Prayer for the Dead

by James Oswald

  ‘It’s all too new. Too experimental. It takes too much time.’ He rubs the grit from tired eyes. ‘Jon doesn’t have time. Not any more.’

  ‘You know I work mainly on the research side these days, right?’ I finally turn to meet his gaze. ‘Can’t remember the last time I actually treated a patient, if I’m being honest.’

  ‘I did sort of wonder. See you about a lot, but never round the wards or in theatre.’

  ‘Always think that by the time you’ve got there, it’s usually too late. I’d much rather have the body heal itself. Just maybe give it a little help.’

  ‘You reckon you can help Jon?’

  I make a show of studying the boy through the glass, even though I couldn’t care less what happens to him. He is flawed. There is no point trying to save something as flawed as that. The silence feels right though, makes it look as if I am thinking.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say eventually. ‘But I can try.’

  25

  ‘Why is it that of all the officers working out of this station, you are the only one who doesn’t seem to understand the chain of command?’

  Late afternoon, Detective Superintendent Duguid’s office. Having cooled down at the hospital, McLean was once more hot and sweaty from his walk back. He could have gone straight to his nice cool office at the rear of the building where the sun never shone, but that would only have been a delaying tactic.

  ‘I always find I get better results this way, sir. Every time I take something to DCI Brooks he sends me straight to you anyway. Thought I’d cut out the middleman, save us all some time.’

  ‘With that attitude it’s no wonder no one will take you seriously. You do realise they’ll probably give Brooks my job when I leave, don’t you? What’re you going to do then?’

  ‘I’ll cope, sir. Same as always.’

  Duguid made a sound halfway between a snort and a harrumph. ‘So what’s so important you had to bring it straight to me this time?’

  ‘The young woman we found yesterday afternoon, out Fairmilehead way. We’ve got a name for her, a bit of background information. My first impression is this isn’t going to be easy. There’s no obvious suspect, no jealous boyfriend and no sign she was raped.’ McLean summed up the facts of the case he’d uncovered so far.

  ‘So what you’re saying is we’ve got another major incident on our hands.’ Duguid ran spidery fingers over his thinning scalp, slumped back into his seat. ‘Fucking marvellous.’

  ‘I’m sure Maureen Shenks is over the moon about it.’

  That got him a sharp look. ‘What are you on about? She’s dead. She couldn’t give a fuck. I’m more concerned about the sick bastard killed her. That’s the difference between you and me, McLean. You’re all about justice for the victims. I’m more interested in making sure the guilty are caught and locked up so they can’t do it again.’

  ‘Wasn’t aware there was a difference, sir.’

  ‘Course there’s a bloody difference, man. You keep prattling on about ideals. I’m interested in results.’

  McLean wasn’t aware of any recent prattling, but he kept silent on the matter. ‘You want me to lead on this one, sir? I’ve already got Grumpy Bob and MacBride organising the incident room.’

  Duguid made a play of shuffling through the folders on his desk. Most of them were closed, some still tied up with string. McLean knew a fidget when he saw one.

  ‘I want you to pass the case on to Spence,’ the detective superintendent said eventually. McLean’s first instinct was to complain, but then reason kicked in. He was already senior investigating officer on one major incident; the last thing he needed was another.

  ‘Control assigned me the investigation, but I can see the sense in that. I’ll get everything we’ve found so far drawn up into a report for him. Grumpy Bob can hand over to DS Carter once he’s done all the difficult stuff, and I’ve no doubt Spence will be pinching all the DCs anyway. Is Brooks going to be Gold on this one?’

  Duguid gave him the sort of stare you got from a wary sheep. ‘You don’t mind?’

  ‘How I feel about it’s not really important, is it, sir? Just as long as we catch whoever did this, right?’

  The tiny office, tucked away at the back of the station, was a small haven of coolness in the heat of mid-afternoon. McLean didn’t much enjoy the mountains of paperwork that the job seemed to create on a daily basis, but when the temperature outside was hot enough to melt the tarmac, and the major incident room smelled of parboiled detective, it was nice to have somewhere he could escape to. Of course, it would be freezing in the winter, but that was a worry for another day.

  Signing off overtime sheets was relatively mindless, and it wasn’t too hard to justify the expenditure, not with two dead bodies on their hands. It gave him a chance to let the investigation percolate in the back of his mind, let the few facts settle and see what new connections might appear. The intervention of his telephone ruined whatever insight might have come. It took McLean a while to find the handset, buried under a spreading mound of folders. The flashing light told him the front desk was calling, but he knew from bitter experience not to believe it all the time.

  ‘McLean.’

  ‘Thought you might be there, sir. There’s a bloke down here wants to see you about a car? You buying another one? Only after what happened to the last two …’ Pete Dundas was the duty sergeant that afternoon, it would seem.

  ‘This one of your tiresome pranks, Pete? Only you can’t pester me for the overtime sheets and send me off on wild goose chases.’ It had been a while since anyone had tried to pull a fast one on him, but McLean was ever wary of the so-called humour of his fellow officers. Usually it involved costing him money and wasting the time of innocent bystanders.

  ‘Honest as the day, sir.’ Sergeant Dundas did a passable impression of a man offended at the very thought he might not be telling the truth.

  ‘OK. Tell him I’m on my way.’ McLean hung up, shuffled the papers into something resembling a child’s idea of order and squeezed his way around the desk. He knew nothing about buying a car beyond that he’d been thinking about it. Unless he’d suddenly developed some kind of psychic ability, chances were this was some kind of prank. He just hoped it wasn’t an expensive one.

  It clicked when he saw the man waiting in reception. McLean had only met him a couple of times, the last being when he’d brought a flatbed truck to the garages of the forensic services and loaded the old Alfa Romeo on to it. McLean had thought the car beyond repair, its roof crushed under the weight of a falling body, but Alan Roberts had just looked at it, sucked his teeth and said it would be expensive. There had been a few telephone conversations since then, and McLean had written a couple of eye-watering cheques, quite probably more than it would have cost him to go out and buy an identical car. Lately it had been mostly silence, though now he thought about it, there might have been an email, buried quickly under a mountain of others.

  ‘Inspector. Sorry to disturb you at work. Reckoned I had a better chance of catching you here, though.’

  ‘Mr Roberts.’ McLean shook the man by the hand, noticing his spotlessly clean brown overalls, like a mechanic from a bygone age. In many ways that was what he was. ‘This about the Alfa?’

  ‘It certainly is. Got her back from the body shop last week. We’ve just been finishing off the mechanical work. She’s all done now. Good as new. Better really.’

  McLean checked his watch. Too early to call it a day, and there was the small matter of a major incident investigation requiring his attention.

  ‘That’s great, thank you. But I don’t think I’ll be able to pick it up until the weekend. It’s a little busy here.’

  ‘Aye, that business in Gilmerton with the journalist. I heard.’

  ‘You did?’ Mr Roberts worked out of a busy little garage in Loanhead, which wasn’t all that far from Gilmerton. Still, it surprised McLean that he’d take much of an interest in the case.

  ‘Thought you’d be a bit too
busy to come and collect, so I brought her over for you.’

  Parked on the street by the front entrance to the station, Alan Roberts’ flatbed truck had begun to attract quite a lot of attention from public and police alike. Partly this might have been to do with the double yellow line, but mostly it was the gleaming red classic sports car on the back.

  McLean remembered his father’s old car fondly. He’d found it hidden away at the back of the garage after his gran had died, had it fixed up and driven it around for a year or so before Detective Sergeant Pete Buchanan had fallen several storeys on to its roof. Before that accident, the car had been tidy, but not exactly new. Its paint had been glossy and red, just a shame about the several different shades where individual panels had been resprayed down the years. Now it looked even better than it must have done in the showroom, sometime in the early 1970s.

  It was still red, gleaming in the hot afternoon sun like something wet and dangerous. McLean didn’t think he’d ever seen it so clean. Any car so clean, for that matter. Roberts set about undoing the straps holding it down to the flatbed, while yet more underemployed police officers wandered up to see what was going on.

  ‘You got her fixed. That must have cost a bit.’ McLean didn’t need to turn to know it was DS Ritchie who had spoken.

  ‘I couldn’t see it scrapped,’ he said as Roberts tilted the flatbed back hydraulically until it formed a long shallow ramp to the road. They both watched as the mechanic fished a key out of his pocket, unlocked the car and climbed in. The noise it made when he started it up was not what either of them were expecting.

  ‘Didn’t used to sound like that, did she?’ McLean thought the question, but it was Ritchie who asked it.

  ‘Not as far as I remember. They did say they were going to do a bit of mechanical work on it. Bring the brakes and cooling up to modern standards. Stuff like that.’

  A bit more rasping exhaust noise and the little red Alfa Romeo inched backwards down the ramp, on to the road. The cluster of police officers thickened around it, all peering in through the windows, so that McLean almost had to fight his way through them. Mr Roberts had turned off the engine and was climbing arthritically out of the low-down seat when he and Ritchie made it to the kerbside.

  ‘Your keys.’ Roberts handed them over. ‘You’ll want to take it easy for the first few hundred miles. Let the engine bed in a bit.’

  ‘I thought you were just fixing up the bodywork and giving it a bit of a service,’ McLean said. He ran a hand over the warm, smooth surface of the roof. The shine was so glossy it was almost painful to look at.

  ‘That was the first cheque. We had that conversation about making a few improvements, remember?’

  McLean thought he might have done, vaguely. Mostly it had been messages on his answering machine informing him of progress, or lack thereof. He’d not been too bothered, or rather he’d been too busy to worry about it. Roberts had a good reputation, the rest was just time and money.

  ‘It’s all in the folder there, Inspector.’ Roberts reached in to the passenger seat with much popping of joints, and came back holding a large black ring-binder. Inside were many, many receipts, and photographs in neat plastic wallets. ‘Oh, and there’s this as well. Never did have much truck with technology, but there’s a couple of thousand photographs on here.’ He dug a hand into the pocket of his overalls, coming out with a small black memory stick.

  ‘I … um … thank you.’ McLean took it, dropped it into his own pocket.

  ‘No. Thank you, sir. There’s not many’s prepared to spend the money keeping these old girls alive. She’s been a pleasure to work on. Just try not to break her again, eh?’ Roberts gave him a grin, then walked away. McLean watched him as he started to pack up the flatbed, ready to leave. When he turned back to his car, DS Ritchie was on the other side, peering in through the window. She crouched down, ran a hand along the curve of the bonnet, then went to the front and looked back along the side.

  ‘This must have cost you a fortune, sir. They’ve done a beautiful job.’

  McLean looked at the gleaming chrome door handle and the trim around the window edges. They had been tarnished before, pitted by age and road salt. Now they were like new. The door itself had never quite sat right on its hinges, the gap at the front noticeably larger than that at the back. He couldn’t see that now. It was almost as if they’d given him a different car.

  ‘Hop in then, Sergeant.’ He opened the door and smelled a heady mixture of leather cleaner and oil.

  ‘What?’ Ritchie stared at him over the roof.

  ‘I said hop in. I think we should see what Mr Roberts has done, don’t you?’

  26

  He had to wind the window down to keep cool; there was no air-conditioning in the little Alfa, of course. Even so McLean reckoned he must have had an idiot grin plastered all over his face as they drove south from the city centre. Traffic was mercifully light and they made good speed, the temperature gauge on the dashboard rising swiftly to the middle and then sticking there.

  ‘Don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that noise,’ DS Ritchie said, as they pulled out of a side turning and McLean put his foot down. The exhaust crackled and popped and the car surged forward like a terrier after a rat. Whatever Alan Roberts and his mechanics had done to the thing, it was a different beast indeed from the car he’d found tucked away in his grandmother’s garage after her death.

  A chuckle from the passenger seat brought him out of his musing. He glanced sideways to where DS Ritchie was sitting, a smile on her face as the breeze from her open window played with her short red hair. ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve not seen you look this happy in …’ Ritchie paused a moment, her smile turning to a thoughtful frown. ‘Can’t really say I’ve ever seen you so happy, actually.’

  ‘Thanks,’ McLean said. ‘I think.’ He wrapped his fingers around the thin steering wheel, suddenly self-conscious. The moment’s simple enjoyment had gone, the bubble burst. It was still a damn fine day though, and a great way to be spending it driving a classic sports car.

  ‘Where we going, anyway?’

  ‘Nearly there.’ McLean dropped a gear and sped forward to make it through a set of lights before they changed. The Alfa did exactly what he asked of it, chirping its rear wheels with a little spin. He had to admit he’d missed the thing. A couple of hundred yards further on and they slowed for another crossing.

  ‘Gilmerton Cove?’ Ritchie peered through the windscreen as the lights turned green. McLean indicated right, then dropped the clutch and spun the wheels trying to get across the turning before the car coming towards him. He didn’t care about the blaring horn and rude hand gesture the manoeuvre got him. The car brought out the long-suppressed adolescent hooligan in him.

  Parking in the lot behind the library at least meant they were off the street and largely out of sight. It still left him with a dilemma. Part of him wanted to make DS Ritchie stay and act as a guard. It would be too terrible to come back and find key marks in that lovely gloss-red paintwork. But that was just paranoia, and besides, she was a trained detective, not some junior uniform constable to be set menial tasks.

  McLean still turned back and gave the car one last long look before he walked round the corner and out of sight.

  ‘She’ll be fine, sir. Don’t worry.’

  ‘You’re right. I’m just being stupid.’

  ‘Mind you, I don’t think I’d dare leave something like that in a public place. Who knows what some little toerag’ll do to her?’

  ‘Not helping, you know.’ McLean looked across at the detective sergeant, saw the smile on her face. She was recovering well from her brush with death, her cheekbones less prominent, eyes less sunken, but she still had a way to go.

  ‘We going to the crime scene then, sir? Only I thought forensics were all packed up and away now. Place is meant to be opening to the public again soon.’

  McLean stopped at the edge of the road. Somewhere under his feet, give or take, Ben
Stevenson had met his gruesome, violent end. He had gone willingly into the caverns, perhaps in search of higher truths, lured by someone with motives he couldn’t begin to understand. At least not yet. Going down there again himself would serve no purpose.

  ‘There’s only one way into those caves, right?’

  ‘Pretty much. Well, there’s two, but they both exit on to the road up there.’ Ritchie pointed up towards the entrance to the visitor centre. ‘There may be others, but they’ve been filled up with rocks for centuries. Stevenson and his killer had to have come past here at some point before he died.’

  ‘And yet we got nothing off any cameras.’ McLean pointed at the CCTV on a nearby pole. They’d already spoken to all the shops in the area, trawling the footage for the slightest glimpse of anyone who might have looked like the dead reporter. For a backwater suburb, Gilmerton was surprisingly well covered by cameras, but they’d found nothing.

  ‘Half of them had been scrubbed by the time we got to them. Some weren’t even working, just for show.’ It was nothing McLean didn’t know. That wasn’t why he’d come out here.

  ‘You can’t always trust the cameras, anyway. But someone will have seen our man on his way here.’ McLean turned away from the road, walked the short distance to the door to the betting shop on the corner. ‘You just need to know how to ask.’

  There were bookies and there were bookies. Some places you wouldn’t go into without a stab vest and a fully armed back-up team. Some places you’d get a hard eye and a cold shoulder but certainly no answers to any questions, however civilly you put them. And then there were bookies that were simply businesses trying to keep afloat in the face of twenty-four-hour online poker, smartphone apps that made it even easier to lose your shirt, and a population increasingly too simple-minded to manage anything as difficult as studying form. McLean had noticed this one, part of a national chain, the first time he’d come to Gilmerton Cove. He had no doubt that some detective constable had been in, armed with his PDA and some questions, to quiz the owner about the night Ben Stevenson had died. There would be a transcription of the answers on file somewhere in the major incident room, and probably backed up to the cloud too, wherever that was. They weren’t the sort of questions he was interested in now, and certainly not the right answers. It was always better to do these things yourself, anyway. And besides, he’d needed an excuse for taking the car out.