Authors: James Oswald
12
His mind is a whirl of confusion. He doesn't know this city, doesn't understand the harsh language they speak here. He feels sick, right down to his core. His breathing is ragged, and every gasp hurts in his throat, his chest burning. Once he was strong, he knows this even though he can't remember his name. Once he could carry a dozen sheaves of grain at a time, clear a whole field in an afternoon under the hot sun. Now his back is bent, his legs weak and faltering. When did he become old like his father? What happened to his life?
Noise spills out from a nearby building. Its tall glass windows are frosted, but he can see the colourful shadows of people moving about inside. The central door swings wide and a young woman staggers out, closely followed by two more. They are laughing, jabbering away at each other with words he doesn't recognise. Drunk and happy, they don't see him watching from the other side of the street. Their high heels clatter on the pavement as they stagger away, their short skirts riding up their legs, crop-tops revealing pale white flaccid flesh.
He catches glimpses of memory. Someone doing terrible things. More pale flesh, parted by a sharp knife. Blood welling up from the edges of the cut. Rage at an ancient injustice. Something dark and wet and slippery underneath. These are not his memories. Or maybe they are. He no longer knows what is real.
The air is warm; a heavy moist blanket under the dark night sky. Orange streetlamps reflect off dull clouds overhead, casting everything in a hellish light. He is slick with sweat and his head pounds to the rhythm of his heart. His throat feels suddenly dry and he knows now what the building across the road is.
The noise stabs at him as he pushes open the heavy door. It envelopes him in a smell of unwashed bodies, deodorant, perfume, beer, food. There are hundreds of people standing, sitting, shouting at each other to be heard over the tuneless music that fills everything. No-one seems to notice him as he steps into the throng.
He looks at his hands, so familiar. These are hands that have built walls, caressed lovers, held a tiny baby whose name is as forgotten to him as his own. These are hands crusted with dried blood, worn into the wrinkles and underneath the short fingernails. These are the hands that wielded the knife. That violated another man so completely. The hands that sought vengeance for all the wrongs done to him and his kind.
He sees the sign, understands one small thing in this foreign place. Is it the sickness that has weakened him, or the terrible images flooding his mind that drives him there? Either way, he is in the toilet, hunched over the bowl, vomiting. Or at least trying to vomit. Nothing but dry heaves, his stomach empty.
He grabs paper, wipes his face and hands, flushes. When he stands up, the world seems to tilt dangerously. He is breathless, unknowing. There are other people in the toilet, laughing at him. Moving around him like bullies in the schoolyard. He can't focus, can only remember the terrible feel of the knife in his hand, the power that flowed through him as he used it, the righteous fury. He can feel it again, heavy against his palm.
They're not laughing now. A silence has fallen on the place. Even the droning thump of the music outside is still. He looks around, noticing for the first time the long mirror in front of him. It's hard to make out anything past the images of carnage filling his mind. But he can see a man he doesn't recognise, haggard and gaunt, dressed in filthy clothes, hair matted and grey. He watches, fascinated, terrified, as the man reaches up with one hand. A fist is clamped around a short builder's knife, the blade angled inwards towards his exposed throat. He has done this before, he thinks as he feels the welcome touch of cold steel on his flesh.
Blood sprays across the mirror.
~~~~
13
The station was in turmoil when McLean came in the next morning. A take-away curry and an early night had left him feeling much better than the previous day's brain-dead zombie. He was half an hour early for the morning briefing on the Smythe case, and had hoped he might use the time to make a start on his outstanding paperwork. As he approached the incident room on his way to the stairs, he could hear Dagwood's distinctive voice rumbling out through the open door.
'...Bloody marvellous. Can't keep the buggers out, and when they come here they're all nutcases...'
He peered around the doorframe, hoping to get the lay of the room before stepping past. The chief inspector took the same moment to break off from his conversation with a pair of uniformed sergeants and look around.
'Ah, McLean. Good. Glad to see you're in early. You can help with the tidying up.'
'Tidying up, sir?' McLean looked around the room and saw constables busy packing things into boxes, pulling photographs from the walls and rubbing down the whiteboards.
'Yes, Tony. We got him last night. No doubting his guilt, his prints were all over Smythe's library.'
'You caught the killer?' McLean was finding it hard to reconcile the point they had reached in the investigation yesterday evening with what he was being told. He hoped his mouth wasn't gaping open. 'How?'
'Well, I wouldn't say exactly caught,' Duguid said. 'This man walked into a pub just off St Andrews square about half eleven last night. Went into the gents and cut his own throat. It was even the same knife he used on Smythe.'
'Is he all right?'
'No of course he's not all right, you idiot. He's dead. Do you think we'd be taking this all down if we had him in the cells waiting for interrogation?'
'No, sir. Of course not.' McLean watched the dismantling of the incident room proceed apace. 'Who was he?'
'Illegal immigrant. Name of Akimbo or something. I can never tell how you're supposed to pronounce these foreign names.'
'Who ID'd him?'
'Some wifey from SOCO, Baird, I think she's called. The fingerprint search came up blank, but then she had the bright idea to try the illegal immigrants register. This chap should have been locked up. He was due to be shipped back to Fuzzistan or wherever it is he came from.'
McLean tried to ignore Duguid's casual racism. The Chief Inspector was a walking reminder of all that was wrong with the force. The sooner the man retired, the better.
'I guess the chief super will be happy, no doubt the Chief Constable too. I know there was a lot of pressure for a quick result.'
'Quite right. Which is why we need the report typed up and on Jayne's desk by the end of the day. I don't think the procurator fiscal will want to take it any further, but we've got to go through the motions. You'll need to attend the post mortem, just to make sure there's no nasty surprises. But the evidence is pretty compelling. He had Smythe's blood type on his clothes. DNA results will confirm it, I'm sure. He's our man.'
Oh great. Another chance to watch a dead body being cut up. 'What time's the PM, sir?' McLean looked at his watch. Seven o'clock in the morning.
'Ten, I think. You'd better phone and check.'
'Ten. I'm supposed to be meeting...' But McLean stopped. He knew there was no point in complaining to Duguid. It would only provoke the man into one of his tirades. 'I'll reschedule.'
'You do that, McLean.'
*
The small incident room was empty when McLean finally managed to escape from Duguid and make his way to the back of the station. Grumpy Bob's newspaper lay on one of the two tables; Constable MacBride had piled a neat stack of files on the other. He flicked through them quickly, burglary reports stretching back five years. Post-it notes with questions on them poked out between the pages. Well, at least someone had been busy.
The photographs of the organs and other artefacts from the dead girl crime scene were pinned to one wall, arranged in a circle just as they had been found. A full-on A3 printed photograph of her twisted, violated body hung in the middle of the circle. He was staring at it still some minutes later when the door nudged open.
'Morning sir. Hear the news?' Detective Constable MacBride looked like he had scrubbed himself pink. His hair was still slightly damp from showering and his smooth, round face held an expression of innocent hope and excitement.
'News? Oh, Smythe's killer. Don't you think it's a bit odd?'
'How so, sir?'
'Well, why'd he do it? Why did he break into some old man's house and cut him open? Why shove his spleen in his mouth? And why kill himself just days later?'
'Well, he was an illegal immigrant, wasn't he?'
McLean bristled. 'Don't start on that, please. They're not all coming to rape our women and steal our jobs you know. It's bad enough hearing that nonsense from Dagwood.'
'That's not what I meant, sir.' MacBride's face went pinker still, the lobes of his ears turning almost blood red. 'I meant he might have had a grudge against Smythe because he was chair of the Immigration Appeals board.'
'Was he? How'd you know that?'
'Alison... Er, Constable Kydd told me, sir.'
It was McLean's turn to feel the warmth of embarrassment.
'I'm sorry, Stuart. I didn't mean to snap at you. What else do you know about Smythe that I missed?'
'Well sir. He was eighty-four but still worked every day. He sat on the boards of a dozen different companies and owned controlling interests in at least two biotech start-ups. He took over his father's merchant bank just after the war and built it into one of the largest financial institutions in the city before selling out just before the dotcom bubble burst. Since then he's been mostly setting up charitable trusts for various good causes. He had a permanent staff of three at his city house, all of whom had been given the night off when he was killed. Apparently that wasn't unusual; he quite often sent them away for the evening so he could be alone.'
McLean listened to more potted history, noting as he did that the constable seemed to have committed the detail to memory. Apart from the tenuous connection with the illegal immigration and repatriation, there was absolutely nothing to connect Smythe with the man who had murdered him.
'What was the killer's name again?'
This time MacBride pulled out his notebook, licking the tip of his finger before leafing through the pages.
'Jonathan Okolo. Apparently he came from Nigeria. Applied for asylum three years ago but was turned down. He was being held in a secure facility until April, "awaiting repatriation" the records say. No-one's quite sure how he escaped, but there's been a few others disappear from there in the last year or so.'
'Do you have their names?'
'No, sir. But I'm sure I could find them out. Why?'
'I don't know, really. Duguid's going to want to wash his hands of this whole thing as soon as possible. Quite likely the chief constable and all the top brass will be happy to let it lie too. If I had half a brain I'd do the same. But I've a nasty feeling we haven't heard the last of Jonathan Okolo yet. I wouldn't mind being one step ahead of the game when his name pops up again.'
'I'll do some digging sir.' MacBride made a note in his book, putting it carefully away. McLean wondered what he had done with his own notebook; it was probably upstairs in his office. Along with all that paperwork which wouldn't do itself.
'What have you got lined up for today then, constable?'
'Detective Sergeant Laird and I are meant to be interviewing some of these burglary victims, sir. Just as soon as he gets in.'
'Well, Grumpy Bob always was more of a night shift person.' From the look on MacBride's face McLean reckoned he'd never heard the sergeant referred to as Grumpy Bob before. 'I tell you what, constable. You tell him when he gets in that he can do those interviews on his own. He can take a uniform with him if he feels lonely. I want you to spend the next hour tracking down what you can about Okolo and his friends. Then you and me're going to take a trip down to the Cowgate and watch Dr Cadwallader cut him open.'
'Umm. Do I have to sir?' MacBride's ruddy complexion paled to a pasty green.
'You've been to post mortems before haven't you constable?'
'Yes sir, I have. A couple. That's why I'd rather be somewhere else.'
*
He found his notebook where he had last left it, sitting under the evidence bag containing the dead girl's floral dress, on his desk. McLean slipped it into his pocket, reminding himself to take the dress back down to the incident room. The scrap of paper with Carstairs' number on it was still lying beside the phone. He rang through, rearranging their meeting for later in the afternoon, then switched on his computer and pulled the pile of papers towards him. He understood the need for full accounting and proper procedure; he just wished someone else could do it for him.
It was mind-numbing work, requiring just too much concentration for him to mull things over in his mind whilst he was doing it. And all the while, out of the corner of his eye, he could see the dress. Finally when he had reached a point optimistically halfway down the pile, he took out his notebook, pushed his chair back from the desk and flicked through the pages.
He came almost immediately to the strange swirling patterns he had seen in the basement room, or at least had thought he had seen. They had suggested that the murder was some form of ritual sacrifice, but the hidden alcoves had revealed far more obvious and tempting clues. So he had concentrated on the names, the preserved organs and the personal items. But as his old mentor had always told him, it was usually the least obvious things that were the key. McLean glanced at his watch; it was half past nine. He logged off the computer, grabbed the dress and headed back down to the tiny incident room. Grumpy Bob was there, reading the paper again. Constable MacBride concentrated on the screen of his laptop computer, tapping furiously at the keys.
'Morning sir,' Grumpy Bob folded his paper and stuck it in a box under the table.
'Morning Bob. You got the photos from the murder scene?'
Grumpy Bob looked over at MacBride but got no response, and so had to fetch the box from the corner himself. He sat it down on the table and pulled out a handful of glossy prints.
'What were you looking for, sir?'
'There should be a series of pictures of the floor about a foot or so in from the wall.'
'Aye, I wondered why the photographer took those.' Grumpy Bob guddled around some more, coming out with a handful of sheets. He started to lay them out on the table, occasionally referring to numbers printed on the backs.
'I asked him to.' McLean studied the first of the photos, then the next and the next. They all looked the same; washed out with the flash, the floor was smooth, featureless wood with absolutely no markings on it at all. He pulled out his notebook and looked at the shapes he had drawn. The shapes he was certain he had seen.
'Is this all of them?' he asked Bob when he had studied every picture and come up with nothing.
'Far as I know.'
'Well get onto the SOC team and double check will you, Bob? I'm looking for pictures of the floor that show markings like this.' He showed the images in his notebook to the sergeant.
'Can't Constable MacBride do it?' Bob complained. 'You know he's much better at all this technical stuff than me.'
'Sorry, Bob. He's coming with me.' He turned to the constable. 'You finished there?'
'Just about, sir. One moment.' MacBride tapped a couple of keys, then folded the notebook flat. 'I'll run past the printer and pick that up on our way out. Unless you'd prefer Sergeant Laird to go with you to the post mortem, sir?' There was hope in his voice.
McLean smiled. 'I suspect Bob's only just had his breakfast, constable. And I for one have no desire to know what it was.'
~~~~