by James Oswald
‘Thanks, Rae. I might well take you up on that.’
‘And as for you, Tony –’ Rachel gave him a peck on the cheek – ‘stop running away from the best thing that ever happened to you.’
29
A hard frost had left McLean’s car almost impossible to get into and even harder to warm up, which meant that he was late for the morning briefing. As he approached the major incident room, Detective Superintendent Brooks lumbered down the corridor from the opposite direction, followed a couple of steps behind by DCI Spence and a gaggle of detective constables, like so many obedient wives.
‘Cutting it a bit fine aren’t you, McLean?’ Brooks growled like the bear had been drinking heavily the night before. Behind him, Spence looked like he’d been on an even more epic bender, his face drawn, sweat slicking skin so grey it might have been paper. If he hadn’t been standing upright, McLean might have mistaken him for a corpse.
‘You know what they say, sir. If I’m late, I’m wasting your time; if I’m early, I’m wasting mine.’ He gave the detective superintendent his best innocent smile, another quick glance at the walking dead that was DCI Spence, and then he ducked in through the incident room door.
There was more of a buzz to the place than there had been at the catch-up briefing the night before, although on reflection it would have been hard for there to be less. Over on the far side of the room, McLean saw that the original map of the city had been joined by a large flat-screen monitor showing a smaller-scale image of the whole of East Lothian and South Fife. The same image appeared on a smaller monitor at a nearby desk, where DC Harrison was busy duplicating the white dots from the previous days’ interviews, which would hopefully be supplemented by more from the late shift working their way through the phone contacts.
‘Good work, Constable,’ he said as he neared the big screen, seeing what looked more like the splatter from an incontinent seagull than any actual pattern. ‘At least, I think it is.’
‘Oh. Morning, sir.’ Harrison tapped at her keyboard, shifted the mouse and tapped once more before she turned to face him, then her gaze darted past him and her eyes widened. ‘Sirs.’
McLean turned wearily to see that Brooks and his entourage had followed him right across the room. The detective superintendent was staring at the big screen through narrowed eyes.
‘What’s all this, then?’
‘All the people who contacted the hotline after the press release, sir. We’ve been weeding out the improbable stories and interviewing a few of the more plausible ones. Plotting time and place to see if we can’t work out how Chalmers got to the Meadows, and where from.’
Brooks carried on peering myopically at the map, but behind him DCI Spence made a noise that sounded a bit like someone strangling a chicken.
‘Is there a problem, Mike?’ McLean asked. ‘Should I ask a constable to fetch a glass of water?’
‘Very funny, McLean.’ Spence’s voice told eloquently the lie of his words. His eyes were watery and this close there was a scent coming off him that wasn’t unpleasant but neither was it healthy. He flicked his head back, using his weak chin to indicate the spatter of white dots spread over the city. ‘You’ll be needing something a bit stronger than a glass of water if that’s the best you can come up with. Maybe some of that ridiculously expensive whisky you’re so fond of. Too fond of, I’ll wager.’
McLean ignored the jibe as best he could. It was true he’d often sat in his favourite armchair with a small dram of whisky from a bottle that had cost the wrong side of a hundred pounds, but too fond? That was a bit strong.
‘At least I’ve something to be fond of, Mike. It must be so difficult loving only yourself.’
‘Are you two going to bicker like old women all day?’ Detective Superintendent Brooks asked. ‘Only if you are, can you not do it in front of the constables?’
‘Sir.’ McLean nodded, suitably chastised. It was too early for a proper argument anyway.
‘This map.’ Brooks tossed a hand in its general direction. ‘Is it as useless as it looks?’
‘That depends –’ McLean began, but DC Harrison butted in.
‘Sorry to interrupt, sir, but it’s a bit confusing because it’s not finished yet.’
Brooks made a low rumbling noise that might have been a precursor to the main earthquake or might have been an invitation to Harrison to continue. Whichever it was, she took it as the latter. She had stood up in the presence of the detective superintendent, but now she sat down again and began tapping at the keyboard.
‘The white dots are the geographical locations of all the callers claiming to have heard something like a plane or helicopter that morning, barring the obvious crazies. This is everything we’ve got, regardless of time and bearing in mind that very few people have reported any kind of actual sighting.’
‘We know he was dropped from an aircraft of some form. How does confirming that help us? Or have you still got teams out in the Pentlands looking for dragons?’
‘Actually sir, we reckon whatever it was brought Chalmers to the city came from the north or north-east. Not the south.’ DC Harrison tapped her keyboard again and some of the white points turned red. ‘See?’
‘What’s this?’ Brooks stepped closer to the screen. Forgotten to put in his contact lenses again.
‘This is the points filtered by time, sir. Everything within a half-hour window of when we know Chalmers must have been dropped. Well, approximately. We don’t know how long it took the wee boy to run home, or how long before his mum called after that, but I’ve made my best estimate and come up with this.’
McLean peered at the map on the big screen. The white points were still there, like second-hand pizza on a Saturday-night pavement, but the red points formed a much tighter group. They clustered around Newington, Sciennes and the Meadows itself in a squashed circle whose centre was just about near enough Jawbone Walk to be statistically significant. More interesting to him though was the tail on the circle, heading off over Dumbiedykes and the parliament before petering out as it curved north over Trinity and Newhaven.
‘And what’s this?’ Brooks stabbed a pudgy finger at a single red point on the south coast of Fife. It was hard not to draw a line to it from the city.
‘That’s Bill Chalmers’ house, sir. Where he was last known to be.’
‘That’s very good work, Constable. And thanks.’ McLean kept his eyes on the big screen, not wanting to watch as Brooks and Spence stalked out of the major incident room, followed by a gaggle of sycophant detective sergeants and constables.
‘Thanks? For what, sir?’ Harrison asked.
‘For this.’ He gestured towards the mess of red and white dots. ‘And for stopping me having a go at Spence, I guess. There’s something about him that just winds me up. Even if he does look like something out of a horror movie right now.’
‘Is it true what they say about him and the detective superintendent?’
McLean stopped himself from asking what it was that they said. He knew exactly who they were, the junior officers taking the piss out of their superiors whenever they could. He’d done it himself as a constable, less so as a sergeant. It was important for morale, but only so far. And it wasn’t something constables were supposed to share with inspectors.
‘I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,’ he said. ‘Now, where are we with the interviews?’
Harrison blushed a little at the reprimand, but her embarrassment didn’t last long. ‘All done, sir, and all in the database. It was much easier once we got the big screen and the mapping software sorted. Not sure why we didn’t have it here from the start.’
McLean took a sweeping look around the major incident room, seeing the busy horde of constables, plain clothes and uniform, carrying out the thousand and one tasks that were more about making sure the investigation ran smoothly and on budget than actually solving the case. He knew there was a need for the procedure, that simple and boring things like ploughing through endless phone calls f
rom the public were what would give them the break they needed, but it still didn’t feel like detective work to him.
‘So what’s next? Have we had forensic results back from the mews flat or the charity offices yet?’
Harrison looked slightly lost. ‘I don’t know, sir. I think DS Laird was in charge of that. Do you want me to chase them up?’
McLean stared at the screen for a moment. ‘No. They’ll get here eventually. I’m not holding out any great hopes they’ll give us much anyway. I’m more interested in this.’ His eyes glazed over as he let his thoughts wander, turning the image into a mess of greens and blues. They headed out across the Forth from Newhaven, and sooner or later he’d have to follow that lead back to Fife. But there was another case that needed his attention just west of there, a coincidence that didn’t sit well. ‘Do you know if the house where we found Malky Davison is still secure?’
‘Sir?’ DC Harrison’s puzzled frown suggested he’d made one too many mental leaps. She was young and inexperienced. Hopefully she’d catch up soon.
‘Muirhouse. You know. Where we found the dead drug addict?’
Harrison shook her head slightly. ‘I know who he is, sir. Just wasn’t sure how it fitted in with the interviews.’
‘Never mind. Just find us a car, can you? I really don’t fancy driving the Alfa over there and I’d like to have another look at the place before the locals start using it as a dosshouse again.’
The little red lights on the dashboard read minus two as McLean turned up the heater in the pool car to max. Outside, the air was clear, a pale blue sky threatening even lower temperatures as darkness fell. DC Harrison drove carefully, no doubt mindful of black ice. They were twenty minutes into the journey before she finally spoke.
‘Why are we going back to Muirhouse, sir? Thought we’d come to the conclusion Davison slipped off the wagon after his boss died so publicly.’
‘That sounds like Brooks talking. Find the simplest solution and fit the evidence to it.’
Harrison flushed slightly, her cheeks reddening as if she had been scolded. ‘Isn’t it usually the simplest solution, though, sir? I mean, Occam’s razor and all that?’
McLean almost made a disparaging comment about standards in education but stopped himself at the last minute. ‘You’re right,’ he said instead. ‘But simplest doesn’t mean ignoring evidence because it doesn’t fit in with your solution. Take Davison. There’s a logical explanation for what happened to him, sure. He was a recovering addict who was pushed back over the edge. It’s not uncommon for people like that to overdose. Chances are his death was just another tragic accident. But we can’t ignore the fact that his place of work was turned over, and we have to ask the question why he was in Muirhouse when he lived on the Dalry Road? What’s so special about that derelict council house?’
As he spoke, they turned the corner into the street, seeing the house in question up ahead. Blue-and-white crime scene tape still covered the doorway, but the main deterrent to the locals was a squad car parked conspicuously across the road. Harrison pulled in behind it and killed the engine as a couple of uniform constables climbed out.
‘Morning, Janie,’ one of them said, then noticed McLean getting out of the passenger side. ‘Sir. Heard you wanted another look at the place.’
McLean nodded. ‘This part of your beat?’
‘Aye. We cover the whole of Muirhouse, down the coast to Newhaven too, if necessary.’
‘Know anything about these houses?’ McLean indicated the row of council tenements, all with boarded-up ground-floor windows and an enviable collection of graffiti.
‘Scheduled for demolition a while back, so I heard. There’s meant to be new housing association blocks going up in their place, but planning and funding keep getting in the way.’ The constable rubbed his hands together and blew on them for warmth. McLean couldn’t blame him; it was freezing, and the icy wind whistling around the crumbling buildings didn’t bother going around a person, just cut straight through.
‘Any idea who used to live there? Before it was all boarded up?’
The first constable shook his head. ‘Sorry, sir, before my time.’ He turned to his colleague. ‘You any idea, Andy?’
As McLean turned to face the other constable, an older man who might possibly have been working the area when people still lived in it, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye. A man, dishevelled and hunched over himself, had appeared from the gap between two of the blocks and was walking towards the cordoned-off entrance, head down. He looked up as if suddenly remembering something, a flash of pale face as he saw the policemen, then he swiftly turned and started to walk in the opposite direction. He didn’t run, but his shuffle sped up and he disappeared back the way he had come. Quite clearly he didn’t want to be anywhere near them.
‘You see that?’ McLean asked the constables. He stepped out into the road and hurried over, expecting them to follow him. By the time he reached the gap between the two blocks and glanced back, they were still standing beside their squad car, mouths open. DC Harrison was nowhere to be seen.
Shaking his head, McLean set off down the narrow passageway, coming out in a scrubby communal area at the back of the development that only someone with a very vivid imagination could call a garden. At first he couldn’t see the man, but then he spotted him, heading away towards a similar passage on the other side. Suppressing the urge to shout, ‘Stop! Police!’ he hurried after him, careful to avoid tripping over the abandoned shopping trolleys, broken bicycles, discarded mattresses and endless other rubbish strewn around.
The man wasn’t moving quickly, but he clearly knew where he was going, which gave him an advantage. McLean barked his shin against a metal post hidden in the long grass, letting out a choice expletive at the pain, and limped on. He reached the passageway just as the man was approaching the other end and the street beyond.
‘Wait. I just want to talk.’ It was a stupid thing to say, but it seemed to work. The man stopped, turned and faced him. McLean didn’t recognize him, hadn’t really expected to.
‘Fuck off, pig,’ the man said, then turned away again. Straight into the path of DC Harrison as she stepped out to block the passage.
‘You kiss your mother with that mouth?’ she asked, and before he could say anything else he was in an arm lock on the ground.
30
‘Why’d you run away from us? And what were you doing sniffing around our crime scene in the first place?’
McLean sat on the business side of the plain, Formica-topped table in Interview Room Three and wished he was in Interview Room One, where the ventilation worked, or even back in the observation booth and letting someone else do the interrogation. Sitting across from him, the man DC Harrison had so skilfully detained didn’t look like a person so much as a mismatched collection of skin and rags. And smell. There was a miasma rising from him that even a powerful extractor fan would have struggled to cope with. In here, far from any windows or any other kind of draught, the effect was more powerful than any chemical weapon banned under the Geneva Convention. He had reluctantly given his name as Scotty Ferguson, and he had a record of convictions going back a decade. More interesting to McLean was the fact that he was currently undergoing one of Morningstar’s rehabilitation programmes. That and the two medicine bottles they had found on him, their contents now on their way to Forensics for urgent analysis.
‘Dunno what yez mean.’ Ferguson coughed, dislodging something wet and slippery from his lungs that McLean hoped wasn’t going to make itself known to the rest of them. Beside him, DC Harrison was getting her first suspect interview experience the hard way. Hovering a few paces back, Grumpy Bob had the benefit of being close to the door, should the atmosphere become unbreathable.
‘These bottles we found in the pocket of your …’ McLean paused, considering how best to describe the tattered rags that hung from the man’s shoulders. ‘… Coat.’
‘Dunno what yez talkin’ aboot. ’Snot mine tha
t. Never seen ’em before.’
McLean leaned back in his chair, partly to put as much distance between himself and the source of the stench as possible, partly because leaning forward was making his hip ache.
‘I’m inclined to believe they’re not yours, Scotty.’ McLean lifted one of the bottles off the table, peering at the label through the plastic of the evidence bag. There were no words on it, just an abstract design that looked remarkably similar to the tattoos on Malky Davison and Bill Chalmers.
‘I can go, then?’ Ferguson made to stand up, but without much enthusiasm. The effort of lifting his body a few inches seemed to exhaust him, and he slumped back down in his seat with a noise McLean hoped wasn’t a trump.
‘Funny,’ he mused. ‘Like I said, I believe they’re not yours. I don’t believe you’ve never seen them before. What’s in them, Scotty? What’s the significance of these designs?’
A haunted look spread over Ferguson’s face. Hard to see the true colour of his skin under all the grime and stubble, but McLean could have sworn he paled at the question. He said nothing, just folded his arms, his gaze flicking this way and that, avoiding McLean’s eyes until it finally alighted on DC Harrison’s chest. Staring at that seemed to soothe him. McLean put the bottle back down on the table. ‘You know Malky Davison, don’t you, Scotty?’
The twitch was almost not there, but McLean saw it. A momentary flick of the eyes away from the ogling, towards him and then back again. Ferguson muttered something that might have been ‘Malky who?’, but it was said with such lack of conviction McLean knew the man was on the verge of breaking.
‘When was the last time you had a fix, Scotty? Yesterday? This morning?’ He turned in his seat to speak to Grumpy Bob. ‘What do you reckon, Sergeant? Stick him down in the cells for a few hours? Let him sweat it off?’
‘There’s only the lower cells left at the moment, sir. You know, the ones in the basement with no windows? We’ve got a few remand cases blocking up the nice ones. The electrics are on the blink down there too, but I don’t suppose you’ll mind sitting in the dark, will you Scotty?’