The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (25 page)

‘Where’ve you been anyway?’ He didn’t expect an answer and wasn’t disappointed. It occurred to him that Mrs McCutcheon’s cat had not been there when he and Jenny had returned from the station. Normally it would present itself at some point soon after he came home; ever since Emma had come from the hospital it had been her shadow. And then he knew exactly where it had been. Halfway across town and back. Following Emma all the way to the Canongate and Donald Anderson’s shop. Only when Madame Rose had brought Emma home in a taxi, she hadn’t noticed the familiar. Poor bloody thing must have run the whole way back.

‘Let’s get you something to eat then.’ McLean pushed himself up from his chair, ignoring the creaks and groans from his knees as he did so. The cat stopped its cleaning, watched him with glass-black eyes as he went to the cupboard where the cat food lived. It stayed where it was, sitting in the middle of the kitchen table, until he’d bent down and brought out the box. Then with a disdainful flick of the tail it jumped down to the floor and trotted off into the hall.

26

He must have been a drummer, once. He has one of those little round stools with the padded top that rises on a screw thread. The drum kit has long gone, no doubt to pay off debts, or the rent, or just to eat; he looks like he hasn’t been doing enough of that. But he kept the stool. I like that. A reminder perhaps of a better time, when life was full of possibilities.

Now the possibilities are all gone, and there is just the stool. Unwound to its fullest extent, he teeters on the edge, wobbling slightly, toes flexing as he tries to maintain his balance. He really is a skinny thing. Not an inch of fat on him. There’s muscle in his legs but it’s wasting away now, and his arms, his torso, are weedy. Naked, I can see the scars all around his middle and yes, there across his buttocks. Dark purple stains in the skin, slashed with shiny, white tissue. He looks like some mad headmaster has flayed him to within an inch of his life. Some malevolent first mate gone at him with the cat-o’-nine-tails, but kept the strokes low. Even if I couldn’t taste the despair in his soul, I could see it written all across his ruined body. Once he was alive, fit, strong. Now he is reduced to a hobbling, pain-wracked mess of a boy. No future at all. The spirit sings in me to end him.

‘You are in your safe place now. Nothing can harm you here.’ My voice fills the room like smoke, spreading into
every corner, pushing its way deep into the boy’s mind. It is always like this when the spirit is with me. The power sends shivers deep into my core. I take the rope from my bag. Not much left now; I will have to send the next one out for some more. Heavy, rough hemp, my hands work it as if I had done this all my life, the knot appearing without any thought, perfect, deadly. I pull a chair over from the nearby table, climb up and throw the other end of the rope over the ceiling beam. I have no idea what I am doing, and yet I know exactly how long the rope must be, how far the drop. I have done since I first saw this boy, first shook him by the hand and sized him up, first knew that his struggle would soon be over. The spirit guides me in this, as it has always guided me. Since we first came together in our perfect union.

‘We are close, you and I. Much closer than lovers could ever be.’ I whisper the words into his ear as I lower the noose over his neck. His eyes are closed, little fluttering movements under the lids. He breathes lightly, slowly, his hands hanging loose beside him like branches swaying in the gentlest of breezes. This close, I can smell his musk, an intoxicating mixture of sweat and hormones, soap and shampoo. His mouth is shut, but his lips are pursed, dark red, full like a girl’s. I have to suppress the urge to kiss them, though I feel no attraction to him. The spirit would not want me to sully myself, not when it can offer me so much more.

‘Not long now and we shall be joined so perfectly you cannot begin to imagine it.’ I step lightly from the chair, put it back where it came from. A quick look around the room, the shelves of bric-a-brac, the boxes strewn here
and there, the thin glass panes set into the top of the old garage doors. So much bigger than the hovels the last two lived in, and this is a house, not some dingy bedsit squashed into the back of a tiny terrace. Once he had a future, this poor, poor boy. Once he might have been something. All that was taken from him in a squeal of brakes, a moment of lost attention, a terrible accident. The van that broke his bones might not have killed him straight away, but it killed him nonetheless.

I feel the spirit rising up in me now. Its power is overwhelming and pure. I give myself to it without pause or regret. The world expands in my sight and I can see every tiny detail laid out before me. The note pinned to the corkboard over the workbench. The door, slightly ajar, leading through to the kitchen where this beautiful, damaged boy took off his clothes and folded them neatly over a chair. The pores on his skin, glistening as the effort of keeping his balance brings a sheen of sweat to his cheeks and forehead. The slow, relaxed beat of his heart and the steady rhythm of his breathing.

‘Come to me, now.’ And my voice is a command so strong even I take a step. The boy responds without hesitation, without fear. Forward, forward.

And down.

27

‘I want you to close your eyes, Emma. Take a breath. Hold it. Now let it out slowly.’

The office of Doctor Eleanor Austin, early morning. McLean sat on the low, comfortable sofa, cradling a cup of coffee. As ways to start the day went, it wasn’t too bad. Just a pity he’d been awake since half past four, when Emma had crawled into his bed, sobbing and shivering in her sleep.

‘That’s good. Concentrate on my voice. Take a breath. Hold it.’ A pause, and McLean found himself struggling to breathe out. ‘And let it out slowly. Good.’

Emma’s nocturnal visits had become regular as clockwork in the days since her disappearance. She’d started talking in her sleep, too. Low whispers that he could never quite understand. There was no mistaking the distress in her voice. Or the fact that it often didn’t actually sound like her voice at all.

‘Now, concentrate on your breathing. In. Hold. Out. Good. I want you to keep that rhythm.’

McLean struggled to keep his eyes open, took a long sip of coffee and looked around the room. There wasn’t all that much to it. His sofa, the two high-backed armchairs one facing the other, a bureau under the window at the far side of the room. There were no pictures on the walls, just a pair of antique mirrors, candle holders set
into the frame dripped with wax. A similar pair hung in the living room in his grandmother’s house. He couldn’t remember them ever having held candles, but presumably they must have done once. Back in the days before electric light. Before he was born. Before even his grandmother was born.

‘Now I want you to think back to your earliest memory. Keep breathing. In. Hold. Out.’

His hand in someone else’s. His mother’s, perhaps. An adult’s, certainly. He has to reach up almost above his head. He is standing alongside a car, staring into fog that swirls about the trees. Everything is white, and yet at the same time dark. The car’s headlights spear through the fog, making it seem like the road is a tunnel leading to who knows where?

‘And breathe – Inspector, really!’ The tinny warbling of his mobile phone cut through McLean’s dream. He scrabbled around, trying to get the damned thing out of his pocket, succeeding only in pouring lukewarm coffee all over his trousers.

‘I’m sorry. I could have sworn I’d turned the thing off.’ Finally McLean pulled the phone out, just as it rung off. Caller ID told him it had been DC MacBride. He stood up, the room swaying gently as he shook away the last vestiges of sleep. ‘I’d better phone this in. Sorry.’

‘I think we’ve probably got as far as we’re going to today anyway.’ Doctor Austin turned her attention back to Emma, who was trying hard to suppress a smirk but not really succeeding. ‘Now I need you to practise that breathing exercise every day. Jenny will help you. It’s important to learn to relax.’

McLean left them to it, heading out the door and into the small reception area as he tapped the recall button on the screen. Dave looked up at him with a slightly startled expression, but said nothing. The phone rang twice before it was answered.

‘What’s up, Constable? I said I’d not be in until later.’

‘I know that, sir. And sorry to phone, but I thought you’d want to know as soon as. We’ve got another hanging.’

‘You have got to be fucking joking.’

McLean stood in the small yard outside a nondescript fifties detached house in Colinton, looking in through the opened doors to a garage that like most of its ilk was not actually used for the housing of cars. This one had been pressed into the inevitable storage role, with a distinct theme of bicycle about the place. There were also a workbench, table, some chairs. And a naked man hanging by a rope, his toes just a few inches off the ground.

‘Why do they always take their clothes off?’ Detective Constable MacBride slammed the door of the pool car and came to join him, unwilling to go any further into the crime scene. Probably best to leave it to the SOC officers who were even now swarming over the place like well-trained, white boiler-suited ants.

‘That, Constable, is a very good question. Would you like to hazard an answer?’

MacBride said nothing, which was probably a good thing. McLean looked around the street, a long line of identikit dormer bungalows each with its pitched-roof garage alongside. Homes for Edinburgh’s swelling middle
class at a time when the motor car was every man’s dream and global warming hadn’t been invented yet.

‘Maybe there’s a sexual element to it?’

‘What?’

‘The nakedness, sir. Maybe it’s a … I don’t know, a fetish or something.’

‘What, like auto-erotic asphyxiation? Aren’t we missing a couple of items here? A broom handle and an orange?’

It was difficult to tell whether the young detective constable was blushing or not, his face was always pink. The way MacBride turned away from the dangling man, full-frontal but not exactly stimulated, suggested he was. McLean looked back too, distracted by a car as it drove slowly along the street, almost stopping as the driver tried to get a look at what was going on.

‘Why’s this street not been cordoned off? Jesus, who’s the officer in charge?’

‘Umm … I just got here, sir. With you?’

‘Well go and find out, won’t you? And while you’re at it get someone to tape off this road, at least fifty yards each way. See if the SOC boys have got a screen they can put up to stop the gawkers seeing your man there in all his glory.’

MacBride scurried off on his errands. McLean shoved his hands in his pockets and approached the nearest SOC officer. She looked at him with a scowl, her eyes dropping to his feet in a deliberate, slow motion. He stopped, backed away from the scene.

‘I just need to know who’s in charge, OK? I won’t come inside and spoil anything.’

‘Speak to him. And don’t come in here without a suit. Better yet don’t come in at all till we’re done, aye?’ The
SOC officer pointed towards the front door to the house. The porch was open, little more than a slim shelter to keep the rain off as you entered. A thin haze of blue-grey smoke hung around it, the telltale sign of someone sneaking a crafty smoke. Sure enough, as he rounded the corner, McLean was confronted with the sight of two uniform constables and one plain clothes detective sergeant keeping well out of the way.

‘Everything under control is it, Sergeant?’

‘I … Sir … No one told me …’ Detective Sergeant Carter hurriedly dropped his half-smoked cigarette and scrunched it under his foot. The two constables with him hid theirs behind their backs, shuffling in the tight porch to put the DS between them and McLean.

‘You two. Go see DC MacBride. We need to secure this crime scene. I want someone at each end of the street, too. Only let people in who live here, and take their names. Get started on a list so we can go house to house and speak to people.’

‘Sir, is that really necessary? Silly bugger topped himself. It’s not as if –’

‘A man’s dead, sergeant. I don’t consider that silly in any way.’ McLean had a head’s height on Carter, and the advantage that the DS was backed into the porch.