The Gathering Dark: Inspector McLean 8

by James Oswald

  McLean followed McInytre’s gaze to the far side of the room, where a group of plain-clothes officers were huddled around a computer terminal. Most were standing, some leaning forwards. One sat on a low chair directly in front of the screen, and even so his head was on a level with the rest of them. Detective Constable Lofty Blane. McLean checked his watch.

  ‘You’ll be at the briefing? Forty minutes?’

  McIntyre nodded. ‘Aye. And you can expect more senior company, too.’

  It made sense, McLean supposed. This was a high-profile investigation with a lot of public interest. No surprise that the top man would need to face the cameras. He just needed to make sure the chief constable had all the facts.

  ‘OK. I’ll see you there. Meanwhile I’ve a complicated task needs doing, and I know just the detective constable for the job.’

  ‘You got a moment, Constable?’

  ‘Sir?’ DC Harrison spun around so swiftly she almost knocked over the person next to her. ‘Almost got them all typed up now, sir.’

  ‘What? Oh, the briefing notes. Fine. We’ll be starting at half five. Hopefully won’t take long. It looks like we’ve got most of the bodies identified now, anyway.’

  All eyes turned to the whiteboards, where another name was being written out in neat script. McLean had worked on too many investigations to count, and almost always the scrawl on the whiteboards tended towards the illegible. And yet, here, each name was spelled out with care. The horror of the incident, perhaps; it was as if collectively the investigation team acknowledged how utterly random and senseless these deaths were. How easily it could have been any one of them, or their friends and family. The scale of it was daunting, too. Twenty lives snuffed out in an instant. Many of these officers would have attended car crashes or house fires, accidents that claimed a couple of victims, perhaps even a whole family. But twenty people dead and another fifty injured. You had to go back a long time to find anything comparable. At least up here in Scotland. Manchester, London, the big cities down in England had seen more than their fair share of tragedy and atrocity in recent times, but up here there’d been nothing comparable since before some of these officers had been born.

  ‘It was Constable Blane I wanted to talk to actually.’ McLean pulled his attention back to the case. ‘What are you working on right now?’

  The tall detective swivelled in his chair enough for McLean to see the screen in front of him. A data entry form designed by some statistics genius to capture the information from phone calls, interviews and any other source and put it into a format that computers could use.

  ‘Just collating the latest from the phone lines, sir. And Janie … DC Harrison’s notes from your interviews. Important to get everything cross-referenced and filed correctly. Wouldn’t want to miss an important clue.’

  ‘Good, good. There’s something else I need you to do, though.’ McLean indicated the computer terminal with a flick of the hand. ‘The admins can keep on top of this.’

  Blane looked a little hurt at the suggestion. ‘What is it you wanted, sir?’

  ‘I need you to look into the financial status and corporate structure of a couple of companies. Finlay McGregor and Extech Energy. You reckon you can do that?’

  The look of concern turned to one of pride on the young constable’s face. He’d be hopeless in an interrogation, but he knew finance better than any of them. ‘Of course, sir. Do we have a warrant? For getting financials from the banks?’

  McLean tapped the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He had a warrant to search the compound where Finlay McGregor locked their trucks up at night. If it had been worded correctly it would stretch to investigating any aspect of their operations. On the other hand, he didn’t want to go full forensic accountancy on them. At least, not yet. There were budgets to be considered, after all.

  ‘Let’s just see what you can come up with through normal channels first, OK? Companies House and that sort of thing. See what the links are between them, if there’s anything suspicious. We’ll only bring out the heavy artillery if we have to.’

  ‘Thought you were trying to get home at a reasonable hour these days.’

  McLean looked up from his overlarge desk and its tide of paperwork to see a welcome face smiling back at him. Detective Inspector Ritchie leaned against the open doorway, her short-cropped strawberry blonde hair looking like it hadn’t seen a brush in days. Her clothes weren’t much better, her jeans ripped at both knees and sporting some interesting stains, bum-freezer leather jacket over a tight once-white T-shirt. She looked like someone who’d just got home from a rock festival, not a detective inspector at work.

  ‘And I thought T in the Park wasn’t on this year,’ he said.

  Ritchie stuck her tongue out at him, stepped fully into the room. ‘Aye, funny. Guessing it’s been a while since you last worked undercover.’

  ‘That you just in, then? You could have taken your time, you know. Had a shower, change of clothes.’

  ‘I know that now. Missed the bloody briefing, didn’t I. The traffic’s all to buggery back the way to the bridges. It helps that this is all over the news, mind you. Nobody’s shifting anything at the moment, so I can skive off a few days.’

  ‘And how is Operation Fenton going? Still camped out in the Perthshire Glens, I presume?’

  Ritchie dropped into one of the comfortable chairs over by the window that filled most of one wall of the office. ‘I’m beginning to think it’s a bust. We had good intel. We know they’ve been working through there before, but we’ve not seen anything for a fortnight now.’

  ‘I take it that’s unusual.’

  ‘Possibly. Might be a seasonal thing, might be that we’ve been strung along. Could be they’re moving stuff through the next glen, safe in the knowledge we’re all tucked up in our wee hidey-hole on the other side of the mountains. Bloody waste of time, if you ask me.’ Ritchie sighed, ran a hand through her hair, then stared at her palm as if only just noticing how grubby she was. ‘So what’s the story with the crash. Heard you were there when it happened. Must’ve been horrific.’

  ‘Not sure I really want to talk about it.’ McLean leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t so stupid that he couldn’t understand his own motivations. Heading out to the hauliers’ compound first thing, speaking to Hamish Tafferty and then swinging past the anaerobic digester site: these were all ways of avoiding the quiet moments when he would be able to think about what he had seen. Time would take the raw edge off that experience, but for now he needed something to keep the horror at bay.

  ‘Understandable.’ Ritchie shrugged, the buckles and zippers on her jacket jangling quietly. ‘How’s the investigation going?’

  ‘Early days. Have you seen Jayne yet?’

  Ritchie shook her head. ‘In a meeting with the boss man. Quite why they dropped him on us and didn’t give the job to her I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Funny you should say that. We were having the exact same conversation earlier.’ McLean leaned back until his head clunked against the wall, a distance much further than he was used to. He only managed to avoid tipping himself over completely by wedging a swift foot under the desk. ‘We’ve currently got two strands to the investigation. First one’s working out what happened and why. That’s what I’ve been doing all day and it’s already looking murky.’

  ‘Doesn’t it always when you get involved, Tony?’ Ritchie had the decency to grin as she spoke. ‘What’s the second strand? I take it that’s my job.’

  ‘Aye. Jayne’s been dealing with it today, and Sandy Gregg’s got most of the legwork done already, but you’re in charge of identifying all the victims.’ McLean held up his hand before Ritchie could interrupt. ‘And I know, yes. It would make more sense for me to do that, given how closely I’ve worked with Angus and the rest of the staff at the city mortuary before. Chances are there won’t be much for you to do anyway. Last I saw there were only six bodies still to identify.’

  ‘There’s a helpline number? People coming
forward with suggestions?’

  ‘Like I said, Sandy Gregg’s got it all under control. And, believe it or not, Forrester’s rolled up his sleeves and pitched in, too. It’ll only get complicated if we can’t identify someone from dental records or DNA or something. Then we’ll have to start going through missing persons reports, CCTV and the like.’

  ‘Wait … What? Dental records? DNA?’ Ritchie ran her hand through her hair again, didn’t look at the stains on her palm this time. ‘I’d heard the crash was bad, but … really?’

  ‘It melted the tarmac, whatever the chemical goo was that spilled from the tanker. Stank so bad I had to throw my suit away. There’s a chunk of the Lothian Road still closed, likely to be that way for weeks. That’s why the traffic’s a nightmare.’ McLean pulled himself forward again, leaned his elbows on the desk. ‘Look, it’s probably not going to take long to identify everyone. Collate all the witness statements, sort out the timeline, put it all in a nice report and deliver it to the Procurator Fiscal. Job done, and then you can get back to your splendid isolation in the Highlands. Who knows? Might even be in time to catch those gun runners of yours before they bring the next batch in.’

  ‘Aye, I’m sure it’ll all be fine and dandy.’ Ritchie stood, yawned, rolled her shoulders as if she’d been sitting for hours rather than minutes. ‘I’ll go see if Jayne’s finished her meeting. Head home and get some kip. Early start tomorrow, I’m guessing?’

  ‘Six o’clock briefing, yes. I’d probably better get home myself if I want Emma ever to speak to me again.’

  14

  The sun hung low in the northern sky as McLean parked his car and headed to the back door of his house. He would have liked to think that meant he wasn’t coming home too late, but summer this far north was a time of almost perpetual daylight. Emma would have been home from work for a couple of hours by now; he just hoped she wasn’t too upset at him, even if he deserved it.

  There was no sign of her or Mrs McCutcheon’s cat in the kitchen, although there was plenty of evidence both that Emma had already eaten her supper and that the cat had helped. He didn’t find them in the library either, so McLean headed upstairs. The door to his old bedroom stood ajar, light spilling out on to the landing, and as he approached he could hear a strange sound coming from within.

  ‘Em? You in there?’ McLean popped his head around the doorframe, taking in the partially redecorated room. Most of the wallpaper was gone now, and a smell of fresh gloss paint filled the air. Before he could register that the room was empty, he heard the toilet flush in the bathroom beyond, and then Emma emerged, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.

  ‘Oh, Tony. You’re home.’ Something flickered across her eyes that he would have considered guilt were she a suspect being interviewed.

  ‘Sorry it’s so late. It’s always a nightmare when you set up a new investigation. Still, you’ve been busy.’ He nodded at the freshly painted window.

  ‘Just thought I’d get a little bit more done. Something pleasant after a hard day at work.’

  ‘Let me guess, the truck crash?’

  ‘The same. Spent half of the day in front of a fume cabinet. No wonder your suit stank when you got home yesterday. That stuff’s beyond foul.’

  ‘Should you be working with that sort of thing? You know, in your …’ McLean nodded in her general direction. Experience had taught him that referring to her pregnancy as a ‘condition’ rarely went well.

  ‘I’m fine. Just a bit tired.’ Emma laid a hand on her belly for a moment.

  ‘You sure, Em? Only you look a bit peaky.’

  The furrow that ran across her brow suggested he’d said the wrong thing. He couldn’t help himself sometimes, though, especially not after she had so obviously just been throwing up whatever it was she and the cat had been eating earlier.

  ‘You must be hungry,’ she said, as if reading his mind. ‘I ate already, but there’s supper in the oven if you’ve not had anything yet.’

  McLean considered lying and going without. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d skipped a meal, but his stomach chose that moment to let out a low grumble. He smiled, shrugged. ‘I guess lunch was a while ago.’

  ‘Come on, then.’ Emma took him by the hand, her touch ever so slightly warm and clammy as she led him out of the room and back to the stairs. Mrs McCutcheon’s cat sat on the top step, staring at them both like a disapproving parent.

  ‘She’s been keeping a very watchful eye on me,’ Emma said as the cat stood, arched its back and shook its tail at them before striding elegantly down the stairs.

  ‘I’m glad someone is. I feel I’m rather neglecting my duties on that score.’

  Emma laughed, her pale skin flushing. ‘You don’t half sound like a Victorian gentleman sometimes, Tony. I managed to travel right around the world on my own. I can cope with a little neglect. Just don’t let it become a habit, aye?’

  She dropped his hand, taking a hold of the rail as she followed the cat’s route down to the kitchen. McLean watched her from the top of the stairs and wondered whether it hadn’t already.

  He woke with the ghost of a scream on his lips. Heart pounding, breath ragged, he sat upright in bed and stared across the almost dark bedroom. Outside, the dawn had begun, tinging the sky a fiery red beyond the trees. His whole body was slick with sweat, dampening the sheets and the thin duvet tangled around his legs. Beside him, Emma lay on her back, not so much snoring as breathing noisily. He rubbed at his face with fingers still stiff from sleep, then hugged his knees to his chest and just sat there staring at her as the light slowly rose.

  The nightmare wasn’t a surprise, although its intensity had been worse than the one from the previous night. If he had the time, he could unpack the imagery, but there were more important things to worry about than his brain getting over the trauma of the crash. Finding out how it had happened, and who was responsible, for a start. They’d seen where the truck had come from already, today would be finding out where it was supposed to go. He couldn’t help but think there had to be a better way of pursuing the investigation, though. Co-ordinating with the Health and Safety Executive and the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency was a nightmare, too, not the kind of teamwork he was used to at all.

  Emma rolled over with a snort, one arm slapping against him in a grim parody of the nightmare that had woken him up. She grunted, sniffed and then opened her eyes. ‘You ’wake?’

  ‘Bad dreams.’ McLean leaned back against the headboard, shivering slightly as the sweat evaporated from his skin.

  ‘The crash?’ Emma hauled herself up, leaning on one arm as she stared at him. Her tousled hair and eyes still puffy with sleep were deeply alluring.

  ‘It’s to be expected. I’d be more worried if I didn’t have them, to be honest.’

  ‘But you’ve spoken to someone about it, right? There’s a trauma counsellor at the station these days, isn’t there?’

  McLean bent down, kissed Emma lightly on the forehead. ‘I’m fine, Em. Don’t worry about it. You’ve got the day off today, right?’

  ‘The joys of working part-time, aye.’

  ‘Well, make the most of it.’ He swung his legs round, climbed out of bed even though the clock told him it wasn’t going to wake him up for another hour yet. ‘Won’t be long until sleep’s a rare luxury, you know.’

  15

  I’ve been trying to track a few things down since the crash. Where the truck was coming from, where it was meant to be going. It’s not easy, even if that’s more or less what I do for a living anyway. My head’s not in the game at all, and I keep on seeing that brief flash of recognition on Maddy’s face as she turned towards me. The smile lighting up her eyes as she started to say my name. But how could I possibly have taken any of that in? It all happened in an instant.

  Then again, details have a way of imprinting themselves in your memory at times like that. It’s life afterwards that chunks up into blocks of unpleasantness with big gaps of nothing in between. The story
of my life, in undigested, bite-size pieces.

  Like the house in Essex. Like Maddy.

  Her presence emboldened me, as I think mine emboldened her. So when the opportunity presented itself, I dared take it, rifling through the pockets of the man’s discarded trousers while he slept, his sick appetites sated at least for a while. The slim, brass cigarette lighter was a prize beyond reckoning. Did I voice my plan to Maddy as we passed it back and forth? Was it some telepathy we shared? I don’t really know. And neither do I know what exactly I was thinking when I flicked open the lighter. How could I have possibly known how it worked? And yet somehow I managed to coax a flame out of it, orange and flickering.

  The curtains caught easily, the room lighting up in seconds as the fire ate its way through everything it touched. It seemed alive, vengeful. Almost as if it was my own anger and hatred released. It grew with terrible swiftness, devouring everything it touched.

  I remember hugging Maddy tight, kissing her on the forehead as the heat grew ever more unbearable. Soon it would take us, too, and the pain would be over. And yet the flames seemed to skirt around us as they searched the room for yet more things to eat. The man, asleep at first, then slowed by smoke and a lack of air, screamed as he burned. I remember the smell of his hair, the way his skin bubbled and his eyes turned white like the poached eggs we sometimes had for breakfast. His death sent a little thrill through me even as I knew that mine would come soon enough, that Maddy, too, would be eaten up by the fire. And still we knelt in the middle of the room, our tiny bodies hugged together so tightly we might have been one.

  And that’s how they found us. The only two survivors of a blaze that claimed many lives. I thought that house had taken everything from us, but I was wrong. Up until the fire we at least had each other. Then they cut us apart.

  If I thought the house in Essex was bad, the care system really wasn’t much better. OK, so I came into it as damaged goods, but really you’d think they might have worked that out from the beginning and made some kind of adjustment for it.