The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (12 page)

‘You’re a trained crime scene photographer.’ McLean knew as he said the words that they were the wrong thing. It was so difficult to know how to deal with Emma these days. Her mood swung back and forth like a small child at a birthday party.

‘Yes, but I don’t remember.’ Emma waved the camera about like a club. ‘It’s like there’s this other person inside me who knows all sorts of stuff, but she never talks to me. Just steps in and takes over when it pleases her.’

‘Perhaps you need to let her. Encourage her.’

‘Actually, that’s not a bad idea,’ Jenny said. ‘You should take loads of photographs. We can make a project of it. Get you outside a bit.’

Emma looked nervously at the window, even though the curtains were drawn. ‘Outside?’

‘You’ll be fine, Em.’ Jenny stood up and took the camera. ‘We’ll start in the garden. You can take pictures of the birds. We won’t go any further until you’re happy, OK?’

Emma nodded, even though she didn’t look happy. As soon as outside had been mentioned the life had fled from her. The sky still seemed to terrify her.

‘I think it’s probably bedtime anyway.’ Jenny handed the camera to McLean, took Emma’s hand like she was a child. Unlike a child, she didn’t throw a tantrum, just muttered a quiet ‘Night’ and allowed herself to be led out of the room.

Much later, a hefty dram consumed and most of the case files at least skimmed over, McLean glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece. One in the morning was not such an unfamiliar time to him, but it was still late. He knocked back the last of the whisky, stacked the files neatly on the desk and headed for bed.

The hall was dark, no lights on in the rest of the house, so that when he switched off the library light he was plunged into darkness. Shapes re-formed slowly as his eyes adjusted, the ever-present orange glow of the night-time city filtering in through the skylight high above. The dark didn’t bother him, not in this house where he’d grown up. He knew all its secrets, the feel of the air in different rooms, the way the floorboards creaked as he walked over them. In the almost-black, with just the faint, distant roar of the city as a background noise, this was his place. He didn’t need lights to know it.

The door to Emma’s room was closed, which was a relief. It had been a few days now since she’d climbed into his bed for security, like a child frightened of the dark, but her mood swing earlier, and the mention of going outside, had worried him. It wouldn’t surprise him at all if he woke to find her alongside him again.

He trod quietly across the landing, the reflected glow of the clouds shining through the big glass skylight over the stairwell, casting evil shadows of deeper black, twisting sinister shapes out of the banisters. His own room was at the far side, opposite Emma’s, and as he reached for the door handle, he noticed something out of place. Froze.

When she’d taken on the job of Emma’s full-time carer,
Jenny Nairn had insisted on taking one of the attic rooms, rather than any of the main spare rooms that McLean had offered. He wasn’t sure why; maybe the opulence bothered her. Or maybe she felt that as a hired help she should of course live in the servants’ quarters. Perhaps she felt a need to be above everyone else and looking down. Whatever her reasons, now she was sitting on the narrow back stairs leading up to her room.

‘Thought you were never coming up. You work too hard, Inspector.’ She pushed herself upright, stepped from the shadows towards him. For a moment he wondered whether this was some kind of awkward advance, but she stopped just outside his personal space.

‘You could have come and talked to me downstairs. If there was something you wanted to ask.’

‘Nah. You were busy. Looked like you wanted some time to yourself too.’

Nothing could have been further from the truth, really. What he wanted was the company of the Emma Baird he’d met all those months ago. Someone he could go down the pub with, forget about the slow torture that was work in a station run by Acting Superintendent Charles Duguid and his band of cronies. But he couldn’t have that, of course.

‘Not really,’ was all he managed to say. ‘This about Emma, I take it?’

‘Yes. No. Sort of.’ Jenny studied her fingernails for a moment. ‘It’s kind of, well … I don’t really know you, but you seem open-minded, right?’

McLean said nothing, wishing she’d get to the point.

‘It’s just, I’ve got this idea of something that might
help. Help Em, that is. Only most people, if I mentioned it to them they’d scoff.’

‘Doctor Wheeler thinks highly of you. That counts for a lot in my book. If you think there’s something that can help Emma, please don’t hold back.’

‘You sure? OK. Well I was going to suggest you try hypnotic regression therapy.’

Of all the crazy ideas that had skimmed his mind, this wasn’t the most loony. At least not quite. ‘Hypnosis. As in Derren whatsisname? Brown?’

Jenny’s shoulders slumped. ‘There you go. It’s so hard to shake the old magic trick aspect of it. Hypnosis is a well-researched therapeutic tool. And Doctor Austin is the most skilled hypnotherapist I’ve ever encountered. She helped me, way back when my folks died. I really think she could work wonders with Emma.’

McLean stifled a yawn born only from lack of sleep. He didn’t know much about Jenny’s background beyond the basic checks he’d done before hiring her, but the news of her parents’ death struck a chord. No stranger to him, that experience. She worked well with Emma and, despite her rather unorthodox appearance, didn’t seem the type to suggest something lightly.

‘You say Doctor Austin. This is a qualified practitioner?’

‘Eleanor’s a psychiatrist, yes. She has a private practice in the New Town and teaches at the university.’

‘OK. It’s not something I’d normally consider, but I’ll run it past Doctor Wheeler at Emma’s check-up tomorrow. If she’s happy, then we’ll go see your Doctor Austin.’

‘Thank you, Inspector. You won’t regret it.’ Jenny’s face
broke into a wide grin, her teeth flashing white in the semi-darkness. She darted forward, grabbed his hand and squeezed it for a moment in a peculiarly old-fashioned gesture. Then without another word she turned and scampered up the black, narrow staircase to her attic room.

14

‘Well, this is all a bit of a fucking mess, isn’t it.’

McLean stared out through the grimy windscreen at the long line of traffic not in any way moving down Queen Street. Digging up the roads to put in tram tracks had been one of Edinburgh Council’s more inspired ideas. Buggering up the procurement contracts in true civil service fashion so that the job was going to take twice as long was just the icing on the cake. There were times when the city just ground to a halt, and this seemed to be one of them. He suspected the traffic wasn’t what was bothering his old friend though. Sat beside him in the passenger seat, Grumpy Bob was for once living up to his name.

‘Dagwood making life miserable again?’

‘He’s a walking disaster area, breaking up teams for no bloody reason. You know what he’s got Ritchie doing now?’

McLean did, but he knew better than to get in the way of one of Grumpy Bob’s rants.

‘She’s down in the basement doing Needy’s old job. Filing. I mean, for fuck’s sake. She’s a detective. What’s that all about?’

‘It’s only short term. A week at the most.’ McLean indicated, turned down towards the Colonies, got a hoot of the horn from another frustrated driver. Serve him right. Idiot had been half asleep and missed his chance.

‘You know as well as I do why she’s been sent there and it’s got bugger all to do with them needing a sergeant at short notice. There’s half a dozen would’ve come back out of retirement to do the work part time.’

‘You think he’s really that vindictive?’ McLean was going to use the word petty, but thought the better of it. He was searching the corners of the buildings, looking for the street sign whilst at the same time trying to avoid driving into the back of another car.

‘What do you think? First thing he did when he took over. Jayne McIntyre’s seat wasn’t even cold and he’d split up our team. Sent you off to the SCU? Young MacBride running around after Spence like he’s a sergeant with years under his belt.’

‘He’s not making you work for a living is he, Bob?’ McLean found the street he was looking for, slowed down as he saw the blue and white tape across the road.

‘Ach, you know what I mean, sir. He’s just changing things ’cause he can. Fucking us around ’cause we pissed him off. Great man management that is.’

‘You’re not telling me anything I didn’t already know, Bob. Not a whole lot I can do about it though.’ McLean killed the engine, climbed out of the car. They were in a tiny street, both sides blocked in by neat terraces of houses. Once upon a time these three-storey buildings would have been single residences, the basement levels the realm of servants. Now they were all split up into as many flats as the landlords thought they could get away with. Tiny little bedsits shoe-horned into rooms that had been small by the standards of the New Town to start with. All the activity seemed to be focused around an
upper flat, reached by a flight of stone steps from the pavement. McLean showed his warrant card to a uniform PC who looked about twelve. ‘Who’s SIO?’ he asked.

‘Umm. You, sir?’ The PC looked confused.

OK. Start again. ‘Who’s in charge of the crime scene?’

‘I’m not exactly sure, sir. Detective Constable MacBride’s inside. He seems to be giving orders.’

And so it begins. The breakdown in the chain of command.

‘This is a dead body we’re dealing with here, Constable?’ Grumpy Bob asked the question before McLean had the chance.

‘Aye, sir. Hanged hisself.’

‘And they sent a detective constable to take charge? No sign of DI Spence or DS Carter? Anyone else?’

‘No, sir. Just Stu– … DC MacBride. Duty doctor’s been too.’

Bloody marvellous. McLean looked around the street, the rows of wheelie bins, the gates in the metal railings where steps led down to basement flats, the tightly parked cars with their permits proudly displayed, the gathering faces at windows.

‘Right, well, I guess it’s up to me then. I want this cordon moved further down the street. Take in the houses either side of the crime scene. I want to know who owns all these cars. I want a list of all the neighbours, this side and across the road. And I need someone to go and tell everyone who’s rubbernecking to get back inside. We’ll start interviewing as soon as I’ve seen the body. OK?’

The constable stared slack-jawed, rooted to the spot by the impossible list of tasks.

‘Well,
get on with it, lad. Don’t stand there like you’re wanting your arse kicked.’ Grumpy Bob stepped in with his size nines. With what might have been a frightened yelp, the young officer jumped to attention, then scurried off in search of help.

‘Right then. Let’s go see what we’ve been saddled with, shall we?’ McLean said, and headed up the stairs.

There wasn’t a lot of room in the tiny flat, and most of it was taken up by the body dangling from a rope tied up in the skylight. Judging by the smell and what little McLean could see as he approached, the deceased had been there quite a while.

‘Another suicide?’ he asked by way of a greeting. Detective Constable MacBride turned a little too quickly and almost tripped over his own feet, wobbling precariously as he tried not to touch the body. The look of worry on his face eased as he realized who had spoken.

‘Oh, thank Christ for that. You back from Vice then, sir?’

‘No, Constable, and it’s the Sex Crimes Unit, as well you know.’ McLean gave the constable a reassuring grin, even though he didn’t much feel like it. ‘And I’m not here. Just cadged a lift from Bob, OK? He’ll be SIO on this one.’

MacBride nodded, he was quick on the uptake that way. Might make sergeant soon, inspector in a couple of years if he was unlucky. He turned back to the body, flattening himself to the wall to make room for McLean and Grumpy Bob to see.

‘Looks like a suicide, sir. Jammed a broom handle in the skylight, threw the rope over it, stood on a chair at the top of the stairs. There’s even a note through in the room there.’

‘But you don’t like the look of it.’ McLean took a step closer to get a better view of the body. It was male, that much was obvious enough. Judging by the smell, the bloating and the discoloured skin, it had been hanging for weeks rather than days. Flies buzzed around the corpse, a few battering themselves against the glass skylight, most happy to be locked in with such a prize.

‘The pathologist been yet?’ Grumpy Bob asked.

MacBride shook his head. ‘Just Doctor Buckley.’

‘Well, we can’t do anything here until Angus has done his bit.’ McLean scanned the narrow hallway, seeing just two doors leading off it other than the one they’d come in through. ‘Where’s this note then?’

‘This way, sir.’

MacBride inched past the hanged man, careful not to disturb the body. McLean followed, trying not to breathe as much to avoid the stench as anything. Grumpy Bob stayed back. ‘I’ll just wait, in case Cadwallader turns up, aye?’

As if he wouldn’t be able to find the body by himself. ‘Fine, Bob,’ McLean said. ‘Fewer of us in here the better. You know what SEB are like if we contaminate their nice clean crime scenes.’