by James Oswald
The options piled up, each as important as the last. McLean knew the symptoms of exhaustion well enough; he’d been here before. The most insidious one, though, was the inability to recognize any of them for what they were. He drained the rest of the coffee, then pushed himself up on to weary legs, stretched and yawned, looked around the empty CID room. Where was everybody?
He stumbled slightly, catching his foot on the edge of a loose carpet tile as he left the room. A little shock of pain ran up his thigh, reminding him of the broken bone that would never be truly healed. It always ached when there was a change in the weather, but at least the adrenaline woke him up a little. He moved swiftly through the station in the direction of Brooks’ office, but when he got there the door was closed, no one home. Time for him to head to his own.
The snow had finally stopped falling as he stepped out into the yard at the back of the station. McLean’s little red Alfa sat under a heavier dusting than the last time, but he spent less time cleaning it off. It wasn’t that far, really, and as long as he could see out the front and back, glimpse the wing mirrors, he’d be fine. The engine purred like the masterpiece of Italian engineering it was, soothing him as he pulled out across the slippery tarmac and on to the street beyond.
It was strange driving across a city almost devoid of life. Normally at this time, the first tricklings of the rush hour would be starting to flow down the main arteries. He would expect to see people out on the pavements, battling their way through the snow to work or school, but there were precious few about. Even the buses were absent, trapped in the depot by the weather, he assumed. Snow ploughs had been hard at work though, clearing enough of the road for him to make a careful journey home.
Cocooned in the warm cabin, McLean drifted through a cityscape as alien to him as the moon. Somewhere in the back of his mind he was aware that something was wrong, but still he pressed on, through the silent white turned hellish orange by the streetlamps. He wanted to get home, needed to be there even though the house would be empty. It was safe there, protected by something he didn’t fully understand. She was out there somewhere. Mrs Saifre. The devil. But she couldn’t reach him as long as he was within those walls.
He was almost there now, peering through an ever darker windscreen as he inched past the church with its new roof and slightly tarnished reputation. The road here was more treacherous, snow still thick between the soft white humps of cars parked on either side. Just before the turn up to his drive, McLean sensed that something was amiss, his sleep-deprived brain too slow to process the information. He looked sideways, across the road to the driveway of the house opposite, just in time to see something massive and formless hurtling towards him. He slammed a foot hard on the brakes, but the car slid forward regardless, straight into the path of whatever it was that had somehow appeared from nowhere. A horrible, expensive crunching of metal, and he was thrown forward. His head clattered off the steering wheel, and McLean had just enough time to rue driving a car with no airbag before the blackness took him.
41
Something rough rasped at his face, scraping sore skin that tingled all over with a horrible sensation. McLean shivered against a cold that ached him to the core. He couldn’t move, a dead weight on his chest, something holding his arms and legs tight and at awkward angles.
A noise like the distant revving of engines accompanied the rasping sensation on his cheeks, and the weight on his chest shifted. McLean risked opening his eyes a fraction and was greeted by the sight of Mrs McCutcheon’s cat, far closer up than he would have liked.
‘Get off, will you?’ He groaned and struggled against the bonds holding him down as he tried to take in his surroundings. It made no sense. He was still in his car, in the road outside his house. The impact had smashed the front end almost completely, but somehow his seat had collapsed backwards, tangling his arms in the seatbelt. Wincing at the little stabs of pain that accompanied every motion, he slowly extracted himself from the straps, then lifted the cat off his chest and sat up. The steering wheel had folded on to his legs, pinning them against the seat, but he managed to shuffle backwards and extricate them. A tug on the handle proved only that the door had wedged itself closed as the whole car had concertinaed. McLean clambered out through the broken windscreen, barely noticing the shards of glass as they embedded themselves in his palms and scratched at his skin through the tattered fabric of his suit.
He stood on wobbly feet as the snow tumbled around him, and looked at the mess that had been his car. No amount of money was going to put it right this time. The front end was twisted and broken, as if some massive, taloned hand had reached out of nowhere and squeezed the car until it popped. The metalwork was not so much bent as torn apart, long gashes glistening silver and fresh against the red paintwork. A wave of nausea washed over him, followed by a bone-deep shiver. McLean put a hand out on to the crumpled roof to steady himself, and that was when he realized.
‘What the fuck hit me?’
There was nothing else in the street. No vehicle with its front bent out of shape, no stone wall driven into in confusion and exhaustion. Just his crumpled and ripped Alfa Romeo sitting in the middle of a wide, empty road. McLean turned slowly on the spot, but there was nothing to see. Just a single pair of parallel tracks behind the car, already half filled with fresh snow.
‘How …?’
His voice sounded distant, drowned by the roaring in his ears. Mrs McCutcheon’s cat had been twining herself around his legs, but now she reached up one paw and dug her claws into his thigh. The bright point of pain brought McLean back to himself, at least enough to act.
‘Thank you. I think,’ he said. Rubbing at the sore point seemed to help too. He reached back in through the broken passenger window, fetched out his briefcase and phone. Then, with the cat leading the way through the drifts, he limped through his front gate and up the gravel drive to safety.
The first squad car arrived just a few minutes after he’d put in the call about the accident. McLean heard the crunch of gravel under wheels as he sat at his kitchen table, nursing a large mug of hot tea. He’d heaped several teaspoons of sugar into it, even though he didn’t normally take any, and now he was waiting for the shock to hit.
‘Jesus Christ, Tony. What the fuck happened?’ Acting Detective Inspector Ritchie swept into the kitchen without bothering to knock. Behind her, DC Stringer stood in the doorway, eyes wide as he looked around a room that was probably bigger than his entire tenement flat.
‘Grumpy Bob and Harrison, are they OK?’ It was the one thought that had been going round and round in his head since the accident. If it had been an accident at all. He remembered all too well the strange attacks his team had suffered the last time they ran in with Mrs Saifre and, given the bizarre nature of his accident, he was under no illusions now that she was somehow behind all this.
‘They’re fine, although Bob had a few choice words at being disturbed from his kip. We found him in one of the old cells down in the basement, sleeping like a baby. But what happened out there? You lose control and spin or something?’
McLean looked up from his tea. He’d been contemplating the perfect evenness of its beige surface, finding it hard to concentrate on anything else, but something in Ritchie’s words sunk in.
‘I don’t know. It all happened so fast. Hit so hard I bashed my head off the steering wheel, and then …’ And then he had no idea.
‘I think we’d better get you to the hospital. Get you checked up.’
‘Hospital.’ The words hit him like a bucket of cold water to the face. ‘Emma.’ He tried to leap to his feet, but somehow his legs were all tangled around the chair, and then the kitchen was tilting like a cheap special effect in a disaster movie. Strong arms caught him before he hit the floor, but not before his mug of perfectly beige tea toppled over. A shame, he’d been looking forward to that.
McLean was only vaguely aware of the journey across town. A gaggle of squad cars had blocked off the street at the end of
his drive, protecting his broken Alfa Romeo like sentinels. Too late, of course, but he appreciated the gesture. Ritchie tried to question him a few times about what had happened; there was no sign of any other vehicle, and neither were any of the parked cars in the street damaged. Snow had obliterated a lot of the tyre tracks, the milling policemen the rest. There could be no denying that something large had collided with him, but it looked more like the car had been attacked than crashed. One for the forensics experts to puzzle out perhaps, except that poor old Amanda Parsons would be devastated when she learned what had happened.
Someone must have called ahead to the hospital; he was rushed through reception and into a private room in a huddle of uniforms and detectives. It all felt slightly unreal, as if it were happening to someone else and he was just watching.
‘Looks like concussion. He’s got a nasty bump on the forehead there.’
McLean focused his eyes and saw that Dr Wheeler was standing in front of him, an expression of weary concern spread across her face. He had no idea how long she had been there.
‘How’s Emma?’ he asked. His voice sounded like a stranger’s, cracking and brittle.
‘Oh, so you’re with us now, are you? Emma’s fine. She’s sleeping. Let’s worry about you, Tony. What the hell have you been doing to yourself?’
‘I crashed my car.’ It seemed like such a simple thing, but the ramifications spiralled away from him in ever widening circles, threatening to stretch out into nothing. There was something important he had to remember, had to tell the doctor before he passed out.
‘Coffee.’
‘No, Tony. You’re not having any coffee now. You need to rest.’ Dr Wheeler laid a hand on his shoulder, pushing him firmly down on to the stretcher they’d wheeled him in on. ‘I’ll give you a sedative if I have to.’
‘No. Not coffee now.’ McLean struggled against the waves of exhaustion that pulled at his consciousness. ‘This morning. I drank Harrison’s coffee. Think someone might have spiked it.’ He reached up to grab the doctor’s arm, convinced that someone had slipped a few drops of Bill Chalmers’ drug into the drink. The movement sent a spasm of pain through his neck and back, sweeping over him and dragging him back down into darkness.
Everything ached. His arms and legs were pinned down as if by some invisible hand, smothering him. McLean struggled to wake up, each breath laboured and unsatisfying. But at least he was warm.
Sounds slowly pushed their way into his attention, a rhythmic, gentle beeping of some distant machine, the quiet shush of air through a ventilation system, muffled voices in conversation, their words too soft to hear but their tone one of urgent concern.
‘What …? Where …?’ He forced open eyes gummed up with sleep, and saw above him a familiar pattern of ceiling tiles. The tone of the voices changed, an impression of motion on the periphery of his vision. He moved his head to see better, wincing in anticipation of a pain that never came.
‘So you’ve decided to come back to us. Good.’ A head appeared in his eyeline, followed by the rest of a doctor he didn’t recognize.
‘What happened?’ McLean struggled weakly against the restraints that held him down, discovered that it was only the hospital blankets. He had no strength at all. Another face swam into view, this time one he did know. Dr Wheeler clutched a clipboard to her chest like a shield and he noticed for the first time that her fingernails were chewed down to the quick.
‘You had some nasty toxins running through your system. Still trying to work out what they are. You’ve had a stomach pump, and we’ve been keeping you on a drip while your body sorts it all out.’
He relaxed his head back into the softest of pillows, blinking away the blurriness in his vision. As if words were power, he could feel his strength flowing back, but the pit of his stomach was an empty void and his throat was as dry as the wind.
‘How long since I came in?’
‘A day, more or less. I expect you’ll have the mother of all hangovers. You were right about the coffee, by the way. What the hell was in that?’ Dr Wheeler put the back of her hand to his forehead in much the same way as his grandmother had when he was a child. McLean wondered what she would have made of the neurosurgeon.
‘I don’t want to know.’ He squinted against the dull pain beginning to blossom in his head. Very much like the feeling of having spent too long with Phil getting on the wrong side of a bottle of whisky. ‘You’ll have sent blood off for analysis, though? My guess would be some kind of opioid with traces of other unusual chemicals. The profile will be similar to your six lawyers and a judge, only they’re in withdrawal, so maybe not.’ McLean struggled upright, the weakness of sleep sloughing off him. He looked at the catheter in his arm, the rubber tube connecting it to the drip. In the movies, the hero just pulled the thing out and walked off, but he wasn’t in a movie. Or a hero for that matter.
‘How do you get this thing off?’ he asked.
The still-unnamed doctor looked at him as if he was mad. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Trust me, Isobel. It’s not worth arguing with this one.’ Dr Wheeler handed over her clipboard and then went to a cupboard at the side of the room. She came back with cotton wool, a plaster and various other things that smelled of antiseptic, set about removing the catheter and taping up the hole in McLean’s arm. Her touch was light, soft and warm, her scent as she bent close to him surprisingly pleasant.
‘How’s Emma?’ he asked again.
‘She’s fine. We think we know what the problem was, and we’ve got it under control. She’s …’ Dr Wheeler paused, a strange, distant look in her eyes as she considered something. ‘Well, she can tell you herself. We’ll be sending her home either today or tomorrow. Probably tomorrow, since you seem intent on discharging yourself right now.’ She pressed her thumb perhaps a little more firmly on the centre of the sticking plaster than was necessary, sending a tiny jolt of pain up McLean’s arm. ‘And now I suppose you’ll be wanting some clothes.’
42
It took a surprisingly long time to get across town. If the taxi driver was to be believed, the snow hadn’t let up much in the twenty-four hours McLean had been out cold, and while the council roads department was doing its best to keep the main arteries clear, there were still sidestreets that were impassable, cars buried under shapeless mounds of white. And all the while, it kept on fluttering down.
‘That nice wee lassie on the telly reckons we’ve got this for another week. Something about a freak deflection of the jet stream. Don’t understand a word of it, ken, but it’s no’ making life easy for the likes of me. Whole city’s in gridlock.’
McLean only half listened to the monologue. He’d been in hospital for just a day but it felt like the world had changed completely. Who was looking after the investigations? Where were his team right now? What had happened to his car? Who was looking after Mrs McCutcheon’s cat? He stared out at a world gone mad, draped in white, where beasts could appear out of nowhere and grab you while you were driving down the street.
The station was quiet as he walked in through the front door, but the look of surprise on the duty sergeant’s face said it all. He was buzzed through without a word, even though McLean knew that everyone in the building would know he was here in the next couple of minutes. He toyed with the idea of going to his office, hiding behind his paperwork and using the solitude to get his head around everything that had happened. But if that had been his plan all along, then he would have gone home to his irate cat. Instead, he carried on up the stairs to the major incident room.
‘What the fuck are you doing here, Tony?’
Maybe not the friendliest of greetings, still it was delivered in a tone of incredulity rather than hostility. DCI McIntyre stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by an attentive court of junior detectives and uniform officers. Whatever it was she had been telling them would have to wait, as all her attention focused laser-like on him.
‘Thought I might be of some help,’ he said.
/> ‘Help? You’re barely standing, man. Nasty crash like that, you should be off for at least a week.’
The fact that she mentioned the crash and not whatever it was they all thought had caused it didn’t go unnoticed. McLean had to admit he felt like shit, but he’d come into work feeling worse before, usually self-inflicted and in the company of either Grumpy Bob or Phil Jenkins. Now his mind was curiously clear; it was just his body that was wrecked.
‘I’m fine … ma’am.’ He held McIntyre’s gaze as she scowled at the title.
‘You’re far from fine, Tony. But since you’re here, I’ll use you. God knows, we’ve few enough decent detectives as it is. And unlike some people you’ve had a day off.’
‘I wish I felt like it.’ McLean scanned the room, noting the buzz about the place. ‘Something come up? Only last I was here it wasn’t exactly a hive of activity.’
‘Aye, well. That was before someone tried to poison you. Good thing the cleaners are rubbish. Picked up that mug you drank out of and parcelled it off to Forensics. Traces of some opioid in the dregs. It’s a miracle you drove as far as you did.’
‘Harrison. She’s OK, though?’ McLean scanned the room, looking for the detective constable, but his eyes were bleary and difficult to focus.
‘She’s fine. Grumpy Bob’s a bit pissed off because someone broke into his flat and trashed the place, though.’
‘Trashed it?’ McLean had been there and for the life of him couldn’t see how anyone could tell.
‘Aye. He’s fine. Probably just as well he crashed out in one of the empty cells. Might have been a different matter if he’d gone home.’
‘So what’s got this place buzzing?’
‘Ritchie had a bit of a breakthrough.’ McIntyre pointed at the wall with its maps and whiteboards. Photographs had been pinned up showing a snow-covered landscape, and as McLean approached so he could make out ramshackle hangars and the gutted remains of a control tower.