Natural Causes (34 page)

65

The tinny little buzzing of his alarm clock broke through the pain in his head, reminding him with far too much enthusiasm that it was six o'clock and time to get up. McLean groaned and rolled over to hit the snooze button. Perhaps his hangover would go away in the next ten minutes. It was worth a try. He bumped into something solid beside him and couldn't for the life of him work out what it was. Then it grunted and moved and he was suddenly very wide awake.

Sitting up in bed and rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, he looked down on the prone form of Emma Baird and felt a curious mixture of anger and fear. He'd slept in this bed alone for so long, always keeping his relationships professional, always keeping people at arms length. A therapist might have said he was afraid to commit, and they'd be right. After Kirsty, the thought of getting close to anyone else was just too painful. And now, after a couple of dinners and a night spent drinking with half of the station, she was asleep alongside him.

He tried to remember the night before. They'd both celebrated having found Chloe safe, but that was another part of his barricade; he never let himself get so drunk he lost control. Never so drunk he couldn't remember what he'd done.

She'd been angry with him, Emma. She'd heard all the things he'd said to Duguid outside the SOC offices at Force HQ. About how he had planned to use his friendship to investigate the leaked photographs. It didn't matter how much he explained, how much he tried to persuade her that what he had meant was different to what she had assumed. From her point of view he had been playing her. She'd only really relented when he'd apologised and begged her forgiveness. But that was women for you, wasn't it?

Then they'd been thrown out of the pub by the cleaners. God only knew what time it was in the morning, and there'd be a fair few sore heads in the station come shift change. Had he suggested whisky at his place, or had it been Grumpy Bob? That memory was a little hazy, but he did recall thinking that company of any sort would be better than returning to the cold, empty, silent flat alone. So a gang of them had come back, and most likely finished off his entire supply of malt. That, at least, would explain the pounding in his head.

Trying not to groan, McLean rolled over and out of bed. He was still wearing his boxer shorts, which was something. His suit was folded over the back of the chair, his shirt and socks in the laundry basket. These were automatic things; he didn't have to think about the routine. But equally, he wouldn't have been so conscientious had he been half cut the night before, or gripped in a fever of unlikely passion. And the more he thought about it, the more he remembered going to bed alone. Grumpy Bob had stayed the course, but MacBride had passed out on the floor, and Emma? Yes, Emma had fallen asleep in the armchair. He'd dug a blanket out of the closet and draped it over her before putting himself to bed. She must have woken up in the night and crawled in under his duvet. Well, that said something pretty loud and clear.

The shower managed to shift some of the grey fog from his mind, but he was still slow when he stepped out and dried himself down. His cracked ribs protested, the bruise around his torso turning yellow at the edges. Towel round his middle, he filled the kettle and set it to boil. Then, taking a deep breath, he went back into his bedroom. Emma was still asleep, but she had rolled over, throwing the duvet askance. Her short black hair covered her face, but pretty much everything else was on view. A trail of clothes covered the floor from door to bedside; items of underwear he'd not seen in a good few years. Not this side of a crime scene, anyway. As quietly as he could, he gathered up his suit, fetched a shirt and a clean set of underclothes from the wardrobe, and retreated to his study to dress.

The dictaphone sat on his desk, accusing him of callous disregard for the memory of the dead. He ignored that part of his mind, knowing it was just self-indulgence, a protective cocoon of guilt. He knew he'd never throw away the tape, just as he knew he would never forget Kirsty. But perhaps after all these years he really should be taking the advice of all his friends and trying to move on. Shit happened in the world, but sometimes things came good. They'd found Chloe Spiers alive, after all.

Dressed, he went through to the kitchen and made coffee. The carton of milk in the fridge hadn't yet given birth, but it would need inducing soon if it wasn't going to explode. Poking his head into the living room and the spare bedroom revealed one sleeping detective constable and one snoring detective sergeant, both of whom would need coffee and bacon butties. He grabbed his keys from the table in the hall and headed out to the corner shop.

By the time he had returned, the bathroom door was firmly closed and the sound of the shower running hissed through it. Grumpy Bob sat at the kitchen table looking like he'd slept in his suit, and as McLean began making bacon butties, DC MacBride stumbled in, looking slightly nervous.

'Morning, constable,' McLean said, noting how the MacBride winced in pain at the sound. Well, fair enough. He'd drunk the most. But his liver was still young. He'd survive.

'What was I drinking last night?' he asked.

'In the pub, or here?' Grumpy Bob scratched at his chin. He'd be needing the electric razor he kept in his locker at the station.

Confusion spread across DC MacBride's face, but before he could say anything, a light knocking came at the door.

'Take over the butties, Bob. There's brown sauce in the cupboard.' McLean went through to the hall and opened the door. Jenny Spiers stood on the communal landing.

'Tony. I...'

'Jenny. Hi...'

They both spoke at the same time, then both stopped speaking to let the other one go first. McLean moved aside from the door.

'Come on in. I was just making bacon butties.'

Before he could say any more, she had wrapped him in a huge embrace. 'Thank you for finding my baby,' she said. Then burst into hysterical sobs.

Emma chose that moment to come out of the bathroom. She was wearing McLean's old towelling dressing gown, which revealed rather more thigh than perhaps it should have done. Her hair was spiky where she had rubbed it dry, and she smelled strongly of tea tree oil shampoo. The temperature in the hallway plummeted as the two women stared at each other in silence. McLean could feel Jenny tense as she still held onto him.

'Umm. Jenny, this is Emma. Emma, Jenny.' The tension didn't ease. Then a voice shouted 'coming through!' and DC MacBride stumbled out of the kitchen, pushing past Emma on his way into the bathroom. The door slammed and behind it they could all hear the noise of the toilet seat being lifted, followed by quiet retching.

'We had a bit of a party last night.' McLean tried to tactfully extract himself from Jenny's embrace, though she seemed reluctant to let him go. 'It looks like young Detective Constable MacBride may have had a little too much cask strength Bowmore.'

'More likely the tequila slammers he had in the pub,' Emma said, and padded off in the direction of McLean's bedroom.

'How is Chloe, by the way?' He asked, hoping to distract Jenny, who's gaze had followed the other woman with a sort of haunted, disbelieving look. She dragged her attention back to him, fixed a smile onto her face.

'The doctors say she'll be fine, physically. She was badly dehydrated when you found her. Thank God you did. I really don't know how to thank you enough.'

'It's my job, Jenny.' McLean steered her into the kitchen where Grumpy Bob was standing at the cooker, wearing a long apron with an amusing bikini motif printed on it.

'I just don't know how she'll cope mentally. Being chained up like that. With a corpse.'

McLean wondered just how much Jenny knew. 'She told you?' he asked. She nodded, accepting a proffered mug of coffee. 'Then she's taking the right steps towards dealing with it. She's a tough kid. I'm guessing she gets that from her mother.'

Jenny sipped her coffee, sitting at the kitchen table and saying nothing. Grumpy Bob kept his silence, diligently constructing breakfast for an army. Somewhere in the background, the toilet flushed. Then Jenny put her mug down on the table and looked McLean straight in the eye.

'She said they chose her because of you. They wanted to get to you through me. Why would they do that? I hardly know you.'

'You came to my grandmother's funeral.' It was the only thing he could think of. 'Wemyss must have been watching me even then. He was behind it all from the start, trying to discredit me, hiring McReadie to set me up, Killing Alison to slow us down. He needed to get me off the investigation into the dead girl, and he needed someone to take her place. Chloe was just the right age. I'm sorry, Jenny. If you'd never met me, they'd have found someone else.'

*

'One of these days, Tony, you're going to have to tell me how you do it.'

McLean stood in the post mortem examination theatre for what felt like the millionth time in the past fortnight. He liked Angus Cadwallader, enjoyed the older man's sharp wit and sense of humour, but he'd rather have met him in the pub. Even the Opera would have been preferable.

'How I do what?' he asked, shifting on the balls of his feet as the pathologist went through the motions of examining the body of Gavin Wemyss.

'Peter Andrews. You knew that there'd be traces of blood and skin under his nails, didn't you.'

'Call it a hunch.'

'Did the hunch tell you whose blood and skin it would be?'

'Buchan Stewart.'

'You see, that's what I mean, Tony.' Cadwallader stood up, staring at the inspector, quite oblivious to the fact that he was holding Wemyss' liver in his hand. 'We've got all this expensive technological wizardry here, costing millions of pounds of taxpayers money, and you already know the answer before you ask the question.'

'Do me a favour, Angus. Keep that nugget of information to yourself.' It was bad enough that Jonathan Okolo and Sally Dent were down in the annals of history as murderers when it was far more likely they'd been unwitting pawns in Wemyss' sick game. There was no need to cause Peter Andrews' family any more anguish.

'Gladly.' Cadwallader finally noticed the dripping liver and placed it on a stainless steel tray to be weighed. 'It would be very embarrassing to have to admit I missed it in the first place.'

He went back to guddling around in the dead man's chest, taking out unidentifiable bits, peering at them, weighing them and placing them in individual containers; as happy as a pig in shit. Pity poor Tracy who would have to put them all back again and stitch the cadaver up later.

'So would you like to hazard a cause of death?' McLean asked when he felt he could take no more.

'Heart failure due to massive loss of blood would be my best guess. The knife wound to the throat went deep enough to sever the carotid artery and leave marks on the neck vertebrae. We've got the weapon, haven't we?'

Tracy produced a plastic bag with the hunting knife in it. Cadwallader weighed it in his hand, inspecting the blade and holding it to the dead man's neck.

'Yes, that would do it. And it would also explain these marks here on his sternum and ribs. The killer cut him open to remove his heart. It's a tricky organ to get to without either a great deal of skill or being very messy indeed.'

'Can you hazard a time of death?'

'Thirty-six to forty-eight hours. He'd been sitting there quite a while. I'm surprised your man hadn't made a run for the border. Could've been in a different country before you found the body.'

McLean did the maths. Wemyss had been killed not long after David Brown. Dead in the bushes on the boundary of Wemyss garden. Killed by Jethro Callum in a violent fury.

'He was waiting for us, in the room where we found him.' McLean nodded at the eviscerated man lying on the table. 'He tried to kill himself. Right in front of me.'

'Ah. I see a pattern emerging.'

So did McLean, but before he could say anything more, his jacket pocket started to buzz and vibrate furiously. It was such an unusual sensation, it took him a long time to realise that his mobile phone was ringing. He flipped it open, noticing an almost full battery readout.

'Do carry on without me,' he said to Cadwallader, then stalked out of the room. Past the doors, he answered the call. 'McLean.'

'MacBride here, sir. There's been an incident at the hospital. It's Callum. He's collapsed.'

Violence is all it knows. McLean recalled the words of Jonas Carstairs' letter. And then names: Peter Andrews, watching Jonathan Okolo die violently in a city centre pub; Sally Dent, witnessing Peter Andrews taking his own life; David Brown, watching Sally's body plunge through the glass ceiling of Waverly Station, smashing into the windscreen of the train he was driving; Jethro Callum breaking David's bones, throttling the life out of him; Callum smashing his head into the glass window, trying to kill himself. What had he said? 'You'll understand soon.' That voice so different and strange.

Despite the summer heat, a shiver ran through his whole body. Maybe he did understand. And maybe he knew what had to be done. If he was wrong, he was going to have a hard time explaining himself, but if he was right? Well, that didn't really bear thinking about.

~~~~

66

The hospital had a sad familiarity for him. McLean had visited his grandmother here too many times to count. The nurses all smiled and said hello as he walked the corridors; he knew most of them by name. Walking beside him, DC MacBride blushed at the attention. A junior doctor, looking tired and harassed, walked up to them as they strode down the corridor.

'Inspector McLean?'

McLean nodded. 'What's the story, doc?'

'It's hard to say. I've never seen anything like it before. Mr Callum's a very fit man, young, too. But his organs are packing up one by one. If we can't stop it, or stabilise him, he could die in hours.'

'Hours? But yesterday he was fine. Better than fine.' McLean felt his bruised ribs, remembered the muscled man he'd fought with not twenty-four hours before. Another piece of the puzzle slotting into place, a picture emerging that he really didn't want to see.

'We're working on the hypothesis that it's some form of steroid reaction. He didn't get the size he is just by pumping iron, and whatever he was on might have made him over-sensitive to something we've given him. But I've never seen anything come on so quickly before. I treated him for his damaged eye yesterday evening, and apart from a little hyperventilation, he seemed fine.'

'Did he speak to you?'

'What? Oh. No. He didn't say a word.'

'Didn't struggle, didn't try to kill himself?'

'No. But he was restrained, and there were three constables with him at all times.'

'Where is he now?'

'We've put him in one of the single rooms up by the coma ward.'

'So that if he becomes too violent, no-one will be disturbed?'

'Well, yes. But we've got all the intensive care monitoring kit up there as well. Here, I'll show you the way.'

'That's all right. I know where it is. I'm sure you've got a hundred and one things more important to worry about than a murderer who's going nowhere.'

They left the doctor behind, looking slightly puzzled. McLean lead the way through the miles of faceless corridors, MacBride trotting at his heels like a faithful hound to keep up.

'What are we doing here, sir?'

'I'm here to interview our only surviving murder suspect before this mysterious illness kills him,' McLean said as they approached the room he had been seeking. A bored looking PC sat on an uncomfortable plastic chair outside, reading an Ian Rankin novel. 'You're here because Grumpy Bob's developed a talent for hiding when he knows I'm about to do something the chief superintendent won't approve of.'

'Inspector. Sir. No one told me...' The constable stood to attention, trying to hide the book behind his back.

'Don't panic, Steve. I just want a word with the prisoner. Why don't you go off and get yourself a cuppa, eh? DC MacBride'll keep an eye on things.'

'What do you want me to do?' MacBride asked as the relieved policeman scurried off to the canteen.

'You stand guard here.' McLean opened the door and stepped through. 'And don't let anyone in.'

*

The room was a small and soulless, a single narrow window opening onto a view of sun-blasted concrete and glass. Two plastic chairs lined up against the wall, and a narrow cabinet had been pressed into service as a bedside table. Jethro Callum lay at the centre of a bewildering array of humming machinery. Tubes pumped noxious looking fluids to and from his body. He looked nothing at all like the fit bodyguard McLean had wrestled with just the afternoon before. Propped up in a mound of pillows, his face was sunken and pale, his eyes dark hollows. Most of his hair had fallen out, some still lying on his pillow in dead heaps. The skin on his scalp was mottled with vivid red spots. His arms lay on top of the blankets, fat with muscle but all the tone gone. He still had his bulk, but now it hindered his breathing, pinning him down far more effectively than the leather restraint straps that tied him to the bed frame.

'You came. I knew you would.' Callum's voice was barely audible above the hum of the life-support machinery. But it wasn't the voice of the bodyguard. This was the other one, the voice that had threatened and promised. The voice that had a strangely hypnotic power behind it.

McLean picked up one of the chairs, wedging it under the door handle. He took the emergency call cord and looped it out of reach. Then he leant down to study the machines for a moment. Wires trailed from an ECG to a slim sensor attached to one of Callum's fingers. McLean slipped it off, pushing it swiftly onto his own. The machine gave a few hurried bleeps then settled back down into a steady rhythm. He inspected the other machines, but only the ECG seemed to be plumbed into the emergency monitoring system. He searched for the switches and turned them off, one by one. Medical science kept the body alive, but Jethro Callum had really perished the moment he had killed David Brown. Whatever it was that had taken hold of his soul then had been slowly devouring his flesh ever since.

'Tell me about the girl.' McLean settled himself into the other chair.

'What girl?'

'You know who I'm talking about. The girl they killed in their sick ceremony.'

'Ah, yes. Her.' Callum sounded oddly distant, like an emphysemic ventriloquist's dummy, but the pleasure in his voice was sickening. 'Little Maggie Donaldson. Pretty little thing. Can't have been much more than sixteen. Pure, of course. That's what attracted me to her. But they soiled her, all of them. One after the other. The old one, he knew what he was doing. He trapped me inside her and then they split her up. Took a part of me each.'

'Why did they do it?'

'Why do your kind ever do anything? They wanted to live forever.'

'And you? What happens to you?'

'I go on. In you.'

McLean looked at the pathetic figure dying in front of him. This was what it was all about. This was what had caused all the shit that had happened to him since they'd discovered the dead girl in the basement of Farquhar House. This was what had killed innocent people, twisting them to its purpose without a care. This was why Alison Kydd had been run down in the street. He was filled with an urge to strangle the man. It would be so easy to wrap his hands around his throat and squeeze the life out of him. Or better still, to grind something into his blinded eye, and on through to his brain. He had a pen in his pocket, that would be enough of a weapon. You just needed the right entry point, the right leverage. There were so many ways to kill a man. So many...

'Oh no you don't.' He shook the alien thoughts from his head. Barnaby Smythe, Buchan Stewart, Jonas Carstairs, Gavin Wemyss. They had all sat calmly, unrestrained as they were butchered and killed. And Fergus McReadie, too. He had taken his own life just because of a word. Now McLean knew why. They had been in thrall to that voice, connected to it by an act of savagery to which they had all been party. But he hadn't killed the girl, hadn't planned to murder Chloe. There was no connection between him and this monster.

'Oh but there is, inspector. You made the circle whole. You're as much a part of this as any of them. More so. You have a strength of spirit they all lacked. His blood runs through your veins. You are a fit vessel to contain me.'

This time the persuasion was like a wall of darkness, pushing against him. McLean saw glimpses of gruesome scenes: Smythe's face contorted in pain as the knife bit into his grey-haired chest; Jonas Carstairs' heart still beating beneath his exposed ribs; Gavin Wemyss sitting calmly, only his eyes showing his true state of mind as his throat was slowly cut. And with each image came a surge of power, a feeling of unrestrained excitement and joy. He could have this, be this. He could live forever.

'I don't think so.' McLean pushed himself out of his chair and crossed to the bed. He reached up to the saline drip, twisting the tap around until the flow was cut off. 'I understand now. I didn't want to believe it, but I guess I have to. You need the violence to pass from one host to the next. Without it you're stuck. And when this one goes, so do you. Back to wherever it was they summoned you from with their foul ceremony.'

'What are you doing? I command you to kill this body.' Callum fought against the straps and the sheets that pinned him to the bed, but it was a weak effort, and he fell swiftly to a fit of gurgling coughs.

'You're doing a good enough job of that yourself.' McLean shrugged off another wave of compulsion, weaker this time, more desperate. He sat himself down again, staring at the wasted form in the bed. 'I'm guessing you never meant to stay in poor Jethro this long, but you had to cover your tracks and that took time. He was never strong enough to carry you, was he?'

'Kill me.' The voice was little more than a faltering breath now. 'Set me free.'

'Not this time.' McLean settled himself into the chair. Watched and waited as Callum's last few breaths rattled out of him like escaping insects.

'This time you die of natural causes.'

~~~~