The Gathering Dark: Inspector McLean 8

by James Oswald

  Harrison leaned forward, tried a couple of the mice lurking in the detritus on the desk top, then found a trackpad. She tapped a couple of times, minimizing some of the windows, bringing up others, eyes flicking this way and that far more swiftly than McLean could keep up with. ‘There’s stuff here Lofty really needs to see. Financials, contracts, emails. Oh my.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Harrison had brought up an email programme, selected one message in particular and maximized it on the screen to make it easier to see. McLean noticed the name in the ‘from’ header, Jennifer Beasley. The message itself was short.

  Dan. It’s me, Maddy! Can’t believe I’ve found you. Been searching for years. We need to meet up. Compare notes. Bring it all out into the open. They’ve hidden us too long. People need to know!

  ‘Is there a reply?’ McLean asked.

  ‘Just a moment.’ Harrison closed the window, the cursor arrow darting about the screen before she found what she was looking for. ‘Here we go.’

  McLean read quickly. The email was from an Edward Gosford, the same name that Featherstonehaugh had given him.

  Maddy? For real? Jesus. I’ve been Ed for so long I’d almost forgotten Dan. Yeah, we should meet up. Lots to talk about. Christ, how long has it been?

  ‘There’s a whole conversation. Looks like it’s been going on for a couple of weeks. The last one’s here.’ Harrison tapped again, a final message from Beasley.

  The old Picture House sounds good. Coffee and cake at ten. I’ll wear a red scarf so you recognize me. So much to tell you. It’s so exciting! Maddy.

  ‘That’s the day before the crash. Picture House would be the old Caley Picture House. It’s right by that bus stop. Ten o’clock, have them heading there half an hour or so beforehand. Poor bastards.’ McLean stared at the screen without really seeing it, the whole tragic story now unfolding in his mind. And then something occurred to him.

  ‘Those other files you had up a moment ago. The research ones. Are they dated?’ He held up the mobile phone, clicked the button on the top in the hope of squeezing just a few seconds of life out of it, but the screen stayed blank this time. Harrison tapped at the trackpad, reopening the windows that she had closed.

  ‘Some of it’s old stuff, sir. But this file’s only been created in the last day or so. Why do you ask?’ She pointed at a document that would be of great interest to the Organised Crime team. Clearly Edward Gosford was very good with computers.

  ‘Because it’s after the crash. If this is Finlay’s phone, then Ed or Dan or whatever his name is can’t be dead. He was there, though, probably saw what happened and decided to find out who was to blame. He’s been one step ahead of us all the way.’ And now McLean remembered the young man, eyes wide with shock. But that didn’t work. That was the face re-created from the skull.

  ‘There was a Daniel Penston in Jennifer’s notebook. You think that’s him?’ Harrison’s question distracted McLean from his train of thought.

  ‘Could be. Chances of Featherstonehaugh admitting it are small, though. Why?’

  ‘Because if it is him, I think I know where he might have gone.’ Harrison scrolled down the document, pointed at the last few lines. McLean read them swiftly and as he did so the last pieces of the puzzle started to fall uncomfortably into place.

  59

  The leafy back streets of the New Town were home to much of Edinburgh’s old money. Vast terraced town houses, suited more to Victorian living than the needs of modern life, many had in the past been converted into flats or offices. Now that process was being reversed, but some corners had never changed in the first place. Unexpected closes and squares centred on private gardens, the massive trees an indication of how long it had been since this modern city had been planned. Alan Lewis’s money wasn’t old. He had forged it out of the new financial regime that grew after the deregulation of the banks in the 1980s. Nevertheless, he had found himself an ancient lair in which to hide, taken on the trappings of the gentry despite his humbler roots.

  ‘That’s his car there, sir. Thought I recognized the number.’ DC Harrison pointed to a shiny black Bentley, its windows almost as dark as its muscled flanks. The number plate wasn’t personalized, no awkwardly misspelled version of his name or reference to his company. It merely showed that, like McLean’s new Alfa, it was only a few months old.

  ‘Not sure if that’s a good sign or bad.’ McLean peered in through the windscreen, past the resident’s permit, to the black-leather interior. Nothing lay on the passenger seat or in the footwell, but then he’d not really expected anything. Looking up from the car, he saw the four-storey bulk of Lewis’s town house looming over them both. If its windows were eyes, then they were sightless and old, the stonework around them blackened by soot from fires last lit half a century ago. Stone steps led up to a shiny black-painted door, and something about the way the light played on it struck McLean as wrong.

  ‘You tried his phone, aye?’ He crossed the pavement, climbed the steps, Harrison close behind him.

  ‘Three or four times, sir. Mobile and landline. They both just kept going to voicemail.’

  McLean pressed lightly on the glossy wood, and the door swung slowly inwards. Not just unlocked, but unlatched as well. He knew that Edinburgh wasn’t a bad city for burglaries, but leaving your front door open wasn’t something most people did.

  ‘Get on to Control. I think we might need a squad car over. Maybe more than one. See if you can’t get a message to DCI Featherstonehaugh, too.’ He dug out a pair of latex gloves and snapped them on. Then pushed the door all the way while Harrison made the call.

  It opened on to a small porch, glazed double doors leading to a larger hall beyond. For a moment he wondered whether Lewis was simply in the habit of leaving the front porch accessible for any delivery drivers, but then he noticed the double doors had been left just slightly ajar, too. It was an odd way to leave them, as if whoever had passed through was only paper thin. Or the wind had caught them after they hadn’t been closed properly.

  ‘They’re on their way, sir. ETA five minutes. We going to wait?’

  McLean frowned at her. ‘What do you think?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, but pushed open one of the glass doors and stepped into the hallway. It hadn’t been all that noisy outside, just the hum of the city as background, the occasional distant wail of a siren. Now the silence was almost total, underlined by the slow tick tock tick tock of an old grandfather clock standing between two closed doorways. Wide stairs of dark wood climbed towards a halfway landing at the back of the house, light filtering through an impressive stained glass window.

  ‘Hello? Anyone home? Mr Lewis?’ McLean walked across the hall, opened the first of the doors on to a well-appointed drawing room. The air had a stale quality to it that suggested people didn’t go in there very often, and when he ran his gloved finger over the surface of a nearby occasional table, it came up in a fine smear of dust.

  ‘Phone’s over here.’ McLean looked back out to the hall and saw Harrison pointing at a modern handset on an antique sideboard. She had pulled on gloves, too, he noticed. ‘Looks like there’s just the one message. That’ll be me, most likely.’

  ‘Leave it for now. Let’s just check all the rooms. Touch as little as you can, aye?’

  Harrison nodded her understanding, moving off towards the back of the house. McLean checked the opposite side of the hall, an empty dining room as unused as its twin on the other side. He found more signs of life in Lewis’s study, but still not the man himself. Bookshelves lining the walls were filled mostly with dry economics and finance texts, a few biographies and a sizeable collection of Mills and Boon romances, all well thumbed. Well, there was no accounting for taste. He was leafing through the third in a row, surprised to find that they had all been signed by the authors, when a distant voice reminded him of why he was there.

  ‘You’ll want to see this, sir.’

  He replaced the book, went back to the hall, trying to work out wher
e Harrison had gone.

  ‘Up here. The bathroom.’

  McLean followed the voice and found the detective constable waiting for him on the first landing. More stairs led to higher floors, but she indicated for him to follow her through an open door. Lewis’s bedroom lay beyond, set to the front of the house and overlooking the private gardens shared by the other addresses in the close. Beyond the massive bed, another open door led to an en suite bathroom.

  ‘He’s in the bath.’

  The flatness of Harrison’s tone was a warning, but it still couldn’t prepare McLean for what he saw. Alan Lewis lay in the bath, the clear water making his body look bloated and distorted. There was no mistaking the fact that he was dead. One arm covered his modesty, for all that it was worth. The other dangled over the side, pointing to the marble floor. A small puddle of drips had accumulated beneath his fingers. All of these things McLean noticed as he tried hard not to focus on Lewis’s face.

  The dead man stared at nothing, a point in the middle distance that might have been where the ceiling met the corner of the far walls, or might have been head height to a short man standing over him as he lay in his bath. His lips were curled back to reveal yellowing teeth, a swollen tongue. But it was the terror in his eyes that McLean would find hard to forget. A look all the more horrifying for being almost identical to one he had seen just two days before.

  The same sheer terror as that on James Barnton’s face.

  ‘I guess that’s why he wasn’t answering his phone,’ Harrison said, her voice a little squeaky. McLean dragged his gaze away from the dead man, looked over to where she was standing in the bathroom doorway. He couldn’t remember ever having seen her face so pale.

  ‘Go downstairs. Wait for the squad car to arrive and let them know what we’ve found.’ He reached out, touched her gently on the arm and steered her away from the horrific sight. Contact brought her back to herself, a little colour flushing her cheeks.

  ‘Sorry, sir. Bit of a shock, right enough.’

  ‘That’ll be the understatement of the year.’ McLean turned back to the corpse in the bath. ‘Better get on to Control again. We’ll need the duty doctor and the pathologist. All the usual stuff.’

  ‘You think this is suspicious? He didn’t just have a heart attack or something?’

  ‘Front door open? And we’ve been trying to get a hold of him all day?’ McLean shook his head. ‘No. I’m sure he was under a lot of pressure, but I don’t think Mr Lewis died of natural causes. Angus can be the judge of that though, but only once you’ve spoken to Control.’

  Harrison took the hint and hurried away. McLean was tempted to go after her, not wanting to spend any more time with the dead man than was strictly necessary. He’d seen death plenty of times before. Too many times, some would say. After a while, it became easier to deal with the aftermath. A dead body was just an empty vessel, a series of clues that might help determine how the end had come. The sudden, senseless violence visited upon the crash victims had been horrific, but only in a slasher movie, slaughterhouse manner. It was terrible, but all too easy to explain what had happened to them and so he had been able to compartmentalize their deaths, let his subconscious deal with them over the course of a few bad dreams, and move on.

  This was different in the same way that James Barnton’s death had been different. Both had left bodies largely undamaged, the only clues their expressions of utter, abject terror. To look at Alan Lewis’s face was to see raw, primal fear.

  ‘What the hell spooked you?’

  McLean spoke the words aloud as much to centre himself as anything. He needed a clear head here, a detective’s head. He crouched down, looking around the bathroom for clues that there might have been someone else in here when Lewis had died. The bath was cast iron, with a roll top and one of those wonderful column plugs he remembered from his childhood. Dust bunnies had collected underneath, away from the cleaner’s reach, but apart from the puddle of water beneath Lewis’s fingers there was nothing untoward in the room. Except there was something that was bothering him. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  McLean reached out, turned the back of his hand to the side of the bath, and that was when it clicked. The water was still warm. Hot, even. Knowing he’d get a ticking off from Angus, McLean reached out and gently turned the dead man’s hand. The flesh on the tips of his fingers had barely begun to pucker. He hadn’t been in the bath long at all. Had only died very recently.

  McLean thought he saw a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye. Turning a little too swiftly, his head reeled as the blood drained out of it. For a moment he saw a shadow on the wall, the silhouette of a person running from the room.

  And then DC Harrison screamed.

  60

  McLean stood up too quickly, catching the side of his head on the roll top lip of the bath. Reeling at the impact, he staggered into the bedroom, unsure how it had suddenly become so dark in there. Sunlight speared through narrow slits in shutters he hadn’t noticed were closed before, casting more shadow than light. One ray splayed across the bed, the crumpled form of DC Harrison laid out on the mattress. He stumbled over, vision still starred from the blow to the head.

  ‘Harrison? Janie?’ He reached a hand out to shake her shoulder, but she didn’t respond. Face down, unmoving, he couldn’t see if she was even breathing. Nor could he see any reason why she should be this way.

  ‘Come on, Constable. No time for kipping.’ He rolled her over and almost screamed himself at the look on her face. It mirrored that of Alan Lewis in the bath, of James Barnton, propped up against a headstone in Dalry Cemetery. Hardly daring, he reached for the exposed skin of her neck, just below her jaw, trembling fingers feeling for a pulse that wasn’t there.

  Something clicked in his brain, and the training kicked in. He loosened her collar, checked her airway was clear and started CPR. Backup was on its way, wasn’t it? Did he have time to stop and call Control? What the fuck happened to her?

  It felt like hours, but was probably less than a minute before the detective constable started to respond. A gentle finger to her neck again revealed an erratic, weak pulse, and her eyes began to flicker beneath closed lids. Sitting upright on the bed, McLean breathed a sigh of relief, only then feeling a tinge of embarrassment burn the tips of his ears as the unusual intimacy of the situation dawned on him.

  ‘Don’t try to move. Help’s on its way.’ He wasn’t even sure if she heard him, but at least he could see she was breathing now. He slid off the bed, still a little disoriented himself, reached up to the side of his head and felt the start of a nice, sore lump forming there.

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt her. Honest.’

  Startled by the voice, McLean spun round in search of who had spoken. His head throbbed painfully, stars dimming his vision as something moved in the deep shadows. A figure shuffled towards him, vaguely man-shaped but oddly distorted, and as the light played across it, McLean saw a creature from his worst nightmares. Skin bubbled and burned from a face locked in a permanent scream, arms bent at impossible angles, broken white bone poking from gaping wounds. A stench of chemicals and ordure filled the room, choking him and forcing tears from his eyes. He took an involuntary step back as the creature emerged more fully into the light, something that might have been a hand reaching out for him.

  ‘All I did was touch her.’

  McLean took another step back, almost overwhelmed by the horror, the stench and the sheer impossibility of what he was seeing. His leg hit the side of the bed, DC Harrison still sprawled out behind him, forcing him to stop as the apparition came ever closer. He could hear its breathing now, a choking, bubbling sound like a man drowning in a bath of acid effluent.

  ‘What are you?’ The words croaked out of McLean’s throat, but the act of speaking them cleared his head a little. It also made the apparition pause, cock its head to one side like an inquisitive dog. There were features in that broken, bloody mess, and by some strange trick of the light the
y began to emerge more clearly with each startled blink.

  ‘Edward?’

  The grotesque shook its head, becoming less horrific with each passing moment, more like the face McLean had seen on the computer screen in the city mortuary. More like the young man clutching the red scarf at the crash scene, lost and bewildered.

  ‘Dan?’

  The young man stopped completely now, just an arm’s reach away. McLean couldn’t see anything clearly, his head fuzzy. How hard had he hit it?

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ‘You were there, at the crash. I saw you, remember?’ McLean reached out to touch the apparition, then remembered Harrison’s scream, Lewis’s face. ‘You went to meet Maddy.’

  ‘How could you possibly know that?’ The young man spoke with a soft, quiet voice, his accent hard to place beyond English. McLean’s head ached with the stench of chemicals and the dull thudding of the lump forming on his skull.

  ‘We’ve been to your flat, Dan. Seen your computer. You had Mike Finlay’s phone, so you must have been there when he died. James Barnton, too.’

  ‘I never meant to hurt them. Sure they deserved it, but I didn’t … I just …’ The young man pawed at his face as if trying to claw the skin from his cheeks, and as his agitation rose, so the room darkened and the chemical reek grew ever stronger. McLean could scarcely breathe, let alone think straight. How had he come to be here? How could any of this make sense? Maybe it didn’t. Maybe that was the whole point. This was where logic fell apart and Madame Rose’s world of waifs and spirits, unnamed ghosts and gathering darkness finally had its place.

  ‘You didn’t kill them, Dan. You couldn’t have killed them. You died in the crash, with Maddy at your side.’

  Silence settled over the room like the haar rolling in off the North Sea. The young man stood as motionless and limp as a hanged corpse, head dropped and arms by his side. Then slowly, he raised his gaze to meet McLean’s, a dark fire in his eyes, and screamed like a banshee. A crushing weight fell upon McLean, as if the air had grown too heavy on his shoulders. It gripped him tight, squeezing the breath from his lungs, wrapping his head in a vice. His vision blurred as his eyes began to pop. Slowly, he sank to his knees under the pressure, feeling his ribs crack with the strain.