The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (13 page)

The door on the right-hand side of the hall opened onto a bedsit room scarcely big enough to stun a kitten. A single bed, unmade, was rammed into one corner, a cheap Formica-topped table within easy reach of it forming a desk of sorts. The only chair in the place was lying on its side in the hallway, not far from the dangling feet of the hanged man. A narrow window peered out through years of grime onto the back of the terrace and the slow-moving
Water of Leith. Underneath it, a kitchen sink, electric water heater and two-hob cooker all filled a space only marginally bigger than a tea tray. The dirty plates in the sink had begun to grow some interesting new life forms, but looking around the tiny room, McLean suspected that was only because the deceased had not been discovered for a week or two. Generally, the place was shabby, cluttered, but not dirty.

‘The note’s here, sir.’ MacBride stood beside the table-cum-desk, studiously not touching anything. A pile of textbooks were wedged up against the wall, the little coloured tags on their spines telling of overdue library tickets. Alongside them, a stack of cheap spiral-bound notebooks and an elderly mobile phone, a broken tin pencil case with a random collection of cheap pens in it. All had been moved to the sides to make space for the single sheet of paper, green biro spelling out the last confused thoughts of a man about to hang himself.

There is no hope, only blackness.

I can see no point in going on.

To whoever finds me, I am sorry.

Farewell, cruel world.

‘It’s a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?’ McLean leaned close, inspecting the page for any marks without actually touching it. The notebook it had been torn from lay on the top of the pile, the leaky plastic pen alongside. Everything was very neat, almost perfectly lined up square. He turned and scanned the room again; shabby, not chaotic, but neither was it somewhere an obsessive lived.

A noise from outside dragged his attention back to the door through to the hall, the unmistakable sound of the city pathologist, Angus Cadwallader, arriving on the scene.

‘Oh good Christ, Bob. Not another one?’ Two footsteps on the wooden steps and then, ‘Oh shit. Tracy!’

McLean rushed to the door, fairly sure what sight was going to greet him. Sure enough, frozen in tableau, Angus Cadwallader and his assistant Tracy Sharp stood in the hallway, with Grumpy Bob silhouetted behind them by the daylight outside. Closer still, the body hung from its stout hemp rope. As he watched in horrified fascination, its head slowly shifted sideways and up, as if the hanged man were trying to look his dissector in the eye. And then with a horrible sucking, tearing sound, like pulling a foot from wet mud, it sheared off completely, rotted flesh of neck no longer able to hold the weight of the body beneath it, vertebrae snapped by the drop that had killed him. The body didn’t so much fall as slough to the floor, exploding in a mess of foetid liquid, a water bomb balloon filled with diarrhoea that splattered over walls, doors, pathologist and assistant alike. McLean sprang back, gagging at the smell as the rope, released of its tension, flipped the severed head in a neat arc through the open doorway. It landed with a horrible thud, rolled over once and came to a halt at his feet, dead eyes staring sightlessly upwards. He stared back, aware of nothing but the noise behind him as Detective Constable MacBride threw up on the threadbare carpet.

The stench of rotting flesh was still in his nostrils three hours later as McLean sat in a chair in Doctor Wheeler’s
office, Emma beside him. No one had mentioned it, but he was sure they could smell him. Just too polite to say anything.

It had taken almost two of those hours just to get out of the tiny little bedsit room. Once the body had exploded all over the hall, he and DC MacBride had been effectively trapped; no way out except to wade through a morass of decaying flesh and noxious fluids. Angus Cadwallader had done his best to inspect the remains in situ as quickly as possible, but removing them had proven tricky. In the end one of the neighbours had produced a ladder and they’d climbed out of the window. McLean had sent the constable back to the station for a shower and a change of clothes, with the advice that he might want to think about burning those he had been wearing. There hadn’t been time for him to do the same, even with Grumpy Bob ably handling the crime scene. McLean had barely made it to the hospital on time, meeting an anxious Emma and scowling Jenny Nairn in the lobby with minutes to spare.

‘These are remarkable. Very good indeed.’ Doctor Wheeler shuffled slowly through a pile of photographs printed off earlier in the day. Not only could Emma handle a camera like a professional, she had taken to the photo-editing software like a teenager with a new video game. The results were costing him a fortune in printer ink and glossy paper, but it was worth it to see the spark in her eyes as she worked.

‘You’ve been going outside, I see,’ Doctor Wheeler added. ‘Is this a park somewhere?’

‘The garden,’ McLean said. The doctor made no reply,
merely raised an eyebrow and peered more closely at the photograph.

‘There’s a squirrel lives in that tree.’ Emma leaned forward, tapping the photo. ‘Mrs McCutcheon’s cat tries to catch it, but it’s too quick for her.’

‘Mrs McCutcheon?’

‘Her?’

McLean and Doctor Wheeler spoke at the same time. Her question was understandable, his less so. He’d never given the cat a name, true. And he would always think of it as Mrs McCutcheon’s cat. But he couldn’t recall ever telling Emma that. Nor had he any idea what gender it was.

‘You’ve been visiting a neighbour?’ Doctor Wheeler asked.

‘Ah. No. Mrs McCutcheon lived in the ground floor flat in my Newington tenement. She …’

‘She died in a fire.’ Emma’s finger slid from the photo, her hands slowly coming together in her lap. Her voice was different, an echo of her old self. ‘It was so sad. Only one of her cats survived. Tony took it in. Like he took me in.’ She looked sideways at him and a shiver ran through McLean’s whole frame. Was that how she thought of him? As the man who took her in and gave her a roof over her head? It was true, in a way. But it was also deeply depressing. They’d had so much more, and now she thought of him as … what? A cross between a knight in shining armour and a parent?

‘Well, these are very good anyway.’ Doctor Wheeler shuffled the photographs into a pile, banging the edges against the desk with a little more noise than was necessary.
‘You’re making progress. And it shows us that the memories are still in there somewhere. We just need to find the right stimulus to shake them free.’

‘Did you have something in mind?’ McLean asked. Alongside him, Emma had retrieved her stack of photos and was leafing through them as if no one else was there.

‘Ah, the detective’s leading question.’ Doctor Wheeler smiled. ‘As a matter of fact I did. Something a bit unusual, I’ll grant you, but a colleague of mine over in Glasgow’s used it a couple of times with good results.’

‘What are you suggesting?’ McLean had a horrible feeling he knew already.

‘It’s called cranial-electro stimulation therapy,’ Dr Wheeler began.

‘Shock therapy.’ It wasn’t a question.

‘Not exactly, no.’ Doctor Wheeler’s voice changed, taking on the tone McLean suspected she used on her students. ‘Not like
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
. That’s electro-convulsive therapy. ECT. That would be counter-productive in that it’s designed to eliminate behaviours and tends to destroy memories. What we’re trying to do is stimulate Emma’s brain into rebuilding the lost connections.’

‘But you still want to pass an electric current through her head.’ McLean slumped back in his chair, let out a long noisy breath. He’d thought maybe some new drug, something behavioural.

‘You’re sceptical.’

‘Does it show?’

‘Just a bit.’

He thought about the odd conversation the night
before. ‘Probably no worse than what Ms Nairn suggested last night.’

Doctor Wheeler gave him an odd little look, half a smile, half a frown. ‘Let me guess. Hypnotherapy.’

‘You think it’s hogwash?’

‘No. quite the contrary. It’s a useful part of the recovery process, especially where memory loss is concerned. It would probably be good for Emma, certainly shouldn’t do her any harm.’

‘I sense a but in there.’

‘So easy to read?’ Doctor Wheeler shrugged. ‘It’s not so much the what as the who. I take it Jenny’s talking about Doctor Austin.’

‘That was the name.’

‘Well, Eleanor’s good at what she does. I’ll give her that much. Silly of me, really. We had a bit of a falling out many years ago, which is probably why I wouldn’t have suggested her myself. But she helped Jenny, many others too.’ Doctor Wheeler shook her head as if trying to dislodge something stuck there. ‘No. You’d be as well taking Emma to see her.’

15

‘Why were you even there, for fuck’s sake?’

Chief Superintendent McIntyre’s office, early morning. McLean tried to focus on Duguid, not stare past him at the pattern of rain on the window. Too easy to be swept away by the endless motion, tune out the droning noise of that voice. It was a skill he’d perfected through innumerable endless morning briefings as a sergeant, but now was not the time for it, no matter how much he wanted to just ignore his superior.

‘You were meant to be assisting Jo Dexter with a murder enquiry, not swanning about poking your nose into messy suicides.’ Duguid grasped the sheaf of paper that was Grumpy Bob’s initial report on the hanged man as if the act of terminal desperation had been meant only for his personal inconvenience. McLean held his tongue, kept his eyes on the acting superintendent, just the occasional sideways glance about the room. No matter what the man did to the place, it would always be Jayne McIntyre’s office as far as he was concerned. A place where problems were shared, dissected, solved.

‘Are you even listening to me, McLean.’

‘Yes, sir. I’m sorry about the suicide scene. I wasn’t meant to be there, but I was getting a lift across to HQ when the call came in. It was on the way, we thought it would be a five-minute detour.’

Duguid sneered. ‘That old Morse-mobile of yours not working then?’

It took a while for McLean to realize what the acting superintendent meant. He’d not been using his grandmother’s old Alfa much; it wasn’t really suited to modern cities with their gridlocked traffic. Somewhere on his list of things to do was buy a new car; he couldn’t carry on living across town without one. It was just that pretty much everything else on the list was higher priority.

‘Why do I fucking well bother, McLean?’ Duguid dropped the mangled report back onto the desk, ran a bony, long-fingered hand over his face and through his hair, like a face-hugging alien. ‘You’re determined to stick your nose into every little investigation going.’

‘With respect, sir. I don’t think this is a “little” investigation at all. If you’ve read the report you’ll know that DS Laird thinks it’s suspicious. Might not be a suicide at all.’

‘Oh Christ. Here we go again. Haven’t I heard this before? You said there was something hooky about the last suicide but we couldn’t find anything. God only knows how many man hours we wasted interviewing the poor bastard’s friends and they all said he was depressed as fuck.’

McLean gritted his teeth. Why couldn’t the man see? It was plain as the knobbly lump on the end of his red nose.

‘I know what they said, sir. I’ve read DC MacBride’s interview transcripts. Mikhailevic wasn’t happy, true, but there’s a long way between that and stringing a rope up, looping it round your neck and jumping off a chair you’ve balanced on the edge of a table. And no one’s been able to explain how he did all that without getting any rope fibres under his nails.’

Duguid stared up at him with his piggy little eyes, an expression on his face of utter bemusement. ‘I just don’t get you, McLean. Suicide note – check. Suicidal tendencies – check. None of the neighbours saw or heard anyone else. What more do you need to convince you that he killed himself? A fucking home video?’

‘I’d be the first to admit it’s tenuous, sir. But I thought we were supposed to investigate crimes. If Grigori Mikhailevic didn’t commit suicide. If someone –’

‘If someone what, McLean? If someone somehow managed to string him up without him struggling? If someone persuaded him to write a suicide note, climb up on a chair, jump off to his death? Have you heard of Occam’s Razor? Educated man like yourself, I’d have thought you would.’

‘To be honest, sir, I’d accepted Mikhailevic’s death as suicide. Not happy about it, but I get that we don’t have limitless resources. I don’t consider the time we put into investigating it a waste, either. We’ll put that down to different priorities, shall we?’

Duguid opened his mouth to speak, the red anger rising in his face. McLean cut him off before he could start.

‘But yesterday’s hanging opened up a whole new angle. There were too many similarities for it to be coincidence. They both used the same phrase in their notes: “To whoever finds me, I am sorry.” ’