‘Looks like he wanted to scare the crap out of his best friend,’ Harrison said after they’d moved forward half a car’s length. ‘Strange how boys are like that.’
McLean remembered that the detective constable had two brothers. Chances were she would know better than him what boys were like.
‘The stories though. That’s what I found fascinating. I don’t believe a word about ghosts and red monks and the like, but there’s always something behind these tales. People have been going missing, that’s the truth of it. Bones have been found too. It’s part of the local folklore. Even Sergeant Donaldson at Penicuik nick mentioned something similar, remember?’
‘So, what? You want to go and speak to Donaldson again?’
‘No. I think I need to get closer to the source.’
‘And the boys? Chances are they’re behind all these recent fires. The car, the moors even. It’s a miracle nobody’s got hurt yet. You think we should just let them off with a caution?’
Something about Harrison’s tone made McLean glance at her briefly, one eye half on the slow-moving traffic ahead. She was staring forward, a grim set to her face that spoke of something in her past that still bothered her.
‘We gather the evidence, present it to the PF’s office. Leave it to them to decide. It can wait for now though. Bobby Wilkins isn’t going anywhere, and the chances of Gavin Mason being let out of his mother’s sight any time soon are slimmer than mine of being made Deputy Chief Constable.’
That brought a slight smile to Harrison’s lips, a distinct improvement on her frown. ‘They’re still a pair of wee scrotes,’ she said, then added ‘sir’ for good measure.
‘Aye, they are. But right now I’m more concerned with finding out what’s happened to Renfrew. If I have to take my clues from wee scrotes, then so be it.’
He dropped Harrison off at the station, but carried on alone through improving traffic to the other side of the city. HMP Edinburgh wasn’t McLean’s favourite place in the city, so he was pleased at the businesslike way he was escorted swiftly to an interview room. He had to wait only a few minutes before Gordon Wilkins was ushered in.
There were traces of the son in the father, although prison food and a largely sedentary life had softened Gordon Wilkins’s edges a little. He wasn’t fat like Norman Bale, but neither was he whippet-thin like Bobby. His face was cleanly shaved, but nevertheless he managed to look dishevelled. Perhaps it was his mop of thick unruly hair, or the rumpled creases in his prison fatigues. Or maybe it was the way he slouched in his chair, eyes slightly out of focus as if he were stoned.
‘They said youse wanted to see me. Din’t say why.’
He had the same accent as his son too. Only deeper and more drawn out. That sense of anger barely contained, but dulled by whatever it was he was on. Not a narcotic, surely? Although it wasn’t exactly unheard of in prison. Maybe it was simple boredom, worn down by day after day of nothing to do.
‘Your boy, Bobby. He’s been getting up to mischief.’
‘An’ youse came all this way just tae tell me?’
‘Actually, no. I wanted to ask you about the stories you used to tell him. Back when he was just wee. About the woods on Oak Hill, the bones in the ground, that sort of thing?’
Colour rose up Wilkins’s neck and into his cheeks. The dullness in his eyes turned to a sharp focus, and he stiffened in his seat. ‘What you talkin’ about? Don’t know nothin’ about bones inna ground.’
‘They don’t let you see the news in here? Don’t read the papers?’
A shrug. ‘Cannae be bothered readin’ that stuff. No’ as if any of it’s important to me, aye? Stuck in here.’
McLean couldn’t argue with that. Wilkins still had a couple of years to go before he could even be released on licence. Most prisoners he’d met clung like limpets to any information about life outside, hungry for any sense of normality. There were a few who went the other way. He’d not have pegged Wilkins as a patient man though, and usually it was the quiet, thoughtful types who accepted their lot and concentrated on doing their time with minimal fuss.
‘You grew up in Rosewell, is that right?’
The change of subject caught Wilkins off guard. ‘Aye. Whut of it?’
‘Nothing particularly. Just establishing a few facts. Has your family always been in the area? Grandparents, great-grandparents?’
‘Far as I ken, aye. Why?’
‘Those scary stories you told your son. Did your father tell them to you? His father to him?’
Again McLean saw that tensing in the shoulders, the slight twitch in Wilkins’s fingers as he tried not to fidget. It could be that he had a drug habit, that this was a sign he needed at the very least a cigarette. Or it could be something else.
‘They’s just stories. Folk tales meant to scare you when you’re a kid, aye? Nothin’ to them really.’ Wilkins slumped back in his seat again, defeated. ‘Dinnae ken why they’re so important to youse.’
It was McLean’s turn to shrug. ‘Possibly because there are bones in the ground up on Oak Hill. Lots of them. Some of them have been there a very long time indeed, but others are much more recent. That could be a coincidence, Mr Wilkins, but I’m a detective and we don’t really believe in coincidences.’
‘You’re no’ tryin’ tae pin anythin’ on me, are youse? I’ve been banged up in here you know?’
‘No. I’m not trying to pin anything on you, Mr Wilkins. Some of the bones we’re finding have been there centuries, maybe longer. Even the most recent ones were put there when you were even younger than Bobby is now. But you know the stories about that place. You told them to your son, like your father told them to you. All I want is for you to tell them to me, and then I’ll leave you alone.’
Wilkins sneered in disbelief for a moment, then seemed to understand that McLean was telling the truth.
‘I only ken what I told Bobby. Back when the whole of Oak Hill was covered in trees, the whole of Scotland an’ a’. There was a castle, aye? Right at the top. That’s where the Druids lived, where they taught their magic and made their sacrifices. Human sacrifices, aye? The story goes they used to kill folk an’ eat them. Then they’d take the bones and bury them, deep in the ground.’
McLean leaned back in his chair. He knew better than to interrupt now. Like listening to old Mrs Roberts in his grandmother’s kitchen, you waited until the end before asking questions.
‘Only, they was greedy, see? They killed so many folk the blood seeped into the earth. The spring ran red with it. And they a’ went mad too. Started killing each other till there was a’ but one left, and he could never die. Nor could he ever leave the place, cursed to roam the moors for ever. They say nothing grows proper on the hill any more, and the ghosts of all those deid folk wander the woods. An’ the last o’ the Druids, when the hunger comes on him, lures wee boys intae the woods, kills them an’ eats them. An’ the spring runs red again wi’ their blood.’
As ghost stories to scare children into not wandering off alone went, it was a good one. If a little gruesome. How long had people been telling it, and how had it mutated and evolved down the years? The only thing that surprised McLean was that he’d never heard it before.
‘And what about the red monks?’ he asked, checking off the other story Bobby had mentioned from his notes. A puzzled frown worked its way across Wilkins’s brow, followed by a half-smile of recognition. Not a man who kept his emotions hidden.
‘Ach, tha’s a Penicuik tale. Youse’ll have tae speak tae the boy’s mother about that one.’
54
The contrast couldn’t have been more marked between HMP Edinburgh and the Royal Infirmary on the opposite side of the city. Both were public institutions, of course, but their aims were very different. It was far easier to park outside the prison too. McLean finally found a space for his Alfa ten minutes’ walk away from the main building, wh
ich meant he was dripping with sweat by the time he reached Reception.
A harassed-looking administrator directed him to a ward at the back of the building, and he was surprised not to bump into any nursing staff or doctors he knew on the way there. Maybe they were all on their tea break. He could have certainly done with one himself, although the air-conditioned chill was welcome.
Genevieve Wilkins was the other half of the mix that made up her son Bobby; there was no doubting the young lad’s parentage. She lay motionless in a bed in a busy ward, and if it hadn’t been for her open eyes staring fixedly at the ceiling, McLean might have thought her asleep. As he came closer, he could see the corner of her mouth twitching, as if she were singing along to a tune only she could hear. He came close enough to see the lines on her face, the pale blotchiness of her skin and the dark shadows around her sunken eyes before she noticed him.
‘Who’re you?’ She rolled her head in the pillows to look at him, the most minimal of movements as if anything more strenuous was beyond her.
‘Tony McLean. I’m a detective.’
‘Polis?’
McLean didn’t show his warrant card, but nodded instead. ‘I wanted to have a word about your son, Bobby.’
He might reasonably have expected some reaction to that, maybe Mrs Wilkins sitting up straight despite her obvious exhaustion, a hand to her throat, a look of concern. Instead she slowly blinked her eyes.
‘Oh aye? What’s he up to now?’
‘You do realise you left him to look after himself. A thirteen-year-old boy.’
‘Aye.’ Wilkins clearly mistook McLean’s chastisement for praise. ‘He’s a braw wee lad. Takes after his father, only wi’out the fists, ken?’
McLean recalled Sheila Underhill’s words about Gordon Wilkins, the reason he was in Saughton in the first place. Was that enough to drive someone to drugs, or had Bobby’s mother been an addict before then?
‘He’s being looked after by social services now. What happens to him after that . . . well, we’ll see.’ If they pressed charges, he’d be in a young offenders’ institute until he was old enough to look after himself. Except that he was already old enough to look after himself, just not in the eyes of the law.
‘Is he no’ stayin’ wi’ Gavin Mason?’ Finally Mrs Wilkins struggled to sit upright, the plump pillows making life difficult for her. After a very short while she gave up again.
‘He was. But now he’s helping us with something else.’ McLean held up his hand to forestall the question he could see forming on the woman’s lips. ‘No, he’s not been arrested. He’s fine. But he did tell me some interesting stories about the woods up at Gladhouse, and Oak Hill. Stories I’m given to understand you told him?’
Confusion knitted the woman’s brow, no better at hiding her thoughts from her face than was her husband. ‘What stories?’
‘I know about the Oak Hill Druids, the buried bones. I’m interested in the red monks. Is that anything to do with the ruined monastery?’
This time Wilkins made more of an effort to sit up, and as she did so McLean could see how thin were her arms. Old track marks pocked the insides of her elbows, but the only fresh injection site was the catheter for her saline drip. She scratched at it absentmindedly with crooked, claw-like fingers, her nails raising red welts on the almost translucent skin of her forearm.
‘Who did you say youse were?’ she asked, suspicion replacing the confusion on her thin face.
‘Detective Chief Inspector McLean.’ He pulled out his warrant card and showed it to her. ‘I’m conducting a missing-person investigation. A woman, last seen in the vicinity of the woods near Gladhouse.’
The focus changed in Wilkins’s eyes, as if someone had just broken some terrible news to her. McLean had seen that look many times before, when he’d told people their loved ones had died or otherwise been the bearer of bad tidings. It was a necessary but uncomfortable part of being a police officer, and he recognised the reaction. When she spoke again, it was barely a whisper.
‘Oh Christ. No’ another one, surely?’
An eerie quiet fell over the ward as the thin, pale woman let her head sink back into her pillows. McLean waited a while for her to speak, but she seemed unwilling.
‘Another one?’ he asked. He had put Genevieve Wilkins in her mid-thirties, possibly younger. It was always hard to tell with drug addicts, and Bobby being thirteen didn’t necessarily mean anything. The eyes she turned to him now seemed far older.
‘Are you a religious man, Inspector?’ she asked.
‘Not especially. Hard to be when you’ve seen the things I’ve seen.’
‘Fair enough. I was very religious when I was wee. Good Catholic girl. Might have been a nun at one point.’ Wilkins laughed, then descended into a coughing fit that lasted long minutes. McLean gave her all the time she needed, surprised that no nurse came to see what was happening.
‘It’s no’ the red monks, that’s just Bobby getting confused. My mother used to tell me about the Red Abbot. She says her family used to work up at the monastery before it was knocked down, but I reckon she made that up too. The way I remember it was they were an order much like any other. The monastery had land, Oakhill Moor and all the farms down towards Temple. No’ the best, but good enough. Hundreds of years they were there, and nobody paid ’em much attention. They just did what they did. An’ every few years someone would go missing. A local girl would wander off and never be seen again. A traveller passing through would set off for the Border towns and never reach their destination. No’ enough to raise much in the way of suspicions, you understand. Girls disappear all the time, always have done. Run off wi’ their beau an’ end up in a whorehouse in the Old Town, aye?’
Wilkins fell silent again, as if the words had exhausted her. She looked even more ill than a recent overdose and an ongoing habit could account for. Some underlying sickness was eating away at her.
‘Only one of the local girls came back. She claimed she’d been lured in by the monks, trapped in their monastery and given nothing but plain bread and water. They’d prayed over her, told her she was being purified, aye? That her blood was becoming Christ’s blood, her flesh Christ’s flesh. They called her blessed, but she knew she was cursed, that they weren’t men of God but of the devil. The locals all owed their living to the monastery, and might have turned a blind eye, but the magistrate found out, took the young woman and her story to the king.’
McLean knew better than to ask which king, and when this was all supposed to have happened. He was also fairly sure he knew where the tale was going, and it wasn’t any more a happy place than it was real.
‘The king went to the monastery and searched it top to bottom. He found bones piled up in the crypt that weren’t the remains of monks, and he found other things too. When he interrogated the abbot, the truth came out, just as the young woman had told it. They took in young girls, used some occult ceremony to purify them. And then like good wee Christians they drank of the blood and ate of the flesh.’
McLean shuddered as he listened to Genevieve Wilkins’s words. He’d heard enough ghost and horror stories to recognise the tropes, but this was the sort of thing to give a child nightmares, not any kind of warning to stay away from the woods. Even told here in the modern, clinical setting of the hospital, bright daylight, sun shining through the windows, it chilled him more effectively than any air conditioning.
‘Why are they called the red monks?’ he asked, after a lengthy silence assured him she had finished with her horrible tale.
‘No’ red monks. It’s the Red Abbot. And it’s no’ real, you know? Just a story, aye?’
‘Stories always come from somewhere.’
She looked at him with those hooded, ancient eyes again. Better educated than her husband, probably from a family that might once have been from a higher class. Her name, Genevieve, wasn’t exactly common. Had she run
away with her beau? If so, it hadn’t worked out so well for her either.
‘Aye, that they do. An’ he’s called that because of what the king did, see? He put the monks all to death. Hung, drawn and quartered. ’Cept for the abbot. He was flayed alive and the monastery demolished. Its lands went to the crown, of course, so that’s your reason for the story there. Nothin’ like a bit of diabolical controversy to justify a land grab, aye? An’ it’s the abbot’s ghost as walks the woods, luring in any who stray his way. He’s red on account of having a’ his skin peeled off.’
‘But girls kept on going missing, even after the monks were gone, the monastery destroyed, right? You knew someone, didn’t you. That’s why you said “another one”.’
‘My best friend. Sally Wainwright. Would have been, what? Fourteen years ago? Something like that. There was a party, up by the reservoir. Was a summer like this, now I think about it. Hot and dry. Gordy an’ me, we’d not long been together. Young love, aye? We sloped off for a bit of privacy. That’s probably when Bobby was conceived.’ Wilkins choked back a sob, tears beginning to well in the corners of her eyes. She didn’t seem to have the strength to reach up and wipe them away.
‘Nobody noticed Sally was missing till the morning. We reported it, searched for her. You lot were useless.’ She turned her head and stared at him again. ‘An’ I never saw my best friend again.’
55
McLean drove back from the hospital with the radio turned off, his phone still in silent mode, thinking through what Mr and Mrs Wilkins had separately told him. The two of them knew similar stories, which was unsurprising given they had grown up within a few miles of each other. It was strange to think that folk tales still had any coinage in this internet age, where everything was filmed and spread around social media the instant it happened, where the improbable antics of the rich and famous were more interesting and more easily seen than the deprivation on your own doorstep. And yet those scary stories were still told, still handed down through the generations. They resonated far more than the instant-fix ephemera of the digital age.
Bury Them Deep Page 30