Dead Men's Bones (Inspector Mclean 4) (33 page)

Bathed,
shaved, wearing clean clothes and having drunk enough coffee to wake the dead, McLean locked up the house and walked back down to the street, half an eye out for the cats that still watched him from all around. It wasn’t far to where he was going, and Shanks’s pony was pretty much the only option he had right now.

The sun had climbed about as far into the southern sky as it was going to manage at this time of year. It was weak against a thin blue sky, but it lit the snow-capped Pentlands and Blackford Hill, Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat. The cold air did its best to be fresh, not filled with the normal city fug. It was sweet to his lungs anyway, so long abused with gas and fire and brimstone.

It wasn’t a long walk to the house. The Rolls-Royce stood by the stone steps leading up to the front door. This was wide open, heat tumbling out of the hallway like an escaping animal. McLean knocked on the door jamb, poked his head in.

‘Anyone home?’

No one answered, so he stepped inside. He tried to remember his previous visit, walked across to the door he thought led into the living room.

‘Tony. What a pleasant surprise.’

She emerged from the shadows at the far end of the hallway. As the light played across her face she appeared
first old and haggard, her hair streaked with grey. Then the image shifted and he saw the same perfectly presented woman he’d taken out to an expensive restaurant just a dozen or so hours earlier.

‘Mrs Saifre.’

‘Oh, I do wish you’d call me Jane Louise. All my friends do.’

‘We all wish for things we can’t have. Karl about?’

‘Karl?’ Mrs Saifre seemed momentarily confused. ‘Oh, Karl. No, he left.’

‘Left? You sacked him?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘Have you heard about Rosskettle?’

‘I have, yes. Terrible news. John Brooks came round first thing. No one was hurt, I’m told.’

John, not Detective Chief Inspector. McLean wondered if his boss knew what he’d got himself into.

‘Your Range Rover was there, at the scene.’

‘My … ?’ Mrs Saifre clutched a theatrical hand to her breast. Then let out a little laugh. ‘And you think … Oh, my, Tony. They told me you had an imagination.’

‘I don’t think anything, Mrs Saifre. I gather the facts first, then try to make sense of them. It’s not always as straightforward as you might imagine. So perhaps you could explain why your Range Rover was parked up at Rosskettle just before it burned down? And why it had a muddy shovel and a body bag in the back?’

Mrs Saifre smiled, but there was no mirth in it. Rather it was the smile of a predator knowing it’s going to feed soon, and well. ‘We left the Range Rover yesterday morning because it broke down. I was there to see how your
forensic friends were getting on. Had to wait almost an hour for the Rolls to come and pick me up. One of the reasons why Karl’s no longer in my employ.’

‘And the body bag?’

‘That you’d have to ask Karl. The cars were his responsibility.’

‘That would be Karl who you just sacked. And I don’t suppose you’ve any idea where he is right now.’

‘He lived here, in the servants’ quarters. No idea where he went.’ Mrs Saifre wandered across the hall to a sideboard. Several crystal decanters sat on a silver tray and she took her time un-stoppering one after the other, sniffing the contents before finally pouring a large measure of something amber and expensive into a glass.

‘Dram?’ she asked.

‘Thanks, but I’m on duty.’

‘Really? After the night you just had? I’d have thought they’d give you a little time off.’ Mrs Saifre took a drink, leaned back against the sideboard.

‘What are you going to do with the hospital site now?’

‘Goodness me, am I under interrogation?’ She pushed away from the sideboard and walked slowly across the room towards him, hips swaying provocatively. Without thinking, McLean slid his hand into his pocket, felt the thin slip of card tingling under his fingertips. Emma’s postcard, he’d picked it up off the kitchen table just before leaving. His anchor to reality. Or at least a kind of reality.

‘What are you suggesting? That I ordered Karl to bury Andrew out there at his favourite spot?’

‘It’s a possibility.’

‘It’s
ridiculous, and you know it.’

‘Well, we have your car and forensics will prove Weatherly’s body was in the back of it. There’s only your word you knew nothing about that.’

‘Am I being arrested? Will you put me in handcuffs, Tony?’ Glass in one hand, Mrs Saifre put her arms out, wrists together in mock submission. She gave up when it became clear he wasn’t going to play. Slumped down into the nearby sofa.

‘Look, I’ve no idea what my staff get up to half of the time. Andrew was my business partner, yes. But I work mostly out of the US these days. This is the first time I’ve been back in Edinburgh in almost a decade. If you want to know what’s happening to the hospital site or where Karl might have gone after I sacked him, then you really need to talk to Jennifer. She was Andrew’s mistress, after all.’

‘You do know that Miss Denton is in hospital, don’t you? She had a stroke. Not expected to regain consciousness.’

‘Oh dear. Poor thing. I rather liked her.’ Mrs Saifre put down her whisky glass and stood up again, stretching like a cat. She had a smell about her, an allure that even McLean couldn’t deny. She was exquisitely made up, and yet somehow managed to appear tousled and vulnerable. She fixed him with hungry eyes, stepped closer than was really necessary.

‘What did you really come here to see me about, Tony?’ She reached out and took his right hand. His left was still in the pocket of his jacket, the thin slip of card between two fingers.

‘I
know who you are. What you are.’

‘You do?’ Mrs Saifre raised her hand to her lips, taking his with it. She kissed the back of his fingers ever so lightly, warmth spreading right through him with each slow touch. When she released it, his arm took far longer to sink back down to his side than gravity would have liked.

‘Yes. I do.’ McLean stood his ground as she reached up and stroked his cheek with the backs of her nails. The small animal deep inside him was screaming run, hide, get away. Only the thin card between his fingers gave him the strength to stay put.

‘Then you’re either very brave,’ Mrs Saifre said. ‘Or else very stupid.’

‘Can I be both?’

She laughed, and far away a forest burned to the ground. ‘This! This is why I like you, Tony!’ She spun away like a little girl, pirouetting around the table before coming back to a standstill, close again.

‘We should be together, you and I. We could do such great things.’

‘Like driving a man to murder his children? What did you have on him? The bodies out at the hospital? Were you going to tell the world about his terrible secret?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Mrs Saifre pouted, and McLean knew she was lying.

‘I don’t think you meant for us to recover the Range Rover. That was your mistake. It was supposed to be destroyed in the fire. Convenient, too, that Karl should disappear. Did you arrange that like you arranged to have the other buildings razed, all evidence of your complicity
carted off site and destroyed? Everything pointing neatly back to Weatherly.’

Mrs Saifre stepped close again, and McLean finally saw the dance she was doing. She took his free hand again, her touch uncomfortably warm. ‘You’ve got me all wrong, Tony. I helped Andrew, I really did. Made him what he was. I had nothing to do with his downfall. How could I?’

‘Don’t worry. I can’t prove anything. Not trying to trick a confession out of you.’ McLean extracted his hand from her grasp. ‘And anyway, you’d just buy your way out of any trouble. You’ve got the money, the influence. I can’t beat that.’

‘Then come with me.’ This time Mrs Saifre’s eyes seemed to light up with excitement. ‘With me at your side you could be anything. Chief Constable? First Minister? How about the first President of an independent Scotland?’

And there it was. The offer. The temptation. McLean studied Mrs Saifre’s face, looking for any sign that she was joking. She was so hard to read, so unpredictable. That, of course, was her nature. This might have been some elaborate joke, but something told him it was true. If he said yes, if he surrendered to her will, then she would make it all happen. He could have fame and power and a beautiful woman at his side, in his bed. But more, he could use that fame and power to do good works. Others had, in her name, in the past. They were precious few in number, but they had existed.

The card in his pocket felt like it was vibrating between his finger and thumb as he stared into those black,
bottomless eyes. So easy to lose yourself in them, so inviting to dive into that warm pit of sensual pleasure and carelessness.

Then he remembered another pair of eyes. Cold, dead, terrified and mad. Andrew Weatherly had stopped being useful to this creature, and look what had happened to him.

‘Is that what you promised Weatherly? And all he had to do was give you his soul?’

‘A soul’s such an overrated thing. You’ll hardly miss it when it’s gone.’ Mrs Saifre reached out to touch his face again. Slowly, gently, she pulled him towards her as she stretched her neck upwards for a kiss. McLean could fool himself and say he’d let her get that close on purpose. Truth was she had sneaked in under his guard. He was trapped, helpless as he watched those lips part, red as burning coals. Her glistening tongue darted over sparkling white, pointed teeth, moistening them with saliva that would burn whatever it touched. Her grip was insistent, bending him down towards her as she let out a low, hissing ‘yes’.

But his hand still gripped the postcard. He could feel the shiny side with its picture of ruins and flowers, and there the other side, the words Emma had written to him. The little row of Xs.

‘No. I don’t think so.’ He pulled away, surprised at how easy it was to do. Mrs Saifre stared at him, stunned, her hand motionless, still holding the air where his chin had been.

‘Why?’ she asked eventually.

‘I’m already spoken for.’ McLean let go of the
postcard, took his hand out of his pocket and straightened his coat. ‘Goodbye, Mrs Saifre. I want you to leave now. Go back to wherever it was you came from. And don’t ever threaten my friends again.’

He left her there, staring at him in bewilderment. Outside, the thin sun warmed his face as McLean closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Sweet air filled his lungs. He stood for a moment, just enjoying the fact that he was alive. Then he shoved his hands back in his pockets, dipped his head against the chill and headed off home.

‘Seems
there were some big old oil tanks in the basement, fed the boilers for the central heating. Five of the buggers. Must’ve been ancient; you can’t have anything like that these days. A couple thousand litres in the bottom of each, turned to gas with the heat.’

Rosskettle Hospital didn’t look all that good in the cold light of day. There were a couple of places where the walls made it up to the second floor, but not many. Mostly it was a pile of rubble, steaming in the morning sun. Deep underground the fires were still burning, apparently.

‘Not going to get much in the way of evidence out of there.’ McLean stood alongside the chief fire officer, a good distance away from the mess. Two days had passed since the fire and explosions, but one of the fire engines was still there, its wheels stuck to the tarmac by the heat. From this side it looked almost normal, but he’d been around the other side earlier and knew just how hot things must have been.

‘Not going to get much of anything. Clean-up’s gonnae cost a bob or two and all.’

‘Aye, well I’m sure that’ll be taken care of.’

‘By the cooncil, no doubt.’ The chief fire officer spat at the ground as if the injustice tasted foul in his mouth.

McLean shook his head. ‘Polluter pays. This belongs to Weatherly Asset Management. They’ve plenty of
money. Them or their insurance company. Then I guess someone’ll build houses on the site.’

‘That’ll be something to see them try. That hole goes doon a long way. And there’s mine workings and all manner of shite underneath. All smouldering away. Might keep burning for years.’ The chief fire officer spat again. ‘Still, the hoosies’ll be warm, aye?’

McLean took an involuntary step back as one of the walls collapsed in on itself with a cascade of sparks and a low rumble he felt in the pit of his stomach. They were more than far enough away to be safe, but the memory of the fire and explosions was still fresh. Andrew Weatherly had opened up a gaping maw here, its gullet leading straight to hell, and the creature that was Mrs Saifre had crawled out. Together they had woven something terrible, and now it was fraying at the edges. At least that was the irrational explanation; a rational one was still a work in progress.

He turned away from the scene, saw the wreck of his car off a ways. He wondered if he could get someone to cart the lump of stone back to his house as a memento. Perhaps put it in the middle of the lawn for the cats to sun themselves on. He’d not had the car long, but he felt a strange nostalgia for it. Time to go looking for something else.

‘I’m not an old-age pensioner, sir. Can manage by myself.’

She batted away the hand that he’d held out to steady her, but the way DS Ritchie hobbled down the corridor, pausing every ten short paces or so to cough, gave the lie to her claim. McLean indulged her though, taking the
time needed for her to leave the hospital under her own steam. She’d been to hell and back, after all. It was the least he could do.

‘MacBride was going to tag along too, but he’s had to go and have his stitches out. Going to have quite a scar once it’s all healed.’

Ritchie gave him a withering stare. ‘I don’t need your help or his, sir. I’ve got this.’

Considering how close she’d come to dying, McLean wasn’t about to argue. Or point out his role in her recovery. He wasn’t really sure whether the drink of holy water he’d given her had done anything. It could have been the antivirals, after all.

They made it outside, and Ritchie stood a little straighter as the sun played on her face. She looked horribly thin, her hair lank and greasy, her eyes sunk deep in their sockets. Rest was what the doctor had ordered, but McLean couldn’t help thinking plenty of wholesome food was in order as well. Perhaps he could take her to Chez Innes, except that he’d have to take the whole team then, and probably DC Gregg’s husband as well. And that would be an expensive outing indeed.

‘Where’s the car?’ Ritchie asked after a while, looking in the direction of the car park.

‘Last I heard it had been towed to a scrappy in Loanhead.’

Ritchie frowned at him. ‘You crashed it? But you only just got it.’

‘I didn’t crash it. It got flattened by a falling door lintel.’ McLean waved over the taxi that had been waiting for him, running up a horrendous bill on the meter all
the while. Ritchie looked at him in puzzlement, then her face broke into a grin.

‘I’m not joking.’ McLean opened the door. She let herself be helped into her seat, then he climbed in after her, gave the taxi driver the address. All the while Ritchie was smiling, which suited her much better than the frown.

‘It’s really broken?’ she asked after a while.

‘Squashed flat. Lucky I wasn’t inside it at the time.’

‘You’ll get another one, though? I liked that car.’

McLean assured her that he would be getting another car, even though he had no idea when he’d have time to look for one.

‘She went after us all, didn’t she?’ Ritchie said as the taxi eased itself into the traffic headed towards the city centre.

‘Reckon so. Grumpy Bob, Stuart, even Sandy Gregg – and she’s hardly been on the team a month.’ McLean had a sudden mental image of DC Gregg holding her own with Mrs Saifre at the hospital. ‘Stood up to her, though.’

‘Heard old Dagwood got it in the neck too.’

‘Car-jacked. Idiot would’ve been fine if he hadn’t tried to fight back. Shook him up that bad he’s talking about early retirement.’

‘Bloody hell. And Christmas just been.’ Ritchie coughed a little in her excitement at the news, but it was nothing like the lung shredding of before.

‘Don’t get too excited. He’s named Brooks as his successor.’

‘Can he do that?’

‘Probably not, but I can’t see them promoting anyone else.’

‘That
means there’ll be a chief inspector post going, though.’ Ritchie looked at him with a sly twinkle in her eye. McLean held up his hands in protest.

‘Not me. Bad enough having to deal with you lot on a daily basis.’

‘True. You never struck me as the ambitious type.’ Ritchie leaned back against the headrest, closed her eyes. ‘Still, if they give it to Spence then there’s an inspector post open. Interesting.’

McLean watched her as she fell asleep, head lolling in time to the movement of the car. She wouldn’t get Spence’s DI post. Not because she didn’t deserve it, and neither because he’d rather not lose her as a sergeant. He knew it was going to take her months to get over the mysterious illness that had laid her low. That alone would keep her out of the running for promotion any time soon. But more than that, she had long ago taken sides, chosen to work with him. Sad, but true, that would hold her back far more than anything else she ever did with her career.

‘We ever going to find out who killed him?’

William ‘Billbo’ Beaumont might have fallen through the safety net, but his old regiment were doing their best to make it up to him with a decent funeral. The Old Kirk at Penicuik had been packed with uniforms singing old favourite hymns with gusto, and a perfectly turned-out honour guard had carried the coffin to the waiting hearse, its final destination a plot in a military graveyard alongside the remains of some of his former platoon members. Outside the kirk, McLean and Grumpy Bob stood to one side, not wanting to get in the way of the
soldiers. Standing in the lee of the old stone building kept them out of the worst of the wind, too.

‘It was the fall that killed him, Bob.’ McLean shuffled his feet against the cold seeping in through his shoes. ‘But I know what you mean. Know who it was, too.’

‘Weatherly again?’ Grumpy Bob shook his head. ‘Don’t you think you’re pinning just a bit too much on him?’

‘Oh, I know I can’t prove it, Bob. And there’s bugger all could be done about it even if I could. But he did it. Well, he set out to do it, like he’d done maybe half a dozen of the bodies we found out there. One every few years.’

‘And the other bodies? Some of them go back centuries.’

‘That’s the point though, isn’t it? Weatherly wasn’t the first. Just the most recent. He made a deal and it brought him his fortune. But our man Billbo here mucked it all up. Escaped before he could be sacrificed. That’s when it all went wrong.’

Grumpy Bob let out a low whistle. ‘A deal with the devil.’

‘The devil? Maybe. I don’t know.’ McLean shivered, though that might have been from the cold. A fresh north-easterly wind was bringing arctic air in from Scandinavia. It had little respect for things like clothes and skin. He remembered his last meeting with Mrs Saifre, the temptations she’d put in his way, the subtle power of her seduction. The things that had corrupted Weatherly so completely were of no interest to him; the influence, the wealth, the excess. But she’d played him differently, a dance that suggested he might be able to control her, use
her to more noble ends. And he’d been tempted, he had to admit it.

‘Poor sod was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, then.’ Grumpy Bob nodded in the direction of the hearse as it pulled away from the kerb, vapour spiralling from the exhaust like playful ghosts in the frigid air.

‘Could be, Bob. It usually is.’ McLean watched as Lieutenant Colonel Bottomley helped Gordon Johnson into a waiting car, then climbed in beside him. It pulled away from the kerb in slow pursuit of the hearse, and for a moment he saw the ex-soldier clearly, sitting ramrod-straight, chin up. Gordy had been convinced the dark angels were coming for him, that his friend Billbo had gone to his rescue and ended up being the one taken. A selfless, heroic act to break the cycle of evil.

‘Either that, or he was exactly where he was supposed to be.’

He’d grown accustomed to the cats filling his garden and prowling the streets around the house. They never came in, apart from Mrs McCutcheon’s cat, of course. She was even more full of herself if that was possible, preening around the house with her tail up, sitting in the middle of the kitchen table as if she were the lady of the manor, sleeping curled up at the end of his bed.

McLean had tried leaving some food out for his newfound glaring of cats, but by and large they disdained his offers. Neither would they approach him for a scratch behind the ears. They were just there, watching – and, he couldn’t help thinking, protecting him.

They didn’t stop the postman, he was pleased to see.
And the takeaway delivery service seemed unaffected. He’d not seen or heard from Mrs Saifre since their interrupted kiss a couple of weeks earlier, though. As the cold, bright February sun had given way to waves of March rain, melting the snow and ice, turning the ground to mud, he worried that they might leave, but still the cats maintained their vigil. It was oddly comforting. He’d never really thought of himself as an animal person, certainly not a great cat lover. He’d taken Mrs McCutcheon’s cat in out of a sense of responsibility, and she had repaid him time and time again.

Only this time she’d let him down, it would seem. She was nowhere to be seen, and there in the middle of the kitchen table, propped up against the pepper grinder, was a slim brown A4 envelope. McLean dumped his handful of case notes and bag of curry down on a chair with a sigh, picked up the envelope and slipped it open.

Inside, a half-dozen photographs were held together with a paper clip, a torn-off strip of paper wedged in at the top of the pile with a single handwritten word.

Thanks
.

He leafed through the photographs, seeing first an image of Mrs Saifre climbing into her Rolls-Royce outside the house that had once belonged to Gavin Spenser. Another photograph showed the car leaving, a third it pulling up beside a private jet on an airfield somewhere. Two more photographs were Mrs Saifre climbing aboard and the plane taking off; not hard to work out the narrative he was being shown. And then the final image. The gates to the house, closed as they had been when he’d walked over there after the night everything had almost gone to
hell. Only this time there was a big sign attached to one of the gateposts, the logo of one of the city’s more exclusive solicitors and the words For Sale in big blue letters.

‘Gone,’ McLean said to the empty kitchen. ‘But I don’t suppose for ever.’

He left the photographs on the table, went to the front door and scooped up the day’s post. It was mostly junk, still a couple of catalogues for his grandmother, and one small tatty postcard. He knew even before reading it who it had come from. Emma always chose pictures of ancient ruins, and she managed to find places even he had never heard of. This one came from somewhere in Montenegro, an old monastery perched on a clifftop over sweeping Mediterranean views. It looked like it had probably been printed in Communist times and had been battered about during its journey to Scotland. He flipped it over to read the words.

Getting there slowly. Two sad souls from this place. They cried when they left, like losing old friends. Heading eastwards. It gets harder each time. Missing you. E
.

There were four large Xs under the E, and nothing else. McLean took the pile of post back to the kitchen, dumped the junk straight in the recycling bin. He went to the fridge and found himself a beer, then scooped his rice and curry out on to a plate, leaving enough of both for Mrs McCutcheon’s cat when she deigned to make an appearance. Finally he shuffled the photographs back into the envelope, then propped the postcard against the pepper grinder so that he could see Emma’s words to him while he ate.