by James Oswald
‘You can’t keep me here. I ain’t done nothing. I swear it. I wasn’t there. I didn’t see –’
‘Didn’t see what, Scotty? Where weren’t you?’ McLean swung back around to face the man. The fear was in his eyes now, and they locked on to McLean’s gaze with a terrible pleading.
‘I … I can’t. They’ll know. They’ll come for me.’
‘Like they came for Malky? Like they did for Bill Chalmers?’
Ferguson sniffed, and McLean could see tears glistening in his bloodshot eyes. For a moment he thought the grubby man was going to say something. He swallowed, opened his mouth, and then the trembling started.
‘Come on, Scotty. We can protect you. If you’ve got information that’s useful to us, we might even be able to turn a blind eye to all this.’ McLean indicated the bottles. ‘Why don’t you tell us what those symbols mean, for starters, eh?’
‘The … The symbols? On the bottles?’ Ferguson’s trembling was more violent now, his arms shaking as he pressed them into his lap. Where his face had been pale under the layers of grime, now it was florid, a vein bulging in his neck. McLean turned to tell Grumpy Bob to get medical help, but the detective sergeant was already at the door.
‘I can’t … I can’t …’ Ferguson stammered the words out as if something had a hold of his tongue. He was starting to foam at the mouth now, flecks of spittle arcing out and on to the table, sticking in the wiry hairs of his scrawny beard. ‘Help … me …’
He stood up like a puppet on ill-handled strings, lunged towards DC Harrison, one outstretched hand reaching for her top. To her credit, she didn’t scream, but stood swiftly, grabbed the offending hand and pressed it hard to the table.
‘Jesus Christ. He’s burning up, sir.’ She shifted her grip as Ferguson collapsed across the table, body spasming. Knocked to the floor, the two bottles smashed in their evidence bags, and then with a scream that sounded more like a wounded bird than any man, he fell still.
‘Poor bastard. You reckon he’ll live?’
Grumpy Bob leaned against the wall opposite the open door to the interview room, far enough away to avoid the worst of the rank smell wafting out into the corridor. McLean had moved further away still, watching as Scotty Ferguson was wheeled out on a stretcher. DC Harrison had already left, clearing out of the interview room to make space for the resuscitation team who had brought the drug addict back from the brink. Her first experience of a suspect interrogation was not one she would easily forget.
‘Who knows? Can’t even say what he was on at the moment, but he really didn’t want to tell us about these.’ McLean held up the evidence bags, now full of shards of glass. A dark, sticky liquid had oozed out into the plastic.
‘You’d best be careful with that. Give it another few minutes and it’ll have eaten through. You really don’t want to get any on your skin.’
McLean looked up to see Harrison heading back down the corridor, a happier look on her face than when she had left minutes earlier. Amanda Parsons walked beside her, eyes fixed firmly on McLean and the broken bottles. She pulled a large evidence bag from her pocket as she approached, opening it wide so that he could drop his prize into it.
‘And maybe another one, too.’ Parsons doubled up the bags again before stepping into the interview room and putting the whole lot back down on the table.
‘Dr Cairns is going to be very disappointed to find you’ve smashed up her bottles before she got a chance to look at them properly, Tony.’ She smiled broadly, then wrinkled her nose. ‘Gods, what is that smell?’
‘Sorry about that. I think poor Scotty Ferguson may have lost control of his bowels when he had a seizure just now.’
‘Would that be the same fellow whose wares you asked us to test on the hurry-up?’ Parsons waved a sheet of paper in the air with a flourish. ‘I was headed over this side of town, anyway. Wanted to check with Janie if she was still interested in sharing a flat. Thought I’d drop your results in and kill two birds. It’s just the basics so far, but I thought you’d like to know asap.’
‘Anything interesting?’ McLean asked.
‘Very. They’re both opium based, but each bottle’s slightly different. Some kind of tincture, like laudanum, only with more weird stuff added in for good measure. It’ll take a bit longer to work out the full chemical composition, but whoever’s using it needs to be very careful indeed.’
‘Why’s that?’ McLean asked the question even though he was fairly sure he already knew the answer.
‘Because its potency is off the scale. I’ve never seen anything like it. A couple of drops would kill an elephant, let alone a man.’
‘Good thing I didn’t get any on me then.’ McLean couldn’t help himself from wiping his hands on his thighs. ‘Do you think this might be the same stuff we found in Bill Chalmers?’
Parsons wrinkled her brow, either in thought or because the stench was truly eye-watering. Outside in the corridor, someone’s airwave set trilled and at the same time McLean felt his mobile phone vibrate in his pocket. He pulled it out as she answered, only half listening.
‘We’ll have to wait for the full spectrum analysis to compare, but if it is the same stuff then I’m buggered if I know how they got it into him. You’d need to water it down a thousandfold, and then some. Christ, there’d be enough in those two bottles to last someone a lifetime. Can’t imagine what that would be worth.’
‘Sir. Just got a call from Control.’ DC Harrison stood in the doorway, her happy smile replaced with a worried frown. ‘Some guy called Cobbold? Called in a burglary. Asked for you by name.’
McLean stared first at the message on the screen of his phone, then at Parsons, then at Harrison. Her frown had turned into a wide-eyed stare of surprise.
‘Eddie Cobbold? Bo’s Inks? Who the hell would want to burgle a tattoo parlour?’
31
‘Fifty years this shop’s been here. My dad set it up with his compensation money when they invalided him out of the merchant navy. Fifty years, and it’s never been so much as broken into. And now this.’
Eddie Cobbold sat on an upturned wooden chest in the middle of the front room of Bo’s Inks. It looked like someone had been through the place with an axe, or possibly a chainsaw. The tables were smashed to splinters, books of designs ripped open and pages strewn everywhere. The burglars had gone around the walls, methodically smashing the glass in all the picture frames. The front windows had fared no better, cracked and hazed where the safety lamination has stopped the panes from disintegrating entirely. What little floor McLean could see had been scuffed and scratched as if some giant beast had ripped at the wooden boards. Gouges and splinters shone white against the deep brown of generations of booted feet like broken bones poking from shattered limbs.
‘You any idea who might have done this?’ McLean picked his way through the carnage and into the back room. He couldn’t get very far. The reclining chairs had been bent and twisted, shelves pulled from the walls and their contents thrown to the floor. Like the front room, all the pictures had been smashed and the books of designs ripped apart.
‘I’ve asked around. But we’re a tight-knit community you know. If I’d pissed someone off, they’d come and tell me to my face. Not smash up my shop like …’ Eddie tailed off, as if acknowledging the extent of the damage was too much to bear.
‘Nobody was hurt though? There wasn’t anyone here? George –?’
‘George is fine. He’s away in the States. Big convention in Vegas. He’s competing for Scotland. Christ but he’s going to be pissed when he gets back.’ Eddie reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone, held it up to the light. ‘Don’t know whether to call him and let him know, or leave it till he comes home. He’s made it to the semi-finals so far. Be a damn shame if he pulled out now. Then again, what’s the point in winning a big competition if this is all the shop you’ve got to come back to?’
‘You know if much has been stolen?’ McLean turned slowly in the doorway, his gaze taking in t
he ceiling, where cracks and holes in the plaster told of frenzy. It put him in mind of the destruction in Bill Chalmers’ mews flat and the offices of Morningstar. Not so much a burglary as a demolition. Unleashed fury rather than any desire to steal.
‘Hard to tell. We don’t keep any cash in here, just the machines. They’ve been smashed up, which is just stupid.’ Eddie slumped his shoulders in defeat. ‘The whole thing’s just stupid.’
‘What about the alarm? Did that go off?’ DC Harrison stood by the front door, inspecting the damage to the frame where something very heavy had battered the hinges out of the wood.
‘If it did, I never got a call. Which reminds me.’ Eddie lifted up his phone again, flipped through some menus. ‘I need to have a word with the alarm company about that. Pay them enough bloody money.’
McLean left him to make the call and went to join Harrison at the front door. She had crouched down, and was teasing something out of the wreckage strewn around the frame.
‘Here, better put these on.’ He handed her a pair of latex gloves. ‘Wouldn’t want you getting it in the ear from your new flatmate.’
‘Hadn’t made up my mind about that yet, sir.’ Harrison took the gloves and snapped them on before going back to the pile of rubbish. After a moment she managed to pull out what looked like a badly smashed security camera. Looking up, McLean saw the holes in the wall where it had been fastened, a ripped coil of flex dangling from the ceiling cornice.
‘Yeah. That should have been working too.’ Eddie Cobbold joined the two of them, slipping his phone into his pocket as he did so. ‘And according to Penstemmin Alarms, my system is still fully functional. Apparently it was set at nine last night, and then switched off at one in the morning. Nine’s when I left, so I guess that gives you an idea of when …’ He shrugged, raising both hands to encompass the utter destruction of his livelihood.
‘We might be able to get something off this, sir. It’s got a memory card in it.’ Harrison held up the mangled security camera for all to see.
‘It’s meant to feed directly to our cloud service, so we can access it from anywhere,’ Eddie said. ‘George understands the tech better than me. He set it up.’
‘OK.’ McLean looked around the shop one last time, not seeing anything new. ‘We’ll get the place dusted for recent prints. Doubt we’ll find much though; it’s a fairly public space, after all. Anyone can come in off the streets while you’re open.’ He pointed at the security camera. ‘I’ll have some of our IT people take a look at that, see if we can’t find anything on there. And could you give us access to the footage from the last couple of days, if you’ve still got it?’
‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’ The tattoo artist let out a low sigh. ‘Not as if I’m going to be doing any inking for a while.’
‘I’m sorry, Eddie. We’ll do our best to find out who’s done this. Maybe even why. But first I think we need to have a chat with all your neighbours.’
The shops to either side of Bo’s Inks were hardly worth bothering with. One was empty, just the sign above the door to suggest that it had once sold antiques. McLean could see through the glass that no one had been in there in an age; the pile of junk mail and final demands spread out from the door in a yellowing paper fan was another indication of its total abandonment. To the other side, the bookmaker’s was one of those places he just knew was going to be unhelpful. It had that kind of air about it.
‘Not open till ten, aye.’ The man at the counter had a sour, thin face, skin pasty as if fresh air and sunlight were strangers to him. His lank, greasy hair had once been red but was leaching to grey like an old paint colour card left too long in the sun. He peered at the world through thick spectacles that would have worked better were they not smeared with fingerprints and other grot.
‘I’m not here to place any bets, unless it’s one on how long this place stays open after I’ve gone.’ McLean held up his warrant card, pulling it back just out of reach when the man tried to take it. He left his grabbing hand hanging in the air a moment longer than necessary before flexing grubby fingers that sported too many heavy gold rings, shrugged and went back to studying his copy of the Racing Post.
‘What do you want to know?’ He didn’t look up as he spoke.
‘Next door. I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s been broken into. You hear anything? See anything?’
‘Only just got in, dint I?’ The man sniffed. ‘We don’t open till ten, like I said.’
‘What time do you close?’
‘Depends, dunnit.’
‘OK. What time did you close last night, then?’
‘Back of ten, I think. Might’ve been a bit later if there was a fight on.’
‘And was there?’ McLean bit back his frustration, resisting the urge to grab the man’s paper and tear it into pieces in front of him.
‘No fight last night, sir. Least not one a place like this would be taking bets on.’ DC Harrison approached the counter with a smile on her face that was as mischievous as McLean had ever seen. She tugged the paper out from under the man’s nose, flipped it around and opened it up to a page that was just a lot of meaningless numbers as far as McLean was concerned.
‘Hey, that’s mine.’
‘Don’t reckon a place like this would have much reason to be open past six. Just long enough to pay out the winners on the last race at Ayr, maybe close a little earlier to make the punters come back for their winnings the next day. You strike me as the kind of man who likes to keep his hands on the money as long as possible.’
‘My hours is my business. Now give me back my paper, aye?’
‘You live here? At the back of the shop? Maybe upstairs?’ Harrison nodded to the single door behind the counter, closed at the moment. She folded the paper but didn’t hand it over.
‘Here? Nah. There’s just a wee office and the cludgie back there.’
‘So who lives upstairs, then?’
‘Search me. Students most likely. Either that or bloody immigrants.’ The man snatched his paper back, and Harrison let him have it. McLean stepped to one side as she turned her back on the counter and headed for the door.
‘Nice speaking to you,’ he said, then followed her out.
‘Sorry if I overstepped over the mark there, sir. Only I know his type and he’d have strung you along for hours if he thought he could get away with it.’
Out on the pavement, McLean was looking to see where the most likely entrance to the flats above the ground floor shops was, and hardly heard DC Harrison’s apology.
‘What was that? Oh, no. No need to apologize. You’re quite right. Probably would have been even worse if he’d had any punters in. Nothing like a bookie for playing to an audience. Nicking his Racing Post was a smart move. I was going to tear it up.’
‘That might not have helped.’ Harrison walked away down the street, past the wrecked frontage of Bo’s Inks and the empty antique shop before calling back, ‘Think this is the one, sir.’
A set of worn stone steps led up to a front door that could have done with a lick of paint. On closer inspection, McLean reckoned it could have done with being thrown in a skip and replaced with a new one. Cracked and squint, it didn’t meet the latch properly, making the electronic door-entry system somewhat redundant. He pushed it open and stepped back in time to his undergraduate years.
The narrow, dark hallway led to a stone staircase at the back, an even narrower passage cutting underneath it to an opening on to a yard behind the building. There were no doors on the ground floor other than the one they had come in through, confirming what the bookie had said. The building was three storeys high, two doors leading off the first landing. McLean chose the one that would open up above the antique shop and Bo’s Inks, knocked loudly on the door and, for good measure, tugged at the ancient bell-pull that jutted from the doorframe. He hadn’t been expecting it to work, but he felt the weight of the wire, and then heard a distant tinkling in the flat. It slowly petered away to nothing, and then was swallo
wed up by the sound of a door slamming. Heavy footsteps clumped across the hallway and the door was yanked open.
‘Youse any idea what time it is, aye?’
A young woman stood before them, dressed in heavy cotton pyjamas and with a tartan blanket wrapped around her shoulders. She had pulled on a pair of Doc Martens boots, the laces trailing across the floor behind her.
‘Detective Inspector McLean. Specialist Crime Division.’ McLean held up his warrant card and the young woman peered at it through bleary eyes. ‘This is Detective Constable Harrison. We’re investigating the burglary of the tattoo shop downstairs. Wondering if we might have a word, Miss …?’
‘Weir. Molly Weir. And before you ask, yes, I know. And no, I’m no’ a witch.’ She looked across at Harrison, and McLean reckoned there couldn’t be much difference in their ages. ‘Aye, come on in. I’ll put the kettle on.’
Molly Weir lived in a surprisingly large flat. Like most Edinburgh tenements built before the war, it had high ceilings with nice decorative cornice work and ornate plaster roses around the light fittings. The hall was dark, walls lined with wood panelling to chest height. Its only source of natural light came from skylights above the doors leading off it, but the kitchen they went into was bright and warm. A tall window looked out on to the yard behind and the backs of more tenements beyond. Molly clumped in her heavy boots over to an electric kettle, took it to the sink and filled it, ignored all the while by another young woman, who was sitting at the kitchen table and staring intently at her laptop.
‘Don’t mind Karen. She’s in her own wee world.’
McLean noticed the white headphone cords snaking up to the young woman’s ears. It surprised him that she hadn’t noticed any of them come into the room though. Maybe she had, and strange men appearing at all hours was nothing unusual here.
‘You lived here long?’ he asked.