The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (54 page)

‘You any idea where we’re supposed to be going?’ McLean swivelled on his feet, taking in the entirety of the car park. There were a couple of squad cars, a Scene Evaluation Branch Transit van and a rusty old Peugeot estate
car parked close by, but no sign of any people. This time of year, and with the snow still falling out of a sky the colour of an old bruise, it was hardly surprising. You’d have to be a hardy dog-walker to chance not getting lost.

‘River’s this way, I think.’ Grumpy Bob motioned past the nearest car. A path of sorts had been bashed through the snow, though it was busy filling in again. Looking up, you should have been able to see the castle on its rocky promontory. Possibly even the chapel, if memory served. No chance of that today, though. McLean started to trudge along the track, but as he passed close to the SEB van, its side door slid open, releasing a blast of warmth, the unmistakable aroma of real coffee, and Detective Constable Stuart MacBride.

‘You’re here, sir.’

‘That much would appear to be obvious, constable.’ McLean peered past him into the van, saw a couple of Scene of Crime Officers huddling around what looked like a portable gas heater, something Health and Safety would no doubt frown upon if anyone brought it to their attention.

‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a spare jacket in there or anything?’

It might have been fluorescent yellow and have ‘Strath-clyde Water’ written across it in large blue letters, but it was warm. McLean hugged his newly acquired jacket close as he followed MacBride and Grumpy Bob down a narrow footpath away from the car park and deeper into the glen. The trees growing either side linked overhead to form a tunnel of sorts. They shielded him from the worst
of the lazy wind, but threatened to drop a dump of snow on the unwary at any moment.

‘What are we looking at, constable?’ McLean asked as the path opened up across a small grass field of miserable sheep.

‘Dead body in the river, sir. Must’ve fallen in somewhere upstream. There’s been a lot of water running through lately. Swept it down until it hit the rocks just a ways up ahead.’

They clambered over a broken stile and into a more forested area. Here the snow had hardly settled on the ground, just a thin dusting sufficient to make the going slippery. The steep slope down to the water’s edge didn’t help either. Somehow McLean managed to make it without falling over, stepping onto a flat rock that protruded out into the water. A few paces away, a couple of uniform officers were huddled into their own bright jackets, breath steaming in the Baltic air.

‘Down there?’ McLean indicated the river where it cut a narrow channel between the flat rocks. He could hear the water echoing below. The nearest uniform nodded. A couple of SOC officers were busy setting up some kind of pulley system and framework over the channel. They both wore heavy duty wet-weather gear and the kind of helmets favoured by kayakers and potholers. No doubt they’d drawn the short straw when it was decided who was going to recover the body.

‘Who found it?’ McLean asked the constable as he inched closer to the edge, wary of ending up head first in the North Esk.

‘Local from the village. Walks his dogs here every day.
Bloody nutter if you ask me.’ The uniform officer looked slightly sheepish before adding: ‘Sir.’

McLean said nothing, just peered down into the gully. The whole of the glen had been cut from the sandstone over millennia. In places the cliffs were well over a hundred feet high. Here, the river had met harder rock, and ancient spates had pushed vast boulders up against one another to form a barrier. The narrow channel into which he was looking was just one of many routes the water took around and through this obstacle before carrying on its journey to the Firth of Forth. The regular spates had deposited all manner of detritus: fallen trees; plastic carrier bags; even the occasional shopping trolley. And now the naked body of a man.

It was difficult to see in the half light, but McLean was fairly sure it was a man’s body. The water hadn’t been kind, tumbling it over, bending arms and legs in ways they were never meant to go. The head wasn’t visible at all, wedged hard into a jumble of rocks. He shivered from something other than cold as he contemplated the possibility that it might be missing entirely. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had tried to make their job more difficult that way, and it was never pleasant.

What struck him first about the body, though, was its colour. Not unusual to see a black man in a city the size of Edinburgh, of course, but there was something not quite right about the colour of this man’s skin. Or maybe it was the texture.

‘You ready for us to bring it up?’

McLean looked up into the face of one of the SOC officers, much closer than he’d been expecting. The
constant roar of the water made it almost impossible to hear people moving about.

‘Can’t do anything useful with it down there. Yes. Bring it up.’

He stood back and waited while they lowered a small stretcher into the gap. One of the SOC officers played out a rope tied securely to a nearby boulder whilst his colleague climbed carefully down to the water. After an age in which McLean’s feet began to lose all feeling, the SOC officer clambered back out again and gave the thumbs up. The two together then hauled the stretcher back, swinging it over before placing it carefully down on the flat rock surface.

‘Bugger had his head jammed right into a crack. Pain in the arse getting him out of there.’ The SOC officer was busy coiling up ropes whilst his colleague dismantled the frame and pulley. They had the look about them of men who wanted to get back to the nice Transit van and its little gas heater. McLean couldn’t really blame them.

He crouched down beside the body, still twisted and broken from its time in the river. He couldn’t see the man’s face without touching, but it was very definitely a man. That much was shrivelled and small but evident nonetheless. What was also evident was that the man wasn’t, in fact, black. There were a few traces of pale white skin visible on his body, but they were very few.

The rest was covered from head to foot, arms, hands, fingers, and yes, even his penis, in a dark swirl of tattoos.

3

‘We had a compact, you and I.’

He turns, startled by the voice. The flat should have been empty; Morag and the girls were at the house in Fife, as usual, and Jennifer wouldn’t be around until much later. The living room is dark, shadows obscuring the high-backed chairs by the fireplace so he can’t see who’s there. The voice is that of a woman, though, and he thinks he can see a shape, vague in the blackness.

‘How did you get in here? What are you doing here?’ ‘Come now, Andrew. Surely you’ve not forgotten what time of year it is. I flew in special, just for you.’

Of course he hasn’t. How could he? This expensive New Town house, his career, the power he flexes every day. All come down to that bargain struck long ago. But he had taken steps. This visit should never have come. She should have stayed away.

‘You! No. You’ve got nothing on me. My slate is clean.’ He says the words with a confidence he doesn’t feel inside.

‘Andrew, Andrew. I have everything on you, sweetheart. And your slate is far from clean.’ Movement at the end of  the room, and she emerges from the shadows. She’s exactly the same as she was that first time they met, twenty – no, thirty – years ago. Her face is white in the half-light, framed with jet hair that drapes just past her
shoulders, straight as a ruler. She moves with the grace of a panther, and the menace.

‘You shouldn’t be here. Not now. Not like this.’ This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen, damn it. ‘I took precautions. It should be her. The other one. Not you.’

‘Your little bribes were welcome, of course.’ She’s right in front of him now. He takes a step back without thinking, feels the press of the sideboard against his thigh. Trapped.

‘But they could only keep me happy for so long. They were only ever the interest. The debt you owe still has to be paid.’

‘That … that wasn’t the deal.’ She is so close he can feel the heat radiating from her now. Not a sexual warmth, more a fever that infects everything it touches. He shrinks back, hand instinctively reaching for a weapon. Fingers brush something solid and he grabs it, tensing to smash it into the side of her head. Before he can act, her hand is around his wrist. She is so much stronger than him it’s like struggling against the embrace of a rock. Slowly she squeezes until he has to release his hold. The object clatters onto the sideboard and she picks it up, a silver photograph frame containing a picture of his two daughters.

‘Joanna and Margaret. Such pretty things.’ She brings the frame up to her face, sniffs the picture in an oddly animal manner. ‘Innocent, too. I will savour them. They’re so much sweeter innocent.’

‘You leave them alone! They were never part of this.’ He tries to fight, this time with his fists, but she is too strong, too quick, and her touch burns. In a flash she has
him by the throat, pushed backwards over the sideboard until his head almost touches the wall. Her hips press hard into his, grinding in a parody of sex. Nothing could be less sensual.

‘Everything of yours is mine, Andrew. I gave it to you, after all. Now I choose to take it back.’

She leans in close, then kisses him hard on the mouth. That’s when he understands what hell really means.

4

‘… getting reports of a shooting incident at a farmhouse in North East Fife. A man thought to be Mr Andrew Weatherly shot and killed his wife and two daughters before turning the gun on himself. We cannot at this time confirm that the man in question was indeed the
MSP
for Fife West …’

McLean thumbed the button on the steering wheel that changed the channel on the radio, searching for some soothing music. He had enough troubles of his own without listening to the woes of other forces. Except, of course, they were all one big happy family now, Police Scotland. Or Greater Strathclyde, as the wags had it. Not far from the truth, either.

A gap appeared in the traffic ahead and he squeezed the throttle, enjoying the surge of power that took him forward a good fifty yards before he had to brake and slow again. Commuting was hell, and not for the first time he missed his old flat in Newington. Being able to walk to work had its benefits, even in this cold and snowy weather. Easier to think to the rhythm of feet on pavement than this stop-start slow-moving car park.

At least the car was working fine, and he didn’t have to worry about it dissolving in the salt spread on the roads. His old Alfa was away being restored, but he couldn’t help thinking its unfortunate demise had been a blessing in disguise.
He was just about to take a side street, hopeful that it might cut the journey time by a couple of seconds, when his phone rang, loud through the stereo speakers. A less welcome benefit of the modern car; he tapped the button on the dashboard that activated the hands-free.

‘McLean.’

‘Where the hell are you?’

Good morning to you too, Detective Superintendent Duguid, sir. McLean glanced at the clock in front of him, orange digits showing there were still twenty minutes to go before eight o’clock.

‘Currently, sir? I’m in my car in a traffic jam on Lothian Road. Where are you?’

‘Don’t get cheeky with me, McLean. You were meant to be at the morning briefing here, half seven.’

That was the first he’d heard of it. He’d been taken off active duty after the incident in his attic, ostensibly whilst his broken leg healed, but also until he’d completed a seemingly endless series of counselling sessions with his favourite hack psychologist, Professor Matt Hilton. The visit out to Roslin Glen the day before had been his first proper case in months. ‘Morning briefing, sir? What morning briefing?’

A short pause, as if the superintendent were thinking deep thoughts. ‘Ah, right. You’re not on that team now, are you.’

Duguid’s brief stint in charge of the running of the whole station had been mercifully cut short by the creation of Police Scotland. That was probably the only positive thing anyone in plain clothes could come up with about the whole sorry affair though. CID had now
become the Specialist Crime Division and split into a bewildering number of teams, each specialising in some different facet of the Scottish criminal hive mind, it was a full-time job just working out where you were meant to be from day to day.