by James Oswald
‘I’m very sorry, Miss Johnston. We’ll try to be as quick as possible, but this is a very serious situation. The more information we can gather, the better. Especially this close to the event.’
‘It’s Mrs, actually.’ Johnston shrugged. ‘You’d better come in, then.’ She stood to one side, letting McLean and Harrison into a hall cluttered with furniture just a little too large for it. No offer of tea; she simply led them over to another door, opening it to reveal a good-sized living room. A young boy sat on a sofa, huddled in close to one of the arms, his eyes darting nervously to the door as they entered. Beside him, a uniform constable first looked up, then stood swiftly.
‘Inspector. Constable.’ She straightened her uniform as she spoke, a look of hope in her eyes that she was about to be relieved of her family liaison duties. McLean so hated to disappoint people.
‘John, there’s more polis wanting to talk to you.’ Mrs Johnston addressed her son brusquely, her irritation at the way her day had started clearly not aimed just at the police. The boy who looked up at him was younger than McLean had been expecting. Too young, surely, to be out walking the dog on his own before it was light. He had some of his mother’s features about his thin face, but mostly looked worried. He flinched at the word ‘polis’ in a manner McLean would have found more understandable in a council flat in Restalrig or Sighthill than in this expensive part of town. There was something about Mrs Johnston’s accent, too, that suggested wealth was something she had come to only recently. Looking around the living room, McLean could see no obvious evidence of a Mr Johnston. There were photographs of Mrs Johnston and her son on the mantelpiece, but no father anywhere.
‘Is there a Mr Johnston still around?’ He had tried to make the question sound innocent, but the scowl that was Mrs Johnston’s response told him he’d missed that particular mark.
‘Tommy’s been dead these ten years now. Not that youse lot ever did anything to catch the bastards responsible.’
‘Tommy?’ McLean had to say the name out loud before the penny dropped. ‘Tommy Johnston? The nightclub owner? He’s John’s father?’ He looked at the boy with more sympathetic eyes. Not just because he’d lost his father but because the boy must never really have known him at all. The family liaison officer obviously understood the situation, too. She stood up, put a gentle hand on John’s shoulder. He looked from her to McLean and then to his mother, eyes wide with fear.
‘Hi there, John. I’m Tony.’ McLean crouched down so that he was at eye level, suppressing the urge to wince at the pain that shot through his hip. The cold weather didn’t do much for his old bones, particularly not the ones that had been broken.
‘You gonnae arrest me? I dint do nothing.’
‘I don’t know what they’ve been telling you about the police, John, but we don’t arrest people for no reason. And you’re right. You’ve not done anything wrong. But you did see the man in the tree, and I’d very much like to find out how he got there. So anything you can tell me about it would be helpful.’
The boy stared at him, silent. McLean could see his thoughts playing across his face, the frown deepening as he struggled to decide whether the polis could be trusted or not. Given what had happened to his father, John’s reticence was perhaps understandable.
‘What’s he called, your dog?’ McLean asked.
‘She. And she’s Tilly. Short for Tillicoultrie. Where she came from. Granny and Grampa live out there. I like going to visit them.’
‘Where’s she now? In your room?’
‘Aye. She’s happy there.’ John’s gaze flicked momentarily from McLean’s face to where his mother was standing by the door.
‘Perhaps I could meet her. But first, tell me about this morning. You were taking her for a walk in the Meadows, is that right?’
‘I take her every morning, ’fore school. She likes to chase the squirrels. Only this time she stayed close. She was whining and shivering like she was scared or something. Then I heard it flying. Sounded like a bird only much bigger, see? It was up high. Too dark, so I couldn’t see it proper like, but I could hear its wings. Tilly did, too. She pulled so hard I dropped her lead. I dint know what to do. Thought it was gonnae swoop down and catch her. She’s only wee, wouldn’t a stood a chance. Only I couldn’t call for her, or it’d have heard and come after me. Seen on the telly how they do that. Swoop down and bam! So I hid under that tree right up against the trunk, like. And then there was a scream and the tree shook and all these branches came down on top of me. I ran home without her. Only when I got here she’d run home herself. She was up against the door, shivering. Couldnae get in quick enough.’
‘He watches too much rubbish on the telly, so he does.’ Mrs Johnston spoke as if her son wasn’t in the room with them all. McLean ignored her. He’d have much preferred it if he could have talked to the boy without her there, but that would have been inappropriate at best.
‘What was flying, John? What did you see? Did it have lights on it?’
The boy paused, as if reliving the events had terrified him into silence. How old was he? McLean wasn’t that good at gauging these things, but he couldn’t be more than ten.
‘Couldn’t see well enough, could I? Only heard its wings. Reckon it must have been big, though.’
‘You heard wings, you say? Not a plane? A helicopter?’
John looked up at him again, and McLean could see the fear in his eyes. Not fear of the police but something much deeper. ‘You’re gonnae think I’m stupid. Just a wee boy making up stories. But I think it was a dragon.’
‘Tommy Johnston. There’s a name I’d not thought to hear again.’ McLean clumped down the stairs, PC Harrison beside him. The family liaison officer had left while McLean was busy being introduced to Tilly, an elderly little Jack Russell terrier who seemed to be just about the only friend in the world poor John Johnston had.
‘Should I know who he is, sir?’ Harrison asked.
McLean stopped mid step and turned to face the PC. She was young, perhaps early twenties. Slim, maybe an inch or two shorter than him, and her round face had a rosy-cheeked tint to it that suggested she was someone who spent much of her time outdoors. Beyond that she was a PC, he knew absolutely nothing about her, least of all how long she had been in uniform. It was perfectly possible there was a generation of officers out there who had never heard of Tommy Johnston, unlikely though that seemed.
‘Thomas John Johnston was one of Edinburgh’s more colourful characters. He ran a string of lap-dancing clubs across the city. A few in Perth, Dundee and Aberdeen, too. Always just the wrong side of the law, but he never did anything so obvious we could put him away for it. And he was better than the alternative, which I guess means we tolerated him.’
‘So what happened to him? He’s dead, right?’
‘Oh, very. Being shot in the head will do that.’ McLean resumed his trudge down the stairs. ‘Seems while Lothian and Borders tolerated him, others were less forgiving. It was a very professional hit. We found him in his car in a back lane at the south end of the Pentlands. Never did find out who killed him.’
‘And the clubs?’
‘His whole empire was built on tick. Creditors came and took the lot. We ended up with some fairly unsavoury Glaswegians running things for a while. People trafficking, drugs. With Tommy it had been pretty much just prostitution, and he looked after his girls, unlike most of the pimps we have to deal with now.’
‘And that makes it OK, then? He’s nice to the sex workers so he gets a free pass?’
McLean stopped just by the front door, pulled up short by the vehemence in PC Harrison’s tone. ‘I’m not sure a bullet between the eyes is that much of a free pass, Constable.’
‘Aye, but that wasn’t us, was it?’ She held his gaze perhaps a second too long, then dropped her head. ‘I’m sorry, sir. Not my place to say.’
‘No. You’re right. And don’t be scared to speak your mind. Not to me, at least. There’s other officers in CID may not like it,
but that’s their problem. Come on.’ McLean pushed open the door to a blast of ice-cold air from outside. PC Harrison stood in the hallway, mouth hanging slightly open, the door almost catching her off guard as it swung closed on a heavy spring. She leapt forward with surprising grace and agility, ending up perhaps closer to McLean than was comfortable or appropriate. He stepped back reflexively, foot slipping on the ice-slick flagstone, and only saved himself from sprawling on his arse by grabbing the nearby railing. When he pulled his hand away again it was covered in something dark green and sticky.
‘You OK, sir?’ PC Harrison asked as McLean sniffed whatever it was that was coating the railings, wrinkling his nose at the meaty stench. A smear of something greenish-brown carried on up the outside wall of the building, too, some of it splattered on the door. He’d noticed it on the way in and thought it a well-aimed seagull dropping, but the sheer quantity and the smell of it suggested mischief rather than misadventure, canine rather than avian. He scraped what he could off his palm, then pulled out a clean handkerchief and wiped away the rest.
‘Bloody kids throwing shit at the door. Reckon there’s a story in that, but not ours to investigate.’ He considered putting the handkerchief back in his pocket, then settled for just bunching it up in his soiled fist. There’d be a bin somewhere he could chuck it in, and one of the forensics vans would have antiseptic wipes. ‘Come on, let’s go and see if they’ve finished fetching our man down out of that tree.’
It wasn’t far to walk back to the scene, and PC Harrison said nothing the whole way. McLean could see long before they arrived that the operation to safely extract the body was still underway. The cherry picker reached into the leafless canopy and a couple of men in hard hats and climbing harnesses were halfway up the tree itself. At least the pathologist had finished his inspection. McLean found him sitting on the passenger seat of his muddy green Jaguar, door open as he pulled off his white paper overalls. Far from his normal cheerful self, Cadwallader looked even paler than he had before, but he brightened a little when he saw them approach.
‘Tony, I was wondering where you’d disappeared to. And who’s this new friend you’ve made?’
‘PC Harrison’s been helping me interview the boy who found the body. Here, you haven’t got any wipes in there, have you, Angus?’ McLean held up his grubby hand. ‘Touched something I don’t really want to think too hard about.’
Cadwallader leaned into the car, came back with a pack of supermarket own-brand baby wipes. ‘There you go. Got through a fair few myself. Poor chap didn’t just bleed out up there. Branches have ruptured his guts, and more besides. Not going to be much fun doing the PM, I can tell you.’
McLean took one of the wipes and set about his hand with it, unsure whether the pungent synthetic lavender smell was any better than the dog-mess odour. He scrunched the whole lot up into a ball along with his soiled handkerchief, then looked around for somewhere to put it all.
‘Here.’ Cadwallader held up a small plastic bin and McLean dropped the lot in.
‘So, what’s the deal with our dead man, then?’ he asked.
‘He’s dead. That much I can confirm. Superficial injuries are consistent with him being dropped into the tree canopy from a considerable height above. It’s only bad luck that he didn’t carry on straight through and end up on the path there.’ Cadwallader nodded in the direction of the inflatable safety bag rolled out across the tarmac track.
‘Any idea if it was the fall that killed him? Or was he already dead?’
‘I’ll have a better idea once I’ve had a chance to examine him somewhere I’m not in danger of imminent death myself. But given the amount of blood on the branches directly beneath him, I’d have to say it was the impact that killed him. That and being gutted by a broken stick.’
‘Any idea who he is?’
‘Not a clue. His face is pretty badly beaten up. They sent the crime-scene photographer up in that contraption of theirs after I’d finished, so I’ve no doubt someone’ll put a name to the face soon. That’s your department, though, Tony. Not mine.’
‘Well, at least I won’t ask you for a time of death. Not yet, anyway. If it was the fall that killed him, we’ve got a fairly good time for that already.’
‘The boy?’
‘If he’s reliable, aye. Says he heard something crash into the trees when he was out walking his dog. Mind you, he also says he thought it was a dragon come to get him.’
‘A dragon, you say?’ Cadwallader raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘I’ll be sure to keep that in mind when I’m examining him.’
‘Think that’s them bringing him down now, sir.’
McLean turned away from the pathologist, looking in the same direction as PC Harrison, up at the tree. Sure enough, the cherry picker had manoeuvred itself in under the body, a stretcher strapped to the box. The two climbers were in place, too, perched on branches McLean thought couldn’t possibly support their weight. He had scrambled higher up trees without any ropes or heed for his safety when he’d been a boy, but watching them now gave him an uncomfortable sensation in the pit of his stomach.
When it came, the noise was like a rifle shot, echoing out across the Meadows. For a moment McLean thought that was what it was, and then the realization dawned. He saw a brief scramble as the operator in the cherry picker lunged for the stretcher. The two climbers sprang back, their training kicking in instinctively as the branch that had been holding up the body snapped.
It fell like a dead weight, rapid and ungainly, hit headfirst into the inflated safety bag with a sound like a box of eggs dropped on a supermarket floor. For long moments there was only silence, underscored by the chuntering noise of the pump as it struggled to reinflate the bag. Then, with an audible creaking of joints, Cadwallader hauled himself to his feet and began pulling his soiled white overalls on again.
‘Well, that’s one way of doing it,’ he said.
4
‘What I want to know is how the fuck he got up there in the first place.’
McLean sat at the large table that dominated one end of Detective Superintendent Brooks’ office, trying not to be distracted by the view out of the glass wall. The cold, still morning had turned into a bright day, a weak sun struggling to warm a sky of blue so pale it was almost grey. Behind the window it was pleasantly, almost soporifically warm, and the meeting so far hadn’t been all that stimulating. There was something about the detective superintendent’s tone that struck a nerve, though.
‘Really, sir? That’s your first thought? Not, who is this guy? Why was he killed? What message is this meant to send?’
‘Now now, Tony. Those are all important questions, it’s true. But you can’t deny it’s unusual to find a body high up in a tree like that.’
Sitting opposite him, face shaded by the sunlight streaming in behind his head, Deputy Chief Constable Steve ‘Call-me-Stevie’ Robinson made his usual half-hearted attempt at pouring oil on troubled waters.
‘In some cultures, that’s a standard method of disposal. Leave the cadaver out for the birds to pick at. Something about returning the body to nature once the soul’s departed.’ Acting Detective Inspector Kirsty Ritchie chimed in with an observation that was probably only slightly more useful than the deputy chief constable’s. ‘Not that I think that’s what we’re dealing with here,’ she added, the hint of a smile playing across her lips.
‘It’s a bloody nightmare is what it is,’ Brooks said. ‘Closing the Meadows like that. We shut down the whole city for most of the morning. No way we can keep the details under wraps. Press are already sniffing around like dogs.’
‘Why would we want to keep the details under wraps, sir?’ McLean sat forward, finally committing himself to the meeting. ‘The sooner we can get an ID on the victim, the sooner we can find out who killed him and why. The press can help us there, if we let them.’
‘You’d know, of course, McLean. Heard you were like this now, you and that reporter Dalgliesh.’ Sitting next to Brooks like
a lovesick puppy, Detective Chief Inspector Mike Spence held up his right hand, index and middle fingers twisted together. McLean suppressed the urge to sigh; it was partly his fault Spence was DCI anyway. If he’d not been so reluctant to accept the post, then things might have been very different.
‘You know what they say, Mike. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. Classically educated man like you, I’d have thought you’d know that.’
Spence twitched at the insult, notoriously prickly about his poor background and state schooling. McLean found it hard to care. The man could be a good detective when he put his mind to it, but these days he seemed to be interested only in criticizing all his colleagues. That and brown-nosing the higher-ups in search of promotion.
‘Gentlemen, none of this is getting us any closer to an answer. And Christ knows, we need one soon.’ Brooks laid his pudgy hands out flat on the table like a couple of strings of badly made sausages. ‘McLean. What’s the situation with the crime scene? Forensics finished up, have they?’
‘Apart from a small area at the end of Jawbone Walk, yes. Melville Drive’s open again and the traffic’s getting back to normal. We’ve not managed to identify the body yet. His face was badly battered before he fell out of the tree on to his head. Afterwards, well …’ McLean left it hanging, much like the string of entrails ripped from the victim’s belly that had been still up in the tree when he had left.
‘And he was dropped there. From a good height? An airplane, perhaps, or a helicopter? Has anyone spoken to Air Traffic Control?’
‘DS Laird’s on it. We spoke to a potential witness, too, but I’m not sure he’ll be much use to us. He’s only ten, it was still dark, and he reckons it was a dragon coming for him and his dog.’