by James Oswald
19
‘Why’d you have to speak to that bloody reporter? And in a pub full of police officers too? What the fuck were you thinking?’
Six o’clock sharp in the small conference room, and McLean wasn’t at all surprised to find the DCC in a towering rage. He’d woken to the radio bulletins going on about the two dead girls, police incompetence and rumours of a cover-up. Over a hasty breakfast he’d looked at some of the online newsfeeds and seen even more lurid speculation about both serial killers and mysterious epidemics. He’d not seen that morning’s Tribune yet, but no doubt Jo Dalgliesh had done her best to spin the story for maximum outrage. That was all people wanted these days, after all.
‘If I’d refused to speak to her, she’d have written the story anyway. At least this way I was able to find out more or less how much she knew before it went to print.’
Robinson stared at him as if he had two heads. Perhaps the DCC wasn’t used to people answering him back when he was giving them a bollocking, but McLean had been ranted at by more violent people than Call-me-Stevie. It was too early in the morning to get riled up, and Emma’s more cheery disposition had left him in a good mood.
‘We knew this was going to happen, sir,’ he continued. ‘Sooner or later the press were going to find out about the girl in the basement. We were going to have to tell them today, start using them to try and track down who she is. A second body . . .’ He shook his head, unsure whether he wanted to go on.
‘It’s still bloody irregular talking to a reporter off the record in the pub. We sack constables for doing that, you know.’ Robinson was a bit calmer now, but still agitated.
‘That’s because constables who mouth off to the press are either doing it for backhanders or don’t know better. I’m a chief inspector, as you keep reminding me, sir. I made a decision based on the situation that was presented to me. And I made sure all the senior officers involved in this investigation knew about it as soon as it happened.’ He glanced across the room to where Detective Superintendent McIntyre was pretending to read a report. She had spoken to the DCC the night before, he knew. It was just that instead of using the time to reappraise what he was going to say during the press conference, Robinson had spent the night fretting.
‘Where are we then? What do they know, and what don’t they know that we do?’
‘Judging by the newsfeeds, they know pretty much everything and are having a lot of fun making up everything else.’ McIntyre picked up a small remote control and pointed it at the projector slung from the ceiling. A portion of the conference room wall lit up with the image from her laptop computer, a web browser page displaying the breaking-news section of the BBC Scotland website. ‘The less sensational reports have two separate deaths, a few days apart, neither body yet identified but both young children.’ A click and the screen changed to a tabloid website. ‘Clickbait sites reckon there’s some terrible new virus that’s targeting the young.’ Another click, another site. ‘Or that it’s a side-effect of vaccinations.’ Once again. ‘Or possibly alien abduction and experimentation.’
‘Enough, Jayne.’ Robinson slumped against the table, his wrath expended.
‘I hadn’t got to the one where they say it’s all a conspiracy by the Freemasons and something calling itself the Brotherhood.’
‘All that in less than twelve hours? I’m impressed.’ McLean looked at the latest screen McIntyre had displayed. He didn’t recognise the site or the name of the person who had authored the piece, but that was hardly surprising. ‘Maybe we should pay them to do our job for us.’
‘It’s not funny, McLean.’ Robinson growled out his surname. ‘What the hell am I supposed to say to those ghouls in there?’ He didn’t point or nod his head, but McLean knew well enough what he meant. Even now the assorted members of the press would be descending on the station like flies on a carcass, filing into the largest conference room, anticipating salacious detail they weren’t going to get. Outside in the street a line of trucks festooned with aerials and satellite dishes were already buggering up the rush hour traffic.
‘I know it’s old-fashioned, but we could try the truth. I’ll go in there and tell them everything we know so far. Appeal to the public for help and we can shut down all this nonsense before it gets the wind up its tail.’ He waved a hand at the web page pretending to be news that was plastered all over the wall.
‘You’ll go nowhere near that conference room and you’ll speak to nobody without my express permission.’ The edge of anger was back in the DCC’s voice. ‘You’ve done enough damage as it is.’
McLean opened his mouth to complain, then realised what he was going to complain about and shut it again. Not speaking to the press suited him just fine, although deep down he knew that it wasn’t going to be that easy.
‘Go see your friend the pathologist,’ Robinson said. ‘We need answers as to how these two girls died, and we need them now.’
He wasn’t sure whether the DCC had meant it literally when he’d told him to go and see Angus, but McLean took the opportunity anyway. It meant running the gauntlet of reporters outside the station, doing their pieces to camera with a snow-clad Arthur’s Seat in the background for good visuals. Luckily no one seemed to notice as he slipped out of the back door, collar on his overcoat pulled up like a spy. It didn’t take long to walk to the mortuary, and the cold air helped to clear his head, sharpen his thoughts.
Cadwallader was already prepped for the post-mortem when McLean let himself into the observation theatre. He’d seen one small girl opened up to reveal her innermost secrets this week already, had no great desire to get too close to a second one.
‘I’ll just watch from up here if you don’t mind,’ he said as the pathologist looked up at him. Doctor MacPhail was there too, no doubt to corroborate any findings, and he waved uncertainly at McLean before returning to his stool beside the X-ray viewing screens.
The examination didn’t take long, thankfully, and he was able to avoid seeing the worst of it by leaning back in his seat and staring at the ceiling. From a distance, he couldn’t hear properly what Angus said, although at one point the pathologist asked Tom MacPhail for his opinion on something. McLean let most of it wash over him, chasing thoughts instead. Who was this little girl, and who was the one they had found in the basement? How could a parent lose a child like that and not kick up a fuss? How terrified for your own life would you have to be that you would keep silent? Or how little did you actually value the life of a young girl? That was always a possibility, if as he suspected both children were illegal immigrants. There was every chance their parents weren’t even here in Edinburgh, might not even be still alive. And there was a chance too that a young female life was not worth preserving in whatever foreign land they had come from. There were those in his own country who almost certainly felt the same way.
‘You still with us, Tony?’
The words cut through McLean’s musing, and he looked up to see Angus Cadwallader staring at him from a couple of paces away. His green scrubs were remarkably clean for a man who had just performed a post-mortem, and for a moment McLean thought he might have changed already. That he was rubbing his hands on an off-white towel gave the lie to that idea quickly enough.
‘Just trying to get my head around what’s happening here.’ He stood up stiffly, hip aching from where it had been broken several years earlier. It did that when the weather was cold, he’d noticed. Or when there was a storm coming.
‘You and me both.’
‘That bad, is it?’
‘At least. Come and have a look.’
McLean hesitated. ‘Not sure I’m in the mood to see another dead wee girl, Angus.’
‘That’s not what I’m going to show you. Bad enough I have to myself.’ Cadwallader turned away and set off towards the open-plan office that stood adjacent to the examination theatre. Glancing back at the stainless-steel table, McLe
an saw Doctor Sharp busy sewing the dead girl back together again, destined for a long stay in the cold mortuary and then final rest in an unmarked grave. He shook his head to try and dislodge the uncharacteristic lump that had appeared in his throat, then followed his old friend away from the grisly scene.
‘How much do you know about ancient Egypt, Tony?’
McLean had found himself a seat that didn’t face the glass looking out onto the examination theatre. This meant that he had to watch his old friend as he stripped off his scrubs and clambered into a tweed suit, but that was preferable to the more intimate and horrifying scene playing out behind him.
‘I saw a documentary once, I think. And I went on an educational cruise around the Mediterranean when I was about ten. We visited Alexandria, took a bus down to Cairo and Giza. Mostly I remember wee boys begging for sweets, meeting the Gully Gully Man, and feeling terrified when we were taken into a pyramid somewhere in the desert. I was convinced the entrance was going to collapse and we’d be trapped there for ever.’
Cadwallader looked at him as if he were a total stranger. ‘I had no idea. You’re full of surprises. But trapped under a pyramid for ever? That’s . . . kind of appropriate to what we’re looking at here.’
‘It is?’
‘Aye. The wee girl you found in the basement, and that poor thing out there. Both of them have undergone some kind of process that’s begun to mummify them. Their skin, well, I don’t really know how to describe it. Not exactly tanning. You see, the ancient Egyptians preserved the bodies of their dead because they believed they would need them in the afterlife. They were very skilled, knew things we haven’t even begun to rediscover about how to stop flesh and bone from rotting away.’
‘You’re saying they’ve been mummified?’ McLean stole a glance over his shoulder towards the examination table, but Doctor Sharp had finished her work and was wheeling the body away to its lonely cold store.
‘Part-mummified. And only their skin, as far as I can tell.’
‘But . . . That makes no sense, surely?’
Cadwallader took off his spectacles and polished them with a grubby handkerchief. ‘Tony, none of this makes any sense. The Egyptian mummies had all their internal organs removed before the preservation process began. They’d use a wee hook through the nose to scoop out the brains. These two girls both had all their organs still inside them, only something was making them fail. Their hearts gave out, but their kidneys, liver, spleen, pretty much everything else looks like it belongs to an eighty-year-old, not someone who’s only eight. I’d say they might have suffered from progeria, except that it’s incredibly rare and outwardly they don’t show the classic signs.’
‘But they died, you say? They weren’t killed?’
‘I don’t know. Something killed them before their time, for sure. But was it a person, or was it some disease I’ve not seen before? Something my colleagues at the Faculty of Medicine, even the Centre for Tropical Veterinary Medicine, haven’t seen before? Something we can’t find any toxin for in their blood? I’ll admit it: I can’t say why they died. I can say that the unusual preservation of their skin seems to be an after-effect though.’
‘So they both died of the same thing.’
‘Exactly so.’
‘Are they related, the two girls?’
Cadwallader shook his head. ‘Not closely, at least. We’re still waiting on the full DNA analysis of the first one, and that poor wee thing—’ He waved a hand in the direction of the now empty examination theatre. ‘Her sample’s only just gone off. Blood tests say they’re not related though, and physically they don’t look much alike.’
McLean hadn’t seen much of the young girl in the Hermitage, and now he slightly regretted not getting a proper look at her during the examination.
‘Have you got photos of them both? Their faces?’
‘Should have. Hang on a minute.’ Cadwallader sat down at a computer, reached for the mouse and started swiping and tapping with all the dexterity of a silver surfer. McLean waited as patiently as he could, wondering whether his old friend would find the photographs before Doctor Sharp came back and did it for him.
‘Here we are, look.’ The pathologist leaned back in his chair and let McLean see the screen. An examination table photograph of the first girl’s face filled it, leaving nothing to the imagination. Her eyes were closed, cheeks thin and hollow. She looked darker than he remembered, as if whatever had started to tan her skin was still working its evil magic. The tangle of wiry black hair framing her head looked almost wig-like.
‘And this is the one we just examined.’ Cadwallader clicked the mouse and another photograph appeared. This girl looked a touch less malnourished, although her skin had that same waxy quality as the other girl. It was tanned, but less so than the previous image. What struck him most about her though was her hair.
‘How did I not notice that at the crime scene yesterday?’ McLean pointed at the screen as if his old friend would know immediately what he was referring to.
‘Notice what?’
‘Her hair.’
‘Oh, that. She was wearing a woolly hat, remember? Pulled down over her ears. What about her hair? I mean, it’s cut short, aye. A boy’s cut, but that’s not so strange these days.’
McLean stared at the screen, mind racing as it tried to find a place for this piece of the puzzle to fit. Failing badly. There were too many unknowns, and too many coincidences that made no sense. But most of all there was this young girl, dead and shoved away in a cold storage unit in the city mortuary. This little girl with hair as red as the setting sun in the desert.
20
McLean climbed out of the passenger seat of his Alfa at the main entrance to the Hermitage, leaving DC Harrison to lock the car as he walked over to the main gate. He was pleased to see it closed and a uniformed constable making sure nobody slipped in unawares. At least that much procedure was being adhered to. A couple of cars parked further up the road were most likely journalists looking for a photo opportunity. He just hoped they had enough bodies on the ground to keep them from contaminating the crime scene.
‘DI Ritchie here, is she, Constable?’ he asked as he showed the young man his warrant card.
‘Aye, sir. She’s up at the crime scene.’
‘Any trouble from the press?’ McLean waved a hand at the parked cars.
‘No’ so much. Think this cold weather’s keeping them away mostly. Could be creeping in the back way, mind. There’s more ways into this place than I reckon anyone knows.’
He was right. A network of official and unofficial paths crisscrossed the park, and there were ways in from gardens of nearby houses, his own included. You could walk in along the Braid Burn, from Blackford Hill and the golf course. Closing the whole area off would have required far more manpower, and expense, than they could afford. Ritchie was experienced enough to prioritise working the immediate area around the crime scene itself. They could expand the search outwards if nothing came up from that. At least the weather was in their favour. In the summer the Hermitage would have been bustling with people. But then, in the summer someone might have seen what had happened too.
He left the constable behind and set off into the park, Harrison following in silence. The still air had a dampness to it that made the chill feel even colder than usual, their breath steaming as if they were dragons.
‘Used to come down here when I was a boy. It’s a great place to hide out. Well, in the summer anyway.’
Harrison said nothing as they walked down the wide footpath alongside the Dean Burn, but he could see the sideways glance she gave him out of the corner of his eye.
‘Of course, that was a long time ago. I don’t suppose parents would let their kids go wandering off into the woods all day during the holidays now.’
‘Kids today probably wouldn’t want to. Why come here when you can hang out at th
e play park drinking Buckie and swearing at the passers-by?’
McLean raised an eyebrow at Harrison’s cynicism, but said nothing. They walked on down the footpath for a while before she spoke again.
‘Your place isn’t far from here, is it, sir?’
‘No.’ He stopped to get his bearings. Things had changed since he’d come here regularly. The paths were better maintained for one thing. The city felt closer, too. Before, this had been a jungle. His own adventure playground. Now it hummed with the noise of not-too-distant cars, and peering through the leafless trees he could see buildings where thirty years ago there had been none. Thirty? McLean corrected himself. More like forty.
They walked a bit further, rounding a bend in the path to be confronted by a couple of bored-looking uniformed officers. Crime scene tape had been rolled out between the trees to the side of the path, a marked way leading to the clearing where the young girl’s body had been found.
‘Morning, sir. Constable.’ One of the officers turned as they approached, smiling as he saw them both. Police Sergeant Reg Clark. McLean knew him from his early days with Lothian and Borders, surprised that the man hadn’t retired already.
‘Busy, Reg?’ he asked.
‘Hardly. The main entrances are locked down, and the weather’s doing the rest for us.’
‘Forensics still in there, I take it?’ He peered through the spindly trees, just about seeing the white shape of the tent in the gloom.
‘Aye. Reckon they’ll be done by the end of the day.’
‘What about the area search?’ He turned in a slow circle, not seeing the undergrowth crawling with coppers.
‘No’ sure sir. DI Ritchie was here a wee while ago, sir. I think she lost the plot a bit when she found out we’d only a handful of constables to work with and most of them were guarding the gates.’
‘She still here?’
‘Think she got a call back to the station.’
McLean glanced over to the trees again, then up at the purple-grey clouds low overhead. There was a scent in the air of more snow on the way, which would make any search pointless. They wouldn’t have daylight for much longer either. A whole day wasted.