by James Oswald
Harrison opened her mouth to speak at the same time as Seaton lunged at DS Peterson. His face had turned bright red, a snarl ripping from his mouth and leaving trails of spittle behind. The lawyer fell off his chair in his haste to get out of the way, crashing to the floor with all the dignity of a dead bat. Peterson dodged Seaton’s badly thrown punch, grabbed the man’s arm and had him face down on the table in seconds. The young detective constable with him piled in just as swiftly, and in a few moments Seaton was being bundled out of the interview room by three large uniformed officers.
‘We’ll just add assaulting a police officer to the list, shall we?’ Peterson said as the lawyer struggled to his feet. ‘He’ll be up in front of the sheriff on Monday, but I think we’ll be keeping him here until then.’
McLean flagged down DS Peterson as he was leaving the interview room a couple of minutes later.
‘Nicely done,’ he said. ‘There weren’t many signs he was going to explode like that.’
‘I thought at least one of them would lose the rag, sir. Hoped one would. All the rest were quite quiet by comparison.’
‘You get anything useful from them?’
‘Only confirmation of what we already knew. Same old faces turning up over and over again. It all helps to build the bigger picture. At least we know who’s talking to who. And after that little outburst there, Mr Seaton’s not going to slip away from us, no matter what his solicitor might say.’
‘Don’t think I’ve had the pleasure of his acquaintance before. Shifty fellow. Looked expensive.’
‘Oh aye, Kennedy Smythe. He’s a right slippery wee bugger and no mistake. And not cheap, no.’
McLean looked up and down the corridor, half expecting the lawyer to still be hanging around like the bad smell that he was. ‘You know him?’
‘We’ve crossed paths before, aye. Made a name for himself over on the west coast, getting gangsters off the hook on technicalities. He’s a partner at MacFarlane and Dodds.’
McLean recognised the name of the firm, recalled a case a couple of years back where he’d encountered one of their junior partners. That hadn’t gone well for anyone involved. ‘I thought they were corporate law, not criminal.’
‘They’re that big I reckon they’ve departments covering everything under the sun. Smythe’s a pain in the arse. Sharp as they come. I’ll give you good odds he’ll get them all bailed and away before the sheriff’s even sat down.’
‘All of them?’ McLean nodded his head towards the still-open door to the interview room.
‘Aye, well. Young Mr Seaton’s done us a wee bit of a favour there. Attempted assault on a police officer. Plenty witnesses, and we’ve got it all on tape too? No, I think he’ll be kicking his heels in Saughton until his time comes round to see the judge. That’s something Kennedy Smythe’s no’ going to be happy about.’ DS Peterson didn’t look like he was too bothered about the lawyer’s state of mind.
‘You know what he does for a living?’ McLean asked. ‘Seaton, I mean.’
‘File says he’s a security systems expert. Fits alarms to office blocks and stuff like that.’
‘Not his own business though, I take it?’
Peterson consulted the sheaf of papers he’d brought for the interview. ‘He’s self-employed, apparently. Sole trader. But it’s all contract work as far as I know.’
‘Pays well, then, the security business. If he can afford a sharp suit like your man Smythe there.’
‘Aye, I thought that too. Smythe’s representing all of them, and he’s not known for working pro bono. He turned up pretty sharpish, too. It’s not like we had to bother the duty solicitor or anything.’
‘Too much to hope we can find out who’s footing the bill, I suppose.’
Peterson shrugged. ‘We could ask, but I’d not hold out any great hopes.’
‘Maybe not right now. But give him a couple of weeks in prison and he might be a bit more forthcoming, aye?’
Peterson tried to suppress the smirk, hiding it with a wipe of the hand across his mouth. ‘That’s kind of what I was hoping, sir. Just need to make sure he gets the right cellmate when he arrives at Saughton.’
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Sergeant.’ McLean hid his own smile with a nod of the head. ‘Keep me up to speed on any developments, OK?’
7
The ceiling lights flickered as McLean clumped down the stone steps into the basement, as if the ghosts of villains past were haunting him. The station had been built on top of a much earlier building, retaining the Victorian stonework below street level. Most of the old cells weren’t considered fit for incarcerating felons any more, and had instead been pressed into service as stores. The evidence lockers were down here, and so too was the Cold Case Unit. He often wondered whether it had been put there in the hope that nobody would want to work in it for more than a couple of months, but if that was the case then they hadn’t reckoned with the sheer bloody-mindedness and thrawn of ex- Detective Superintendent Charles Duguid.
‘Anybody home?’ McLean asked as he stuck his head in through the open door. At least the CCU room was large, and the arched ceiling was too high in the middle for him to reach with an outstretched arm. The only natural light came from two narrow wells in the stonework that pointed up towards the car park at the rear of the building. They hardly worked in the height of summer; winter left the room in a state of perpetual gloom.
‘Thought I might be seeing you down here soon enough.’
McLean turned to see a figure emerging out of the shadows. Clutching a heavy archive folder in one hand, Duguid threaded his way through the empty desks.
‘You heard about the dead girl?’ McLean knew that the station gossip travelled fast, but it was only a couple of hours since Cadwallader had told him he thought the body had been around for a while.
‘Word is she was mummified. Might have been there twenty years or more. Sounds like a cold case to me.’ Duguid shuffled around and sat down at his own desk, pulling the anglepoise lamp closer and placing a pair of spectacles on the end of his nose. In his tweed suit he looked more like a teacher than a detective.
‘Aye, well. Post-mortem’s Monday, so we’ll know better what we’re dealing with then. Meantime I’ve got DC Harrison chasing up the details on the building. Hard to believe a basement room off the Royal Mile hasn’t been used in all that time.’
‘You’d be surprised.’ Duguid took his spectacles off again, the folder on his desk still unopened. ‘Look at this place, after all. Some of the old cells in the lower basement probably haven’t been opened in a decade, and this is a working police station. Stuff gets shoved away and forgotten. People get old and die. You know how it goes.’
McLean remained unconvinced. ‘Well, I’ll get Harrison to work with Grumpy Bob on it anyway. He’s down here more than not these days, but if it does turn out to be something else, he’s not retired just yet.’
Duguid opened the folder, pulled out the top sheet of paper and peered at it myopically. Then he grabbed his spectacles again, shoved them on and frowned. ‘That all you came to tell me about?’
‘Pretty much. Actually I was just going to leave a note. Didn’t think you’d be in at the weekend. Certainly not this late.’
‘Mrs Duguid has her bridge club tonight. I prefer to stay away. What’s your excuse?’
From anyone else, the question might have been innocent, just a simple retort. McLean knew the ex-detective superintendent better than that. He knew himself better too. With the Anti-terrorism Unit looking after the men they’d arrested on the march, and all the tasks relating to the dead girl delegated to reliable junior officers, there was no reason for him to be still here. He should have gone home an hour ago, possibly more. He glanced at his watch, knowing that the later he left it the worse it would be.
‘You’re right. I’ll be off then. We’ll keep you in the loop on the
dead girl investigation. Might appreciate your insight.’
Duguid made a noise halfway between a grunt and a growl, shoved his spectacles up his nose and started reading. McLean knew a dismissal when he saw one. There was no getting away from it, he was going to have to go home.
Snow made the drive across town tricky, and not just because a multi-car accident meant he had to take a different route to normal. McLean could remember a time when every winter brought snow, when the icy cold air fell on the city from the Pentland Hills to the south, chilling him through as he built lonely snowmen in the garden of his gran’s house. Childhood memories were not the best to rely on though, and he knew those deep winters had been few and far between. More recently the mild, wet weather had stretched on through spring and into summer as climate change wreaked its predictable havoc, but the past two years had seen something of a return to the seasons he remembered. It was hard to view the white chunks tumbling from the sky and smearing themselves against his windscreen with the same naive wonder he had as a child.
All these thoughts and more occupied the rest of the slow journey through a city turned into a hellish orange-white landscape. At least the heating worked in his Alfa, and he’d even remembered the little dial that toned down the performance to make it easier to drive in the conditions. As he pulled up the drive and parked outside the back door, the snow began to fall in fat chunks, filling in the rectangular patch of clear gravel where a car had been parked until recently. So she’d gone again. He couldn’t really blame her.
The hot engine pinked and clicked as it cooled. McLean sat there, hands still on the wheel, motionless as he stared through the windscreen at nothing. At everything. The months since Emma’s miscarriage had been cruel. He’d tried to reach out to her and been rebuffed, tried to support her as she threw herself into work even though he knew well enough she was using it as a distraction. An excuse not to talk about what had happened. It was what he did, after all. Easier to keep moving than sit still and let the grief catch up with you.
The thought spurred him into action. He unclipped his seatbelt and climbed out of the car, hurrying to the back door as the snow fell ever thicker. A last glance back showed the space where Emma’s car had been was almost covered now. McLean shook his head. Not an omen. He had no time for such things.
‘Just you and me then.’ Mrs McCutcheon’s cat eyed him with feline disdain as he entered the kitchen. At least Emma had left the lights on for him this time. No note, though. McLean stared at the magnets on the fridge door for a while, then opened it and peered inside. Last night’s takeaway curry was about the most tempting thing in there. He pulled out a beer and popped the top off, considered drinking from the bottle and then fetched a glass instead.
He sat and leafed through the various reports and other useless paperwork he’d brought home while the microwave went about reheating his meal. It wasn’t perhaps the most exciting way to spend an evening, but at least the kitchen had the benefit of no distractions. Not for the first time, McLean regretted giving in to Deputy Chief Constable Stevie Robinson’s insistence on promotion back in the summer. Detective inspector was a level of responsibility he didn’t exactly feel comfortable with, detective chief inspector even less so. There was never time to concentrate on anything properly. Too much chasing targets, squaring budgets, going to endless meetings about performance where none of the others present could see the irony of them wasting so much time not doing the job. He began to understand now why Duguid had been such a crabbit bastard in the years until he retired. Maybe that was why the ex-detective superintendent was being nice to him now.
The ping of the microwave interrupted his musing. McLean struggled to his feet and crossed the kitchen, surprised to find it still whirring away, the countdown minutes yet to go. His confusion was cut short by a second ping, this time from underneath the report on resource efficiency monitoring that he’d not been reading. Picking it up, he saw the screen of his phone lit, a text displayed. It disappeared before he could read it, but he knew it wouldn’t be important. Just Emma telling him not to wait up for her. Again. He dropped the phone back down on the table as the microwave pinged for real. Food was more important right now. He’d get everything ready for Monday and then he’d worry about whether or not he still had a relationship to salvage.
A freezing fog hangs thick in the midnight air, making dull orange circles of the street lamps and swallowing the winter trees whole. It muffles all sound, a silence so total it seems as if the city has simply stopped. All is still, not a car moving, not a person to be seen.
Billows swirl and eddy on hidden currents, thickening and thinning as the frozen air churns. Monsters form in the mist, fight each other and are absorbed again unseen. For a moment, soft headlights pierce the darkness, form a perfect tunnel bound by white like ectoplasm in a Victorian medium’s parlour. And then the low thrum of diesel engines shudders into hearing as, one by one, the trucks trundle through.
The city never truly sleeps any more, but this one night there is nobody out to witness as the convoy slows, pulls off the glistening, icy tarmac and onto the snow-crusted grass. Insect-like, they circle. Headlight eyes struggle to pierce the fog, and yet without any sign of direction they find their allotted spaces. The chutter of engines dies in steps, each massive rig shuddering into silence. And as the lights wink out, so the fog reclaims the meadow, the barest outline of monoliths in the swirling, swallowing white.
Soft noises float through the air, the clink of hammer on iron, thwap of canvas unrolled, rip of rope pulled taut. Occasional voices mutter and moan, the odd curse thrown out to the weather gods or the wind or the cold. And, all around, the city rumbles on, unaware of what is unfolding at its heart.
8
McLean yawned and rubbed at his face, felt a roughness under his fingers where he’d missed a bit shaving that morning. It was always the same; Sunday off pretending to relax had left him sluggish and unfocused. He’d spent most of the day trying to find a way to talk to Emma that didn’t sound either needy or patronising. In the end his suggestion they maybe go out for a meal had met with a noncommittal shrug, and now he felt bad for not pushing the point. They’d eaten separately again, her perched on the sofa in front of the television with a healthy salad, him in the kitchen with Mrs McCutcheon’s cat and cold leftover pizza he couldn’t remember ordering.
‘Rough night, Tony? Thought you had the day off yesterday.’
He looked up to see the smiling face of Detective Superintendent Jayne McIntyre. She stood in the open doorway to his office, clutching a heavy folder under one arm.
‘Eh? Oh. Not really. Just can’t seem to get my head in the game today.’
‘Too much paperwork and not enough street time?’ McIntyre stepped into the room, and for a horrible moment McLean thought she had brought him yet more to wade through. She kept hold of the folder though, slumping into one of the armchairs at the far side of the office that wasn’t nearly as comfortable as it looked.
‘Too many distractions and not enough getting on with the job.’ McLean looked at his watch. ‘Still, Angus is going to be doing the post-mortem on that wee girl soon. That’s my reward for dealing with all this.’ He picked up one of several reports lying open in front of him.
‘Thought you’d given that case to Grumpy Bob to follow up. Seeing as it’s likely to be the CCU who take it on anyway.’
‘You know what Bob’s like with post-mortems, Jayne. And this one feels kind of personal, given that I was the one who found her.’
McIntyre leaned forward in her chair, folder on her lap, arms crossed. ‘About that. How was it you came to be in that building anyway? What were you doing in the close? You were meant to be here overseeing Operation Fundament, weren’t you?’
‘Thought I’d get a bit of street time like you suggested.’ McLean told the superintendent about his last-minute decision to join the marchers, leaving out the bit wher
e Grumpy Bob won the bet that he would. ‘ You’re right though. It looks like it might well be one for the Cold Case Unit, and Bob’s working there more than with CID these days. Easing himself into the position in time for his retirement, I guess.’
‘Another experienced officer we can’t really afford to lose.’ McIntyre drummed her fingers against the folder for a few moments before getting to the point she’d clearly come to make in the first place. ‘So you don’t think this wee girl’s going to be a problem then? I mean, it’s tragic, for sure. And we’ll have to investigate it as thoroughly as we can. But if she’s been dead a long time . . .’
McLean closed the folder he’d not been giving his full attention to even before the detective superintendent had come in. ‘I know. Budgets are tight and we can’t afford to waste too much time chasing down a decades-old crime. Best-case scenario nobody knew she was in there, and she died of something natural. Let’s wait until Angus has a few more answers for us though, aye?’
‘It’s an interesting case. Not often I see a body so well preserved. Things left in basements in this city tend to rot, not cure.’
McLean stood in the examination theatre, a few paces back from the stainless-steel table where Angus Cadwallader carried out his grim task. He’d long since lost count of the number of times he’d been in this position, but he could count on the fingers of one hand the times the subject of the examination had been this young. The girl’s body seemed even smaller and frailer for having been stripped, the table too big for her.
‘Preserved?’
‘Well, I can’t think of any other way to describe it. Her skin’s like leather. Dried-out leather. She must have been treated with something after death, but damned if I can tell you what. I’ll take a sample and send it off for analysis, of course.’
‘Any indication of how she died?’
‘Patience, Tony. I’m getting there.’ Cadwallader bent close to the cadaver, sensitive fingers running over the dead girl’s skin. He picked up her hands, one at a time, turning them this way and that as he inspected her fingers under the powerful overhead lights. McLean had watched his friend perform this ritual many times, but he couldn’t remember ever having seen him take quite so much care, quite so much time.