‘Aye, that’s what I told Doctor Graham.’ Grumpy Bob slumped back in his seat. ‘She’s something of an expert on the subject too, oddly enough, but she reckons Bale’s fixation on folk tales harks back to his childhood, and given what he did to his parents it’s a part of his life that he needs to find a way to address. Or something like that anyway. I kind of tuned out after a while.’
McLean was tempted to do the same, but something was niggling away at the back of his head. ‘Have you seen the PM results for the bones we found up on the moors?’
Grumpy Bob’s confusion might have been because of the rapid change of subject, but was most probably because he hadn’t.
‘Should I have?’ he asked.
‘Marks on one of the bones might tie in to an old missing-persons case. I spoke to Duguid about it. Meant to send him a couple of DCs to help search through the archives.’ McLean pulled his laptop towards him, tapped away at the keyboard until the screen showed him Cadwallader’s preliminary report. He didn’t really need to read it; he’d been there after all. ‘There was something else though, about the bones. They’d been de-fleshed completely before they were buried. And there were knife marks on them, as if they’d been butchered.’
Grumpy Bob ran a hand through his thinning hair. ‘Jesus. And you think . . . ?’
‘Sawney Bean. Scotland’s infamous cannibal. And Bale insists that he was a Lothian man. He might just possibly have heard about the bones we found on the moors, but there’s no way he could have known about the butchery marks.’
‘Then how?’ Grumpy Bob asked.
McLean sighed, picked up his mug and drained the bitter liquid. ‘I don’t know, Bob. But I’m going to have to find out, and there’s only one way to do that.’
Having only heard her on the phone, McLean wasn’t sure what to expect from Dr Millicent Graham. He’d imagined her to be young, and wasn’t disappointed. Late twenties or very early thirties, she hid her face behind a veil of straight black hair and spectacles that were too large and too thick. She was dressed for an earlier century too, although that might have been a conscious decision to put her patients at ease. She met him at Reception discreetly branded with the Dee Foundation logo, and led him along institutional corridors to a surprisingly spacious office.
‘I’m so glad to finally meet you, Detective Chief Inspector.’ She indicated a seat away from the desk. It was one of four arranged as casually as four chairs can be around a low table. A sickly pot plant sat dead centre.
‘Call me Tony, please. Detective Chief Inspector’s a hell of a mouthful.’
Dr Graham looked momentarily flustered, a slight blush tingeing what little of her face he could see. ‘Oh, of course. Millicent. Can I offer you a coffee?’
McLean was more keen to get on with things; the sooner they started the sooner he could leave. But one lesson you learned early in the police was never to turn down an offer of coffee. He’d only had the one that day so far too. ‘Thank you,’ he said, then waited another five minutes for it all to be sorted. Finally Dr Graham sat down in the chair opposite him and placed a thick folder on the table.
‘I’m very pleased you changed your mind and came out.’ She brushed hair away from her face as she spoke, but it slid back again seemingly unnoticed. ‘I really think I’m getting somewhere with Norman.’
McLean tried not to tense at the name, although he might have failed in that. ‘Doctor Graham . . . Millicent . . . I realise that it’s your job to help people like Bale, and in the main I think it’s a good thing that you do. But I very much doubt you’ll get anywhere with him he doesn’t want you to go.’
Dr Graham recoiled slightly, as if she’d been slapped. ‘Do you think I don’t know my own patients, De— . . . Tony?’
‘I’m sorry. That’s not what I meant to say. It’s just that I saw what Bale did. I know how long he’d been doing it too, before we caught him. His skill is inveigling his way into your life, winkling out your deepest secrets. He takes on the identity of his previous victim, like a penance. And then he begins the whole sick charade all over again.’
‘I don’t think that’s how things are going to work out here.’ Dr Graham recovered her composure almost as quickly as she’d lost it, taking McLean’s diagnosis in her stride. ‘He hasn’t tried to gain the confidence of anyone in the hospital, although he speaks very highly of you. In his own way, he considers you his intellectual equal. Not that he’d ever say it in quite so many words.’
‘What does he say then? About me. Why is it so important he speak to me face to face?’ McLean wanted to ask: ‘Why am I even here?’ and throw his hands up in the air, but that would have meant spilling his coffee for one thing. It was never a good idea to ask such questions of a psychiatrist, for another.
‘Norman is a changed person. The first year here was difficult for him, as it is for many long-term patients, I expect. He’s adjusted though, found his place and accepted it. I genuinely think he wants to be helpful as a way of atoning for his past sins. That’s how he sees the world, after all, in terms of a deeply held religious belief. However flawed. He believed he was doing God’s work, freeing the blessed from the temptations of mortal sin. You showed him that he was wrong about that. He wants to prove to you that he has understood. More than that, I think he needs to prove it to you. Not to me, or a parole board or anything like that. To you. His childhood friend and the man who stopped him. Who brought him back to his senses.’
It was a long speech, possibly rehearsed. McLean knew enough about psychology to see the truth in it, and the lie. People like Bale didn’t change, not really. They adapted to the circumstances, but always with an eye on any chance to revert to their old ways.
‘There’s something I’d like you to see, before we go and meet Norman.’ Dr Graham must have taken his silence as doubt, which to be fair it was. She stood up, and crossed the room to her desk. Grabbing the mouse, she woke her laptop and clicked away for a couple of moments. McLean drained the last of his coffee, but before he could go to see what was on the screen, she had brought the laptop over to him. This time she sat in the seat next to his, rather than across the table, put the laptop down and tapped the return key. The screen had been showing a still image, but now it sprang to life. A video of a room, a man sitting on a bed.
Norman Bale.
42
McLean remembered Norman Bale as a thin-faced man, a little shorter than average and in many ways unremarkable. He was still short, but clearly the food served at Bestingfield suited him. Either that or he’d never got the hang of feeding himself before. Now that he didn’t have to, his sallow features had filled out, the start of a paunch gently straining at the lower buttons of his shirt. Seen from the high perspective of the security camera in his cell, Bale’s greying hair had almost completely retreated from the top of his head. He wore thick-framed spectacles, pulled down to the tip of his rat-like nose. Sitting perfectly still on the edge of his bed, he peered over the top of them at an empty chair in the corner opposite.
‘This isn’t live, I take it?’ McLean asked. He could see no timestamp on the video screen, but the washed-out black-and-white image was clearly taken with an infrared CCTV camera.
‘No. This was from a while back. Every night’s pretty much the same though.’ Dr Graham reached out and tapped a key. The screen image jumped slightly, then a timestamp appeared in the top-left corner, seconds and minutes counting away. It was half past ten at night, apparently. Bale still sat motionless.
‘He only sleeps for a few hours each night. Lights out is at ten, so he should really be in bed.’
‘Do you have cameras in all the cells?’
‘This is a secure mental-health establishment, not a prison,’ Dr Graham said. ‘We prefer the term “secure room”.’
‘What’s he doing now?’ McLean ignored the tone of disapproval in the doctor’s voice, leaning forward as Bale did so
mething similar on screen. A quiet mumbling noise drifted out of the tinny loudspeakers either side.
‘He does this every night. It’s a conversation of sorts. Only, as you can see, there’s no one there for him to talk to.’
‘Can you hear what he’s saying?’
‘Some of it, but it’s very quiet. I’m not sure it’s all actual language either. Something subvocal.’ Dr Graham adjusted the volume up, a hiss showing that the microphone was at full stretch. McLean strained to make out the noises. It was a bit like listening to someone in another room speaking a foreign language. It sounded like words, sentences, questions and exclamations, but the intonations were all wrong.
‘I think he’s praying half of the time. The rest of it feels more like a conversation,’ the doctor added.
‘Have you confronted him about this?’
‘I have, yes. He says he’s talking to his friends. Says that’s how he knows all the things that are going on out in the world. How he knew about the missing woman, and that she’s still alive.’
‘And you don’t think he’s just playing us all like a stage magician? Doing the old mind-reading trick of suggesting vague things and picking up on the ones that get a reaction?’
Dr Graham turned sharply, that face as if she’d been slapped again barely visible through her curtain of hair. McLean thought it had been a perfectly reasonable question, but obviously he’d stepped over some invisible line.
‘I do know how to do my job, you know.’
He paused a moment before replying. His first instinct was to argue the point, but he held back the sarcastic comment and counted a silent five seconds instead.
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest that you didn’t.’ Another count of five while Dr Graham stared at him unconvinced.
‘Look, what about visitors? Talking to the nursing staff? He has to be getting information from somewhere, and I don’t believe for a minute that it’s an invisible fairy who comes in the night and sits in that chair.’
‘He’s had no visitors other than a lawyer since he arrived. He has no family of course . . .’ Dr Graham’s voice trailed away, and McLean couldn’t help but remember the scene he’d found in the dining room of Bale’s house. The desiccated corpses of his mother and father sitting at the table. Their meal untouched. Rotten.
‘What about the staff here? Does he have any favourites? Maybe other –’ McLean stopped himself from saying ‘inmates’, added instead ‘patients?’
‘There are a couple of nurses who deal with him most of the time, but they’re not the gossiping kind really. You can talk to them, anyway.’ Dr Graham reached out and tapped the enter button again, pausing the video and killing the mumbling noise. ‘As to the other patients, well, they tend to avoid him. We’ve a couple like that. Keep to themselves. To be honest, as long as they’re not being difficult, we tend to let them.’
McLean picked up his coffee mug, then realised it was empty and put it back down again. He didn’t want to be here, but neither could he ignore it. If there was the slimmest possibility Bale could shed light on Anya Renfrew’s disappearance, however he’d come by the information, then the visit would have been worth the discomfort. And if not, then he could rest assured that Norman Bale would have guaranteed his continued incarceration in this secure facility for the rest of his natural life.
‘OK then.’ He struggled to keep the sigh from his voice. ‘Let’s go and see what he’s got to say.’
The interview room was rather more pleasant than those back at the police station in the city. It had a window that looked out onto parkland and trees. The walls had been painted in a calming shade of institutional beige, and a near silent air-conditioning unit pumped cool, fresh air through a vent in the ceiling. No odour of unwashed bodies and nervous farts in here.
McLean took a seat at the one table, noting as he did so that it was bolted to the floor. The single chair opposite was similarly fixed, although there was no ring set into the tabletop for securing handcuffs. Dr Graham fussed a bit with her folder while they waited, and then with a minimum of fuss the door opened. Two large men in white uniforms escorted Norman Bale into the room.
The video had only partially prepared McLean for the physical change. It was one thing to see him seated, in monochrome video on a tiny laptop screen. Quite another to see him in the flesh. All of it.
Oddly enough, the fuller face reminded McLean more of the six-year-old Norman from his childhood. Something of the puppy fat about Bale’s neck and jowls harked back to the young boy he’d known. He was still not entirely convinced this wasn’t some imposter though, a changeling monster who had taken on the identity of a dead child, and used it somehow to gain the confidence of still-grieving parents. And yet there was that DNA test result he couldn’t ignore, however much he wanted to.
‘Tony, you came! I’m so pleased.’ Bale’s voice was different too. Fatter like the man who spoke. His sibilant hiss had almost gone, the barest traces of it left. He tried to step forward, extend a hand or possibly even attempt a hug, but the nurses were too quick for him. The handcuffs made it difficult too.
‘Sit,’ one of them commanded. He gained a disdainful stare for his efforts, but Bale complied with no other hint of complaint. The two nurses took up station behind him, which was a little intimidating but reassuring too.
‘Doctor Graham, might I say you are looking particularly lovely this morning.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Norman. But need I remind you of the rules regarding personal observations?’ The psychiatrist retrieved an A4 notebook from her folder, opened it on a blank page and took out a pen. McLean knew better than to look up at the cameras that were recording the entire interview.
‘I’m sorry. This is all a bit exciting for me. I don’t often get visitors,’ Bale said. ‘And we’re running out of time too.’
This last comment he addressed at McLean directly.
‘We are?’ he asked. There was little point coming all this way and not engaging with Bale, even if that was the last thing he wanted to do.
‘Did you get my message? What I told Detective Sergeant Laird?’
‘That Sawney Bean was an East Lothian man?’ McLean placed his hands on the table in front of him, fingers interlocked to stop him fidgeting with them. ‘Yes, I did.’
‘Good old Grumpy Bob.’ Bale’s shoulders slumped a little, his nervous energy abating. Then he sat up again so suddenly one of the nurses almost grabbed him. ‘Sorry, sorry. I shouldn’t have called him that.’
It was an act. A good one, McLean had to admit, but he could see exactly what Bale was doing. He had a knack, like any circus sideshow performer, of reading his audience. He could pick up information like a vacuum cleaner, and remember every last detail. Squirrel it away for a time when it might be useful. And he’d been years in this place now, with nothing much to do but think and plot, put all those little fragments together into a picture he found pleasing, build it all into a strange machine and then set it off running.
‘Sawney Bean never existed of course.’ McLean held Bale’s gaze even though what he really wanted to do was get up and leave the room, drive out of the security gates and never come back to Bestingfield again. ‘He’s just a reflection of our worst nightmares. A horror story. But then you’d know all about that, wouldn’t you.’
Bale shook his head slowly from side to side. ‘Ah, Detective Inspector. No, Detective Chief Inspector of course. But no, you’ve got it all wrong. Alexander Bean was a real person. It’s true his parents weren’t ditch-diggers or hedge-layers or whatever the later tales have them being. They came from a much older and nobler tradition than that. They were cannibals only after a fashion, but Alexander had too much of a taste for human flesh. That’s why he was banished, and how he ended up on the Galloway coast. If only his family hadn’t cast him aside. If they had just tried to understand him, then none of it would ev
er have happened.’
‘None of what? The thousand victims that there’s no trace of in any contemporary records? The children and grandchildren held in a prison that wasn’t big enough for more than a single convict? The fact that they were executed in Leith when their crimes were committed on the West Coast?’
McLean stopped himself, realising he’d been drawn in. What was he even doing here? The man had nothing to say that was going to help them find Renfrew.
‘He was an East Lothian man. That’s why they brought him home for his punishment. They could control what came out when he was confronted with his crimes. That’s an old secret held by powerful folk, Detective Chief Inspector. They would go to any lengths to stop it being revealed in open court.’
McLean almost drummed his fingers on the tabletop, managed to stop himself at the last moment. Bale’s eyes might have been set in a fleshier face now, but they were still pin-sharp, attentive, reading the whole room and the people in it as if they were open books.
‘And you know this how?’ he asked.
‘I haven’t always been locked up in here. Nice though it is to have three square meals a day. I’ve been a student of the esoteric all my life. A collector of tales like your old friend Madame Rose.’
McLean ignored the reference. ‘Tell me about this missing woman you’re so concerned about. Who is she? And how do you know she’s missing?’
Bale smiled like a snake, tilting his head slightly to one side. ‘She has secrets of her own. A double life, I think? Unusual appetites.’
‘Maybe even a name?’
‘That much I don’t know. I can tell you though that she is destined to become the centrepiece in an ancient ritual. Something truly momentous. You might say life-changing.’
‘Enough of the mumbo jumbo. Either you have useful information for me, or you don’t. If it’s the latter, then it’s time I was leaving. Plenty else to be getting on with.’ McLean stood up and turned towards the door.
Bury Them Deep Page 23