The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (28 page)

Brooks scowled, which just made the rolls of flesh on his face wobble. ‘Why are you still here, McLean?’

The question took him by surprise. McLean looked around the canteen, then hefted his booty. ‘A man’s got to eat. You of all people should know that. Sir.’

The scowl deepened, folds of skin rippling across Brooks’ damp, ruddy forehead. ‘Don’t get cocky with me. You know damn well what I meant.’

‘I do? Come on then. Say it out loud. Everyone’s been dropping enough hints to start a war. About time someone said it to my face.’

‘You don’t need to do this job, man. Way I heard it you inherited big time when your grandmother died. So why are you still here? Why don’t you fuck off to the country or something? Let us get on with our jobs.’

McLean let out a long slow breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Finally, someone getting to the bloody point. A shame it had to be a senior officer he’d get into trouble for being insubordinate to. He put his coffee cup and bacon buttie down on the table, pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and dabbed at the damp spot on
his hand. Taking his time and keeping his eyes on Little and Large while he did so. Normally he’d have just shoved the hanky back in his pocket when he was done, but this time he folded it neatly before tucking it away. Finally he picked up his cup and roll again. Maybe thirty seconds of silence had elapsed, but it felt like a week.

‘You’re a detective, sir. Why don’t you see if you can work it out, eh?’

29

‘Your man Fenton. Now there’s an interesting case.’

Angus Cadwallader sat at his untidy desk in the little office off the main examination theatre of the City Mortuary. For so late in the day, his green scrubs were very clean, which probably meant he’d had to change. McLean leaned against a long workbench by the door, happy to be out of the station and the idiot politics of the place for a change.

‘Interesting for you, or for me?’

Cadwallader smiled. ‘Oh both, I hope. But mostly me. It’s not often I get to see reconstructive surgery so soon after it’s been done. The work on rebuilding his pelvis is masterful. Just a shame they couldn’t do much about his femur. Poor bugger would always have walked with a limp, and I doubt he’d have ever been completely free of pain.’

‘So what’s interesting for me then?’

‘You mean apart from the warm glow of knowing you’ve rescued what was otherwise a particularly rubbish day for me?’ Cadwallader grabbed a pair of latex gloves from the desk beside him, stood up. ‘Come.’

McLean followed his old friend out into the examination theatre and over to the banks of chill stores. It was a route he’d trodden far too many times before. Cadwallader opened a door that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a commercial catering refrigerator, slid out a
drawer holding a corpse covered in a heavy rubberized sheet. Pulled aside, it revealed John Fenton as naked as he’d been the day before, dangling from his rope.

‘Don’t need to get him up onto the table, really.’ Cadwallader pulled on the gloves, then picked up one of Fenton’s hands. ‘The other two suicides you’re looking into had no traces of hemp fibre under their nails, you’ll recall. Well, this one’s just the same.’

‘He never touched the rope?’

‘I’m not saying that. Not never touched it. But certainly not any time soon before he died. It’s possible he strung up the rope, then went away and had a thorough scrub, but he’d still have had to touch the bloody thing to get it over his head and tighten it up.’

McLean looked down at the young man’s face, pale in death. His hair was short, recently cut, and he was clean shaven. Were those the actions of a man in the pit of despair? He didn’t know. Time was he’d been close himself, but he’d still managed to keep clean and tidy, so maybe there wasn’t anything suspicious about that.

‘The lack of fibres is interesting enough,’ Cadwallader continued. ‘It suggests a similarity between the three that goes beyond chance. And it’s a puzzle of course. But there’s something else I thought you might like to see. Here.’

The pathologist covered up the mortal remains of John Fenton and pushed him back into his chill rest, then led McLean back to the examination theatre. Where the old x-ray examination light boards had once been, now a sleek set of flat panel screens hung from the wall. Cadwallader flicked these on and fiddled around with the controls a bit until he had three images side by side.

‘It’s much easier when Tracy’s here. She’s brilliant with all this modern stuff.’

‘I was going to ask where she was, actually. You’ve not done away with her and buried her under the patio have you?’

‘No. She’s off on some orientation workshop to do with all this new single body bollocks. Police Scotland, what a waste of time and money.’

‘I keep on losing DS Ritchie to the same thing. Bloody nuisance if you ask me. I’m still not sure what problem it’s meant to be solving.’

They fell silent for a while, staring at the images on the screen. McLean had seen enough x-rays in his time to recognize neck vertebrae and the signs of a clean break.

‘These are the three hangings, I take it,’ he said eventually.

‘Indeed, yes. Sands, Mikhailevic and here the new boy, Fenton.’ Cadwallader prodded the screen with a finger, causing it to change to a menu of options. A little cursing and poking brought the original images back.

‘They all died quickly then.’

‘Oh yes. Instant for all of them. And that’s the problem, really.’

‘It is?’

Cadwallader fixed McLean with one of his best teacher stares. ‘How much do you know about the science of hanging, Tony?’

He thought back to the morning’s briefing. Something about short drops and long drops that had made his neck hurt in sympathy. ‘Not as much as Detective Constable MacBride.’

‘Ah yes. Stuart. A quick learner. Well, I’ll give you a brief summary.’ Cadwallader pointed at the first fracture, careful not to touch the screen this time. ‘The idea of hanging, at least in semi-civilized countries, is to swiftly dispatch the condemned. A broken neck is ideal, but it’s not as easy to achieve as you might think.’

McLean remembered now. ‘You need to get the drop right, that’s what I was told. Too short and you choke to death, too long and your head comes off.’

‘Something like that, yes. But there’s more to it than just velocity. You need to jerk the head in a particular way to get a clean break. That’s why the knot of the noose is usually placed here, under the left ear.’ Cadwallader laid his hand on McLean’s left shoulder to demonstrate.

‘Sometimes it’s put under the chin in an attempt to get the head to snap backwards. Putting it to the back is almost guaranteed to cause death by asphyxiation, and none of these victims showed signs of that. Most suicides will put the knot directly behind their head, straight up.’ Cadwallader made the universal ‘being hanged’ motion, sticking his tongue out and scrunching his eyes up as he did so. ‘That doesn’t work. Just strangles you.’

‘I’m still not sure why you’re getting so excited about it though. This was supposed to happen, right?’ McLean pointed at the three snapped necks. ‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Two things, Tony. Since you’re determined to be slow on the uptake today.’ Cadwallader shook his head in disappointment. ‘First, whilst this is the desired outcome, it’s extremely difficult to achieve. I was impressed at the first one, surprised at the second. A third is unprecedented.
Law of averages says at least one of these three would have botched it.’

‘I thought Sands did. That’s why his head came off.’

‘Only after he’d been rotting for the best part of a month. Would likely have happened to the other two if they’d been left long enough.’

‘So what’s the other thing, then?’

‘Here. Here. Here.’ Cadwallader pointed out the three fractures. ‘The hangman’s fracture. Subluxation of the C2 and C3 vertebrae if you want me to get technical. These injuries are almost identical in all three cases. All caused by the noose being placed under the left ear, as per the hangman’s manual.’

‘There is such a thing?’ It would certainly make life easier if they could find evidence the three men had read it.

‘I was being facetious, Tony. No doubt there’s endless stuff on the internet about hanging. That’s how young MacBride found out, I’d guess. But the point is most suicides don’t know this stuff.’

‘So you’re saying these three didn’t kill themselves.’

‘I can’t be as definite as that, Tony, no. None of them struggled at all before they dropped, which would suggest they at least partly wanted to kill themselves. But I can tell you they all had help. Either they all got their information from the same place, or one of them found it and then shared it with the others. It’s possible they even helped each other, which would explain the lack of fibres.’

‘Are you suggesting there’s someone else out there?’

‘That’s your department, Tony. All I’m saying is that none of these three died alone.’

It wasn’t until he’d climbed into his car and started the engine that McLean noticed the brown paper envelope wedged under the windscreen wiper. Climbing wearily out, he snatched it up before sinking back into the seat. A4 size, not very thick. There was nothing written on the front of it, and just the manufacturer’s logo and part number stencilled on the back. It had been sealed, and for a moment he considered taking it straight to forensics for examination. Only for a moment though. He knew exactly what it was, and from whom.

He still put a pair of latex gloves on before switching off the engine and using his car keys to open the envelope from the wrong end. Inside was a very slim report, printed on anonymous office laser paper. The title on the front page read ‘Magda Evans/Ivan ? (Russian)’. Beneath it, the cheap printer had done a poor job of reproducing a pair of mug shot photos of Magda.

McLean skim-read the text, then went back and read it again properly. It was mostly snippets of information taken from other reports; mentions of Magda in connection with ongoing or completed investigations. There were a few redacted black lines, but it didn’t take a genius to work out that she’d just been a pawn in the games of bigger players for most of her working life, and that had started painfully early. At the back was a copy of the hospital report detailing her injuries, which at least meant the SCDEA were up to date with their information gathering. He flipped over the last page, noting that the surgeon expected his patient to need at least eighteen months of reconstructive surgery and rehabilitation. Flipped back again when he realized there was nothing more. Bloody
typical of them to leave the job half done, much like it was bloody typical of them to hand over the information to him in such a stupid, faux-spy manner. Anyone could have seen the envelope there and helped themselves to it. Unless someone was watching him even now, waiting to see what he did so that they could report back to their ringmaster. And Duguid thought he was wasting time and money.

‘Bloody idiots.’ McLean slid the report back into its envelope and dropped it onto the passenger seat. Peeled off his latex gloves before starting the car. Of course, it could always be that Buchanan was right and there was no Russian called Ivan. Which begged the question: who had beaten Magda to within an inch of her life?

30

McLean wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Perhaps something a bit more Bedlam. After all, cranial electric therapy brought to mind Victorian asylums, high-ceilinged rooms tiled in white porcelain and with the windows set too far up the wall to see anything but the sky. Or for anyone to see in from the outside and realize what was going on. There should have been a dreadful contraption of a bed, with heavy leather restraints for head, arms and legs, and alongside it something that looked like the control system for a city-scale power station. There should, in short, have been more wires.

Instead, the room into which Doctor Wheeler had brought him and Emma was pleasantly bright, with a long window showing views out onto city rooftops and the far-distant castle. There was a reclining chair, and it had restraints, but they were slim and padded with what looked like sheepskin but was presumably more hypoallergenic than that. The machinery that would do the actual shocking was disappointingly small. It looked a bit like a transistor radio designed by someone with a knob fetish.