Dead Men's Bones (Inspector Mclean 4) (5 page)

The
walk down to the city mortuary was cold, a bitter wind blowing in from the Firth of Forth. McLean tried to stretch his leg as he walked, stung by the physiotherapist’s words about his fitness. He couldn’t argue with her about his age. Overhead, the clouds had that purple tinge to them that promised more snow. At least it was still daylight, though that wouldn’t last long.

Angus had already started on the body, ably assisted by the long-suffering Dr Sharp. Sitting at the back of the examination theatre, Dr Peachey looked bored, most likely because his presence was a legal requirement as witness to the proceedings. McLean thought he’d slipped into the observation area without being seen, but Cadwallader was never easy to fool.

‘Nice of you to join us, Tony,’ he said without taking his eyes off the cadaver. ‘I was beginning to wonder where you’d got to.’

‘I was told half past.’ McLean looked at his watch, saw that it was a quarter to. ‘Sorry. It’s been a busy day.’

‘No gently easing back into the flow after your enforced leave, I take it.’ Cadwallader pulled something dark and slippery out through the large incision in the dead man’s chest. Plopped it down on the stainless steel tray that Dr Sharp was already holding out for him. They were a well-rehearsed team.

‘What,
you don’t think Weatherly’s an easy case?’

Cadwallader stopped, his hand poised over the body ready to delve in again, and turned to face McLean.

‘I would’ve thought they’d want it all squared away neat and tidy.’ Cadwallader shook his head, turned back to the task in hand. ‘That’s not really your style.’

‘Yes, well whoever “they” are, they’ve pissed off Duguid somewhere along the line. I could’ve told them that wasn’t a good idea. Now he’s decided I’m a spanner and he’s going to throw me into the works.’

Cadwallader straightened up, handing yet another organ to his assistant. ‘You know, that’s so cynical it’s almost brilliant.’

‘You don’t have to deal with the consequences though, Angus. I’m the one who’s going to get all the shit when it doesn’t go to their script. I’ve already had Jo Dalgliesh bending my ear. Christ alone knows what’s going to turn up next.’

‘Yes. The term “poisoned chalice” springs to mind.’

McLean saw the CCTV video spool through his mind’s eye. The twin girls drinking the milk given them by their father. A shiver ran through him at the thought.

‘What about our mysterious tattooed man? Didn’t just accidentally fall in and drown?’

‘After taking all his clothes off first? If only it were that simple.’ Cadwallader stood away from the body, swept his arms wide to take in its full length. ‘This, I’m afraid, quite literally has suspicious death written all over it.’

‘Literally?’

‘Sometimes I wonder how you ever made it to sergeant, let alone detective inspector.’ Cadwallader waved
his hand at the body, blackened by the intricate web of designs covering every inch of skin.

‘The tattoos?’

‘Yes, Tony. The tattoos. Unusual enough that someone would go to such lengths. I’ve read a few stories of full body tattooing, but it’s very rare.’

‘So this was an unusual person. Should make identification a lot easier.’

‘Oh I very much doubt that. Quite the opposite.’

‘How so? Surely—’

‘These tattoos are all fresh. Some of them are barely healed. I doubt a single one’s more than a month old.’

‘We’re going to need a room. Somewhere not too far from the Weatherly case.’

Back at the station and McLean was feeling the effects of his walk to the mortuary. His thigh ached deep in the bone. He wanted to lie down somewhere comfortable until the painkillers kicked in, but he’d stupidly left them at home. The thought of running two murder investigations side by side was bad enough; it would be unbearable if he had to spend half his time walking up and down stairs between different incident rooms.

‘Room five’s free I think, sir. It’s not very big, but it’s just across the corridor.’ DC MacBride had a thick wedge of brown manila folders under one arm, his tablet computer clasped firmly in the opposite hand. Not letting such a prize out of his grasp was probably the only way of ensuring it didn’t disappear. McLean wondered if he took it home and slept with it.

‘Set it up please, Constable.’ He leaned back in his
chair, stretching his legs out under his desk in the hope that it might ease off some of the pain. ‘I take it we’ve not had any hits back from Missing Persons about our tattooed man.’

MacBride shook his head. ‘Nothing yet. Fingerprints turned up a blank. Still waiting on a DNA profile so we can run that.’

‘Angus’ll have that by the end of the day, hopefully. You’ll need to do the Mis Per all over again, though.’ McLean explained about the tattoos being fresh.

‘The whole body? In a month?’ MacBride’s normally pink face went very pale.

‘I don’t suppose Penicuik turned up anything useful?’

‘Said they walked the banks for a mile upstream and down. Nothing obvious, but then the weather’s hardly helping. Everything’s covered in fresh snow out there.’

McLean tried to remember the area from when he’d mountain biked out that way in his misspent youth. There were a couple of disused railway lines that had been turned into bridleways, if he recalled correctly. Lots of old ruined buildings, and a tunnel.

‘You got a map of the river?’

MacBride looked flustered for a moment, then juggled his tablet computer and the folders until he could access the touch screen. ‘I can call up Google Maps, sir. There’s satellite imagery, too.’

McLean shook his head. ‘No. I’m old-fashioned. Give me paper and lines any day. Get something sorted for the incident room. I’ll be up as soon as I’ve managed to find some bodies to fill it with.’

Several
hours later, with another bruising encounter with Duguid under his belt, McLean entered incident room five, hoping for some peace and quiet. The whiteboard on one wall held a few questions, a photograph of the tattooed man’s dead face and a hastily scribbled list of detectives’ names – those few who would still work with him and the unlucky ones who’d not managed to find a better excuse in time. It was a very short list; he’d have to draft in some uniforms to help out.

At first he thought the room was empty, but a quiet muttering from behind a stack of folders piled up on a desk at the far end turned out to be DC MacBride.

‘Problem?’ McLean peered over the folders. MacBride was fiddling with the cables at the back of an elderly computer.

‘Oh, sir. Sorry. I didn’t see you come in.’

‘Too busy fighting technology. Did someone pinch your tablet?’

A second’s worry flitted across MacBride’s face. He spun around, taking a length of cable with him that probably shouldn’t have gone. McLean saw the tablet lying on the desk behind him at the same time as the constable, who grabbed it like a jealous lover.

‘Don’t even joke about it, sir. You’ve no idea how many people have tried to nick it. You’d think policemen would be less … I don’t know …’

‘Thieving?’ McLean offered.

‘Yes,’ MacBride agreed. ‘I’ve never known so many light fingers as there are in this place. Can’t put something down for five minutes.’

‘Shouldn’t IT be doing that?’ McLean pointed at the
cable still in the constable’s hands. There wasn’t a lot of space for anything in the room, but somehow he had managed to get four desks and four computers wedged into one corner.

‘Depends on whether you want it done today or next month. Figured it’d be quicker if I did it myself. Just as soon as I can get everything hooked up to the network we can start sorting out those actions.’ He nodded at the whiteboard. It wasn’t much, but those questions would only multiply.

‘You reckon you’ll be done by shift end?’

‘Should be.’ MacBride looked at his watch, then back at McLean. ‘No overtime on this one, I take it.’

‘Not yet. No. If we’re lucky we might get some more help, though.’

MacBride said nothing, but his raised eyebrow showed he was developing the necessary levels of cynicism to survive as a detective. McLean looked back at the whiteboard, reading off the actions quickly. There was one thing missing.

‘Penicuik walked the river edge, didn’t they?’ He searched around for a marker pen before writing ‘point of entry?’ on the board.

‘Mile each way, at least that’s what they said.’ MacBride flicked a wall switch and the computers clunked into life. ‘I was going to get you that map. Sorry, sir, slipped my mind.’

‘Don’t worry. I’ve got some old Landrangers at home. I’ll dig them out. You’ll want to wear something warm tomorrow though.’

‘I will?’

‘Yup. Good boots, too. You and me are going for a walk along the riverbank.’

Cold
grey light filtered through the bare tree limbs, reflecting off the thin powdering of snow on the black earth and picking out fringes of frost around the piles of dead leaves. The wind had died down, or turned to a sufficiently different direction to be less noticeable deep in the glen. McLean stamped his feet against the chill, feeling the unfamiliar weight of his walking boots. They were new, like the ski gloves he had bought the evening before. The hat was one of his grandfather’s, though, an old tweed deerstalker his grandmother had found in a cupboard somewhere and presented to him when he first made detective. The Meerschaum pipe to go with it had long since disappeared.

‘What exactly are we looking for, sir?’

DC MacBride appeared to have kitted himself out from the stores back at the station. His yellow fluorescent jacket was hardly subtle, and it had been built for a constable twice his size. He had what looked like a balaclava nicked from the Armed Response Unit rolled up into a makeshift woolly hat. It was undoubtedly cosy, but nothing could stop the end of his nose from turning red.

‘I’m hoping we’ll know it when we see it.’ McLean slapped his hands together as he turned on the spot, surveying the scene around him. Many years ago, back in his student days, he had bicycled out this way from time to
time. The old railway followed the line of the river for a bit, dropping eventually into Penicuik, but first he wanted to walk the other bank.

‘This was all munitions factories, back in the war.’ He swept an arm over the expanse of car park, empty save for the ticking hulk of his car. His breath misted in the frigid morning air, hanging like the ghost of an idea. MacBride said nothing, perhaps unwilling to open his mouth and thus lose valuable heat.

‘They made gunpowder here in the eighteen hundreds. Built the material stores into the cliffside to contain any accidental explosions.’ McLean led the way as they crossed a modern bridge over the North Esk. The water was deep and fast moving. Enough to wash a body down to the rocks further along? Looking downstream it was impossible to get to the banks on both sides without cutting a path through the thick undergrowth and weed saplings. A water team with dinghies would get a better view; there was certainly no way Penicuik’s uniforms could have done anything more than a very cursory inspection. If they’d done even that much. A single snowflake tumbled lazily down to the rushing black water, no doubt soon to be followed by very many more. McLean found it hard to blame them for taking the lazy option.

At a sharp bend in the road, two heavy stone gateposts formed an entrance into what a sign proudly declared to be Roslin Glen Country Park. That was new to him; it had never had a name before. The old dirt track had been replaced with a wheelchair-friendly path as well, but the scenery was otherwise much as he remembered. They walked upstream, but even though the trees
were leafless it was all but impossible to see the river. This wasn’t somewhere you might stumble in by accident.

Further up, and the track ended by a series of ruined buildings. The stump of an old chimney stood to one side, the narrow shape of a wheelhouse nearby evidence of an earlier form of power. The river here was choked by a weir, diverting water to the wheel that was no longer there. McLean clumped down to the water’s edge.

‘If he’d fallen in further upstream this would have stopped him.’ He turned to where MacBride was standing up the slope. ‘I’d forgotten this was here. Could’ve saved us all a bit of time, really.’

‘You think Penicuik might’ve mentioned it.’

‘Yes, well.’ McLean looked across the river to the trees on the other side. The bank rose steeply, a hundred feet or more, a narrow gully formed by a smaller stream almost directly opposite. Sheltered from the worst of the wind, the ancient oaks and beeches had grown tall and thin. Here and there the earth had given way under their weight, toppling them down to the water. The undergrowth grew thick in the gaps, brambles and gorse fighting for the light. A little further downstream the slope became a cliff of dark yellow sandstone, rhododendrons billowing over the top like spume, cascading down the cracks in the rock.

‘His neck was broken, which would suggest a fall.’

‘You think he fell down there?’ MacBride had followed McLean’s gaze across to the cliff, and now the constable shuddered somewhere in the depths of his overlarge jacket.

‘Micro-lacerations
to the front of the body. Like he’d pushed his way through a gorse bush.’

‘With no clothes on? Jesus. What would make someone do that?’

‘Being in fear of your life, perhaps?’ McLean tapped MacBride on the shoulder, pointed back in the direction they had come. ‘Let’s go.’

‘Where’re we going?’

He pointed to the cliff top. ‘Up there. Only I don’t fancy trying to climb it from this side.’

It took a lot longer to walk than McLean had anticipated. Strange how memory changed a place over time, shortening distances and tidying up reality. Perhaps it would have been easier driving rather than struggling up the narrow lane to Roslin Castle station and then down on to the old railway line. The snow was coming in heavier flurries as they walked along the footpath that was the only good thing to come from Dr Beeching’s axe. There were dozens of abandoned railway lines around here, mostly old freight routes for the mines and factories, taking coal and goods to the port at Leith. This one was mostly sunk into a cutting, making it almost impossible to gauge where they were in relation to the ruined gunpowder factory on the other side of the river. The undergrowth to either side was thick, covered with snow and mostly so full of thorns it would have been impossible to get through no matter how terrified or desperate you were, but there were some stands of broom that might give way to someone determined enough.

‘When did this snow start to settle?’ McLean pushed
at a likely spot and was rewarded with a heavy dump of cold powder in the gap between his coat and glove. Flapping his hand to get rid of it only forced more snow up his sleeve.

‘Friday, I think. It’s not been properly cold enough to hang around until this week.’

‘And best estimate is our man went into the river on Saturday.’ McLean pushed deeper into the undergrowth. Somewhere down below, he could hear the water cascading over the weir. They had to be fairly close to the spot he’d seen from the other bank.

‘I think that was pretty much blizzard all day. I was processing actions on the Danby case for DI Spence for the whole afternoon and I don’t think it let up.’

McLean brushed more snow from the top of the broom, then pushed the branches aside, placing a boot carefully where he thought he’d be able to get a good footing. The edge was nearby somewhere and he really didn’t fancy taking a tumble over that cliff.

‘So what we’re looking at is a naked man, covered from head to toe in fresh tattoos, running through a blizzard and so terrified of whatever’s chasing him that he doesn’t notice, well, anything.’

‘And you think he went over the cliff—’

With hindsight, he should have noticed that the broom’s thin, whippy fronds had given way to the bulbous leaves of the rhododendron bushes. Maybe he had, but it just hadn’t clicked in his head as to what that actually meant. All McLean knew was that one moment he was standing on firm ground, and the next the bushes had leapt up to consume him. He flailed about, grabbing at the branches
with gloves slick with snow. Their padding had been great for keeping out the cold, but now they made it almost impossible to get a decent grip. He twisted around, feeling nothing under his feet now, certain that he’d just stepped into air and a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot drop. He was just beginning to curse himself for such gross stupidity when something clamped hard around one wrist and he jarred to a stop.

‘Jesus, fuck!’

McLean whipped his free hand round, used his teeth to pull the glove off. It fell away from him in a lazy arc, bouncing off thin branches before disappearing into the grey. The cold was instant, but at least now he could reach for something a bit more substantial. He looked back, seeing what it was that had saved his life. A gloved hand clamped around his wrist and the pale, worried face of DC MacBride peered through the snow-covered foliage.

‘Can’t hold on much longer, sir. Can you reach that branch?’

McLean saw what MacBride was nodding at, hooked his free arm around the thick stem and took some of the weight. His feet still hung over nothing, and he suppressed the urge to look down. Concentrated on getting back up the ways.

‘Just to your left. There’s a rock jutting out. Should be able to get a foot on it.’

McLean inched his left foot over, feeling the boot connect with something solid. He slowly transferred his weight on to it, conscious that the rock might give at any moment. Christ, but he could be stupid sometimes.

‘That’s
it. A little more.’

He felt his back press against the clifftop, brought his right foot over to join the left one. The scramble from there back over the edge, up a short steep slope and then down to the safety of the footpath was inelegant, but McLean really didn’t care. It wasn’t until he’d collapsed on to his backside on the snowy ground that he realized he was breathing hard, his heart racing. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

‘Please don’t do that again, sir.’ MacBride rested his hands on his knees. He too was panting like a man who’s just run a marathon with a fridge tied to his back. His face was white, only the tip of his nose still red from the cold.

McLean looked past him, seeing the railway line curve gently in either direction. True, there was a bank to climb before you got to the bushes, but it was worn away here, not as steep as elsewhere along the route. And that apex in the bend of the line obviously kissed the clifftop. There should have been a fence, or at the very least a sign giving warning.

He pushed himself to his feet, wobbly, dusting the snow and dirt from his coat. One hand was still gloved, but the other was bare. He held it up to his face and watched it shake for a moment.

‘I think I know where our man went over.’