The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (16 page)

‘Are you going to hypnotize me?’ Emma asked.

‘Not straight away, no. I just want you to relax. Close your eyes. Listen to my voice.’ Doctor Austin began to recite a slow, quiet litany, her voice even softer than it had
been before. It took him a while to make out the actual words, longer still to realize that he, too, had closed his eyes. With an effort, McLean opened them. The room turned darker, and colder too. An involuntary shiver ran through his body. Emma had almost disappeared into the back of her chair, her head drooped, eyes closed, arms folded loosely on her lap. Opposite her, Doctor Austin was in complete contrast, ramrod stiff, upright, chin jutting out. Her eyes too were closed, but McLean could see flickering movement behind the lids as if she were reading some script off the inside of them. She crackled with an energy that was both reassuring and alarming. He shook his head, not realizing until he did that it was fuzzy, as if he’d been drinking on an empty stomach. With the motion, the room brightened, the scene shifted almost imperceptibly, Doctor Austin’s words drifted away to nothing.

‘Did you fall asleep, Tony?’

McLean shifted his gaze at the question. Emma was no longer sitting in her chair, but had somehow stood and crossed the room to where he was sitting without him realizing. He looked up at her with a mixture of confusion and surprise. She loomed over him, the ceiling light making a halo of her spiky hair, and she was smiling at him with a grin that went right up to her eyes. It was the first time he’d seen her smile like that since she’d woken in the hospital, and it filled him with hope that chased away the strangeness of the past few minutes.

‘I did? I guess I was more tired than I thought.’

‘Can we go home now?’ Emma turned a little, towards where Doctor Austin was still seated, and the effect of the lights disappeared. Without the halo, the smile, she was
once more the frightened little girl in a woman’s body. Her whole posture was different, hunched into herself as if she had no self-confidence.

McLean hauled himself out of the sofa, knees protesting as if he’d been sitting there for hours. A quick glance at his watch, but no, only twenty minutes had passed since they’d been ushered into the room by Dave.

‘Are we finished?’ he asked Doctor Austin.

‘For now, yes.’ The doctor stood, touched a hand lightly to Emma’s elbow and steered her towards the door. ‘I’ll need to see you again in a few days. Then we’ll try a little hypnosis.’

McLean followed the two of them out of the room, through the reception area where Dave was forcing coffee and biscuits on another customer. He felt removed from the scene, as if his hearing were dulled by listening to loud music, but as he stepped out of the building into the street and the clear, bright sunlight, the noise of the city returned, enveloping him like the embrace of an old friend.

The downside of taking the morning off to see Emma through her session with the hypnotherapist was that he had a mountain of paperwork waiting for him when he finally arrived at the station. McLean had taken the unusual step of closing his office door in the hope that nothing would disturb him. Now an unpleasant electronic imitation of an old-fashioned bell broke his concentration as he fought to understand a set of overtime forms that appeared to have no bearing on any of his active cases. He
dropped the sheaf of papers and reached gratefully for the phone, noting the flashing light for the front desk.

‘McLean.’

‘Ah. Glad I caught you, sir. There’s a fellow down here asking for you by name.’ Sergeant Murray was working the desk this afternoon, it would seem.

‘You couldn’t be a bit more specific could you, Pete?’

A short pause as if the desk sergeant were trying to find the right words. ‘It’s, errr … personal, sir.’

Oh bloody hell. ‘OK. I’m on my way.’

McLean hung up, took a quick look around his office in an attempt to fix it in his mind. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d been called away on a false errand only to find on his return that things had been moved. He could lock the door, of course, but somehow that felt like ceding victory to his tormentors before the game had even begun. And there was always the possibility this was a perfectly genuine matter requiring his personal attention. A slim possibility.

The station was quiet as he strode the corridors, which either meant everyone was out fighting crime or they were all avoiding him. He pushed through the security door into the reception area, seeing a well-dressed elderly gentleman with a large leather Gladstone bag. No one else had seen fit to bother the police at that precise moment, and a quick glance over his shoulder showed that Sergeant Murray was nowhere to be seen. Ah well, might as well play along.

‘You wanted to see me, Mr … ?’ McLean approached the elderly gentleman, who looked up, startled by the voice. He was thin, long-fingered bony hands folded
neatly across his lap, head somehow too large for his body. His suit fitted perfectly, but whereas on a younger man this would flatter, on him it only emphasized how much he needed a really good meal. McLean had seen enough cadavers to know better than to use the adjective cadaverous lightly, but this time he felt it was perhaps justified.

‘Detective Inspector McLean?’ The well-dressed man stood up as if his muscles had been replaced with rubber bands. Standing, he was taller than McLean had been expecting. He held out a hand to be shaken. ‘Jeremy Scranton. From Garibaldi and Sons.’

‘The tailors?’ McLean took the hand, surprised to find it was warm and not mortuary cold.

‘The same. I’ve come for your measuring, as arranged. Would you like to do it here, or is there somewhere a little less, ahem, public? I’ve brought some material samples for you to consider as well.’

It didn’t take a genius to work out what was going on. McLean looked back over his shoulder to the reception desk, hidden behind its screen of bullet-proof glass. Sergeant Murray was nowhere to be seen, which rather confirmed that he’d been in on the joke. Like most pranks, it was hilarious to the people who’d thought it up, and no doubt they’d be sniggering at how well they’d fooled him, but this poor old man had done nothing. He’d come here, taken up his precious time, expecting to be paid, and now he was going to have to go back to his shop empty-handed. Worse, if McLean ever wanted to buy something from Garibaldi and Sons, who were by all acknowledgement the finest tailors in the city, if not the whole of Scotland, then he was going to have to do some serious apologizing.

Or he could just go with it, and get a nice suit into the bargain.

‘Thank you so much for coming, Mr Scranton. Please, follow me.’

A parcel sat on the kitchen table waiting for him when McLean let himself in late. He fully expected to get a couple of fine suits out of the prank, but being measured up had taken a lot longer than he’d anticipated. And the paperwork he’d been avoiding all day had still needed doing after Mr Scranton had left.

The house was quiet, even Mrs McCutcheon’s cat barely stirred from its place beside the Aga, just lifted its head and fixed him with a beady stare for a moment before going back to sleep. He strained his ears for sounds that anyone was still up, but at this hour he doubted it. The clock in the kitchen suggested it was more tomorrow than today. So much for work–life balance.

One good thing to be said about having two women living in his house was that there was always food in the cupboards. Jenny was a vegetarian, something that had not come as much of a surprise to him, and Emma had taken her cue. Consequently most of what was in the fridge could be labelled under the broad term ‘salad’ and everything in the cupboards looked distressingly healthy. There was beer though, and wine. Through in the library there would be whisky too. He set about making himself a cheese sandwich, debating long and hard before adding a couple of lettuce leaves and a smear of mayonnaise. Poured himself a glass of Riesling from the bottle he’d started yesterday and took his spoils to the table.

The parcel was a little larger than A4, and as thick as a box file. His name and address were on a label printed out and stuck across the front, but there were no franking mark or stamps. Taking a bite of sandwich, he pulled the parcel towards him, turned it over. The name of an old city auction house had been printed on the back, and at the sight of it he remembered. The auction of Donald Anderson’s books, the curious impulsion to buy this copy of Gray’s
Anatomy
, purportedly from the collection of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

‘A nice lady dropped it round earlier.’

McLean twisted round in his seat, sending a slice of pain up his neck in the process. In the shadows by the door through to the hall stood Jenny Nairn. He’d not heard her come in; a quick glance showed bare feet poking out from the legs of her sweatpants, hoody with the hood down on top, arms folded as she leaned against the wall. Her nose ring glinted in the light, her eyes dark shadows that were hard to see. How long had she been standing there watching him?

‘I say lady.’ She pushed herself away from the wall, padded into the light. ‘But he was plainly a man dressed as a lady. You have strange friends.’

‘Madame Rose. She … He runs a, well, I’m not sure what you would call it. A psychic centre, I guess. Palm reading, Tarot cards, that sort of stuff. Out of an old flat down Leith Walk. He’s also something of an expert on medieval books and manuscripts, especially the more esoteric stuff. Not sure I’d describe him as a friend. He brought this round himself?’ McLean hefted the parcel.

‘Just winding you up. Everyone knows Rose.’ Jenny
grinned as she drew out a chair and slumped into it. ‘He dropped in back of six. Think he was a bit disappointed you weren’t home.’

‘That makes two of us.’ McLean took another bite of his sandwich, carefully peeled open the parcel and slid out the book inside. There was a bill of sale from the auction house and a handwritten note.

‘May I?’ Jenny nodded at the book.

‘Sure.’ McLean handed it over.

‘You went to see Eleanor today,’ Jenny said.

‘Doctor Austin? Yes.’

‘I’m so glad you did. She helped me out when my folks died. Don’t think I’d be here if it wasn’t for her. She’ll sort Emma out, don’t you worry.’

‘Your folks?’ The words were out before McLean remembered. ‘Oh yes. You said. I’m sorry.’

‘No worries.’ Jenny tapped a slender finger on the cover of the book as she spoke. ‘It was a few years back now. Christ, near enough ten. You deal with it. Move on, y’know?’

‘As it happens, I do. Sort of. I was four when my parents died. My gran raised me. Here in this house. Seemed somehow appropriate given I was born here.’

‘Here? In this house? For real?’ Jenny’s face cracked into a wide grin as she echoed his words. ‘How’d that happen? Your mum not trust doctors?’

‘Far from it. Gran was a doctor. Ended up a pathologist, but she was working as a GP when I was born. She wouldn’t hear of my mother slumming it in some hospital.’

‘So which room, then? Where did the great Detective Inspector Tony McLean take his first breath?’

The question surprised him, not so much for its personal nature as for the wild-eyed enthusiasm that had come over her. He’d not thought about the facts of his birth in years; well, it wasn’t something you dwelt upon, really. He remembered his gran bringing it up at dinner parties or whenever he invited a girl home. Her little way of embarrassing him to show she cared.

‘Oddly enough, it was in the attic. Mum was up there doing all the sorts of things pregnant women are told not to do when they’re close to term. I arrived earlier and quicker than expected. Gran just rolled her sleeves up and delivered me on the attic floor. That’s how she tells it, anyway. Told it, I should say.’

Jenny’s smile faded slightly. ‘You miss her. Your gran.’

‘She was more of a mum than my mother ever had the chance to be. But like you said, we deal with it, move on.’ He shook his head slightly, trying to dislodge the feeling that he was lying to himself. No doubt sensing the awkwardness, perhaps feeling it herself, Jenny opened up the book near the back and started leafing forwards. McLean watched her for a moment before realizing he was still holding the note Madame Rose had written to him.

My Dear Inspector
, it began.
I trust this finds you well. I hope to speak to you in person, but if you are not around then this note should suffice for now. My investigations have, alas, yielded little to corroborate the signature in the front of this book. It is of the correct type and age for a medical student of that time, and if Donald had it in his collection then it is likely he thought it genuine
.

McLean stopped as he read the name. Donald. So informal, as if he and Madame Rose had been friends. But then there was really no reason why they should not have
been. Anderson was older, of course, but he’d been another expert in the same small field. They’d have known each other well. McLean shook his head, dispelling the train of thought, and returned to the note.

The grapevine informs me that your paramour is returned to consciousness. I would be the last to indulge in idle gossip, but I trust that Miss Baird fares well and is making a speedy recovery. You and I both know the malign influence to which she was exposed, however, and you have unique experience of the evil that can come of it. It is my most fervent hope that her encounter was brief and has led to no permanent harm, but should you suspect otherwise, please know that you need only ask and I will do all in my power to help
.

Ever yours

Madame Rose

‘Arthur Conan Doyle. Who’d’ve thought it?’ Jenny Nairn snapped the book shut as McLean stared at the note and its curious contents. He placed it on the table, then laid the bill of sale on top of it, though he couldn’t really be sure who he was hiding it from.

‘We don’t know it’s real,’ he said eventually, taking the book back and opening it up. The dedication and signature were there on the top of the first page. Just the sort of place a young and impecunious student would mark his valuable possession.

‘We don’t?’ Jenny arched an eyebrow. ‘It looks like his signature, doesn’t it?’