Dead Men's Bones (Inspector Mclean 4) (14 page)

He’d
switched his mobile phone to silent before the press conference, which was why McLean wasted half an hour wandering around HQ looking for DC MacBride so that he could get a lift back to the station. It wasn’t until he’d been to the IT department and been told the constable had gone already that he remembered, and checked the screen to find both a text and a voicemail message saying he’d had to leave early. Cursing his forgetfulness, McLean set about finding a patrol car headed towards the city centre that he could bully into giving him a ride.

It was always a risk, hitching a lift that way. You never knew if an emergency call was going to come in mid-journey. A considerate driver would at least pull over and let you out, but McLean also had happy memories of attending incidents the other side of town from where he’d wanted to be.

This one at least dropped him in the New Town before heading off up Queen Street with the full Blues and Twos going, its destination the site of a collision between a tourist bus and one of the new trams, which had ground all city centre traffic to a standstill.

McLean shoved his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders against the cold and started walking. It wasn’t long before he realized he wasn’t heading in the
right direction. Quite without realizing it, his footsteps had taken him on a slight detour, ending up in the street where Andrew Weatherly’s terrace house sat empty, awaiting its fate.

There wasn’t really any reason to go and look, other than that he was there. He did anyway, jogging across the road just ahead of a black taxi, his steaming breath hanging behind him in the frigid air.

The house was unchanged from the last time he’d been there, apart from the lack of a uniform constable standing at the top of the steps that led up to the front door. The windows reflected the harsh white brightness of the afternoon sky, and from pavement level you couldn’t see inside anyway. If memory served, the backs of all these terraces looked on to a large, private, communal garden that you couldn’t easily access, and anyway he hadn’t come here to go inside. Wasn’t really sure why he’d come, except that the patrol car had dropped him off nearby.

‘Thought the Weatherly case was closed. Got your man bang to rights.’

As puns went it was weak, and brought back the uncomfortable image of Andrew Weatherly’s dead body, propped up against the statue in the middle of his lawn, the back of his head painted all over the stone.

‘Are you following me, Dalgliesh?’ McLean replayed the last few moments in his mind, realizing that the black taxi he’d crossed the road in front of had pulled in to the kerb a bit further on.

‘That depends on whether you’re going the same way as me.’ The journalist fished a packet of cigarettes out of
her coat as she sauntered up, tapped one out and shoved it in her mouth. Then went from pocket to pocket until she found her lighter. She nodded at the steps and the front door as she lit up. ‘You going in?’

‘Haven’t got the key.’

‘What you doing here, then?’

McLean thought about his conversation with Jack Tennant after the press conference. ‘Just laying some ghosts to rest.’

‘What if they don’t want to be?’

‘Not my problem. Unless you’ve got some more evidence you want to bring to my attention?’

Dalgliesh laughed, a crackly cackling sound like a child’s nightmare of a witch. ‘I’ve got nothing, and that’s God’s honest truth. I’ll tell you this much for free, though. This isn’t finished. Not by a long chalk.’

‘That your fine-tuned journalist’s instincts twitching, is it?’

‘Fine-tuned bollocks. This whole thing stinks. There’s no way Weatherly was as pure as driven snow.’ Dalgliesh kicked at the grey, salty slush the council hadn’t bothered sweeping from the pavement. ‘And shutting down the investigation when it was hardly started? Give me a break. Youse lot are covering up something.’

‘Come on, Dalgliesh. You just want there to be a conspiracy so you can get your story. We closed the investigation because we were done with it. The evidence was all there. It’s not as if someone else shot Morag and suffocated the girls. There wasn’t anyone forcing Weatherly to do what he did.’

‘You sure of that?’ Dalgliesh took another drag on her
cigarette, tilted her head back and let the smoke billow out into the air. McLean watched it climb, noticing the pair of CCTV cameras on a nearby lamp post. One faced away from them, the other seemed angled deliberately to take in Weatherly’s front door. Well, he was an important man. Maybe it had been set up that way on purpose.

‘Look. We interviewed everyone he worked with, both in business and politics. No one noticed him being under any pressure. There’s only so much time we can spare, even for someone like Weatherly with his influential friends. Hell, if we threw all the resources of Police Scotland at it, you’d be writing pieces about dead junkies in Leith not getting a tenth of the attention.’

‘It’s still a stitch-up, and you know it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’ Dalgliesh nodded at the building again.

McLean considered explaining exactly how he’d come to be there, then realized it would just be a waste of breath. ‘Was there anything in particular you wanted?’

‘From you? Not really, no. I was just having a look at the place for background, soaking up a bit of the ambience. I’ll be doing a piece on Weatherly for the weekend supplements. Helps to be able to picture the place when you’re writing, you know. Really didn’t expect to see you here.’

‘Well, I’ll leave you to your work, then.’ McLean shoved his hands in his pockets and started to walk away.

‘Why’d they give it to you?’ Dalgliesh’s question stopped him in his tracks.

‘What?’

‘Why’d they put you in charge? Man like Weatherly,
you’d think an assistant chief constable would be SIO. I didn’t see anyone more senior than you at the funeral. You’ve headed up all the press conferences.’

‘Detective Superintendent Tennant was SIO.’

‘Aye, in Fife. And he never made it to the funeral either.’

‘It’s not in the job spec, you know. “Must attend the funeral of all murder victims.” ’

‘Aye, I ken that. But you do anyway.’

‘If we think there’s something to be gained from it. If we’re interested in seeing who turns up.’

‘So why’d you go then? If everything was all fine and tickety-boo?’ Dalgliesh accompanied the odd phrase with a wiggly-finger motion that scattered ash from her dying cigarette on to the pavement.

‘Professional curiosity?’

‘Aye, I heard that about you. Never did know when to let something lie.’

‘There a point to all this? Only I need to get back to the station. Just because we’re done with Weatherly doesn’t mean there’s nothing else to worry about.’

Dalgliesh shrugged. ‘Just thinking out loud really. No offence, but you’re hardly the obvious choice for the job. And Jack Tennant’s no’ exactly any better. A washed-out super from Fife Constabulary just a few months off retirement? That’s hardly putting your best man on the case.’ Dalgliesh took a last long drag on her cigarette, holding on to the smoke like a jealous lover before finally, reluctantly, letting it go into the cold air.

‘No one up high wanted to touch this ’cause it’s got shit all over it. You mark my words, Inspector. They’re setting you up for a fall.’

Darkness
was falling over the city by the time McLean made it back to the station. He’d considered getting a taxi from George Street, then remembered the reason his ride in the patrol car had been cut short and decided walking was better. Judging by the noise of angry horns and the long lines of unmoving cars and buses, he’d made the right decision.

It gave him time to think, too. For all that she was an annoying wee shite, Jo Dalgliesh was a shrewd reporter with lots of good contacts and a knack for putting all the pieces together, however far apart and apparently unrelated they might be. It didn’t help that he was all too aware of the political machinations surrounding and directing the Weatherly case, either. He knew damned well that Duguid would have convinced his superiors that he was expendable and so should be put in charge of the case; there to take the fall when necessary. Fife had been fortunate enough to have a more senior officer who was about to leave anyway. That seemed a shitty way to treat a detective of Jack Tennant’s long service and good reputation.

And, of course, there was the double bluff that Duguid was playing. It was almost enough to make McLean stick to the rules like a militant shop foreman, but he had to admit, however grudgingly, that the detective
superintendent had got the measure of him. There was no way he could leave the case alone until he knew that no stone had been left unturned. As much as anything else, he needed to know everything he could possibly find out in order to protect himself when it all went tits up. Dislike Jo Dalgliesh as much as he did, he still had to agree with her on that point. This wasn’t finished yet, and when it did end it wasn’t going to be pretty.

He had intended to head straight to his office, use the rest of the day to wade through the never-ending stream of paperwork that flowed through that tiny little room. Then McLean remembered DC MacBride’s cryptic text and decided that finding out what the constable had been up to would be infinitely more fun. He pushed his way through the doors to the main first floor corridor, squeezed past the pile of archive files being moved out of the Weatherly incident room to make way for whatever investigation needed it most, and slipped into the much smaller room dedicated to the investigation into the as-yet nameless tattooed man.

MacBride was nowhere to be seen, but another figure sat at his desk.

‘Detective Sergeant Ritchie. What a pleasant surprise.’

DS Ritchie looked up from the report she had been reading, and for a moment McLean thought he’d got the wrong person. Her eyes were dark circles, puffy and sore. Her short red hair hung around her face like wet rags. Her skin was pale, just the golden spots of her freckled cheeks to give any colour. She’d only been off a few days, and yet she looked like she’d lost half her body weight.

‘Afternoon,
sir. Thought you were over at HQ.’ Ritchie struggled to her feet.

‘Sit down, sit down.’ McLean flapped his hands like an old hen, and Ritchie slumped back into her seat with an audible sigh. ‘I was going to ask how you were, but you look—’

‘Like shit?’ Ritchie’s smile was something of the sergeant he knew, but it was tired.

‘I wasn’t going to say it myself, but since you mention it. Yes. You sure you’re OK to come back to work? What the hell happened, anyway?’

Ritchie scrubbed at her face with both hands, digging the heels into her eyes and rubbing hard for a moment. It didn’t improve how she looked much. ‘I’ve no idea, sir. Must’ve picked up some lurgy at Weatherly’s house. One of the Fife constables came down with a bad flu bug the day after, I’m told. I didn’t start feeling sick until the next day myself. We were interviewing friends and business colleagues.’

‘That’s right. You interviewed Mrs Saifre.’

Ritchie raised a quizzical eyebrow.

‘I met her at the wake, yesterday. She said you’d spoken to her.’

‘Aye, well. She was the last. Strange woman.’ Ritchie frowned, as if she’d been going to say something but had forgotten what it was as soon as she tried to speak. Then she shook her head, let whatever it was go. ‘To be honest I was feeling OK by the end of it all. A bit run-down maybe, but you know how it is when you’ve spent the whole day asking people the same questions over and over.’

McLean
did, all too well.

‘Next morning I could barely move. Never had a bug hit me like that before. Felt like someone had shrunk my brain and it was rattling around inside my head. I tried to hit it with flu drugs, but I couldn’t keep anything down more than a minute. You really don’t want to know any more details, trust me on that.’

‘I’ll take your word for it. It’s good to have you back. Even if, you know, you look like you really ought to be still in bed.’

Ritchie stiffened slightly at the suggestion, the tiniest hint of colour deepening her freckles.

‘I can manage, sir. Honest. Just don’t ask me to go running after any criminals for a day or two.’ She lifted the report from her desk, then let it fall back again. ‘Paperwork’s good.’

‘Well, if you get really bored I’m sure I can find you plenty. You seen MacBride about recently?’

‘He was here, oh, maybe a half-hour ago.’ Ritchie checked her watch. ‘Might’ve gone down to the canteen for a cup of tea. Grumpy Bob was muttering about it being four o’clock somewhere.’

‘Actually, tea sounds like a great idea. You want one?’

Ritchie picked up a bottle of spring water from her desk and held it to her forehead. Drips of condensation on the outside glistened in the overhead lights. They matched the sheen on her forehead. ‘Having a bit of a hard time keeping tea down at the moment, sir. Water’s fine, though. Hurts less on the way back up.’

McLean was going to suggest that maybe she’d be doing them all a favour if she just went home. The last
thing he needed was the rest of his team coming down with something so debilitating, let alone getting it himself. But then he’d been at the house in Fife with Ritchie, and he’d shared his car with her all the way there and back. If anyone was going to get what she had then it was him. Before he could say anything, and risk seriously putting his foot in it, the door to the incident room swung open to reveal the twin figures of DC MacBride and Grumpy Bob, each clasping a mug of tea in one hand and a biscuit in the other. The only way you could tell they weren’t twins, apart from the obvious age difference, was that while MacBride had a case file slipped under his arm, Grumpy Bob’s reading of choice appeared to be the
Edinburgh Herald
.

‘Ah, you’re back, sir. Sorry I had to leave you at HQ like that.’

McLean eyed MacBride’s steaming mug of tea, wondering whether his seniority would allow him to commandeer it, and maybe the biscuit as well, and send the constable back for more. Then he realized that was exactly the sort of thing Duguid would do.

‘No matter. I assume it was something important.’

MacBride looked a little sheepish, something he was quite good at. He went swiftly over to the desk Ritchie was occupying, put down his tea, then balanced his biscuit precariously on the edge of the mug before pulling the folder out from under his arm. Grumpy Bob, McLean noticed, was completely unapologetic about his own mug, taking a noisy slurp before chomping on his biscuit.

‘I had an email in from the DNA database people.’
MacBride unlocked a drawer in the desk, opened it and pulled out his tablet computer. A couple of swipes on the screen. ‘I needed to check with them directly before I spoke to you about it.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Well, there weren’t any matches, sir. Not on the civilian database, certainly.’

‘You ran it past the military, though?’

‘Yes, and that’s where it gets interesting.’ MacBride swiped a couple more times, then turned the tablet so McLean could see. He peered at the screen but it was mostly numbers arranged in boxes, along with some tiny text he really couldn’t read without giving himself a migraine.

‘In words a normal person can understand?’

MacBride’s expression was that of a disappointed parent, which was strange given his age. ‘DNA matching’s not an exact science, sir. It’s like fingerprint matching in many respects, only a lot more complicated.’

‘I don’t need a lecture, Constable, just an answer. Have we got a match or not?’

‘Possibly. Only it’s unlikely.’

McLean held his breath and counted to ten. MacBride opened his mouth to speak, but Grumpy Bob beat him to the punchline.

‘There’s a partial match, aye. Above-average probability that it’s the same person.’

‘So what’s the problem? You’ve got a name, I take it? Request his personnel file, get his address, track him down.’

‘There’s just the wee inconvenient fact that the person
in question died in Afghanistan four years ago.’ Grumpy Bob took another slurp of his tea, shoving the last of his biscuit in after it.

McLean paused for a moment to let that sink in. ‘What was his name?’

MacBride swiped at his screen again. ‘Lance Corporal William Beaumont, sir. He was in the Royal Highland Fusiliers, apparently. Local boy. The info we got says he trod on an IED during a patrol. Wasn’t much of him left to bring home.’

Afghanistan. IED. The words triggered a partial memory, but McLean couldn’t immediately put his finger on it.

‘The Fusiliers? So he’d have been stationed at Glencorse.’ McLean checked his watch, then the window. It was fully dark out now, but the army never really slept. ‘Who fancies a trip over to the barracks, then?’