Dead Men's Bones (Inspector Mclean 4) (19 page)

The
early morning sun hung low in the southern sky, painting the glittering snow in shades of white and gold as McLean drove out of the city towards Dalkeith. He’d forgotten to put his shades back in the car after the last time he’d needed them, and was forced to squint to see anything ahead. Beside him in the passenger seat, Grumpy Bob had given up and just closed his eyes. Any excuse for forty winks; the man was a living Womble.

Climbing up on to the Midlothian plain, the roads were narrower, less frequently used and bordered on both sides by high banks that trapped the snow into deep drifts. McLean had often wondered why so many DCIs and superintendents drove big four by fours; he’d have given good money to be in one of them right now. As they neared the hospital though, the road became clearer, the snow turned to grey-black slush by heavy traffic. Turning the final corner to the entrance gate, he saw why.

The NHS Scotland sign was still there, proudly proclaiming the existence of Rosskettle Hospital, but alongside it a new sign had gone up. McLean had never heard of Price Developments. Apparently they were turning the site into a science and technology park, with funding from the EU and a dozen other quangos whose logos had probably cost a king’s ransom in taxpayers’ money to design. A barrier hung across the driveway,
and a fluorescent-jacketed security guard approached with a clipboard and a frown as McLean pulled the car to a halt in front of it.

‘Private site, sir. No visitors allowed,’ he said, as McLean lowered the window.

‘I was wondering if I could have a word with the site manager, actually.’ McLean held up his warrant card for inspection and the security guard’s frown deepened.

‘One moment please.’ He bustled back to the control booth, a Portakabin with a wide glass front. Inside, McLean could see him pick up a phone. A lengthy conversation ensued, during which time the nice warm air inside the car was replaced with cold, dry air from outside. He was about to raise the window again, reached across to rack up the temperature and point it at his feet, but the guard finished his conversation, pressed a button that raised the barrier and bustled out again.

‘Sorry about that, Inspector. If you’d like to follow the drive to the main house, the boss will meet you there. Please don’t go wandering off, though. A lot of the buildings are in a dangerous condition. We had one roof fall in just last week. Miracle no one was hurt.’

‘Thanks. We’ll be careful.’ He raised the window and drove into the site. Before he’d gone more than fifty yards he had to pull hard over to the verge to let an enormous truck past the other way. Craning his neck, he could see it was filled with bits of scrap metal, twisted hospital bed frames, iron balustrades and other rubbish. Everything had a value these days; no doubt this lot would be melted down and turned into something useful.

The
old buildings at the centre of the complex came into sight, three storeys high and looking every inch the Victorian asylum. They were surrounded by trees, the large old oaks and beeches looming over hundreds of whippy little weed saplings. No groundsmen had worked here for a few years, it appeared. McLean parked in the yard between a rusty Transit minibus and a brand new Range Rover, shiny black with tinted windows. Looking around as he climbed out of the Alfa, he could see that it was very much out of place among the cheap and dirty cars and vans of the work crews. Someone important was visiting the site. It didn’t take long to find out who.

‘Inspector McLean, we meet again.’

She walked slowly down the stone steps from the front entrance, looking for all the world like a 1940s movie star in her long black coat, lined with sable fur around the collar. The door she had come through was vast, its surround made from enormous blocks of red sandstone, the keystone of the lintel arch an ornately carved coat of arms that looked more suited to some ancestral home than a lunatic asylum. Following behind her, two enormous men in expensively tailored suits and wearing mirror shades were more likely bodyguards than builders.

‘Mrs Saifre. You’re back from your business trip, then?’

‘And you haven’t called. I was so looking forward to lunch.’ She gave him a Marilyn Monroe pout.

‘I’m afraid us lowly detective inspectors don’t get much time for lunch.’

‘Dinner it is, then. I’ll send a car to pick you up at eight.’

McLean studied the woman’s face, trying to tell
whether she was joking or not. He had a terrible feeling she was not. Then she broke into a broad smile.

‘I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t play around. What do they call it? Wasting Police Time? You might lock me up.’

‘I take it Price Developments is one of your concerns, Mrs Saifre?’ McLean asked, anxious to get the conversation on to more stable ground.

‘Please, call me Jane Louise. All my friends do. And yes. Price is one of mine now. We have such plans for this place. So what brings you here? Obviously not me.’ She arched a perfectly shaped eyebrow at him.

‘Just part of an ongoing investigation into an incident down in the glen.’ McLean nodded in what he thought was the right direction, although given the twists and turns in the road here, he might have been indicating Fife. ‘I remembered this place from when I was a student. Heard it had closed, and wondered if anyone had been squatting here.’

Mrs Saifre gave a theatrical shiver. ‘Don’t much fancy it in this weather. Half the windows are gone and there’s nothing much to burn in the fireplaces. You’re welcome to have a look around if you want. Just be careful, and avoid the outbuildings. They’re pulling a lot of it down at the moment.’

‘Thanks. I don’t think we’ll be here long.’

McLean watched as one of the bodyguards pulled open the Range Rover door for Mrs Saifre, then went around to the other side to drive. The second bodyguard climbed in the back and they reversed out of the parking space. The window wound down as they were about to leave.

‘Eight
o’clock, Inspector. Karl will pick you up.’ And before he could say anything in reply, they were gone in a waffle of V8 engine and steaming exhaust.

‘Friend of yours?’ Grumpy Bob stood beside McLean’s car, his elbows resting on the roof, a familiar grin plastered over his old face.

‘Hardly. She’s … was one of Andrew Weatherly’s associates. I met her at the funeral. Well, the wake to be precise.’

‘And there she is inviting you out to dinner. Seems you have all the luck.’

‘That’s just some strange kind of joke. At least I hope it’s a strange kind of joke. Come on. Let’s have a look at this place, since we came all this way.’ McLean set off across the parking yard in the direction of the snow-covered fields and the collection of outbuildings beyond.

‘Aren’t we going inside?’ Grumpy Bob asked.

‘No. There’s nothing in there worth seeing, unless you’ve a thing for derelict buildings. I’m far more interested in the stuff they didn’t want us to look at.’

There
wasn’t much left; that was the first thing McLean noticed. Half a dozen large diggers were busy ripping down buildings, filling up an endless line of trucks with rubble and steel. They had churned up the previous night’s snow over a small area, but it was easy to see the scope of the work they had already done. Separate blocks where the smooth surface turned bumpy over some disturbance below must have been four or five outbuildings, probably identical to the one that was coming down now and the three still standing entire.

‘Which way’s the river from here, Bob?’

‘Search me, sir. I’m useless at directions.’

McLean squinted up at the sun. At this time of year it never got very high in the southern sky. Through the skeletal trees to his right he could just make out the Pentland Hills, which meant that the river must be in that direction, too. He walked that way, boots crunching deep into the snow, giving the buildings and the diggers a wide berth. No one shouted at them to keep away or ran over to accost them as they worked a slow, wide arc, ending up at the boundary between the hospital grounds and the surrounding farmland. A thin band of trees opened up on to a flat field, probably ploughed and sown under its blanket of white. Beyond that more woodland marked the edge of the glen itself. The developers had put up a
three-metre-high temporary fence to stop anyone wandering on to the site by mistake. If it circled the entire complex it must have cost a fortune.

‘How long d’you reckon this has been here?’ McLean reached out, grabbed the nearest section of fence and gave it a good shake. No matter how terrified he was, a naked man wouldn’t have been able to get over it.

‘Hard to say with this snow.’ Grumpy Bob walked over to where two sections connected, sturdy poles slotted into a heavy concrete block. He kicked at the slight drift that had built up against it. A bit further along, an old oak tree had fallen down long enough ago to have been partly sawn into logs. Here the snow had been heaped high by the wind, carved into an elegant curve at the top. ‘Not long.’

‘What I thought. Come on.’ McLean trudged back to the nearest undemolished building. It was a single-storey prefab of the kind thrown up in haste just after the Second World War. Never intended to be used for as long as they had been. Thin walls, no doubt featuring asbestos heavily in their make-up, windows up too high to see in from the ground, single glazing, minimal insulation. They were a product of a time when heating oil was cheap and cold air at night was meant to build up your moral fibre. He remembered the miserable school nights he’d spent in similar accommodation, the frozen tooth mug of water on the bedside table every winter morning. The happiest days of his life. Aye, right.

A concrete ramp led up to double doors, but they were locked from the inside, no handles on the out. McLean
walked around the building looking for another way in, Grumpy Bob trudging along behind him like a reluctant servant. At the end of the wall they were following they would come into view of the digger operators and other workmen on site, and for some unaccountable reason, McLean didn’t want to be seen. At least not yet.

‘Give us a leg up, will you, Bob?’

‘You’re not going in there, are you? They could start smashing it down any minute. And besides, we’ve not got a warrant.’

‘It’s just a wee look-see. I wasn’t planning on going in.’

Grumpy Bob grumbled a bit about getting his hands cold, but he crouched down anyway. McLean clambered up and reached the windowsill, pulling at the edge of the frame. Something snapped, clattering to the floor inside, and the window swung open.

‘Bit higher, eh, Bob.’

‘Thought you weren’t going in.’

‘Didn’t think I’d be able to.’ McLean hauled himself up and over the sill, then lowered himself carefully down to the floor inside, not trusting it to take his weight. The room he was in took up about a quarter of the building, its ceiling collapsed near the centre. Snow had come in through the hole in the roof and been spread around in the wind, covering everything in a fine white powder. He could still see the chairs and tables, a row of benches along one wall, whiteboards fixed to another. The windows that would have looked out on to the next building had been painted black at some point in the past, which meant that he couldn’t be seen by the workmen. It also
meant he couldn’t see the diggers when they approached. He’d have to rely on the sound coming in through the roof. And Grumpy Bob’s nervous grumbling.

Keeping to the edge of the room, McLean walked carefully around to the door opposite where he had climbed in. It opened up on to a dark corridor that smelled of damp and cold. He guddled around in his pocket for the pen torch he always carried, flicked it on and played it up and down the way. At the end facing the main building complex, the corridor widened out into a small reception area, with a desk, shelves and a few uncomfortable-looking armchairs scattered around. The windows here were painted black too, as if whoever had been sent to this building had been terrified of the light. Looking back the other way, the corridor ended with the double doors they’d not been able to open before. On his side of the passage there was one other door; opposite him there were four, evenly spaced.

McLean tried the door on his side first. It opened on to a room similar to the one he’d just left. Some kind of communal area, only this one had a basic open-plan kitchen in it as well. The windows were all blacked out again, and a dark stain on the ceiling tiles suggested it wouldn’t be long before the roof collapsed in here too.

Across the hall, three of the rooms were small dormitories, containing four narrow iron-framed beds, one in each corner. The final door opened on to a bathroom. McLean played his torchlight over the heavy-duty shower heads that poked from one wall. The toilet cubicles alongside the showering area had no doors on them;
communal living at its most primitive. But who had lived here, and what had become of them? He had no idea.

Coming back out of the bathroom, McLean heard the sound of diggers ever closer. At the same time he noticed the small metal ring in the floor. It sat in a little recess and had been covered with a thin plastic-backed runner that lay crumpled against the wall nearby. Playing the torch around, he could see the edges of a trapdoor, and there on the wall a catch to hold it open. He pulled on the ring, but the door seemed stuck fast. Nearby the sound of the diggers was even louder, heading straight for this building. He knelt down and studied the trapdoor and ring more carefully, looking for some kind of keyhole but finding none. And then it dawned on him. He twisted the ring through a half turn, then pulled.

The door opened with a terrible crashing noise. For a moment, McLean couldn’t work out what was happening, then he realized that the diggers had begun their work on the front wall of the building. Light flooded in through the collapsed door at the other end of the corridor, bringing with it billowing, powdery snow. He hefted the trapdoor up and latched it against the wall, then shone his torch into the darkness beneath. Concrete steps led down to a corridor that followed the line of the one above it, breeze-block walls with modern-looking light fittings bolted to them, a freshly painted door just visible.

Another crash of demolished wall, and this time a chunk of the roof collapsed into the corridor. McLean covered his eyes and mouth as a wave of asbestos dust
smothered him. It was time to go. He retreated reluctantly to the double doors at the back of the building as another crash roared in from the room to his right. How many diggers were they using, for Christ’s sake?

A kick at the bars, and the doors popped open. Grumpy Bob stood a few yards away, his face a picture of horror, turning to relief as he saw McLean run down the concrete ramp. He had his mobile phone out, hand poised over it to make a call, whether it was for back-up or an ambulance, McLean couldn’t be sure, but he waved his hands to stop him as he trotted down the ramp.

‘Don’t call it in,’ he said as he reached the sergeant.

‘But they just carried on knocking it down. Stood in front of the digger and that fat bastard just drove on like he hadn’t seen me. Had to get out of his way sharpish.’

‘Like you said, Bob, I wasn’t meant to be in there. We were warned, and we’ve no warrant.’ McLean turned back to watch as three diggers converged on the centre of the building, their buckets making short work of the flimsy walls. The rate they were going it would only take a half hour or so to flatten the place and load it all into the waiting trucks. Carted off to landfill somewhere or crushed into the foundations of the new Forth Road Bridge. Any evidence of wrongdoing long gone.

‘Come on. Let’s get out of here.’