by James Oswald
‘On foot, I think.’ He pulled over to the kerb, just past a gateway into a garden so choked with mature trees that it was impossible to see the house that lay beyond. They both climbed out, feeling the heat of yet another long sunny day reflect off the street and the stone walls to either side. That was when McLean noticed the smell.
‘Well, well, well. What on earth brings you here?’
He turned to see an unwelcome figure climb out of a nondescript car parked just a few tens of yards further on. Jo Dalgliesh had a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth and breathed out the words in a cloud of her own smoke.
‘I’m tempted to say the same for you, Ms Dalgliesh.’
‘Suspect we’re both interested in the same thing.’ The reporter nodded in the direction of the house. ‘Norman Bale?’
‘What do you know about him?’ McLean tried not to make the question sound too urgent, but he could see from Dalgliesh’s stance that she knew something and was playing with him.
‘He’s no’ in. That’s one thing.’
‘You’ve been up to the house?’
‘Aye, creepy place it is.’ Dalgliesh took a long drag on her cigarette, stared at it for a while as if unable to comprehend why it had finished, then flicked it on to the pavement and ground it out under her foot. It was obvious she wasn’t in a sharing mood.
‘Look. You know how important this investigation is. Are you going to tell me why you’re here, or do I need to get Constable MacBride to arrest you for littering?’
Dalgliesh let out her lungful of smoke in a long slow breath, then started to search for something in her bag. ‘All right, all right. You were much more fun when we were working together, you know.’
‘Thought we were supposed to be still.’
‘Aye, well. If you’d been a bit freer with the sharing, maybe I’d have given you this a bit quicker.’ Dalgliesh handed over a thin sheaf of papers, mostly photographs of the research wall in Ben Stevenson’s flat. McLean leafed through them, but it was hard to make out details in the failing light.
‘Always thought it was a bit strange, Ben falling for some conspiracy nutter.’ Dalgliesh produced a cigarette packet from the depths of her bag and proceeded to light up again. ‘He could be a bit stupid at times, but no’ like that. When you told me someone had broken in and taken down all that stuff he’d got, I reckoned it had to be important.’
‘And it led you here?’ McLean asked.
‘Aye. Took a while to find it, but it was there. He worked out his contact was following him, so he followed him back. Reckon he probably thought there might be more to the story than he was being told. Guess he found out the hard way how true that was. So tell me, Inspector. Why do you want to talk to Norman Bale?’
‘He’s not here, sir.’
McLean and Dalgliesh both started at the voice. DC MacBride appeared from the gloom, his feet barely making any noise on the gravel.
‘Jesus, Constable. You’re a creepy sod sometimes.’ Dalgliesh gave a low chuckle.
‘No one home at all?’ McLean asked.
‘Doesn’t look like it. Door’s locked. Most of the downstairs windows are shuttered.’
McLean looked up the driveway into the gloom. His eyes were adjusting to the falling darkness now, better able to make out the house. It didn’t look at all changed from how he remembered it, but it felt very different. Very wrong.
‘Let’s just go have a closer look, eh?’
The house was dark, surrounded by trees that cut off even the minimal light from the street lamps and the darkening gloaming sky. McLean stood outside the front door and was transported back decades. He remembered that one final summer as if it had been a whole lifetime; a clarity of memory associated only with childhood. Growing up brought so many distractions.
‘Are we looking for anything in particular, sir?’ DC MacBride stood perhaps a little too close, and McLean could tell from his body language that he wasn’t all that happy to be there. Over by the large window that opened on to the morning room, Jo Dalgliesh was poking around in the gloom like an inept cat burglar.
‘Small pot. It used to live by the boot scraper in the porch. Probably a bit less obvious now.’ McLean fetched his pen torch from a pocket, then shone it around the area. Sure enough, an upside-down terracotta pot in the flowerbed a few feet off yielded a rusted key. So much for security.
‘Touch nothing.’ He handed a pair of latex gloves to Dalgliesh, pulled a pair on himself. There were so many reasons why he shouldn’t have been doing this, and yet he needed to know what secrets the house revealed. In the blackness the nods of understanding he received from his companions were minimal. He directed the torch at the keyhole, slid the key in and turned.
Inside was a smell that he couldn’t place. Not mouldering or rot, but something older and darker. It put him on edge, and did the same to Dalgliesh and MacBride if the way they drew closer in was anything to go by. McLean reached out and found the light switch, lower down the wall perhaps than he remembered, but exactly where his six-year-old self would have expected it to be. He flicked it up and bathed the hallway in light.
‘Warn me before you do that again.’ Dalgliesh stepped away from him, her hand reflexively going to her side. McLean wondered whether she had been about to hold his, and found he couldn’t blame her. There was nothing obviously unusual about the room they were standing in, but it raised the hairs on the back of his neck all the same.
‘Kitchen’s that way, if I remember right.’ He pointed across to a door beside the stairs. ‘That’s where the family spent most of their time.’
‘You know this nutter then?’ Dalgliesh asked.
‘One summer. A long time ago, Norman Bale was my friend. Whoever we’re looking for, whatever he says, he’s not Norman Bale.’ McLean led the way, retracing childhood steps along a corridor far shorter than he remembered, through a much smaller door still strangely covered in green baize, and into the kitchen.
‘Looks like a kitchen to me.’ MacBride walked slowly around the table in the middle of the room, ran a gloved hand over the spotless wooden surface. McLean remembered a room full of life, a place where things happened, food was prepared, plans made, prayers said. This wasn’t the heart of the house any more. He crossed to the stove, placed a hand on the cover over the hotplate, lifted it and felt the flat metal underneath. Cold, or at least as cold as the summer heat would let it be. Certainly not lit.
‘Not in here,’ he said. ‘Maybe this way.’
They followed him out into the hallway again, then through another door into the drawing room. This was no more alive than the kitchen, the air stale, the dust heavy on every surface. If the man claiming to be Norman Bale had been in the house, he hadn’t spent any time in here.
Neither had he spent time in old Mr Bale’s study, the morning room or the library. With each new door opened, each light switched on, McLean found himself transported back in time. And with each new door he also began to see how the house had been frozen in time, how nothing had changed since that long-ago summer.
And then they reached the dining room.
Perhaps he had been expecting it and given off subliminal signals. Or maybe there really was something about the place that put people’s backs up. Either way, as he pushed open the final door downstairs and reached for the light switch, McLean could feel Dalgliesh and MacBride press in close behind him. The smell that had bothered him when he’d opened the front door was stronger in here, a wrongness he couldn’t quite place. Until he switched on the light.
As a young, innocent wee boy, McLean had eaten lunch at that table. Guzzled down plates of jelly, Angel Delight and all those terrible things people had thought were food in the 1970s. He remembered a polished surface you weren’t allowed to put your glass of squash down on, a slightly scary room where adults talked to you as if you might one day be an adult too.
‘Oh my God.’ Dalgliesh took his hand this time, clutching it hard and drawing herself closer to him than was
perhaps comfortable. Behind him, McLean heard DC MacBride take a sharp breath, and he could hardly blame the constable. Neither he nor the reporter had ever met Colin and Ina Bale, after all.
They sat as they always had done, much older than he remembered them, but still easy to recognise. Mr Bale was at the head of the table, his wife to his right and at the side. In the artificial light it was difficult to tell how long they had been dead, but it had been a while. They looked like wax dummies, hair turned thin and straggly, faces fixed in rictus grins, eyes dried and white with cataracts. Places had been laid at the table in front of them both, empty plates awaiting food that would never come. And to the other side was a third place where someone had quite recently sat and eaten a meal.
68
‘The Christian cross is a misrepresentation, of course. It looks impressive, but from a carpentry point of view it’s inefficient. Most Roman crucifixes were just two bits of wood roped together in the middle and splayed to form an X.’
He is woozy from the anaesthetic, but I can see the spark in him as he awakens. Arms splayed, legs akimbo, I imagine he must be struggling to work out where he is. The drugs will dull most of the pain, but soon he will feel the nails through his palms and feet. I imagine he’ll start to panic then.
‘It’s no matter, of course. Christian symbol, Roman torture. It’s all a means to an end. Your end, as it happens. And your beginning.’
Eyes flutter under lids taped down. It will be dark where he is. His breathing is growing rapid, snot spiralling down from his nose to form a little puddle on the floor. He can’t breathe through his mouth, of course. That’s taped up too. We are closer here to any passers-by. I can’t take the risk of being interrupted before this ceremony is over.
‘You don’t know just how blessed you are. How lucky. God has singled you out to be with him in heaven. Your soul is pure.’
Naked, his body is thin, ribs straining through pale skin turned orange by the light of the setting sun outside. Greens and reds and blues mottle the flesh on his arms, low light filtering through the smaller north windows. East–west the church lies, catching the rising and setting sun through stained glass at either end of the aisle. Except that this far north, at this time of year, the sun rises far north of east and sets far north of west. It doesn’t matter, truly. The perfect moment will be here soon enough.
I stand before him, watching as the light shifts and swirls over his body. Outside, the city roar has faded away to nothing. It does not exist any more. We are alone, he and I. And God.
‘Our father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.’
He shakes his head from side to side, cheeks puffing in and out as he tries to breathe. His arms tense, hands sliding over their slippery nails, but I’ve bent the ends over. He won’t escape them. Blood drips from his stigmata, runs down his arms and drips from his elbows. It mingles in the dust on the floor with the blood from the wounds in his feet.
‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.’
I can feel the moment building, the tension stretching the air as if it were made of foam. I too find it difficult to breathe, awed in the presence of God.
‘Give us this day, our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we forgive out debtors.’
I am heavy now like a sack of bones. Their weight drags me to the floor, knees settling into the dirt and the blood. And still I am ground down by that awesome presence, squeezed until my face is pushed into the mess.
‘And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’
His breathing is ragged now, the weight of his body making it almost impossible for him to suck in air, the panic crushing him even as the weight evaporates from my shoulders. He won’t hang upon the cross for long, agonising hours. Death will take him swiftly, God’s mercy as He gathers up this saved soul to Him.
‘For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory.’
I look up and see the golden light of the sun, piercing through the coloured glass to limn his head like a halo. For a moment I see the crown of thorns, the blood running down his cheeks, then it blurs as my eyes fill with tears, my whole body suffused with joy.
‘For ever and ever.’
He is close now, and I know the perfect ecstasy of being in the presence of the divine. And yet even in that moment there is the exquisite sadness. Knowing that it is not my soul that will be gathered up. Knowing that it is not yet my time, that I must struggle still longer in this mundane, sinful world. And as I gaze up at this perfect, dying man, I feel the serpent of jealousy squirm in my guts and know why it is that I am not yet worthy.
The tears come freely now and I drop my head in supplication. Kneel before Christ on the cross and pray.
‘Amen.’
69
The gloom outside the Bale house was only slightly less menacing than that within as McLean pulled the front door closed. He considered asking Dalgliesh to stay in her car, or better yet to go home and wait for him to call her, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. She was too much of a reporter to resist following him around as this juicy story unfolded.
‘Get on to control will you, Constable. We need to secure the scene as soon as possible. Wait here until back-up arrives, then come and find me at the rectory.’
MacBride nodded his understanding, pulled out his airwave set and started to make the call.
‘And Stuart? Don’t do anything stupid. This man’s very dangerous.’
‘I’ll keep out of sight, sir. And don’t worry, I’ll not try and tackle him on my own if he shows up.’
‘Right. Dalgliesh, you’re with me. And keep your eyes peeled. Last thing I want is to bump into this man unawares. Whoever he is.’ McLean set off down the drive at a rapid pace, partly to avoid any of the inevitable questions the reporter would throw at him, but mostly because his stomach was telling him something bad was going down.
‘Whoever he is …? You mean he’s no’ real?’ Dalgliesh wheezed as she struggled to keep up. McLean ignored her. They reached the rectory in minutes, and he rang the doorbell. A light shone in the porch even though it wasn’t yet dark, the evening sun still painting the side of the stone steeple in autumn orange. Some of the scaffolding had begun to come down, he noticed. Piles lying beside the graves. It still surrounded the old building like a canker. Engulfed it.
DS Ritchie opened the door a few moments later. Her expression was one of alarm, her free hand unconsciously reaching for her throat and the slim silver band that hung around her neck and tucked into her blouse.
‘You’ve not found him, I take it?’
‘No. Is Mary in?’
‘Kitchen.’ Ritchie stood aside and let them pass.
‘Norman’s not here, Inspector.’ Mary Currie appeared from the hallway, her face pale in the shadows.
‘Norman’s not Norman.’
‘That’s what Kirsty said, but it can’t be true. I’ve known Norman for years.’
Could he be wrong? McLean pulled the e-fit photo out of his pocket, unfolded it and stared at it again. Impossible to tell whether the badly constructed image was the same person as the weedy six-year-old boy he’d known. The boy whose parents were so religious. The boy who his grandmother had told him was dead.
‘Daniel’s missing too,’ Ritchie said.
McLean’s train of thought derailed. A horrible cold sensation forming in the pit of his stomach. ‘I thought he’d gone to St Andrews to meet the bishop?’
‘So did I, but he never showed up. They phoned about an hour ago, apparently. Wondering where he was.’
McLean could hear the panic rising in the detective sergeant’s voice. Controlled for now, but betraying her thoughts all too clearly. They weren’t that far from his own.
‘Look, why don’t we all go through to the kitchen?’ Mary Currie was the voice of reason. ‘The kettle’s on. We’ll have a cup of tea and get to the bottom of this.’
‘Dan’s still not answering his phone. Just keeps go
ing to message.’ Ritchie paced back and forth in the rectory kitchen, doing a good impression of DCI Brooks despite her lack of bulk. She’d called the number three times since McLean and Dalgliesh had followed her into the kitchen.
‘We’ll find him. Find both of them.’ McLean tried to reassure the detective sergeant, only realising what he’d said as the words came out.
‘You think they’re together? Why would they be together?’
‘No. That’s not what I meant.’ McLean tried to convince himself, couldn’t quite manage. He turned his attention to the minister, even now pouring teaspoons of sugar into everyone’s milky tea.
‘Mary, I’m right in thinking Daniel’s living here? In the rectory?’
‘Yes, of course. It’s a big old house to rattle around in on my own. I’m forever picking up waifs and strays. Much like you, really.’
‘I couldn’t have a quick look at his room, could I?’
The minister frowned. ‘Why would you want to do that?’
‘Just to see if he left any clue as to where he was going.’ It wasn’t a good lie, but the minister shrugged.
‘Well, I suppose if I can’t trust a policeman, who can I?’ She picked up two mugs, handing one to Dalgliesh, who took it with a little start of surprise.
‘I’ll show you, sir.’ Ritchie stuck her phone back into her pocket, call number four having been as unsuccessful as all the rest.