The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (49 page)

He noticed the smell when he stood up, and realized that it had been there from the moment he’d stepped inside. Not exactly rot, nor mould, it was something he couldn’t quite place. Other than in a box marked ‘unpleasant’. The air in the house was stagnant, unmoving. He doubted both that there were any windows open, and that anyone had moved from room to room for a while. Like its owner, the place was stuck in a limbo between dead and alive.

The entrance hall opened onto two small front rooms, then past the stairs to a kitchen and scullery at the back. None of them showed much trace of habitation in recent times. The house was furnished, and generally tidy, but it was as if someone had gone out the front door fifty years earlier and never come back.

Upstairs showed much the same lack of habitation. There were three bedrooms, all small, all kitted out with antique beds and old wardrobes. In the bathroom, the water in the toilet bowl had evaporated away, concentric rings of lime scale marking its slow disappearance. McLean looked out through a dust- and cobweb-covered window, down to the overgrown garden below. He’d missed it before, but there was an old garage at the end,
and a gently curving path knocked through the brush leading from the back door. Someone had been down there often enough, even if they’d never bothered with the rest of the property.

The back door had a deadlock and latch like the front. There was also a heavy iron bolt, but it had long since been painted open. As he stepped out of the dead house into the garden it was as if someone had turned the lights and volume back up. Birds sang from the trees, cars whooshed past on the road out the front, and the familiar, reassuring roar of the city bypass covered everything. McLean followed the path through brambles up to his waist, whippy elder bushes and weed ashes that must have been growing for ten years or more, until he finally found himself at the garage.

It was a stone-built structure, tall and narrow, with a steep-pitched slate roof. Probably a coach house in olden days, though it didn’t seem large enough to have housed stables. The paint on the wooden door was coming off in thick, curly flakes, but the keyhole glistened in the sunlight where it had been used, regularly and recently. He tried the handle first, found it wasn’t locked.

If the smell in the house had been unpleasant, it was nothing compared to the stench that hit him now. This one was all too easily identifiable. He’d smelled it too often before, most recently in a tiny flat in the Colonies. But he didn’t need that cue. The body hanging from the beams by its broken neck was clue enough. Sunlight speared through a skylight, dappled by the trees outside. It played upon the naked skin like a weird, moving camouflage.

McLean stepped carefully into the garage, noting the layout. At the far end, double doors would open up onto
the lane. There was plenty of space for a car, but like most garages this one was used mainly for storage. The walls were lined with old wooden shelves, piled up with tin boxes, glass jars, rubbish mainly. A workbench stretched under a window whose panes of glass had been painted white. An attempt to stop sunlight fading the paintwork on a brand-new car sometime in the 1950s, no doubt. The obligatory pair of sit-up-and-beg bicycles leaned against a stack of tea chests, tyres flat, wicker baskets almost completely rotted away. An old set of wooden stepladders lay against the wall to his left, resting where they had landed after the deceased took his last, long step. And there was no doubting it was he, McLean saw, as he walked slowly around the body. Decay might have set in, but enough of his features were still identifiable.

Grigori Mikhailevic.

‘He loved her so much, but she felt nothing for him. That was his undoing, in the end.’

McLean started at the sound behind him, whirled around. All he could see was an outline, silhouetted by the bright sunshine outside, but he recognized the voice.

‘She killed them, didn’t she. Lured them in, tied the nooses, made them do it.’

A little girl laugh. ‘Jenny wouldn’t hurt a fly, Inspector. She was just my huntress. My tool. The spirit’s tool.’

He took a step forwards as the figure moved in the doorway. Still the sun cast it in shadow, made him squint to see a face. Then he caught the eyes, glowing like lava in the night. They held him tight, helpless as an infant, pulling him in, dragging him down, down, down.

52

He can’t think straight. It’s like that time Phil spiked his drink with something he’d cooked up in the lab. Only then they’d both just stared at the wall, trying to work out why the paper was patterned the way it was. For six hours, he thinks it was. Only he can’t remember. He’s not entirely sure who Phil is, either. Something about a place called America, wherever that is.

He’s driving … where? Is it a good idea to drive in this condition? He doesn’t know, and anyway he can’t stop. It’s taking all his concentration just to keep his hands on the wheel, keep the car straight.

There’s someone sitting beside him, but he dare not look. There’s the concentration needed to keep the car on the road, of course. But there’s also memories of fire and brimstone, of burning eyes and deep despair, of a man hanging from a rope, his neck broken, his flesh beginning to rot.

Time passes, and he is no longer in the car. Did they crash? He thinks he’d remember that. His parents crashed, so long ago. Smashed to tiny pieces as their aeroplane collided with the side of a mountain. They’d left him all alone, even though they’d promised him they never would. The fires had taken them, burned them into nothing but ashes and memories.

He is in a room. A kitchen. The terrible presence is
beside him, murmuring quietly. He knows this place. His grandmother lived here. And then she left one day in an ambulance, never came back. He remembers the days dragging into weeks, the weeks into months, hope dying bit by bit until finally there was nothing left but despair.

Now he is in an attic room, small, the servants’ quarters when people still had servants. A leather suitcase lies on the narrow iron-frame bed and he opens it without realizing he has been told to. Inside lies a coil of stout hemp rope. He reaches in and takes it out.

And finally, where he always knew he would end up. He stands in the middle of an attic, warm like a lover’s embrace. The rope is cold in his hands. Cold like the winter’s day when they lowered her coffin into the ground. The monster stands beside him, talking to him in words he cannot understand. His fingers know what to do though, carefully folding and twisting the rope, looping it round and round to a count of thirteen. Unlucky thirteen, like his life.

He has to pull an old trunk into the middle of the room, place a precarious chair on top of it so that he can reach up into the rafters, tie off the rope on a stout crossbeam, just the right length. He wouldn’t want to hit the floor.

Gazing down, he is aware of movement in the dark shadows under the eaves. Something watches him with patient eyes. Watches the monster as it pulls out his pain, his suffering and loss. Lays it out for all to see. Why would he want anyone to see that? Why would he want to see it himself. He dealt with it, didn’t he? Put it all behind him. Moved on.

As he steps back down to the floor, something rushes past him. Commotion, hissing, a flash of teeth and claws and fur. The monster roars: ‘He is mine!’ A scream like nothing he has ever heard and a tiny body falls at his feet. It gasps for breath, mewling and twitching as he looks down at it. He should go to its aid, but all he can do is stand and wait.

The monster steps up to him, kicks the cat so hard it skitters away across the dusty floorboards into the darkness. Another innocent creature hurt because of him. How much better the world would be without him in it. How much less his suffering.

He feels the hands of the monster on him then, stroking his shoulders, running a finger down the middle of his back, another up the side of his neck and into his hair. He does not fear the monster, yet neither can he disobey it. At its unspoken command he begins to undress.

53

His first rational thought was for Mrs McCutcheon’s cat. Somehow it had broken whatever hypnotic trance he had been under, but now it was injured, possibly even dead. The thought of it dying filled him with even greater gloom than the depression that had already settled over him.

McLean struggled to regain control of himself, even as his body continued to respond to someone else’s commands. It was almost as if he were watching from outside, only he could see everything through his own eyes, including the noose now dangling beside his head, the bottom of its loop about level with his eyes.

‘It will all be over soon. The pain, the suffering, the despair.’ The voice behind him was impossible to ignore. It reached into the core of him, pulled out the sadness that had dogged him ever since he had waved his parents goodbye that fateful night, never to see them again.

‘No.’ He forced the word out through teeth clenched tight. He was done mourning for his parents. He would never forget them, but life went on. The dead held no sway over him.

‘Shush now. Calm.’ A finger touch on his bare shoulder. When had he begun to undress? Why had he begun to undress? He couldn’t remember. There was just the touch, and with it an overwhelming sense of grief. Yes, life went
on, but with all the joy sucked out of it by the bad things that lived on with it.

‘Climb up, up. You need to get as high as you can.’ There was something familiar about the voice, about the person behind it. McLean wanted to shake the fog out of his head, reach up and ram his fists into his eyes until he saw stars. Anything other than what his body was doing. And yes, he wanted to get away from the sorrow, the gut-punching waves of sadness that welled up in him, one after another. But there were better ways than this, surely? Anger had helped in the past. And throwing himself into his work.

‘Your anger is all spent, and everyone at work wants you to leave. What will you do without those props? How will you fend off the horrors that have been with you all these years? Better to embrace them, accept them. Take that one step and you will find peace.’

This time the voice was different, all around him, inside him even. McLean struggled against it, but it was too powerful to resist. He had climbed up onto the trunk. And then onto the chair balanced on top of it. The noose was in his hands, the rope looping down towards the floor. All he needed to do was slip it over his head, tighten it just so, and shift it round so the knot pressed against his left ear. That way when his fall was stopped, the weight of his body would snap the vertebrae, killing him instantly. Blessed relief.

‘But. I. Don’t. Want. To. Die.’ Each word was a struggle, each a spasm in his arms as he fought the urge to lift the noose over his head. He was tense now, teetering on the edge of the chair. The floor was somehow miles away,
the air between him and the wooden boards filled with darting clouds that shone and shimmered. Not clouds, but ghosts. Souls once trapped, released in a magical fire. Lost now. Searching for a way through to wherever it was they were meant to go. They sensed his ending, flocked to him as if in his despair he might lead them to their goal. Perhaps there would be some benefit in his passing, then. Some final good to come out of the suffering.

His grip on reality slipped away, inch by inch, step by step. Like poor old Pete Buchanan, staring wild-eyed and terrified as his jacket ripped stitch by stitch. McLean almost laughed at the thought that the two of them would end in such a similar manner.

‘He said he didn’t want to die, you bitch.’

A different voice shattered the bubble that surrounded him. It brought feelings of happiness, excitement, caring. And it had a name.

Emma.

McLean turned around, suddenly back in full command of his body. A single scene painted itself on his eyeballs. Doctor Austin, halfway through turning to see who had interrupted her. Emma with a book in her hands, heavy, leather bound, old, expensive. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s student copy of Gray’s
Anatomy
. She swung it round in an arc, putting the full weight of her body behind it, and as it connected with the hypnotist’s face the spell clouding his thoughts evaporated.