The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (27 page)

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‘So we’ve got three deaths by hanging. All very similar MO. Two I could put down to coincidence, but three’s just too much. And besides, I don’t believe in coincidences anyway. This could be some kind of suicide pact, but if it is, it’s a very odd one. Looks like all three nooses have all been tied by one person, probably using one length of rope. To my mind that makes this at the very least manslaughter.’

The CID room, early, for an impromptu briefing and catch-up. McLean looked upon his gathered team with a mixture of relief and despair. True, they were all people he’d worked with in the past and all people he trusted to bring something to the investigation. But they were also very few in number. Grumpy Bob lurked at the back, his feet up on his desk, cradling a mug of coffee that quite plainly hadn’t come from the vending machine in the canteen. DC MacBride perched on the edge of the neighbouring desk, pink and scrubbed and eager. DS Ritchie had somehow managed to avoid being sent up to Tulliallan for more Police Scotland workshops and was gracing them with her presence, along with a delicate whiff of some perfume McLean couldn’t immediately identify. Unless that was coming from PC Sandy Gregg, on secondment and fair quivering with the excitement of being in plain clothes for a change. DS Carter had put in an appearance a few minutes before the start of the briefing,
and for a moment McLean thought he might have defected. As soon as he’d realized what was going on, he’d grabbed a folder from his desk and darted out of the room. No doubt to report back to Spence and Brooks that the upstart McLean was conducting investigations and what were they going to do about it?

‘They knew each other?’ This from Sandy Gregg. No one else would try to state the obvious so, well, obviously.

‘That’s our working hypothesis. We’ve not managed to find any solid links between them yet, other than the rope and the knots.’ McLean turned back to the whiteboard where he had taped up photographs of Patrick Sands, Grigori Mikhailevic and John Fenton.

‘The deaths are approximately three weeks apart. All left suicide notes. You should have copies of them in the packs MacBride handed out earlier. I think you’ll be as struck by the similarities between them as I was.’

Cue a rustling of sheets as everyone leafed through their paperwork. Except Grumpy Bob, who just took a slow drink of his coffee.

‘All three of them were naked when they hanged themselves, and all three used the standard-drop method to do it.’

‘Standard drop?’ This from Ritchie, sitting at the front like teacher’s pet.

‘Standard drop is between four and six feet, though these were all at the lower end of that. As opposed to long drop, where the optimum drop is calculated for each individual to be hanged. The idea’s to snap the neck cleanly and swiftly so the hanged man is dead before he starts
swinging. Problem is, it’s not very reliable. How far you need to drop depends on your weight, height, body type. There’s a whole load of calculations. You just string someone up and let them fall three or four feet, chances are it’s not enough to break their neck and they suffocate to death. Or if it’s too much, their head pops off, which is messy.’

The whole group turned as one to DC MacBride, the font of this unusual wisdom. His pink face turned even redder under the combined scrutiny.

‘Is that usual?’ Sandy Gregg asked. ‘The standard thingy?’

‘Actually, no. Hanging’s one of the most common methods of suicide; about half of the annual total. But it’s usually just a form of self-strangulation. It’s not easy to engineer a drop, and even if you do, most people underestimate, choke themselves to death. All three of these men put a chair on something, or over a drop, so they knew what they were doing.’ MacBride shrugged at the collection of dropped jaws staring at him. ‘What? I looked it up. OK?’

‘Just as well someone did. Thank you, Constable.’ McLean turned his attention back to the whiteboard and its three photographs. ‘These three not only opted for a very complicated way of killing themselves, they also all succeeded. PM results show three clean breaks. Only Sands possibly overdid it a bit, which is why … well, you’ve seen the photos. They died instantly and painlessly, not slowly strangling to death, which I’m told is a nasty, protracted and agonising way to go. They also all used nooses that were tied by one person. Could have been one of them, could have been someone else entirely.’

‘So they all used the same rope. One of them tied the nooses. And Grigori Mikhailevic bought the rope from The Captain’s Rest in Newhaven?’ Acting DC Gregg ran her finger down the page of the report as she asked the question.

‘That’s how it looks,’ McLean said.

‘But Patrick Sands died a fortnight before Mikhailevic. Isn’t that right?’

McLean stared at the constable in consternation. He’d forgotten that the sequence of deaths wasn’t the same as the discovery of the bodies.

‘That’s a bloody good point,’ Grumpy Bob said. ‘What’s the timeline for these suicides? How’s it all fit in with when the rope was bought?’

All eyes turned to DC MacBride again. He shrugged, then dug out his notebook, flicked through the pages.

‘According to the pathology report, Patrick Sands died sometime in the first week of July. Grigori Mikhailevic hanged himself on the twenty-second and Jonathan Fenton was found yesterday, seen alive the day before, so died sometime on the night of the thirteenth.’

‘Oh bugger.’ Grumpy Bob had his own notebook out, but McLean didn’t need to see what was written in it to know what was upsetting him. If the shopkeeper was right both in his identification of Mikhailevic and his book-keeping, then the rope hadn’t been purchased until the second week of July, when Paddy Sands was already hanging from the skylight in his tiny Colonies flat. He might have used the same type of rope, but it hadn’t been cut from the same length.

‘What? Did I say something wrong?’ PC Gregg looked
backwards and forwards between the two senior detectives, a horrified look on her face.

‘Far from it, Constable. You stopped us making complete tits of ourselves.’ McLean slumped into a nearby chair. It wasn’t like him to miss something as obvious as that, but then he wasn’t normally working for two different teams.

‘OK then, people. Where does this leave us?’

DC MacBride looked like he was about to answer, but then the door to the CID room swung open and Detective Sergeant Carter poked his head through.

‘You come to join us?’ McLean asked. ‘Only we could use some intelligent input.’

Carter made a quizzical face, which wasn’t far off his normal one. ‘No. I mean … Sorry, sir. It’s Dag– … Acting Superintendent Duguid, sir. He wants to see you in his office.’

‘I’m kind of in the middle of something here.’

‘He knows, sir. Think that’s why he wants to see you.’ Carter had the decency to look embarrassed.

‘OK. I’ll go and see what he wants.’ McLean hauled himself out of the chair, paused at the door to address what he hoped would still be his team in an hour. ‘Let’s start from scratch here. Set up a timeline, go over the interviews with friends. These three people are linked. Find out how.’

‘You know your problem, McLean? You make everything more complicated than it needs to be.’

Jayne McIntyre’s office. Well, technically Acting Superintendent Charles Duguid’s office, but he was damned if
he was going to give in and start calling it that. McLean stood in front of the wide desk like a persistent troublemaker called up in front of the beak. On the other side, Duguid flicked through the latest in a long line of tedious and time-consuming daily reports with the air of a man who really couldn’t be arsed reading the thing.

‘The way I see it, you’ve got it in your head these deaths are suspicious, and now you’re going looking for the evidence to back up your theory. Feel free to correct me, but that’s not how I was taught to conduct an investigation.’

Deep breath. Try to keep a lid on the anger. That’s what he’s trying to do, after all. Goad. ‘With respect, sir. Three very similar deaths by hanging in the space of just over a month is suspicious enough to warrant a second look, wouldn’t you say?’

‘We went over this already. People commit suicide every day, McLean.’ Duguid stopped a moment as what he’d said sunk in. ‘I’m not saying that’s good or inevitable or whatever. It’s just that we can’t go treating every single one as if it’s a potential murder.’

‘Seven hundred and seventy-two in 2011, sir. In Scotland as a whole that is. So yes, about two people a day take their own lives. And about half of that total hanged themselves in one way or another. I know the stats.’

‘Like I told you before. Someone hangs themselves in this country every bloody day. And yet you think these ones are so important you’ve got two sergeants working them, three if you count Carter on this latest case. God only knows how many constables running around after you. And that’s just CID. I dread to think what the uniform
count is. All just for a couple of suicides. Have you any idea how much this is costing?’

More than you, in all probability. ‘It’s three deaths actually, sir. And I don’t think they’re suicides. At least not just suicides.’

‘I don’t care what you think. You were only meant to be using DS Ritchie for this investigation. Not half the bloody station.’ Duguid threw the report down on his desk. It missed the edge and tumbled to the floor.

‘Ritchie’s on the local liaison group for the new Police Scotland, sir.’ Which you know perfectly well, since you were the one who ordered her to do it. ‘She’s not here most of the time. And DS Carter’s back working with Spence and Brooks, which is frankly the best place for him. I’ve got Grumpy Bob co-ordinating the investigation with MacBride and Gregg helping him out. I’d hardly call that half the station.’

‘Gregg?’ Duguid’s confusion spoke eloquently of his skill at personnel management. Christ, this man was supposed to be in charge. Of the whole station.

‘PC Gregg, sir. She’s on probation with CID. You know. You suggested her for my team earlier.’

‘Oh, that Gregg.’ Duguid shook his head as he spoke, suggesting he didn’t really have a clue who McLean was talking about. He looked around for the report, made a show of bending down to pick it up and place it on the desk between the two of them. ‘It’s still too much manpower. This PC Gregg could collate the forensic, pathology and background reports on her own. Deliver the whole lot to the Procurator Fiscal’s office and the job’s done.’

Gods, it’s like dealing with a four-year-old. ‘I could ask
her to do that, sir. Or DC MacBride, since he was the officer initially investigating the first one. But he thought there was something odd even then, and everything that’s happened since has only confirmed that for me. These three hangings are all linked.’

‘And yet for all the manpower you’ve thrown at the investigation so far, you can’t find anything except circumstance and supposition. Dammit, McLean, you had a hunch and it didn’t pay off. Happens to all of us. Let it go and move one.’

‘Is that an order, sir?’

‘If it has to be. Wrap it up, and get back to the SCU. I’ve had Jo Dexter bending my ear all day about your beaten-up whore and her dead pimp, not to mention the Port Authority calling me about a freighter that’s still impounded and clogging up their docks. Get on top of things, man. Or move aside for someone who can cope.’

Time was he’d been able to take a meeting with Duguid in his stride. Brush it off in the full and frank knowledge that the man was a complete arse and anything he said was deserving of as much attention as a tabloid headline. But recently McLean had been finding it hard to shrug off the man’s incompetence, and his latest meeting had been a particularly bruising one. Bad enough Duguid was fixated more on keeping costs down than on finding out what had happened, but that last jibe had cut deep.

He couldn’t face going back to his office and the inevitable stack of paperwork to deal with. Neither was he in any great hurry to get back to Jo Dexter and her team, although he’d have to check in on Magda sooner or later.
No, what he needed was to sit down with Grumpy Bob and thrash out this case that Dagwood wanted closed.

But first he needed coffee, and possibly a bacon buttie if there were any left.

The canteen was in mid-shift quiet mode, just a few uniforms catching a breather and a couple of admin staff huddled in the corner with a stack of papers. McLean grabbed his booty and was almost out the door when a low voice stopped him short.

‘The streets must be safe if the great Detective Inspector McLean feels there’s time to get himself a coffee.’

He could have ignored it, could have pretended he’d not heard, walked out the door, but it had been a shit day, really. He turned to face his accuser, unsurprised to see DI Spence was not alone. On his own, little Mike Spence would never have had the temerity, but the presence and bulk of his fat superior emboldened him. Or perhaps made him more rash.

‘I’m guessing all the really bad criminals are tucked away in jail if the two of you can spare the time to sit and hold hands.’ Not his most brilliant riposte, but hey, he was busy. Mike Spence’s face crumpled at the words, but alongside him, DCI Brooks flushed an angry red. His hands were on the table, cupped around a gently steaming mug. A plate that had once held a large portion of lasagne and chips sat on the table between the two men, but it wasn’t hard to work out which one had eaten it.

‘Heard you’d been hauled up in front of Dagwood again. What you do this time, lose your girlfriend in the park?’

Had he not been carrying a Styrofoam cup and a bacon
roll, McLean would have clenched his fists, might well have swung for the DCI. As it was he slopped hot coffee on his hand, the splash of pain diverting his attention just long enough to stop him from doing anything rash.

‘Actually, sir’ – he emphasized the title by clenching his teeth as he said it – ‘the acting superintendent is very concerned about budgets and wanted to know where all the manpower was being directed. I showed him my team roster, think he was just about satisfied there was no wastage. No doubt he’ll be wanting to see yours soon.’