The Book of Souls (The Inspector McLean Mysteries) (37 page)

Emma looked like she was going to explode, but the phone ringing cut her off. She stalked out of the kitchen, trailed by Mrs McCutcheon's cat, as he answered.

'McLean.'

'Oh, good. I'm glad I got you in, sir.' Detective Constable MacBride won the competition for being the first of his team to phone in on his day off.

'What can I do for you, constable?'

'I was just collating the results from my phone-around of the hospitals, sir. When I got to three hundred, I thought I'd better check you still wanted me to go ahead.'

'Three hundred broken noses?' McLean pinched the bridge of his own, feeling a sympathetic ache.

'Well, they're not all broken, sir. But that's how many people have been seen with nose related injuries since last Wednesday. Apparently they're very common at this time of year. When the pavements get all icy.'

'OK, Stuart. You'd better drop it. Not one of my better ideas, I guess.' McLean told the DC to go back to his historical analysis of the fire sites, then hung up. Emma had returned, fully dressed, and was watching him from the doorway.

'You did tell the station you were having the day off.'

'Yes, I did. But that doesn't mean they can't phone me. Your lot would call you if there was an emergency.'

Emma made a noise that sounded exactly like hmph. 'What did young Stuart want anyway? Who's broken their nose?'

He explained about Trisha Lubkin and the bruising on her forehead. 'I don't know what I was thinking,' he added. 'I thought maybe there'd be a couple of dozen cases city-wide. We could probably have done something with the information. Narrowed down our search. Stupid idea, really. It's not as if doctors are going to hand us out lists of their patients' names.'

'It was worth pursuing, surely. What if there'd only been one?'

'Well, there were over three hundred before MacBride gave up counting. Seems the good citizens of Edinburgh can't stop bashing themselves in the head.' McLean nodded at Emma, trying to keep the disappointment from his voice. 'You heading out, then?'

She slumped into a chair. 'I thought we might go to town. Do a bit of shopping, maybe get some lunch. You know, spend a little time together?'

It sounded like a good plan, but the phone interrupted McLean before he could respond. Wearily he crossed the kitchen, picked up the receiver.

'McLean.'

DS Ritchie's voice sounded hollow through the handset. 'Ah, sir. Glad I got you and not the answering machine.  I didn't want to bother you on your day off, but...' She tailed off and McLean could hear raised voices in the background, though he couldn't make out the actual words.

'Is everything all right there, sergeant?' he asked. Ritchie didn't answer at first, but the voice in the background increased in volume enough for McLean to recognise it. Duguid, and winding himself up into a frenzy by the sound of things.

'It's DCI Duguid, sir.' Ritchie spoke in little more than a whisper and McLean had to clamp the handset to his ear to hear properly. Doing that also meant he caught the occasional word from Dagwood. 'Incompetent' was in there, along with 'lazy' and 'waste of police time.'

'He's tearing a strip off DC MacBride right now. Already sent DC Simmons back up to his incident room to help them with his bloody drugs investigation. Says if your caseload's so light you can afford to take a day off, then you don't need the manpower.'

'That's a bit bloody rich. He was on holiday until bloody Hogmanay.' McLean glanced at his watch. Late morning and Emma's talk of lunch somewhere had been really rather appealing. Trust Dagwood to bugger that up.

'OK. I'll come in and sort it out.'

In the background, Duguid's tirade began to fade away, no doubt as he chased poor DC MacBride up the corridor.

'Thanks, sir. I feel a bit of a snitch telling you, but, well, he's a DCI. I can't exactly refuse to do what he tells me.'

'It's OK. I know what he's like. I'll be with you in about an hour.'

He hung up and turned back to Emma, all ready to tell her about the conversation, and ask if she could possibly run him to the station. Her thunderous look dried the words up in his throat.

'It's supposed to be your day off.' Dry ice would have been warmer. She turned away, heading for the hallway.

'Look, Emma. It's not my fault. Dagwood's being an arse and...'

'So little miss Torry phones up and you just drop everything. Go scurrying off to save the damsel in distress.'

'It's not like that. He's jeopardising my investigation. I can't just leave...'

'But what about us?' She was at the door now, pulling it open and letting in the cold winter air. 'What about lunch? Don't you even know how to relax?'

'I  won't be long. If you could just...'

Emma pulled her car keys from her bag and stalked across to her little blue Peugeot, parked on the gravel driveway. McLean followed, then realised that he was wearing only socks and the ground was very cold. He barely whispered the words, knowing they were futile.

'...maybe give me a lift?'

'Oh no, inspector.' Emma pulled open the door, threw herself behind the wheel. 'If you want to head back to your precious work, you can make your own bloody way.'

The engine roared into life, gears crunched and gravel spun. And then she was gone, leaving him shivering in the cold, grey morning.

~~~~

54

McLean found an empty CID room when he finally arrived at the station, so he went in search of bodies elsewhere. A number of the smaller incident rooms were occupied by uniforms, trying hard to look like they were very busy. He hunted around for any of his team in all the usual hideouts before finally accepting the inevitable and heading up to the one place he really didn't want to go.

It was a study of desperate calm. The room DCI Duguid had commandeered for co-ordinating the drugs investigation might have been the largest available in the station, but it felt tiny. Desks had been crammed into every available inch of space; computer screens lined the window wall - God alone knew where they'd come from; and what seemed like more than the station's entire roster of uniform and plain clothes officers busied themselves with moving bits of paper around. Standing in the doorway, unwilling to commit himself further, McLean spotted DC MacBride in discussion with DI Langley from the Drugs Squad over on the far side of the room beside the whiteboards. He hoped that they might notice him before anyone else did, but luck belonged to someone else that day.

'Well well well. Look what the cat dragged in.' DCI Duguid sauntered up the corridor from the direction of the lavatories. 'Come to help, have you? Only it's a bit late. We're narrowing in on your friend Ayre.'

McLean said nothing, trying to gauge the chief inspector's mood.

'Yes, thanks to our little series of raids, he's running out of places to hide. We'll have him by the end of the week.'

If his previous employers don't make him disappear first. Might as well have written the poor sod's death sentence.

'Then you won't mind if I take my team members back, sir. Since it's going so well. Only they're supposed to be working on the Trisha Lubkin case. It's quite important.'

'So important you had to go pestering hospitals about broken noses? So important you couldn't even be bothered coming in to work today?'

Count to ten, McLean thought. Don't rise to it. Deep breaths. Ah, bugger it.

'It might surprise you to learn, sir, that today is the first day I've taken off since before Christmas. But of course, you weren't here, so you couldn't have known. How was the skiing trip, by the way? Mrs Duguid OK?'

Duguid's face reddened at the criticism. 'If you've nothing to add to this investigation, McLean,  I suggest you keep out of my way.'

'Gladly, sir. As soon as I've retrieved my team. I'd really appreciate it if you didn't keep poaching them to run your errands for you. I'd rather they didn't have their careers put in jeopardy that way.'

'What the hell do you mean by that, McLean?'

'You know damn well what I mean, sir.' McLean gestured towards the room, noticing as he did that the place had fallen even more silent than before, all eyes turned his way. 'We've got a fucking serial killer out there and you're acting like it was just a mugging or two on a Saturday night. We're short-staffed as it is, without you bullying everyone in the station into running your stupid actions for you. We're only supposed to be giving Drugs logistical support anyway, not riding roughshod over months of painstaking surveillance work with your bloody raids. And you don't seem to be able to get it into that thick skull of yours that what you're doing is more likely to get our only potential witness killed than find him.'

Duguid had gone from red to white, a sure sign that he was about to blow. McLean couldn't find it in himself to care anymore.

'Gentlemen. My office. Now.'

Both men looked around at the same moment, shaken by how close Chief Superintendent McIntyre had managed to get to them without either noticing. McLean tried a nervous smile, Duguid started to bluster.

'Not a word, Charles. My office.' And she turned away, striding back down the corridor.

'After you, sir.' McLean stood to one side to let the chief inspector pass. Duguid glowered at him, then stalked off like an angry bear.

*

'Why is it that all I ever hear about these days is you two arguing with each other?'

The chief superintendent stood on the far side of her desk, using it as a barrier between herself and the two detectives. McLean noticed that she hadn't sat down, never a good sign. At least he knew a rhetorical question when he heard one. Duguid, it seemed, had benefited from a different education.

'Ma'am, I'm trying to conduct a serious investigation here, and every time I'm getting somewhere, this excuse for a detective inspector comes and takes half my team away.'

Duguid's tone was almost petulant. McLean allowed himself a silent breath of relief that the DCI was digging his own grave.

'As I understand it from last month's overtime sheets, Charles, you've actually managed to use every single officer below the rank of chief inspector, plain clothes and uniform, in this station on your investigation.' McIntyre prodded an angry finger at a sheaf of papers on her desk as she spoke. 'You've even managed to rope in half of the admin staff, which is why everything else is gone to hell in a handbasket.'

'Ma'am, I must...'

'All for one investigation, Charles,' McIntyre cut off his protest. 'Just one. Every other DCI in Lothian and Borders is running at least six. Even the DIs are doing more.'

'I have eight other cases at the moment, ma'am. This one just needs more attention.'

'You're not even supposed to be running the bloody thing, Charles. It's meant to be a Drugs Squad operation with us giving support. Tony was doing a perfectly good job of that before you ordered him off the case.'

'This poison is destroying lives. We have to get rid of it.'

McLean had been studying his shoes up to this point, but something about the DCI's words caught his attention, the way he said them with such utter conviction. There was something here he didn't know, and that put him off guard. McIntyre did though. She finally sat down, and when she spoke again, it was with a much more reasonable tone.

'Look, Charles. No-one's questioning your dedication here. But you've got to take the lead from DI Langley, not browbeat him with your seniority. He's the one who knows how to handle this kind of investigation. This isn't going to be solved by throwing lots of man hours at it.'

McIntyre shuffled the papers on her desk for a moment, let the silence build before she turned her attention on McLean.

'As for you, Tony. I'd hoped you might have had a bit more respect for authority, and a bit more sense. What do you think it does for morale if two senior detectives start taking chunks out of each other in front of the whole station?'

McLean wanted to say that it helped to clear the air; that if no-one else stood up to Duguid then the man would drive everyone to an early grave with his impossible demands and sudden mood changes. But he said nothing, knowing it wasn't a question he could answer without getting into more trouble.