Prayer for the Dead: A Detective Inspector McLean Mystery (14 page)

‘We all done here?’ He
turned away from the reception desk to where DS Ritchie was standing, mobile phone in hand.

‘For now, aye. Just sorting a car. I take it you want me to go with her?’ She nodded in the direction of Adele, sitting on a chair in the waiting area and staring into the middle distance in the manner of someone trying to come to terms with news that’s too big to comprehend.

‘Please,’ McLean said. ‘I’ll
head back to the station and bring Dagwood up to speed. I’ve a horrible feeling this is another Category A, though.’

They were both walking across the reception hall, McLean for the door, Ritchie for the nurse, when she stopped in mid-stride, and turned so suddenly McLean felt her hand brush against him. He followed her gaze to where a white-coated doctor was disappearing through a door.

‘You
all right?’ he asked.

Ritchie shook her head. ‘Sorry. Just thought I recognised someone. Didn’t expect to see him here.’

‘Oh yes? Something I should know about?’ McLean raised an eyebrow and grinned to let Ritchie know he was only kidding. He must have struck a nerve though, as her freckles darkened in embarrassment.

‘No. It’s nothing like … I mean … No. Just someone I met at a … meeting.’

‘None of my business anyway, Sergeant.’ McLean gave her a slap on the arm, as much to cover his own embarrassment as anything. He’d meant it as a joke, but it had clearly backfired. ‘I’ll see you back at the station, aye?’

He left her standing in the middle of the hall, resumed his walk to the door. He had an idea he knew what the meeting was that DS Ritchie meant, but couldn’t quite work out
why she was so uncomfortable talking about it.

‘Jon’s been coming here since he was six. Can you imagine that?’

I let him stew a fortnight, kept away from both hospitals, disappeared as if I’d been no more than a figment of his imagination. It was wise to keep away while the police were asking questions,
too. She had to go, the nurse. She was too much of a temptation to him, and I couldn’t risk him falling when he’s so close to perfection.

It hasn’t hurt to keep him waiting, though. If anything his righteous zeal has grown. When I appeared in the reception hall just after his shift end, he fell upon me like a starving man on a meal. No admonishment for missing our earlier engagement, no asking
me where I’d been. He simply guided me through the building to an intensive care ward, pausing only to make sure we were both kitted out in sterile gowns and face masks, even though we will come no nearer to the object of his concern than a pane of glass away.

‘What’s the matter with him?’

It’s fairly obvious, given the state of the boy. He lies sunken into plump white cushions, surrounded by
machines, connected to them with wires and tubes. His face is mostly obscured by an oxygen mask, but what little I can see of it has a pallor associated more with the very old than the very young. His eyes are panda-like, dark and sunken as he
dozes. He has no hair, not even eyelashes, just sweat-shiny skin the colour of rancid custard, splodged here and there with darker patches.

Jim reaches
a slow hand up to the glass, splays fingers on the surface. ‘What’s right with him? Most of his organs are barely functional. Every time we think we’ve got it beaten, the cancer just comes back again. He’s on chemo at the moment, but honestly, it’s not going so well. It’s a brutal way to treat a child, anyway.’

‘What if we could try something different?’

‘There is nothing different. Unless you
mean prayer.’ He looks at me. I can see the reflection of his head in the glass as he turns, but I keep my eyes on the boy. ‘Trust me, if I thought that’d work I’d try it.’

‘Actually I was thinking of something a little more … scientific? You’ll be aware of cell line therapy. Individual cultures, DNA reprofiling?’ I rattle off the words, all gleaned from the papers I found in his flat. Fascinating
stuff, if you’re into that sort of thing. His reflection drops its head, his hand coming away from the glass as his young patient continues to die a long, painful, drawn-out death.

‘It’s all too new. Too experimental. It takes too much time.’ He rubs the grit from tired eyes. ‘Jon doesn’t have time. Not any more.’

‘You know I work mainly on the research side these days, right?’ I finally turn
to meet his gaze. ‘Can’t remember the last time I actually treated a patient, if I’m being honest.’

‘I did sort of wonder. See you about a lot, but never round the wards or in theatre.’

‘Always think that by the time you’ve got there, it’s
usually too late. I’d much rather have the body heal itself. Just maybe give it a little help.’

‘You reckon you can help Jon?’

I make a show of studying
the boy through the glass, even though I couldn’t care less what happens to him. He is flawed. There is no point trying to save something as flawed as that. The silence feels right though, makes it look as if I am thinking.

‘I don’t know,’ I say eventually. ‘But I can try.’

‘Why is it that of all the officers working out of this station, you are the only one who doesn’t seem to understand the chain of command?’

Late afternoon, Detective Superintendent Duguid’s office. Having cooled down at the hospital, McLean was once more
hot and sweaty from his walk back. He could have gone straight to his nice cool office at the rear of the building where the sun never shone, but that would only have been a delaying tactic.

‘I always find I get better results this way, sir. Every time I take something to DCI Brooks he sends me straight to you anyway. Thought I’d cut out the middleman, save us all some time.’

‘With that attitude
it’s no wonder no one will take you seriously. You do realise they’ll probably give Brooks my job when I leave, don’t you? What’re you going to do then?’

‘I’ll cope, sir. Same as always.’

Duguid made a sound halfway between a snort and a harrumph. ‘So what’s so important you had to bring it straight to me this time?’

‘The young woman we found yesterday afternoon, out Fairmilehead way. We’ve
got a name for her, a bit of background information. My first impression is this isn’t going to be easy. There’s no obvious suspect, no jealous
boyfriend and no sign she was raped.’ McLean summed up the facts of the case he’d uncovered so far.

‘So what you’re saying is we’ve got another major incident on our hands.’ Duguid ran spidery fingers over his thinning scalp, slumped back into his seat.
‘Fucking marvellous.’

‘I’m sure Maureen Shenks is over the moon about it.’

That got him a sharp look. ‘What are you on about? She’s dead. She couldn’t give a fuck. I’m more concerned about the sick bastard killed her. That’s the difference between you and me, McLean. You’re all about justice for the victims. I’m more interested in making sure the guilty are caught and locked up so they can’t
do it again.’

‘Wasn’t aware there was a difference, sir.’

‘Course there’s a bloody difference, man. You keep prattling on about ideals. I’m interested in results.’

McLean wasn’t aware of any recent prattling, but he kept silent on the matter. ‘You want me to lead on this one, sir? I’ve already got Grumpy Bob and MacBride organising the incident room.’

Duguid made a play of shuffling through
the folders on his desk. Most of them were closed, some still tied up with string. McLean knew a fidget when he saw one.

‘I want you to pass the case on to Spence,’ the detective superintendent said eventually. McLean’s first instinct was to complain, but then reason kicked in. He was already senior investigating officer on one major incident; the last thing he needed was another.

‘Control assigned
me the investigation, but I can see the sense in that. I’ll get everything we’ve found so far drawn up into a report for him. Grumpy Bob can hand over to
DS Carter once he’s done all the difficult stuff, and I’ve no doubt Spence will be pinching all the DCs anyway. Is Brooks going to be Gold on this one?’

Duguid gave him the sort of stare you got from a wary sheep. ‘You don’t mind?’

‘How I feel
about it’s not really important, is it, sir? Just as long as we catch whoever did this, right?’

The tiny office, tucked away at the back of the station, was a small haven of coolness in the heat of mid-afternoon. McLean didn’t much enjoy the mountains of paperwork that the job seemed to create on a daily basis, but when the temperature outside was hot enough to melt the tarmac, and the major
incident room smelled of parboiled detective, it was nice to have somewhere he could escape to. Of course, it would be freezing in the winter, but that was a worry for another day.

Signing off overtime sheets was relatively mindless, and it wasn’t too hard to justify the expenditure, not with two dead bodies on their hands. It gave him a chance to let the investigation percolate in the back of
his mind, let the few facts settle and see what new connections might appear. The intervention of his telephone ruined whatever insight might have come. It took McLean a while to find the handset, buried under a spreading mound of folders. The flashing light told him the front desk was calling, but he knew from bitter experience not to believe it all the time.

‘McLean.’

‘Thought you might be
there, sir. There’s a bloke down here wants to see you about a car? You buying another one? Only after what happened to the last two …’ Pete
Dundas was the duty sergeant that afternoon, it would seem.

‘This one of your tiresome pranks, Pete? Only you can’t pester me for the overtime sheets and send me off on wild goose chases.’ It had been a while since anyone had tried to pull a fast one on
him, but McLean was ever wary of the so-called humour of his fellow officers. Usually it involved costing him money and wasting the time of innocent bystanders.

‘Honest as the day, sir.’ Sergeant Dundas did a passable impression of a man offended at the very thought he might not be telling the truth.

‘OK. Tell him I’m on my way.’ McLean hung up, shuffled the papers into something resembling
a child’s idea of order and squeezed his way around the desk. He knew nothing about buying a car beyond that he’d been thinking about it. Unless he’d suddenly developed some kind of psychic ability, chances were this was some kind of prank. He just hoped it wasn’t an expensive one.

It clicked when he saw the man waiting in reception. McLean had only met him a couple of times, the last being when
he’d brought a flatbed truck to the garages of the forensic services and loaded the old Alfa Romeo on to it. McLean had thought the car beyond repair, its roof crushed under the weight of a falling body, but Alan Roberts had just looked at it, sucked his teeth and said it would be expensive. There had been a few telephone conversations since then, and McLean had written a couple of eye-watering
cheques, quite probably more than it would have cost him to go out and buy an identical car. Lately it had been mostly silence, though now he thought about it,
there might have been an email, buried quickly under a mountain of others.

‘Inspector. Sorry to disturb you at work. Reckoned I had a better chance of catching you here, though.’

‘Mr Roberts.’ McLean shook the man by the hand, noticing
his spotlessly clean brown overalls, like a mechanic from a bygone age. In many ways that was what he was. ‘This about the Alfa?’

‘It certainly is. Got her back from the body shop last week. We’ve just been finishing off the mechanical work. She’s all done now. Good as new. Better really.’

McLean checked his watch. Too early to call it a day, and there was the small matter of a major incident
investigation requiring his attention.

‘That’s great, thank you. But I don’t think I’ll be able to pick it up until the weekend. It’s a little busy here.’

‘Aye, that business in Gilmerton with the journalist. I heard.’

‘You did?’ Mr Roberts worked out of a busy little garage in Loanhead, which wasn’t all that far from Gilmerton. Still, it surprised McLean that he’d take much of an interest
in the case.

‘Thought you’d be a bit too busy to come and collect, so I brought her over for you.’

Parked on the street by the front entrance to the station, Alan Roberts’ flatbed truck had begun to attract quite a lot of attention from public and police alike. Partly this might have been to do with the double yellow line, but mostly it was the gleaming red classic sports car on the back.

McLean remembered his father’s old car fondly. He’d
found it hidden away at the back of the garage after his gran had died, had it fixed up and driven it around for a year or so before Detective Sergeant Pete Buchanan had fallen several storeys on to its roof. Before that accident, the car had been tidy, but not exactly new. Its paint had been glossy and red, just a shame about the several different
shades where individual panels had been resprayed down the years. Now it looked even better than it must have done in the showroom, sometime in the early 1970s.

It was still red, gleaming in the hot afternoon sun like something wet and dangerous. McLean didn’t think he’d ever seen it so clean. Any car so clean, for that matter. Roberts set about undoing the straps holding it down to the flatbed,
while yet more underemployed police officers wandered up to see what was going on.

‘You got her fixed. That must have cost a bit.’ McLean didn’t need to turn to know it was DS Ritchie who had spoken.

‘I couldn’t see it scrapped,’ he said as Roberts tilted the flatbed back hydraulically until it formed a long shallow ramp to the road. They both watched as the mechanic fished a key out of his
pocket, unlocked the car and climbed in. The noise it made when he started it up was not what either of them were expecting.

‘Didn’t used to sound like that, did she?’ McLean thought the question, but it was Ritchie who asked it.

‘Not as far as I remember. They did say they were going to do a bit of mechanical work on it. Bring the brakes and cooling up to modern standards. Stuff like that.’

A bit more rasping exhaust noise and the little red Alfa Romeo inched backwards down the ramp, on to the road.
The cluster of police officers thickened around it, all peering in through the windows, so that McLean almost had to fight his way through them. Mr Roberts had turned off the engine and was climbing arthritically out of the low-down seat when he and Ritchie made it to the kerbside.

‘Your
keys.’ Roberts handed them over. ‘You’ll want to take it easy for the first few hundred miles. Let the engine bed in a bit.’

‘I thought you were just fixing up the bodywork and giving it a bit of a service,’ McLean said. He ran a hand over the warm, smooth surface of the roof. The shine was so glossy it was almost painful to look at.

‘That was the first cheque. We had that conversation about
making a few improvements, remember?’

McLean thought he might have done, vaguely. Mostly it had been messages on his answering machine informing him of progress, or lack thereof. He’d not been too bothered, or rather he’d been too busy to worry about it. Roberts had a good reputation, the rest was just time and money.

‘It’s all in the folder there, Inspector.’ Roberts reached in to the passenger
seat with much popping of joints, and came back holding a large black ring-binder. Inside were many, many receipts, and photographs in neat plastic wallets. ‘Oh, and there’s this as well. Never did have much truck with technology, but there’s a couple of thousand photographs on here.’ He dug a hand into the pocket of his overalls, coming out with a small black memory stick.

‘I … um … thank you.’
McLean took it, dropped it into his own pocket.

‘No. Thank you, sir. There’s not many’s prepared to
spend the money keeping these old girls alive. She’s been a pleasure to work on. Just try not to break her again, eh?’ Roberts gave him a grin, then walked away. McLean watched him as he started to pack up the flatbed, ready to leave. When he turned back to his car, DS Ritchie was on the other
side, peering in through the window. She crouched down, ran a hand along the curve of the bonnet, then went to the front and looked back along the side.

‘This must have cost you a fortune, sir. They’ve done a beautiful job.’

McLean looked at the gleaming chrome door handle and the trim around the window edges. They had been tarnished before, pitted by age and road salt. Now they were like new.
The door itself had never quite sat right on its hinges, the gap at the front noticeably larger than that at the back. He couldn’t see that now. It was almost as if they’d given him a different car.

‘Hop in then, Sergeant.’ He opened the door and smelled a heady mixture of leather cleaner and oil.

‘What?’ Ritchie stared at him over the roof.

‘I said hop in. I think we should see what Mr Roberts
has done, don’t you?’