The Book of Souls (The Inspector McLean Mysteries) (5 page)

McLean ignored her. 'Constable, escort Ms Dalgliesh back behind the security cordon. And make sure no-one else gets through. We don't want anyone getting hurt.'

'We can help you, Inspector. If you let us,' the reporter protested as she was led away.

'Aye, right,' McLean muttered under his breath.

'She's got a point,' Grumpy Bob said.

'Yes, well, thanks for the support sergeant. That's really helpful. So what's the situation here? You doing any actual policing, or just drinking tea?'

Grumpy Bob downed the last dregs, then looked for somewhere to put the empty mug. 'I've had Constable MacBride working the crowd. You never know, we could get lucky. There's good CCTV coverage. We'll pull the tapes, see if anyone's lurking.'

Long hours of staring at grainy television images, trying to see if the same faces turned up at more than one fire. Wonderful.

'Inspector? Sir?' McLean looked up to see the new boy himself,  Constable Stuart MacBride, winding his way through the abandoned cars and dodging the milling fire crews. He had an airwave set in one hand, his notebook in the other, a look of excitement flushing his face. Either that or he'd been too close to the fire.

'What is it, constable?'

'Call just came in... they've found a body.'

McLean rubbed his face, trying to get the tired dryness out of his eyes. The firemen had moved back towards the burning building now, but as far as he could tell no-one had gone inside.

'What, in the fire? How?'

MacBride looked momentarily confused. Then held up his radio.

'No sir. South of the city. Looks like a murder.'

'I'm supposed to be off duty. Can't they give it to anyone else?'

'Dagwood's gone to some important society dinner.' Grumpy Bob bent his knee, miming the rolling up of his trouser leg. 'Langley and his crowd won't want to be first in if there's no obvious drugs connection.'

'What about Randall?'

'Off with the flu.'

'Oh Christ.' McLean shook his head to try and scare away the fatigue of a long day about to get even longer. 'Give us the details then.'

MacBride consulted his notebook. 'It's out near Gladhouse. Young woman, naked in the water. Sergeant Thoms said something about her throat being cut.'

Despite the heat from the fire, McLean's insides were as cold as the wind in an Aberdeenshire graveyard. Beside him, Grumpy Bob went suddenly very still.

'The Christmas Killer?'

McLean shook his head. 'It can't be, Bob. He's dead. I watched them bury him just this morning.'

But in his mind, he wasn't so sure.

~~~~

8

A circle of bright white light hovered over the crime scene like some strange alien spaceship. Or maybe the Star of Bethlehem, given the time of year. That made McLean either a shepherd or a wise man, but he couldn't decide which. Whatever he was, it was tired. He stifled a yawn as he clambered out of the car, then remembered he was supposed to get it back to the hire company by seven.  Even driving like a maniac he'd miss that by an hour. Well, it wouldn't be the first time his one day hire had turned into two.

A line of squad cars and a couple of battered old white transit vans meant he had to walk a short distance to the fluttering crime scene tape. Closer in, the arc lights set up by the SOC team washed out an area of rough ground below the road. Fat wet drops of rainwater glistened on the spiky tips of the thick gorse bushes and splashed down from the bare, black, twisted branches of scraggy birch trees. Through it all ran a deep-culverted stream, gurgling loudly with recent rain. It was a while since he'd been out this way. But if memory served, it was part of the reservoir system that fed the city. Just the sort of place you wanted to find a body.

'I'm sorry sir, this is a crime scene. You can't...'

McLean cut off the young uniformed constable who had tried to block his way, wearily pulling out his warrant card for inspection. It wasn't surprising the lad didn't recognise him; this was Penicuik's patch, after all.

'Who's the officer in charge?' McLean asked once the constable had finished apologising.

'Sergeant Price, sir. He's down there with the pathologist.'

'Already? That was quick.' McLean looked up the line of cars, and sure enough, parked at the far end, Angus Cadwallader's British Racing Green and mud-coloured Bentley poked one salt-encrusted headlight out from behind a SOC van.

'Dunno about that, sir. I've been here over two hours already. Call came in about four o'clock.'

Long before Dagwood had set out for his Masonic knees-up. Bloody marvellous.

Knee-high grass and gorse bushes soaked his trousers and shoes long before he made it to the edge of the culvert. A group of people clustered around an improbably Heath-Robinson arrangement of scaffolding poles,  light stands and other paraphernalia. Steam rose off the hot lights, adding to the already surreal, hellish feel of the place.

'Sergeant Price?' McLean waited while an overlarge, white-haired, uniformed officer turned slowly around, trying not to slip on the wet concrete edge to the culvert. The drop to the water was about ten feet, spate-swelled waters running noisily below, so McLean couldn't really blame him his caution.

'About bloody time someone senior showed up,' was all the greeting the old sergeant gave. That and a cursory nod. McLean tried not to rise to the bait.

'It's my day off, OK? I spent the morning in Aberdeen burying Donald fucking Anderson. So cut the small talk and tell me the story.'

If Sergeant Price was impressed by McLean's sacrifice, he didn't show it.

'Couple of lads out on their mountain bikes saw her first,' he said. 'What they were doing down here is anyone's guess.'

'They still about?'

'No. They called in from Temple. You can't get a mobile signal here. I've got names and addresses.'

'OK. What about the body?'

Price shrugged. 'See for yersel'. Crime scene's a' yours.'

McLean inched slowly to the edge, giving the two SOC officers holding the arc lamps time to shuffle aside. A ladder dropped down to a makeshift platform rigged up over the flowing water, two people kneeling together like penitent sinners, praying before a third. He recognised the balding pate of Angus Cadwallader, city pathologist, and the shiny black bob of his assistant Tracy, but the other person in the threesome was a stranger to him.

It looked like the water had carried her downstream until she had been pinned against a rusty iron grating. Her arms were splayed wide, her legs twisted back underneath her body as if she were posing for some arty erotic photograph. Wisps of green-black pondweed trailed across skin so white it could have been porcelain, and only the ugly dark welt across her neck stopped him from thinking she was merely sleeping.

'Tony. Good God, could they not have given this to someone else?' Angus Cadwallader looked up, shuffling carefully off his knees and upright before helping his assistant do the same. Only when he was safely out of the culvert did he finally give McLean a quizzical raise of the eyebrow and add: 'I thought you were in Aberdeen today. Christ, talk about timing.'

'I was,' McLean said, remembering the windswept cemetery as if it had been a lifetime ago. 'So, what's the score here?'

Cadwallader pulled off his latex gloves and ran a hand over his wet hair. 'It's difficult to say much from where she is. Rain's washed her down from somewhere upstream, I'm fairly sure. She's also very clean. Not been in the water too long, though.'

'Cause of death? Time of death?'

'Ah, Tony. You always ask, and I always tell you I can't say. Not now. It looks like she's had her throat cut, but that might have been post mortem. As to time, well, it's cold here, and she's been in the water. But unless she was kept on ice, I'd say somewhere between twelve and twenty-four hours. Thirty-six tops.'

'What about bruising? Any ligature marks?'

'She's ten feet down in a concrete culvert that's barely wide enough for the two of us, Tony. Let me get her back to the mortuary, then I'll tell you what happened to the poor wee lass.' Cadwallader put a damp hand on McLean's shoulder. 'We're not going to find anything here.'

'You're right, Angus. I just. Well...' McLean tailed off, unsure what he wanted to say. He needed answers, but even he could tell he wasn't going to get any here. 'I guess you'd better get her out of there then.'

Cadwallader nodded to one of the SOC officers, who scurried off to get help. They followed him back up through the gorse to the roadside, just in time for another squall of rain. The pathologist hurried to his car, Tracy leaping into the passenger seat without even bothering to remove her white overalls.

'It's not the same, Tony,' Cadwallader said. 'This isn't another Christmas Killer victim.'

'You sure of that, Angus? It looks pretty close to me.'

'I'll get the PM scheduled as soon as possible, but you know what I mean. He's been locked up for the last ten years. And now he's dead. This is something else. Someone else.'

McLean shivered, though whether it was the cold he couldn't be certain. 'I hope you're right, Angus.'

*

The lumpy beat of an engine at tick over and spiral of steam in the damp darkness gave away Sergeant Price's position, sitting in the warmth of one of the squad cars. When McLean tapped on the misted up windscreen, he wound it down with obvious reluctance.

'It's your lucky night,' McLean said.

'Aye?'

'I want this road closed for a quarter mile either side of the crime scene. First light, a search team's going to be back to go over the whole area, and I don't want anyone to have disturbed it in my absence. OK?'

'But my shift ends in an hour. I've got stuff to do...'

'I don't want to hear it, sergeant. This is a murder enquiry, so you're good for the overtime. I'll be back at dawn, and I'll expect to see your smiling face here to greet me.'

~~~~

9

He wanders the streets in a daze, feet following the familiar path they know from when he was on the beat. The steady rhythm of leather on pavement helps to dull his mind, stop the feelings that threaten to overwhelm him at every turn. Thinking is too painful, so he marches instead.

What brings him to this place? He doesn't really know. There must be some reason, but teasing it out might dislodge something else. Better just to go with the flow. It's a second hand bookshop, smelling of dust and libraries. The aisles between the shelves are narrow, towering over him, lined with countless ranks of words. He runs his fingers over uneven spines as he walks towards the desk at the back. There was a reason for coming in here. Something he needed to say.

No-one about. A few old paperbacks lie abandoned on the counter, a ledger open as if the shop owner were called away whilst in the middle of cataloguing them. Beyond the counter, a door opens to a small office. Not quite sure why, he goes through.

Still no-one. A pair of old filing cabinets stand against one wall, a low shelf of books under the large window that looks out onto a scruffy courtyard behind the shop. An antiques desk fills most of the space, its top empty save for a reading lamp and a large, old, leather-bound book.

There's something about the book that sends a shiver through him. Has he seen it before? He doesn't know, doesn't want to think. Thoughts are too painful now. But it won't let him go, drags him toward it like a magnet, whispers to him to open it up, to read.

He is reaching out to it when he notices the marker. A thin strip of fabric slipped between heavy vellum pages, drooping out over the edge of the desk like a wilted flower. His hand moves toward the cloth, takes it between finger and thumb, slides it out of the book. Something like a far-off scream of rage and frustration echoes in the silence, but he pays it no heed. There is only this piece of cloth, this hem torn from a dress. At that touch he knows it.