Cold as the Grave

by James Oswald

  ‘Make it for all of us. And biscuits, if you can find them.’

  ‘I’ve not done anything wrong, you ken? I’ve just been trying to help.’

  McLean sat at the table in interview room one, looking across at an increasingly agitated Billy McKenzie. He wished DC Harrison would hurry back with the coffee; somehow her presence seemed to calm the young man down. Unlike the looming bulk of DS Naismith, standing by the door.

  ‘You’re absolutely right, Billy. You’ve not done anything wrong, and you are trying to help. Believe me when I say you’re not in any trouble here.’

  ‘Then why’d you bring me here in a polis car? Why’d you send those two constables round my place to pick me up? You think they don’t notice stuff like that?’

  ‘They? Who would notice? And why would it matter?’ Naismith’s voice dripped with sarcasm as he asked the question, and his attitude explained a lot of McKenzie’s unhappiness.

  ‘Sergeant, could you maybe step outside? This isn’t an interrogation. We’re not recording this and I don’t need corroboration for anything Mr McKenzie might tell me. Perhaps you could go and find out what’s taking Harrison so long with those coffees.’

  Naismith looked like he’d been slapped, pausing a little too long before giving McLean a tiny nod. He threw McKenzie an angry glance, and then did as he’d been told.

  ‘I’m very sorry, Billy. When I asked for you to be brought to the station, I meant for a plain-clothes officer to fetch you. I can see how it would look to the Dee Trust, having you hauled out of one of their flats by a couple of uniformed constables. They subsidise your rent, I take it?’

  ‘Aye. It’s a halfway house, y’ken? Take us from care homes and set us up. It’s free to start with, and there’s folk there to help you find work, learn how to use the laundry machines, stuff like that. When you get a job, they expect you to pay something, but it’s no’ much, ken. No’ like renting.’

  ‘You grew up in care, then?’

  ‘Aye. Fostered a few times, but . . .’ McKenzie stared at his fingernails for a while, then straight at McLean with an intensity that was shocking. ‘The last place, mind. Before I turned sixteen and could get oot. That was proper nasty, like. I’d ’ve been better off on the streets, but then they told me about Inchmalcolm Tower, the Trust.’ He shook his head a couple of times, and went back to studying his fingernails. ‘It was good there. An’ wi’ a job an’ all. No’ sure what’s gonnae happen now. Specially if they think I’m in trouble with the polis.’

  A noise at the open door disturbed them both. McLean looked round to see DC Harrison bearing a tray with three mugs of coffee on it, along with a plate of chocolate biscuits she had to have stolen from somewhere. There was no way a packet of those could remain hidden in the station for any length of time.

  ‘Sorry it took so long, sir. Canteen’s filling up with frozen constables in from the Hermitage.’

  McLean had been concentrating on the mugs and the biscuits while Harrison spoke, but even so he noticed the way McKenzie stiffened at the final word. A gambler might have considered it a definite tell.

  ‘Here you go, Billy. And tuck into the biscuits. If you don’t, then some thieving constable will.’ He placed one of the mugs down in front of the young man, then waited for Harrison to sit before continuing.

  ‘I’ll have a word with the building manager, let them know what’s been going on and that you’re not in any trouble with us. If there’s anything I can do about your job too, I will.’ He let that sink in for a moment, waiting for McKenzie to lift his mug to his lips before speaking again. ‘Has Rahel been in touch?’

  The tell was more obvious this time, now that he was looking for it, the twitch so pronounced, McKenzie almost spilled coffee down his face. He disguised it by taking a bigger gulp than was wise, then coughed when he found it too hot.

  ‘I know what she thinks of the likes of us. We’re the face of authority, the folk who’ll send her home.’ McLean shook his head even though he knew that he really should report any illegal immigrants he encountered in his work. ‘I don’t want to do that, but I understand why Rahel won’t believe me. We still need to talk to her though.’

  Billy said nothing, staring through hooded eyes. If half his talk of coming up through the care system was true, then he had no great love of the authorities either, nor any reason to believe them.

  ‘Constable, have you got that file?’ McLean turned to Harrison, who produced the folder he’d asked her to put together. Taking it from her as if it were an unexploded bomb, he placed it carefully down on the table, unopened.

  ‘What I’ve got in here is not pretty. I wouldn’t normally show this kind of thing to a member of the public, but given what’s happened, I think it only fair you know just how desperate we are to talk to Rahel. The things you will see in here are very upsetting. I just want to warn you of that. OK?’

  Billy’s nod was almost imperceptible, his gaze darting from unopened folder to McLean’s face and back again. McLean waited a moment before lifting up the cover and pulling out a sheaf of high-resolution photographs.

  ‘This is a young girl we found in a basement just off the Royal Mile a few days ago. The day you first came to see me.’ He laid out two pictures, one from the crime scene and one from the mortuary. ‘This is a young girl we found in the Hermitage yesterday morning. As you can see, her shoes are missing. We found them in a wee shrine a hundred or so yards away.’

  Billy tensed again as McLean mentioned the Hermitage. His face had gone very pale, but there was no spark of recognition on it as he looked at the two dead girls. McLean gave him a few moments to take in the unpleasant details before laying out the final photograph in front of him.

  ‘And this is a young woman found dumped in a commercial wheelie bin up Sighthill way. She’s not dead, but we don’t know if she’ll survive. She was beaten so badly, whoever did it must have thought they’d killed her. The doctors have got her in a medically induced coma. We can’t identify her, Billy. Her DNA’s not on our records, and she was naked when she was found. Our best bet is that she’s been trafficked here, sold into prostitution.’

  McKenzie stared at the photographs for a long time, but didn’t reach out to pick up any of them. McLean let the silence settle, interrupted only by the muted sounds drifting in from outside.

  ‘You think that might be Akka,’ he said eventually, indicating the photograph of the comatose young woman with a slight nod. ‘That’s why you need to speak to Rahel? To get her to identify her sister? If this is her?’

  ‘It’s probably not. But her hair’s the same colour, her skin tone is similar. Hard to tell if they share any distinguishing features, given how badly beaten up this poor girl is, but she’s much the same size as Rahel. I have to look at the possibility, at the very least.’

  McKenzie stared at the pictures for a while longer, and McLean could see the conflict inside him written across the young man’s face. Young man? He was still a boy, really.

  ‘I cannae make any promises, ken?’ he said at last. ‘But I’ll try an’ speak to her. See what she knows.’

  23

  Darkness had fallen outside by the time the deputy chief constable stepped into McLean’s office and closed the door behind him. He was the last to arrive at the meeting, and the rest of them had been waiting impatiently to get started. Not that there was a great deal to discuss beyond their lack of progress so far.

  ‘Sorry I’m late, everyone. Unexpected call from the CC. Wanted an update on the press situation. Seems he’s being hassled for progress updates by the politicians, so I hope you’ve got some good news for me.’

  By unspoken agreement, they had left the chair at the head of the conference table free. Robinson slumped into it with such a sigh McLean could imagine he’d walked here all the way from Strathclyde Region, not taken the lift from the car park and ambled down the corridor. />
  ‘We found the girl’s shoes, sir,’ he said.

  ‘Is that all? I take it they didn’t have a name tag in them? Nothing useful like an address slipped under the insole?’ Robinson didn’t hold back with his sarcasm.

  ‘Forensics spent the afternoon processing the walled garden where we found them. I think DI Ritchie has more information on that.’

  The deputy chief constable’s sneer lifted, but only a little as he switched his attention from McLean to Ritchie. ‘Walled garden? I thought the girl’s body was found in a clearing.’

  ‘It was, sir. But there was a walled garden nearby. Tony— . . . Chief Inspector McLean led us to it.’ Ritchie tilted her head in McLean’s direction. ‘We’d have found it eventually, I’m sure, but local knowledge is always useful. Looks like it’s been used as a camp, and our best guess is a group of refugees hiding out from the authorities. Can’t think it would be much fun living there in these conditions though, which might explain why it’s been abandoned.’

  ‘And how exactly is any of this helping us to identify the dead girl? Either of the dead girls, for that matter?’

  ‘We know nobody’s come forward to claim either of them, sir. We’re not getting any hits for DNA either. Best guess is they’re the children of illegal immigrants, probably trafficked. They’re never going to come forward if they think they’ll be shoved in a detention centre, or, worse, shipped back to whatever war zone they’ve fled from.’

  Robinson stared at Ritchie for an uncomfortably long time, then turned his attention to McLean. ‘You think that’s likely?’

  ‘Can you think of any other reason someone wouldn’t come forward about a missing child?’

  ‘Well, they might have killed them, for one thing.’

  McLean shrugged. ‘It’s a possibility, of course. But local children that age will be missed from school. They’ll have friends, neighbours. People notice these things, especially once the story’s in the papers. We’ve had artist’s impressions of both girls doing the rounds all day, and we’ve been running multiple social-media campaigns on the toy we found. Not had a contact yet that wasn’t some crazy looking for attention.’

  Robinson rubbed at his face, still weary from that long walk down the corridor or ground down by yet more bad news. ‘Illegal immigrants. Brilliant. The press are going to have a field day with this. Coming over here, killing their children. Christ, what a nightmare.’

  ‘We’re still not entirely sure how they died, sir,’ McLean said, eliciting another groan from the DCC.

  ‘Well, what exactly do we know then, Tony?’ Robinson stared at him for a moment, then looked at the other detectives present, one by one. ‘What exactly do we know?’

  The light dusting of snow from earlier in the day had been turned to grey slush and pushed to the kerbside by traffic. McLean drove slowly through the city, heading for home and the hope that maybe Emma would be there. If she was talking to him, so much the better.

  Bright red brake lights slowed him as he left Sciennes and moved onto the Meadows. He couldn’t drive through the park now without leaning forward over the steering wheel and peering up into the sky. It wasn’t snowing any more, but the clouds were low, reflecting back the orange of street lamps. The ancient trees clawed at the night with bare branch fingers, but no dead bodies fell into their grasp this time. Shivering at the memory of that case, he tried to piece together the images of that snowy night over a year past. They’d drugged him, that much he remembered. Or, at least, the doctors told him they’d found levels of the stuff in his blood that would make a racehorse groggy. He’d gone to a house and uncovered what could only be described as a hipster opium den, ironically enough, but that was another detail he’d gleaned from reports after the investigation had been concluded. There’d been something about a helicopter, advanced stealth technology the military didn’t want anyone knowing about. And there’d been Mrs Saifre, otherwise known as Jane Louise Dee.

  Her philanthropy – the Dee Trust – didn’t fool him. McLean knew her for the evil creature she was. But she couldn’t have been there when he’d fallen from the sky, drugged, into a miraculously deep snow drift. They’d found only the body of the pilot, and according to the tabloids Jane Louise Dee had been hosting a gala dinner in New York that night. Not her, and yet even in his madness he was sure.

  A blast of car horn woke him from his musing. McLean saw that the traffic had begun moving again, and hurried to catch up. Glancing to the side, he saw the circus tents pitched on the frozen grass of the Meadows. Saw, too, that the slowing in the traffic was because some drivers were turning off into an improvised car park alongside. Quite how that had got past the city council, he had no idea, but as the car in front turned off the road, he decided to follow.

  There was something about the lights, whirling in the darkness, that took him straight back to his childhood. Or maybe it was the smell of old canvas, greasepaint, diesel generator smoke and candyfloss. It seemed to be having the same effect on the other people here. Mostly couples, he saw, although there was the occasional lone figure like himself, and a young family clustered together at the ticket office. Locking his car, McLean wandered over, taking in the sights and sounds. It was easy to forget he was in the middle of Edinburgh: the circus seemed to exist in its own little world.

  A neatly painted sign outside the office listed show times for the big top, and prices that took McLean back to his childhood all over again. He’d expected to pay at least fifty pounds for two tickets, was prepared to pay a lot more. Seeing the place, feeling the atmosphere, he knew deep down that Emma would love it. If the numbers on the board were correct, he’d get change from a five-pound note.

  He was already pulling out his wallet, waiting for the young family to finish whatever they were doing and step out of the way, when the doubt hit him. What if Emma didn’t like circuses? Some people hated them, after all. And when would be a good time to bring her? Not tonight, obviously, but would a weekday evening be better than a weekend afternoon? What shift was she working these days? He could phone her, he supposed. Ask. But as he thought it, so he realised he couldn’t remember the last time he’d spoken to her on the phone. They never talked that way. Never much talked at all, since that horrible night in the summer.

  ‘You wanting a ticket then, pal?’

  The accent pulled him back to the present more than the question. McLean looked up to see a young man standing at the window to the ticket booth, staring at him. Acne spots scarred his face, and his thin hair was the pale ginger more normally seen in these parts than Rahel’s flame red and that of the frozen little girl. Behind him, at the back of the small ticket office, a young woman closer to his stereotypical image of someone who might work at a circus sat on a wooden stool and stared at her fingernails with total indifference.

  ‘Just wanted to see the show times,’ he lied, putting his wallet swiftly away. ‘How long are you going to be here for?’

  ‘No’ sure. Week or two, maybe.’ The lad turned away, directing his question to the young woman. ‘Irena? How many more shows will we be putting on, like?’

  The young woman dragged her attention from her fingers and looked up with a toss of her head straight out of an eighties pop video. Her hair fitted the image too, tumbling from her head to her shoulders in waves that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a shampoo commercial.

  ‘We? So you are one of us now, Roy?’ Her words were heavily accented and mocking, but her smile was genuine. McLean wasn’t quite sure what was going on between the two of them, nor did he much care. For the life of him he couldn’t understand why he’d even thought of coming here in the first place.

  ‘We still here for a while yet.’ The young woman, Irena, jumped down from her stool and wandered over to the sales window. ‘Plenty time for you and your special one to see the show.’

  24

  The flagstone pavers glistened with i
cy moisture, reflected in the cold clear morning light as McLean stood on the corner of Broughton Street and a tiny, narrow alley that appeared to have no name. He’d grabbed a lift from a squad car, speeding across town with the full blues and twos, but even so the forensic van had beaten him to this new crime scene. White-overalled technicians had begun the painstaking task of creating a safe path to the body, and that there was a body was pretty much all he knew so far.

  ‘I called it in to Control already, sir. Thought you’d want to have a look for yourself though.’ Police Sergeant Kenneth Stephen leaned against a damp stone wall outside a café that had remained closed despite the prospect of cold and thirsty police officers and forensic technicians to swell its coffers throughout the day.

  ‘Any particular reason, Kenny?’ McLean asked. ‘Not that I don’t trust your judgement in these matters.’

  ‘I saw the report on those two wee girls you found. This is similar.’

  McLean felt the cold seep into his gut. ‘Similar how? I was told this was a man’s body they’d found.’

  ‘Aye, but his skin’s all dry and . . . Well, it’s probably best you see for yourself. Just as soon as they let you in.’

  ‘Get yourself a suit, and he’s all yours.’ McLean turned to see Jemima Cairns approaching. Beyond her, the first wave of technicians were filing out of the alley.

  ‘Has the duty doctor been?’ he asked. ‘Pathologist?’

  ‘Aye, and no. Not yet. He’s dead, if that’s what you’re after. Go see for yourself. I’m not making any promises we can come up with good answers for you.’

  By the time he’d located a set of white paper overalls, signed for them and pulled them on, half of the forensic team had gone. Uniformed officers, under Sergeant Stephen’s expert guidance, had secured a wide perimeter and were making enquiries of the offices, shops and flats in the immediate area. McLean didn’t expect much to come of that, but it had to be done. He had been anxious to get to the scene and view the body before it was disturbed, but now he found himself reluctant to enter the dark, narrow alley. It wasn’t fear that held him back, so much as guilt. True, Stephen had called him about the discovery, but this was a job that should have been given to a detective sergeant, or an inspector at a pinch.