbones in a long face with a slightly weak chin. The one eye was blank, too, lifeless. Then the pathologist did something with the mouse and the head turned fully around to face them.

  ‘Maybe this will help, aye?’ He clicked again, casting shadows and light over the features, and McLean took a step back in surprise.

  ‘I … I’ve seen this man.’ But that was impossible.

  ‘You have?’ Cadwallader blinked behind his wire-frame spectacles, peered at the screen as if the fact McLean had seen it before meant that he, too, should know who it was. ‘Where?’

  ‘At the crash scene.’ McLean studied the image again, his head full of nightmares. ‘But he was alive then. I spoke to him.’

  56

  ‘Looks like you might have been right sir.’

  McLean was so distracted by his thoughts he hardly registered he was being spoken to. He’d walked back from the city mortuary in a daze, oblivious to the heat and the sweat trickling down his back. The computer-generated face haunted him, there was no other way to describe the feeling. Perhaps it was the unnatural colour, the lack of proper eyes or any hair. Or maybe it was the way just thinking of that face brought back the acrid smell and squat, dull headache.

  ‘Sorry?’ The words sunk in and he turned to see DC Stringer walking up th
e corridor towards him. The young constable had a spring in his step and a sheaf of papers in his hand.

  ‘Looks like you were right. About the witness protection thing for Jennifer Beasley. This just came in from the NCA liaison at the Crime Campus. Heavily redacted, but the DNA matches.’

  ‘Do we have a name?’ McLean took the pages, leafed through them. It was mostly a waste of printer ink as far as he could see.

  ‘Not yet, sir. DCI McIntyre might know though. There’s another DCI just arrived from Gartcosh not half an hour ago. They’re both in her office right now.’

  ‘Thanks.’ McLean was about to turn and head up to the senior officers’ floor, but then he remembered something. ‘Did you and Lofty go and see her hotel room?’

  ‘Aye, sir. Wasn’t anything there, mind. Place had been cleaned out. I had a word with the receptionist and she said our lot had already been in and taken everything away.’

  ‘Our lot?’

  ‘Aye, I asked that. She said it was a couple of nice polismen. One had an English accent.’

  McLean tried to think back to when the DNA results had come through on the bodies. It would make sense that certain records would be flagged for the NCA if they belonged to people on witness protection.

  ‘Why would they make her disappear?’ He voiced the question out loud, not really expecting an answer.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe to protect someone else?’ Stringer suggested.

  ‘Aye, that’d make sense. No need for a cover-up otherwise.’ McLean handed back the useless report. ‘Think I might go and have a wee chat with this DCI.’

  McIntyre’s office door was closed, which was never a good sign. McLean paused a moment, like a guilty schoolboy sent to report to the headmaster, and listened to the quiet rumble of voices within. Just two people inside, unless there was a third there only to observe. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, though, so knocked gently on the wood.

  ‘Yes?’ That was McIntyre’s voice, he was fairly sure of that. McLean opened the door, popped his head through a small gap as if he had only been needing a quick word and didn’t want to disturb anyone. The detective chief inspector sat at her desk, a single chair on the other side occupied by the man McLean had been expecting to see.

  ‘Oh. Tony. Come in.’ McIntyre got to her feet, beckoning him into the room with a wave. ‘You remember DCI Featherstonehaugh?’

  ‘With a name like that, how could I forget? I take it you’re here about Jennifer Beasley?’ McLean took a little satisfaction in the brief look of surprise that flitted across Featherstonehaugh’s face.

  ‘What do you know about her?’ he asked.

  ‘Not as much as you, I’d wager. She’s come through some kind of witness protection, that much is pretty obvious given that you’re here and her room at the hostel’s been cleaned out already.’ McLean settled on to the uncomfortable chair. ‘Reckon her real name’s Maddy, or Madeleine. Not clever of her to keep on using it.’

  ‘Madeleine,’ Featherstonehaugh said after the briefest of pauses. ‘Yes. She’s always been a bit pigheaded about that. Silly, really. If she didn’t like being Jennifer we’d have given her something else. After all she went through.’

  ‘And what exactly was that?’ McLean asked.

  ‘Ah, yes. Thought you’d probably ask that.’ Another pause, longer this time. ‘You were the detective who found the little girl up in the attic of that brothel … What? Twenty years ago? Twenty-five?’

  A cold sensation filled McLean’s gut at Featherstonehaugh’s question. The image of Heather Marchmont’s face, her almost silent ‘Thank you’ as she died in his arms. Her blood on his hands both physically and metaphorically.

  ‘We had a similar thing down in England about fifteen years ago. Children being kept as … Christ, it still hurts every time I say it. Sex slaves. No other way to describe what they were.’

  ‘I never heard about this.’ McIntyre spoke, but her words echoed McLean’s own thoughts.

  ‘No, you wouldn’t have done. There were no prosecutions.’

  ‘None?’ McLean remembered the raid on the brothel, the local dignitaries whisked away under covers to hide their identities, the prostitutes paraded in front of the press. There’d not been many prosecutions back then either, and none of them had been against the clients of the establishment. It was always the way with sex. Punish those forced to sell themselves, not those doing the buying. Money always worked that way.

  ‘We’d have liked to, but it would have been difficult. Everyone was dead, except the children.’

  ‘Children? Plural? So there’s more than just Maddy – Jennifer, I should say.’

  Featherstonehaugh shrugged. ‘They tell me you’re being made up to DCI, Tony. And I have it on good authority Jayne here’s going to be taking over SCD at this station as detective superintendent. I’m pleased to hear it. This city needs good people looking after it.’

  ‘But we’re neither of us senior enough to get clearance for what we want to know,’ McIntyre said.

  ‘It’s out of my hands.’ Featherstonehaugh held them up just in case either of them might think he was lying, or not know what hands were. ‘But if it makes you feel any better, the DCC doesn’t know either. I’m not sure if the chief constable does, come to think of it. His predecessor did. Wasn’t too happy.’

  ‘What the fuck are you going on about?’ McLean wasn’t given to swearing often, but sometimes it was necessary.

  ‘What I’m trying to say is I can’t say … well, anything really.’

  McLean counted to ten in his head. No point getting angry; that was what the man from the NCA wanted. Angry people didn’t think straight, couldn’t connect up the dots.

  ‘So the fact that Madeleine is dead doesn’t matter to you.’ McLean allowed one second to let Featherstonehaugh open his mouth to protest. Two people could play this game, after all. ‘Or I should say, it does matter to you, but it doesn’t change the fact you can’t tell me who she really was. Is that right?’

  Featherstonehaugh closed his mouth again, eyes wary now.

  ‘She was rescued from a fire that killed all the adults in a place that was probably not what you and I would call a brothel. More a private club where rich people with sick minds went to indulge their perverted fantasies. I’m warm, aren’t I?’

  Again, Featherstonehaugh said nothing, and now McLean could see the glint of enjoyment in McIntyre’s eyes.

  ‘You won’t tell me about her, and you mentioned children, plural, which would suggest you’ve more than one tucked away in your protection scheme. New identity, living as ordinary a life as is possible after their early experiences. You’re still keeping an eye out for them, so the threat’s still there, isn’t it?’

  Featherstonehaugh’s silence was answer enough. His earlier smirk had gone, replaced by a much colder, more calculating look.

  ‘Do I need to remind you how Maddy came to our attention?’ McLean asked. ‘That we’re also trying to identify one more body? A dead man, much the same age, whose DNA was mysteriously mixed up with that of a petty drug dealer? A petty drug dealer who’s alive if not exactly well, by the way.’

  ‘I can’t confirm or deny anything, Tony. I’d like to but I can’t.’ Featherstonehaugh shook his head slightly, and for a moment McLean almost believed him.

  ‘If you want to claim the body, it’s in the city mortuary. Tell Angus I said it was OK.’ He stood up, made a show of straightening his chair. ‘Meantime I’ve plenty other things to be getting on with.’

  57

  ‘Please tell me you’ve had a response from the phone company.’

  McLean had spent a good ten minutes searching for DC Harrison, finally finding her in the CID room, where he should have looked first. She sat in a huddle with DCs Stringer and Blane, the new detectives forming their own little clique of self-protection.

  ‘Nothing yet, sir. But I ran his car through the NMPR system. Nothing seen going over the Forth Bridge, so it’s unlikely he’s gon
e north to Perthshire. He’s not answering any of his phones, though.’

  ‘What about Border Control?’

  ‘Nope. His passport’s not been scanned any time recently. If he’s gone abroad he’s done it on the sly.’

  ‘Well, if I was doing a runner I’d probably not want to leave too many clues either. Doesn’t really seem his style, though.’ McLean leaned against one of the many empty desks in the large room. Not much call for them now the whole of CID had been restructured and most of the detectives that were left had been shipped off to Gartcosh.

  ‘What about you two?’ McLean turned his attention to Stringer and Blane. ‘Get any further with the mysterious Maddy?’

  ‘Hit a bit of a brick wall there, sir. Looks like she’s been systematically erased from the records.’

  ‘Perhaps not so surprising.’ McLean told them what he had learned from Featherstonehaugh.

  ‘Would they do that? Re-home two victims in the same city?’ Harrison asked when he had finished.

  ‘Not on purpose, no. I get the feeling there’s a lot more to the story than I’m being told, and they’re not happy that Maddy, Jennifer, whatever her real name is, was trying to track down her friend. I think that’s what they call a security risk.’

  ‘But why would they care? I mean, if all this happened when they were kids, and they’re both adults now?’ DC Stringer asked the question. Beside him, DC Blane had begun tapping at his keyboard and clicking his mouse, attention focused on his screen.

  ‘I can only assume the threat is still there. Either that or what they know could cause serious embarrassment to very influential people. Given how cagey my new friend from the NCA is about sharing any information, I’m going to go with the both.’

  ‘Might have something for you here, sir.’ Blane clicked his mouse again, then swivelled his screen around to where McLean could see. ‘Sixteen years ago. Big old country house burned down. Wee village called Hatfield Broad Oak in north Essex. About an hour out of London. Only survivors were a couple of young children, not related, taken into care.’ He scrolled down the lines of text. ‘Doesn’t give their names, but some fairly important people died in the fire, see?’