The Book of Souls (The Inspector McLean Mysteries)

by Oswald, James

  'Are you all right, sir?' The voice of the older constable, definitely Cameron. Martin Cameron, that was it. Solid policeman, reliable. Should have made sergeant by now.

  'Sir?'

  McLean looked up, took a deep breath to try and steady himself. The two constables were standing now, moving in slow motion around their desk as they came towards him. Another voice echoed their concern, only this one was behind him.

  'Tony? What on earth are you doing in here?'

  He looked around, vision blurring at the edges. Move more slowly. Can't quite understand what's happening. What's the chief superintendent doing in today?

  'Ma'am.' McLean tried to stand up, but found his legs reluctant to comply.

  'You look like death warmed over, Inspector McLean. What's going on here, constable?' The chief superintendent's focus switched away from him for only an instant. McLean tried to pull himself together and wondered idly whether this was what having a panic attack felt like.

  'We were just discussing a new lead in the case, ma'am. The detective inspector has a positive ID for one of the gang growing drugs in the Newington flat.'

  'Excellent, I'm sure the DCI will be delighted when he gets back from his break.' McIntyre's eyes locked on McLean's, almost ordering him to stay where he was. She didn't alter her gaze as she added, 'Constables, could you give us a moment. I'm sure the incident room won't be inundated with calls if you go and grab a bite of lunch.'

  They didn't need to be told twice. The door slammed shut as two pairs of feet legged it down the corridor, hopeful of roast turkey and trimmings. McIntyre's gaze followed the sound of their departure echoing down the long wall of the incident room, then she laid a motherly hand on McLean's forehead. It felt cold and dry. 'What happened just now? Tony, you're burning up.'

  'Just came over a little light-headed.' McLean moved away from her touch. He was glad she'd sent the constables away, but he held little hope that his strange collapse wouldn't be common knowledge throughout the station before the day was out. 'Not sure why, really.'

  'Would it have anything to do with the hour and a half you spent in your old home last night, by any chance?'

  McLean looked up at the chief superintendent, astonished. 'How'd...?'

  'DCI Duguid has had a team watching that flat around the clock ever since the fire. It's a waste of bloody time, if you ask me, but I have to let my detectives run their own investigations. They saw you arrive and called it in. Duguid's gone to Canada for the whole festive season, and everyone else was out on the lash, so it came to me. I told them to leave you alone, only to go in if you'd not come back out again in two hours.'

  McLean couldn't think of anything to say. He was recovering quickly now, the momentary dizziness passed, but McIntyre's detailed knowledge of his movements astonished him. She pulled up a chair and sat down beside him.

  'I can't begin to know what you're going through, Tony. You lost everything in that fire. All your links to the past. That's got to be as bad as losing a parent.'

  'I'm fine. Honestly. It was just a... I don't know. I just felt a little light-headed. Got up too quickly. You know how it is.'

  'Now I know you're lying to me. Look. It's not a sign of weakness to be overwhelmed every once in a while. You've got a lot going on, too much really. I should never have let you take on the Audrey Carpenter case, let alone Kate McKenzie. Not now we've got the Anderson link.'

  'Anderson's dead and buried. He's gone.'

  'Not up here, he isn't.' McIntyre reached forward and tapped McLean gently on the forehead. 'He's still alive there. And especially so at this time of year. I don't even need Matt's interim report to tell me that. You think I haven't noticed you're always pulling the Christmas and Hogmanay shifts?'

  'I'm an inspector, ma'am. I don't do shifts anymore.'

  'Well what about all the detective constables and sergeants down in the canteen right now, then? Did they volunteer? And what did you think you were going to achieve, interviewing people on Christmas day?'

  'I wanted to see them at home, with their families.' It had made sense at the time. Still made sense, in a mad kind of way.

  'And if any of them complain? You're not exactly flavour of the month with Professional Standards you know.'

  'I'm not going to back off just because someone thinks it's their God-given right to be offended. There's two dead women in the mortuary and their families are having a much worse Christmas than anyone I interviewed.'

  'I know. But you're pushing too hard, Tony. Sooner or later something's got to give.'

  McLean looked up to see the chief superintendent smiling at him, but it was a weary, exasperated smile. The sort of smile he remembered getting from his Grandmother when he was a child. She'd always known when he was overdoing it. Long before he'd ever admit it to himself.

  'I'll be fine, ma'am. And thanks.'

  'For what?'

  'For sending those two constables away.'

  'You think that was for your benefit? I just didn't want them to miss out on the plum pudding.'

  Joking helped, McLean found. He could laugh and for a moment that eased away the blackness.

  'I think I might go and see if there's any left then,' he said, pushing himself up from his chair. His feet still seemed a very long way away. 'Would you care to join me?'

  'For lunch? Why not. But then you're going home, Tony. If I have to drive you there myself.'

  *

  McLean was coaxing the fire in the library into life when the doorbell rang. He preferred this space to the more formal drawing room, and the chairs were more comfortable than in the kitchen, though at least the Aga always kept that room warm. For a moment he thought it was the chief superintendent come to check he was really at home and not off surreptitiously solving crimes.

  He opened the front door to a person he didn't at first recognise. An old man with a pale, pinched face, wispy white hair and beard. He wore a long, dark overcoat and heavy black leather gloves

  'Good afternoon inspector. And a Happy Christmas,' the man said. And then the penny dropped. He'd been one of the carol singers. The one who had turned down his offer of a dram.

  'Umm, Happy Christmas to you. Mr...'

  'Anton, Father Noam Anton. I'm sorry to bother you, especially on this day. I've been staying with Mary at the church. She mentioned that you were a detective. May I?'

  'I'm sorry, please. Come in.' McLean opened the door wide to let the old man pass, not quite sure what else he could do. 'Here, come through to the kitchen. I'll put the kettle on.'

  'I noticed you weren't at church this morning,' Father Anton said as McLean set about making tea.

  'Actually, I was at work.' McLean poured hot water into the teapot. 'But I wouldn't have been at church anyway.'

  'And yet you welcomed us in as carol singers.'

  'That's different. Couldn't really turn you away. And I like the music, even the voices. But I can do that without having to believe in the words.'

  'You believe, in your own way.' Father Anton's accent was odd. It sounded foreign, but McLean couldn't place it anywhere more specific than that.

  'I do?'

  'The things you have seen, the things you have endured. You can't help but believe.'

  'Have we met before?' McLean wracked his brain trying to remember if the old man had ever been a guest of his Grandmother.

  'I don't think so, no. But Mary has told me of you. And, of course, I have read Mr Hilton's book.'

  McLean froze in the middle of passing the sugar bowl over. 'What's this about?'

  Father Anton finally unbuttoned his coat and pulled from its folds a thick wad of papers. Printed across the front page was the familiar name of a prestigious Edinburgh Auctioneers and the words Forthcoming Sale of Antiquarian Book Collection - Draft Copy. Scraps of yellow post-it marked various places.

  'I first met Donald Anderson in nineteen seventy,' Father Anton said. 'He came from the city to join our community. He was a nice man, quiet, thoughtful,
very intelligent. We welcomed him in even though he was quite young.'

  McLean looked at the old man sitting opposite him. He'd have put him in his seventies, yes, but not a great deal older than Anderson.

  'Our monastery was small,' Anton continued. 'Easily overlooked, which is exactly what we wanted. There's nothing much left of it now, not after the fire. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Do you know anything about the Order of Saint Herman?'

  McLean shrugged. 'An anchorite sect?'

  Father Anton smiled at the joke. 'Fair enough. You don't believe yourself a religious man, and there are few enough of faith who know of us. We are a small order, and our retreat was always meant to be hidden. Occasionally new members would come to join our ranks, but we never recruited. Our mission was always to be unnoticed.'

  'Your mission? I thought you lot were all charged with spreading the good word across the world.' McLean twisted the catalogue around on the tabletop and opened it up at the first marker. Lot forty-two: an illustrated medieval bestiary. 'And what's it got to do with this?'

  'Those markers, Inspector McLean, are all books Donald Anderson stole from our monastery when it burned to the ground twenty-five years ago. We had an extensive library, perhaps the most valuable collection of rare early religious works outside the Vatican. The sole purpose of our order was the protection of those books. So when the fire destroyed them, those of us who survived were distraught. We split up, went our separate ways. Travelled the world as you say, spreading God's word to try and atone for our sins.'

  'Except for Anderson. He came here, set up his bookshop and started murdering women. That doesn't sound very holy to me.'

  Father Anton sighed. 'I liked Donald, truly. He was a friend for many years. I should have seen the change in him, should have realised what was going on. He knew the risks, more than any of us. But his heart was pure, that's why he was given the task in the first place.'

  'What task? What is it Anderson's supposed to have done? You say he stole books from your library. Do you think he set the fire in the first place?' McLean suppressed the urge to shout. This really wasn't something he wanted to deal with right now. Not after what had happened earlier in the day.

  Father Anton didn't answer straight away, so McLean let the question hang. It was a technique that worked well with criminal low-lifes, not so much with elderly ex-monks.

  'This is hard for me,' Father Anton said eventually. 'I swore a vow of secrecy. I made an oath in front of God. To break that is no small thing.'

  'If it helps, I can promise not to tell anyone else, unless it is absolutely necessary.' McLean wasn't sure why he was being so helpful all of a sudden.

  'Understand this, inspector. Some books, like those marked there in that catalogue, are rare and beautiful things. They are filled with the devotion of the monks who inscribed them centuries ago. Some of them took decades to complete. Lifetimes. They are special. They can inspire great deeds in men.

  'But there are other books which influence their readers far more directly. Not the words within them, not the meaning. For want of a better word, you might call them magic. But they don't contain spells. They are spells.'

  McLean could see where this was going, felt the stirrings of anger as his mind connected the dots. But there was something about the old monk's voice, the sincerity in his face, that held him back.

  'One such book is the Libro Anima,' Anton said. 'The Book of Souls. It was our greatest treasure and our greatest curse. Some say that it was dictated to a monk by the Devil himself; others that it was copied from words found painted in blood on the walls of the great crypt beneath the Temple of Solomon. Whatever the truth, it is a terrible thing. Those who read it are either driven mad or blessed beyond compare. It weighs your soul, you see inspector. And if your soul's found wanting, then the book keeps it. And with each new corrupted soul, the book becomes darker, more powerful and less forgiving.'

  Father Anton slumped back in his chair, as if the telling of this children's tale had exhausted him. He reached for the mug of black, unsweetened tea in front of him and took a long, noisy drink.

  'And you think Anderson took this book.'

  'Took it, yes. Read it, too. And he was found wanting. That's why he turned bad. It consumed his soul.'

  McLean looked at old man sitting in his kitchen; a total stranger to him. He wasn't entirely sure why he was giving him the time of day, let alone listening to his mad tales. He was tired, irritable from days of frustration, lack of sleep and the slow picking of old scabs.

  'I can't do anything for you,' he said.

  'But inspector...'

  'I'm sorry, but you'll have to leave. I've had enough of people making excuses for Anderson. He wasn't mad, wasn't possessed by some demonic book. He was just evil, and now he's dead.'

  Father Anton didn't move, just sat at the table, his hands cupped around his mug, shuddering gently as if even the warmth of the tea couldn't reach him.

  'Look, if Anderson stole your books, all you need to do is contact the auctioneers. They'll pull the sale until it's all been cleared up.'

  'Those books are unimportant now.' Anton nodded at the catalogue lying on the table. 'In truth, they were never that important, though their value is immeasurable. Call them camouflage, if it helps. They were there to hide what our order was charged with protecting. What we failed to protect.'

  Father Anton picked up the catalogue and flicked it open, leafing through the typed pages far too quickly for McLean to register any of the details within.

  'If something good comes of their sale, then so be it. At least the people who can afford them will know how to look after them.'

  'So why did you come here then? Surely the tea's not that good.'

  Anton didn't raise a smile, but he shifted his gaze, stared McLean straight in the eye.

  'I've been through this list a dozen times. Donald never sold any of the books he stole from us; they're all still there. Except one. It's missing, inspector. The Book of Souls is gone.'

  ~~~~

  40

  Boxing day morning, early. Most of the country would be still in bed, sleeping off hangovers or hiding from their disappointment. McLean sat at the kitchen table, hands cupped around a mug of coffee as he stared out the window at the rising dawn; cold sunlight bouncing off the ice that had crackled onto every available surface. Mrs McCutcheon's cat lay curled on a rug in front of the Aga, purring to no-one in particular. Everything else was silence.

  He picked up his new mobile phone, lying on the table in front of him. It looked surprisingly sleek, with a huge screen and too few buttons. He thumbed at it absentmindedly, flicking through the menus he only half-remembered from the demonstration in the shop, all those weeks ago. What he really needed was a teenager to show him how it worked. Or failing that, Detective Constable MacBride, since he wasn't far off that age.

  The contact list was pitifully small; Grumpy Bob, the station, MacBride, the mortuary. With a wry smile, he noticed that Emma's mobile number was in there; she must have put it in when they were all ogling over the new technology down the pub. Pretty forward of her, or was it justified? She'd slept in his bed, after all, even if it had been without his invitation. He'd even taken her out to dinner a couple of times, and she'd helped him rebuild his wardrobe for an afternoon, which had certainly made the chore of shopping a little more bearable. But any spark that might have been there had fizzled away under his studied indifference. Matt Hilton would say he was avoiding any deep personal relationships deliberately, and the annoying little shit would be right.

  Of course it could well be someone else's number and part of an elaborate joke. He wouldn't have put that past the likes of Grumpy Bob.

  Sighing, he put the phone back down on the table, then noticed that the screen had changed colour. Somehow he'd managed to hit 'dial' without realising. He snatched up the phone, searching for the off button, found it and jabbed it with his thumb. Hopefully the call wouldn't have gone through; it was really
very early after all. Especially for Boxing Day.

  He'd have gone to the station, waded through the ever-increasing mounds of paperwork that threatened to engulf his office, if he hadn't received graphic instructions from Chief Superintendent McIntyre as to what she would do to him if she caught him anywhere near the building. Which just meant he'd have to think of something else to do. Most likely wade through the ever-increasing mounds of paperwork that his Grandmother's death had generated.

  The trilling of his phone took him by surprise. Even Mrs McCutcheon's cat stopped purring and looked up with a disgusted expression. The screen said helpfully; 'Emma Baird calling,' so at least he was going to find out whether it was a joke or not.

  'Hello?'

  'Who is this?' Not a joke. Emma, and sounding very grumpy indeed.

  'Ah... Emma?'

  'Yeah. Who is this? You any idea what time of the morning it is?'

  'I'm sorry, it's Tony McLean. I didn't mean to wake you up.'

  'S'okay. I was awake anyway.' Not a good liar, McLean recalled. 'What'd you phone me for anyway?'

  'Yeah, about that. Sorry, it was an accident. I thought I'd stopped it before it rang.'

  'I still don't get why... Oh, right. I put my number in your phone, didn't I.'

  'Something like that, aye.'

  'Well, that kind've backfired, didn't it.' There was a muffled sound of movement in the background, a shuffling of phone from one hand to another. 'So what are you doing up at... Jesus is that what time it is? Working on some important case, I guess.'