Prayer for the Dead: A Detective Inspector McLean Mystery (36 page)

‘Dear God. It can’t be.’

‘What is it?’ McLean reached for the tablet, staring at the final, composite image. It looked like no one he’d ever met.

‘I … I think I know this man. Don’t you recognise him?’

‘Me?’ McLean peered closer at the image, getting no spark from it. ‘No. Should I?’

‘It’s Norman. Your neighbour.
Well, a couple of houses down. Could swear it’s him.’

‘Norman?’ McLean’s puzzlement was obviously written large across his face. Ritchie took the tablet back and zoomed in on the e-fit eyes and nose.

‘Norman Bale. You must know him, surely?’

A cold feeling seeped into the pit of McLean’s stomach, that all-too-familiar sensation of things spiralling out of control.

‘How do you know Norman?’

‘Thought everybody knew him. He comes to the meetings. Never misses one. He’s been a regular at the church since he was a boy, too. His folks with him, until they died.’

McLean was only half listening, his mind going back to the past, that long hot summer so many years ago.

‘That isn’t Norman Bale.’

‘But it looks just like him. The more I see it, the more I wonder how I didn’t recognise him
before.’

‘You misunderstand me.’ McLean looked into those e-fit eyes, searching for any suggestion that he was wrong. Finding none. ‘I don’t doubt you when you say this is the man who attends your meetings, but it can’t be Norman Bale. I knew Norman Bale, we grew up together for a while. And yes, he lived with his folks in the big house at the end of my street. But Norman Bale had leukaemia.
He died when he was six years old.’

The house looks the same as it always has, but it feels different. I walk from room to room, places I used to play, places I used to hide, trying to work out what is wrong. And then it hits me; the house is just the same as ever it was. It’s me who has
changed. One term at that terrible boarding school, twelve weeks of struggling to understand why the other boys found my accent so amusing, of trying to fit in. Three months of wondering how I’d been so misled, why I’d been abandoned in such a horrible, unpredictable place. I wasn’t the same six-year-old boy who’d travelled down all alone on the train. For one thing, I was seven now.

‘You want
something to eat, Tony?’

Gran came to meet me at the station and we went to Jenners for tea. It felt very grown-up, surrounded by old ladies in their finery, me in my school blazer and short trousers even in December. But I couldn’t help remembering the dark wood-panelled dining hall with its lines of tables and benches. Over-boiled vegetables and something that might once have been meat, slathered
in gelatinous brown gravy that tasted of salt and little else. If I had one abiding memory of that school beyond the random beatings, the interminable dull Latin lessons and the overwhelming sense of bewilderment, it was the nagging,
constant hunger. I polished off two pieces of cake with my tea, a rare luxury, but now just a few hours later I am ravenous again.

‘Yes please, Gran.’ I take one
last look at the drawing room, somewhere I never really spent much time anyway, then follow her to the warmth and welcome of the kitchen. Old Mrs Johnson’s cooked a hearty stew, filled with dumplings and carrots and meat that tastes right. There’s mashed potato that hasn’t got bits in it and bright green peas I can mush up into it to make peaple pie. And best, there’s gravy that runs around the plate
and smells so wonderful I finally feel like I’m home.

‘There’s a choc-ice in the freezer for afters.’ Gran pours a glass of orange squash from the jug in the middle of the table and pushes it over towards me. Sometimes she eats with me, but not tonight. I don’t mind, too fixated on the food even to make conversation. I know I need to finish it if I’m going to have ice cream, and it’s been a long,
long time since I had ice cream.

It’s only as I’m chasing the last of the mash around the plate, soaking up the last of the gravy, that I realise Gran has been sitting watching me the whole time. She hasn’t said a word, just watched me eat.

‘What is it?’ I ask, pausing before the final mouthful.

‘You’ve changed, Tony. Grown. Shot up like a beanpole.’ Gran smiles at me, but there’s something
not right. I remember that smile all too well. It’s the same smile she had when she told me mum and dad weren’t coming home after all. Despite what they’d promised.

‘Is something wrong?’ I ask, and her shoulders slump.

‘Oh, Tony. You’ve had so much to deal with already. It hardly seems fair to add yet more.’ She says nothing for a while, and neither do I.

‘It’s about your little friend up the
road. Norman.’

The rest of it is lost as Gran describes to me something that can’t have happened. He got ill, started bleeding and wouldn’t stop. The doctors did everything they could, but he had a disease. Something that sounds foreign and horrid, and all I can think of is the sight of his cut hand, the deep red blood oozing out, mixing with the dry dusty earth under the cedar tree. Was that
the last time I saw him? I can’t remember. All I know is that he’s dead. Like mum and dad. Gone for ever. And he bled to death from a cut that wouldn’t heal. A cut that was all my fault.

‘Where’re we going, sir?’ Glancing in the rearview mirror, McLean could see DC MacBride slumped across the rear seat, the air from the open window ruffling his fringe and making him look even more like a teenager than usual. Had he not been wearing a dark
suit, he might easily have passed for an undergraduate arrived in the city early for the start of his studies. Or maybe one of the countless hopefuls come to try his luck at the Festival.

‘The church?’ DS Ritchie peered out through the windscreen as they turned into the street. The evening sun was low in the sky, casting the spiky steeple in dark relief. Fingers of scaffolding surrounded it like
barbed wire around a concentration camp. Keeping the faithful out, or maybe keeping something else in.

‘Nothing in there, if Mary’s to be believed.’ McLean brought the car to a halt outside the rectory. ‘Go see if she’s in. Find out more about this man claiming to be Norman.’

Ritchie unclipped her seatbelt, opened the door. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m going to have a quick look at the old Bale house.
See if anyone’s been there recently. We’ll meet back here in twenty minutes or so.’

Ritchie nodded, clambered out and shut the door. McLean watched her through the gate, then pulled away
from the kerb. It wasn’t far to his own driveway, but he carried on past, looking for the right entrance, wondering how best to play this. How many times had he been to this house? It had all been so long ago,
that last lazy summer before his grandmother had packed him off to boarding school in England. He remembered it as dark, quiet, not all that much unlike his own place. At six, he’d not understood the dynamics of the family that lived there; all he’d known was that there was a boy the same age as him he could go and play with. And then that boy had died from a disease he couldn’t even spell, let
alone pronounce.

‘On foot, I think.’ He pulled over to the kerb, just past a gateway into a garden so choked with mature trees that it was impossible to see the house that lay beyond. They both climbed out, feeling the heat of yet another long sunny day reflect off the street and the stone walls to either side. That was when McLean noticed the smell.

‘Well, well, well. What on earth brings you
here?’

He turned to see an unwelcome figure climb out of a nondescript car parked just a few tens of yards further on. Jo Dalgliesh had a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth and breathed out the words in a cloud of her own smoke.

‘I’m tempted to say the same for you, Ms Dalgliesh.’

‘Suspect we’re both interested in the same thing.’ The reporter nodded in the direction of the house. ‘Norman
Bale?’

‘What do you know about him?’ McLean tried not to make the question sound too urgent, but he could see from Dalgliesh’s stance that she knew something and was playing with him.

‘He’s no’ in. That’s one thing.’

‘You’ve been up to the house?’

‘Aye, creepy place it is.’ Dalgliesh took a long drag on her cigarette, stared at it for a while as if unable to comprehend why it had finished,
then flicked it on to the pavement and ground it out under her foot. It was obvious she wasn’t in a sharing mood.

‘Look. You know how important this investigation is. Are you going to tell me why you’re here, or do I need to get Constable MacBride to arrest you for littering?’

Dalgliesh let out her lungful of smoke in a long slow breath, then started to search for something in her bag. ‘All
right, all right. You were much more fun when we were working together, you know.’

‘Thought we were supposed to be still.’

‘Aye, well. If you’d been a bit freer with the sharing, maybe I’d have given you this a bit quicker.’ Dalgliesh handed over a thin sheaf of papers, mostly photographs of the research wall in Ben Stevenson’s flat. McLean leafed through them, but it was hard to make out details
in the failing light.

‘Always thought it was a bit strange, Ben falling for some conspiracy nutter.’ Dalgliesh produced a cigarette packet from the depths of her bag and proceeded to light up again. ‘He could be a bit stupid at times, but no’ like that. When you told me someone had broken in and taken down all that stuff he’d got, I reckoned it had to be important.’

‘And it led you here?’ McLean
asked.

‘Aye. Took a while to find it, but it was there. He worked out his contact was following him, so he followed him back. Reckon he probably thought there might be more to
the story than he was being told. Guess he found out the hard way how true that was. So tell me, Inspector. Why do you want to talk to Norman Bale?’

‘He’s not here, sir.’

McLean and Dalgliesh both started at the voice.
DC MacBride appeared from the gloom, his feet barely making any noise on the gravel.

‘Jesus, Constable. You’re a creepy sod sometimes.’ Dalgliesh gave a low chuckle.

‘No one home at all?’ McLean asked.

‘Doesn’t look like it. Door’s locked. Most of the downstairs windows are shuttered.’

McLean looked up the driveway into the gloom. His eyes were adjusting to the falling darkness now, better
able to make out the house. It didn’t look at all changed from how he remembered it, but it felt very different. Very wrong.

‘Let’s just go have a closer look, eh?’

The house was dark, surrounded by trees that cut off even the minimal light from the street lamps and the darkening gloaming sky. McLean stood outside the front door and was transported back decades. He remembered that one final
summer as if it had been a whole lifetime; a clarity of memory associated only with childhood. Growing up brought so many distractions.

‘Are we looking for anything in particular, sir?’ DC MacBride stood perhaps a little too close, and McLean could tell from his body language that he wasn’t all that happy to be there. Over by the large window that opened on to the morning room, Jo Dalgliesh was
poking around in the gloom like an inept cat burglar.

‘Small pot. It used to live by the boot scraper in the porch. Probably a bit less obvious now.’ McLean fetched his pen torch from a pocket, then shone it around the area. Sure enough, an upside-down terracotta pot in the flowerbed a few feet off yielded a rusted key. So much for security.

‘Touch nothing.’ He handed a pair of latex gloves
to Dalgliesh, pulled a pair on himself. There were so many reasons why he shouldn’t have been doing this, and yet he needed to know what secrets the house revealed. In the blackness the nods of understanding he received from his companions were minimal. He directed the torch at the keyhole, slid the key in and turned.

Inside was a smell that he couldn’t place. Not mouldering or rot, but something
older and darker. It put him on edge, and did the same to Dalgliesh and MacBride if the way they drew closer in was anything to go by. McLean reached out and found the light switch, lower down the wall perhaps than he remembered, but exactly where his six-year-old self would have expected it to be. He flicked it up and bathed the hallway in light.

‘Warn me before you do that again.’ Dalgliesh
stepped away from him, her hand reflexively going to her side. McLean wondered whether she had been about to hold his, and found he couldn’t blame her. There was nothing obviously unusual about the room they were standing in, but it raised the hairs on the back of his neck all the same.

‘Kitchen’s that way, if I remember right.’ He pointed across to a door beside the stairs. ‘That’s where the
family spent most of their time.’

‘You know this nutter then?’ Dalgliesh asked.

‘One summer. A long time ago, Norman Bale was my
friend. Whoever we’re looking for, whatever he says, he’s not Norman Bale.’ McLean led the way, retracing childhood steps along a corridor far shorter than he remembered, through a much smaller door still strangely covered in green baize, and into the kitchen.

‘Looks
like a kitchen to me.’ MacBride walked slowly around the table in the middle of the room, ran a gloved hand over the spotless wooden surface. McLean remembered a room full of life, a place where things happened, food was prepared, plans made, prayers said. This wasn’t the heart of the house any more. He crossed to the stove, placed a hand on the cover over the hotplate, lifted it and felt the
flat metal underneath. Cold, or at least as cold as the summer heat would let it be. Certainly not lit.

‘Not in here,’ he said. ‘Maybe this way.’

They followed him out into the hallway again, then through another door into the drawing room. This was no more alive than the kitchen, the air stale, the dust heavy on every surface. If the man claiming to be Norman Bale had been in the house, he
hadn’t spent any time in here.

Neither had he spent time in old Mr Bale’s study, the morning room or the library. With each new door opened, each light switched on, McLean found himself transported back in time. And with each new door he also began to see how the house had been frozen in time, how nothing had changed since that long-ago summer.

And then they reached the dining room.

Perhaps
he had been expecting it and given off subliminal signals. Or maybe there really was something about the place that put people’s backs up. Either way, as he pushed open the final door downstairs and reached for the
light switch, McLean could feel Dalgliesh and MacBride press in close behind him. The smell that had bothered him when he’d opened the front door was stronger in here, a wrongness he
couldn’t quite place. Until he switched on the light.

As a young, innocent wee boy, McLean had eaten lunch at that table. Guzzled down plates of jelly, Angel Delight and all those terrible things people had thought were food in the 1970s. He remembered a polished surface you weren’t allowed to put your glass of squash down on, a slightly scary room where adults talked to you as if you might one
day be an adult too.

‘Oh my God.’ Dalgliesh took his hand this time, clutching it hard and drawing herself closer to him than was perhaps comfortable. Behind him, McLean heard DC MacBride take a sharp breath, and he could hardly blame the constable. Neither he nor the reporter had ever met Colin and Ina Bale, after all.

They sat as they always had done, much older than he remembered them, but
still easy to recognise. Mr Bale was at the head of the table, his wife to his right and at the side. In the artificial light it was difficult to tell how long they had been dead, but it had been a while. They looked like wax dummies, hair turned thin and straggly, faces fixed in rictus grins, eyes dried and white with cataracts. Places had been laid at the table in front of them both, empty plates
awaiting food that would never come. And to the other side was a third place where someone had quite recently sat and eaten a meal.