Prayer for the Dead

by James Oswald

  ‘Those two houses either side. We know if there was anyone in them when the fire started?’

  ‘Both empty. No furnishings. Lots of building materials, piles of timber, paint pots, that kind of stuff.’

  ‘All very flammable.’ McLean watched as the firemen switched off the hose on the nearest building. Only steam was rising from its windows now. They’d have the other one out soon, by the look of things. ‘I don’t suppose for a moment that’s a coincidence.’

  He knew it wasn’t, of course. Someone was trying to get Madame Rose to leave. Killing her cat hadn’t worked. Pushing shit through her letterbox hadn’t worked either. So now they were going to burn her out. Looking up at the house, it was clear that hadn’t worked out quite the way they had intended. Which left the question hanging: what would they try next?

  33

  ‘Control decides who attends a crime scene. It’s not up to officers to pick and choose where they go. You know that as well as I do.’

  ‘With respect sir, control hadn’t even worked out they needed to assign anyone from CID. I wasn’t there as an investigating officer.’

  ‘Well why the hell were you there then? And why did you have to drag DS Ritchie along with you? Her shift was over, for fuck’s sake.’

  Early morning, up in front of the beak again. McLean wondered whether DCI Brooks would move into this office, assuming he got the detective superintendent job once Duguid had finally taken his leave. The detective chief inspector’s own office was only marginally smaller than this one, and had a better view from its window, facing out towards Salisbury Crags rather than over the rooftops towards the castle.

  ‘Are you even listening to me, McLean?’ Duguid’s question cut across his musing.

  ‘Sorry, sir. Just trying to work out the best way to explain it. I know the owner of the middle house. She came to me a while back complaining of harassment. Someone killed one of her cats.’

  ‘She report this to the police?’

  ‘Of course. It’s Leith’s patch, so they looked into it. Not much they could do, by all accounts.’

  Duguid’s permanent frown turned into a scowl. ‘This wouldn’t have anything to do with the nuisance Grumpy Bob was making of himself at Leith nick, would it?’

  McLean said nothing, wondering who’d been telling tales and why. It was highly unlikely Grumpy Bob would have upset anyone enough to warrant a complaint.

  ‘This isn’t your own private police service you know, McLean. You can’t go off investigating things just because you feel like it, or your friends ask you to. And you can’t pull other detectives off their active cases just to look into things for you.’

  McLean clenched his fists behind his back. Not because he was particularly angry, but to stop himself from making the obvious retort. He couldn’t begin to count the number of times Duguid had abused his position in exactly that way.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. Didn’t think asking Bob to have a word on his way home would bother anyone.’

  ‘You never do, McLean. Think, that is. That’s your problem. Always trying to be the white knight, rushing gallantly in to save the fair maiden.’

  That brought an involuntary smile to McLean’s face. Of all the ways Madame Rose might be described, fair maiden was not one.

  ‘I’ll leave it alone then, sir. Plenty for me to be getting on with on the Stevenson investigation anyway.’

  Duguid’s face creased even further and for a moment McLean thought he was going to cry. Then he realised that the detective superintendent was grinning. ‘No. You won’t leave it alone, McLean. I’ve squared it with control. You stuck your nose in, you can have the bloody case.’

  It was probably for the best. McLean knew himself well enough to realise that he’d just pester whoever else was running the investigation. Duguid did as well, which was annoying. It meant that while he’d got what he wanted, the shine was rather spoiled by the knowledge that Duguid had too. And there was the small matter of the rest of his workload to cope with.

  He cadged a lift in a squad car over to Leith Walk. Only one fire truck remained, a few firemen clearing up the last of the operation. It was a mess, but then fires always were. At least they’d managed to tow away the parked vehicles and get the traffic moving again.

  ‘Fire investigator here?’ McLean asked of the first fireman he could waylay. The startled young man said nothing, just pointed a heavy-gloved hand in the direction of Madame Rose’s front door, where a tall, stout man was crouching down and staring at something. He wore a bright yellow hard hat that appeared about two sizes too small, perching on the top of his large head in a manner that suggested it wouldn’t give much protection if anything should fall on it.

  ‘Mr Burrows. We meet again.’ McLean picked his way through debris pulled out of the shop fronts as the fire investigator stood and turned to meet him. Jim Burrows had investigated the fire out at Loanhead in which McLean had nearly died. That one had been put down to burning underground coal deposits and firedamp seeping up through cracks in the concrete. He was intrigued to hear what the investigator made of this unusual scene.

  ‘Inspector.’ He held out a hand the size of a dinner plate. McLean shook it, then pointed to where the fire investigator had been staring.

  ‘Find something?’

  ‘Yes and no. See here?’ Burrows pointed at the door to Madame Rose’s house. The street door, McLean corrected himself. There was presumably another door around the back somewhere. This was familiar from his previous visits, the rather faded sign above it still advertising the telling of fortunes and reading of tarots. The top half of the door had been glass, but someone had taken a brick to it fairly recently. The sheet of plywood in its place was spray-painted with the words ‘faggot’ and ‘peedo’.

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘All of it. Paint, wood, glass. Look here.’ Burrows took a few steps down the hill to the remains of the empty betting shop. The window frame had been painted white some time in a previous millennium, and the heat of the fire had bubbled and browned it at the edges.

  ‘It was hot enough here to partially melt this glass, see?’ Burrows bent down and carefully scraped a few shards from the pavement. ‘You wouldn’t have been able to stand here while the blaze was going. Even if you could’ve breathed, the heat would’ve burned your skin right off.

  ‘And yet here.’ Burrows took two admittedly long strides back to Madame Rose’s door, then stopped. ‘Here there’s no sign of scorching at all. There’s even some paper still stuck through the letterbox.’

  McLean pulled latex gloves from his pocket, snapped them on, then plucked the paper out. It was a flyer for a local meeting. ‘!!!Stop the Developement!!!’ misprinted in bold script across the top of the page, a badly reproduced photograph just below. There was no sign of singeing on it at all, but there was no way someone could have pushed it through the letterbox after the fire. He folded it carefully and slipped it into his pocket for later perusal.

  ‘So what stopped it then?’ he asked.

  ‘Search me. Never seen anything like it before.’ Burrows walked uphill while he spoke, coming to a halt in front of the charred remains of Gianni’s Chip Shop. ‘I mean, the wall’s brick between the shops, so that might’ve stopped the fire spreading. And there’s a gap between the back of the chippie and the front of the house. That’d go some way to explaining why the fire didn’t spread back like it did with the other two.’

  McLean studied the facade of Madame Rose’s house, the stonework darkened only by a couple of centuries’ exposure to Auld Reekie and more recent car exhausts. To either side the neighbouring houses were smeared with soot, black tears streaking upwards from every burnt-out window.

  ‘You been inside yet?’ he asked.

  Burrows shook his head. ‘Won’t get inside those two. The roof’s going to come down any minute, could take the front wall with it. Only safe way’s to bring it down with machinery from the outside.’

  ‘Won’t that be a ris
k for the other houses?’

  ‘Those ones, maybe.’ Burrows pointed up the hill, then down. ‘But they’ll probably be OK. Engineers know how to shore them up. That one,’ he pointed at Madame Rose’s house. ‘That’d probably stay standing if you dropped a bomb on it.’

  34

  ‘Got you working on this one too, have they?’

  McLean had been looking for a squad car to give him a lift back to the station. It wasn’t far, but the heat was oppressive. The city centre would be crowded with tourists come for the Festival and the Fringe, too, which always lessened the joy of walking. A quick search of the cordoned-off part of the street had revealed nothing but a short reporter, clad in a leather overcoat that must surely have been too warm to wear.

  ‘Ms Dalgliesh. Back again, I see. I’d have thought you’d send a cub reporter to a job like this.’

  ‘You’re very stuck up, Tony. You know that? Some might even say repressed. Public school education, I guess.’

  That stung. It was possible Dalgliesh was just guessing as she tried to wind him up, but it was just as possible that she had dug as deep into his background as she could and knew the names of both expensive and exclusive schools his grandmother had sent him to.

  ‘I take it you’re writing a piece about the fire.’ It was feigned interest, but it seemed to do the trick of diverting her from talking about him.

  ‘Just a puff piece, really. Apart from the traffic buggery last night, it’s not much of a story. This part of town’s been crying out for some regeneration for ages. Maybe this will kick-start something. Get the council off their arses.’

  McLean’s hand went unbidden to his jacket pocket, the ‘stop the development’ flyer he’d pulled from Madame Rose’s letterbox. He stopped himself before Dalgliesh noticed, flexing his fingers into a fist and out again as if relieving an arthritic twinge.

  ‘Actually, I was going to give you a call.’

  ‘You were?’ Genuine amazement spread across the journalist’s face.

  ‘Ben Stevenson. Could really do with an update. You found out what he was working on yet?’

  ‘It’s your lucky day then.’ Dalgliesh gave him a broad grin that made her look like some kind of demented, wizened shark. ‘But you’ll have to buy the coffee.’

  It came in a ridiculously large mug, more like a cereal bowl with handles than something designed for drinking from. On the plus side, the cafe they went to also sold large slices of very good chocolate cake. McLean had missed breakfast in his hurry to leave the house, so a mid-morning indulgence was, he thought, perfectly justified.

  ‘First off, Ben Stevenson was a fine journalist.’ Jo Dalgliesh brushed ginger biscuit from her moustache as she spoke, taking a mouthful of coffee as she chewed. Fortunately swallowing before she spoke again. McLean was too fascinated by her appalling manners and utter lack of self-consciousness to say anything himself.

  ‘Oh, I know you lot think we’re all vicious hacks churning out rubbish just to make life difficult, but actually it takes quite a bit of work sometimes.’

  ‘Making life difficult? And here’s me thinking it came naturally.’

  ‘You know, for someone who wants my help you can be a right sarky bastard at times.’

  McLean took a small bite of his cake to stop himself replying too quickly. Dalgliesh was right, of course. He needed her help. It was just difficult to put aside the loathing of years, harder still to sit across a table from this woman and not think about the hatchet job she’d done on him and the families of Donald Anderson’s other victims.

  ‘OK. Fair enough. Sorry.’ He raised both hands in a mock admission of defeat. ‘I’m not going to pretend I like you, Dalgliesh, but I’ll try to be civil.’

  ‘Aye, well.’ Dalgliesh studied him as if trying to work out whether or not he was taking the piss. He must have passed the test, as she pulled out her notebook, laid it out on the table between them.

  ‘Took a wee while to piece it all together, but I’m fairly sure I know what Ben was working on when he … you know.’

  ‘The Brotherhood?’

  Dalgliesh raised an eyebrow. ‘Aye, that. Bunch of shadowy figures pulling the strings. The secret world government behind everything bad that’s ever happened right through history. Fingers in all the pies. Even own the bloody pie factory. Make the illuminati look like amateurs.’

  ‘And Stevenson was on to them?’

  ‘Oh, he thought he was. Contacts here, secret meetings there. But it’s all bollocks, aye?’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘Pure bollocks. You’ll have talked to Dougie Ballantyne? Daft wee shite that he is.’

  McLean nodded, remembering the trip down to the Borders. Tea and gibberish.

  ‘What did you make of him?’ Dalgliesh picked up her coffee, took a drink while she waited for McLean to reply.

  ‘Delusion on a grand scale. But he’s smart. Very good at seeing patterns, connections between things that you wouldn’t think were connected. Most of the time that’s because they aren’t, but he makes a plausible argument.’

  ‘If you only take his evidence, and only the way he presents it, sure. My job, yours too I guess, is to see all sides of an argument. Check the facts. Look for verification, a second source. You start doing that with Ballantyne’s theories and they all fall apart soon enough.’

  ‘But Stevenson believed him. I thought you rated him as a journalist.’

  ‘Aye, I did. Ben was one of the best, when he put his mind to it.’

  ‘So—?’

  ‘You know what Ballantyne says about himself? How he justifies his rubbish?’

  McLean thought back to the conversation. It had only been a couple of days, but rather more than he’d hoped for had happened in the intervening time. ‘Something about being a messenger?’

  ‘That’s the one.’ Dalgliesh slurped some more coffee, looked at her biscuitless plate with something akin to regret, rubbed a nicotine-stained finger in the crumbs and stuck it in her mouth. ‘He reckons he can get away with revealing secrets because they’re feeding them to him. All part of some strategy to come out from the shadows. He actually believes the Head talks to him and tells him what to write.’

  ‘Ritchie’s expression was “stone bonker”. I think that just about sums up Douglas Ballantyne the third.’

  ‘And yet, for all we can see him for the loony he is, Ben thought he was on to something.’ Dalgliesh tapped the closed notebook lying on the table between them. ‘He really believed there was a Brotherhood. Maybe even a disembodied talking head that ruled them all.’

  ‘From what I’ve heard, Stevenson was under quite a lot of pressure. Workwise he’d not had a decent story in years. And his home life was hardly stable.’

  ‘Ah. Youse lot have talked to Charlie then.’ Dalgliesh’s face was rarely a closed book, but even so McLean was surprised at the flash of anger that spread across it.

  ‘Ex-wife of a murdered man? One of the first people we interviewed.’

  ‘Aye, well. Did she tell you how she came off in the divorce? Did she tell you she was the one playing away from home?’

  She hadn’t, of course, but it didn’t really change anything. ‘All the more reason to suspect that Stevenson wasn’t perhaps concentrating on the job as well as he should have been.’

  Dalgliesh shook her head. ‘You don’t know Ben. That’s not his way. If anything the pressure would have made him more careful, more – what’s the word? Conscientious.’

  McLean was surprised Dalgliesh even knew what it meant. ‘You saw his secret room. That wall. Didn’t look all that conscientious to me. Looked like the last stages of madness.’

  ‘Actually, I’m glad you mentioned that.’ Dalgliesh rummaged around in her shoulder bag, coming out with a handful of A4 colour prints. The first was a photograph of the room off Ben Stevenson’s bedroom, the wall covered in photos, magazine cut-outs, Post-it notes. Everything linked together with endless lines of coloured string. At this scale it was almost impossib
le to make anything of it other than a bad piece of modern abstract art.

  ‘Resolution’s not too good on the printout.’ Dalgliesh smoothed out the creases with a leathery hand, placed a couple more photographs alongside the first to make something of a montage. ‘But I’ve got the whole thing on my computer and you can zoom in enough to see what’s what. What’s interesting is there’s nothing here that’s particularly Masonic. See, there’s stuff about the Hellfire Club, Beggars Benison, all that nonsense. The Guild of Strangers gets a mention, there’s some Templar writings. There’s even some stuff about Police Scotland I’ll have to look into at a later date. But there’s no set-square and compass, no reference to any Grand Lodge or High Poobah. It’s almost as if the Freemasons were deliberately excluded from what he was looking into.’

  McLean pulled the first photograph across the table, swivelling it around so he could see it better. It didn’t really help much, all the details too small to make out properly. The original was still in place, locked up after the forensics team had been through Stevenson’s flat. He’d have to go over and have another look soon, but in the meantime he could take Dalgliesh’s word for it.

  ‘So he wasn’t really looking at the Masons, then,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, he started there. Everyone does. But then he got Ballantyne’s book and went off in a different direction. See?’ Dalgliesh prodded a yellowing finger at the photographs, sliding them over each other and obscuring half of the picture.

  ‘Not really, no. I thought you said Ballantyne was nuts. Surely Stevenson saw that too?’

  ‘Oh, aye. He saw that. But then something else caught his eye. Someone else.’

  ‘Who?’ McLean pulled one of the pictures closer, peered at the blurred lines as if they would magically clear just by squinting.

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out.’ Dalgliesh flicked a final photo on to the table. This one was a close-up of the wall, a blurred image of a man standing underneath a street lamp in the dark. Impossible to make out any features, but Stevenson had scribbled over it in red marker. ‘Who is he?’