The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (5 page)

‘That’s so weird.’ She opened the bedroom door, paused a moment and then darted in, grabbed the stuffed animal toy off the bed, hugged it to herself. ‘Potamus! I remember him. Mum bought him for me when I was eight. Christ, that feels like it was just a couple of years ago.’

She kept the stuffed hippo with her as they moved into the living room. The largest room in the apartment, it was filled with mementos, books, photographs. As far as McLean was aware, even the furniture had moved down from Aberdeen with her, so if anything was going to jog her memory, this should. Emma stood in the middle of the room, looking slowly around. Then she noticed the low bookshelf by the window, its top lined with photos in frames. She picked one up, showing herself and a bunch of young women McLean didn’t recognize, peered at it, shook her head and set it back down again. The same routine went for all the others until finally she got to the one of her mother.

Grey-haired and frail, the old lady slumped in a high-backed armchair that looked too big for her. She wasn’t smiling, wasn’t even looking at the camera properly. Something in her eyes had died long before the photograph was taken. McLean only recognized her because he’d travelled
up to Aberdeen to introduce himself, try somehow to explain to Mrs Baird what had happened to her daughter and assure her that he’d do everything in his power to speed her recovery. What he had found had been a husk, a 65-year-old body with no mind. Emma had told him her mother was in a care home; what she’d failed to mention was the severity of her dementia.

‘This looks like my gran, only different.’ Emma placed the photograph back down on the bookshelf, one finger caressing the glass as she slowly turned away. ‘It’s my mum, isn’t it?’

‘She’s had Alzheimer’s for seven years. She’s getting the best care possible.’

‘Why don’t I remember any of this? The last thing I remember about Mum is talking to her about going to college. I was seventeen. I don’t even know how old I am now.’

‘Do you really want me to tell you?’

Emma walked across to the mantelpiece and stared at her reflection in the mirror hanging over it. ‘No. It’ll just depress me. Why can’t I remember?’

‘It’ll come back. Give it time. Doctor Wheeler said …’

‘I know what Doctor Wheeler said. But she doesn’t have to live with it, does she?’ Emma swept one arm around in an arc encompassing the room. ‘She doesn’t have to live in a place filled with stuff I don’t remember buying. Or worse, photographs of people twenty years older than I remember them.’

‘You want to go somewhere else? I’ve got a spare room. You’re more than welcome.’ The words tumbled out before he’d really considered them. It sounded almost like he was asking her to move in with him. The thought filled
him with conflicting feelings; hope and despair. And guilt. There was always guilt.

Emma took one more slow look at the living room, eyes finally settling on him with a desperate stare. ‘Please.’

It took almost an hour to get across town, fighting the traffic chaos caused by the construction work for the trams. By the time the car crunched over the gravel and came to a halt at the back door, the afternoon was almost gone. McLean was grateful that Jo Dexter had given him the time off, but sooner or later someone was going to phone him and drag him back to the station.

‘Just the one spare room?’ Emma asked as they walked towards the house. She seemed more relaxed here somehow. Perhaps it was easier being somewhere she wasn’t expected to recognize anything. McLean was searching for a suitable reply as he opened the door, but something large and furry trotted out, twining itself around Emma’s legs, tail high and purring like a badly tuned engine. He felt a moment’s irrational jealousy. Mrs McCutcheon’s cat had never shown him that kind of affection.

Emma bent down, stroked the cat. It nudged her hand, rubbing the side of its head on her arm, tail quivering with pleasure at meeting an old friend. She picked it up and it started to nuzzle at her face. And then McLean saw tears in the corners of her eyes.

‘There was a fire. Everyone was killed. Only the cat survived.’ She turned to face him. ‘The cat and you.’

‘There you go. Extra towels in the airing cupboard. I’m not sure how comfortable the bed is, but the sheets are clean.’

McLean stood just inside the guest bedroom, pointed at the door across the way that led to the en-suite bathroom. Emma sat on the end of a king-size bed looking as pale as the white sheets as she stared around the room. It was one of five spare bedrooms in the house, not counting McLean’s own room and his grandmother’s. Or the old box-rooms up in the roof where in times past the servants would have slept. Not for the first time he wondered why he kept the place. It was way too big for him.

‘It’s very nice. Thank you.’ Emma fiddled with the strap on her bag. Awkward. Beside her, Mrs McCutcheon’s cat had leapt onto the bed and was pawing at the bedding, purring as it nuzzled her free hand.

‘I’m just across the landing. Shout if you need anything. I’ll leave the light on.’ McLean cringed at his words, treating her like a child. But in some ways that’s what she was. Scared, alone, unsure of anything. He couldn’t begin to imagine what was going through her mind. Only that she didn’t seem to remember much that had happened since she had turned sixteen.

‘Tony?’

He turned in the doorway as he was about to leave. Emma pushed the cat aside, stood up.

‘We had something, didn’t we?’

An image in his head, unbidden. Lying on a cold bed, staring up at the ceiling. Rolling over to see spiky black hair poking up out of the top of the hogged duvet. A hand reaching out, touching his side. Warmth as the duvet and the body it contains envelope him.

‘Yes. We did.’

Another image. Older. A body lies in the dark, cold
water, naked and splayed out. Long dark hair tugged by the current into a fan like seaweed. A loss as deep and wide and cruel as the gaping cut across her neck.

‘You’re a kind man.’ Emma was suddenly very close, her hand touching his, those dark eyes staring straight at him. He saw her face properly for the first time in months. Those eyes sunken in their sockets like a junkie three days into Cold Turkey. Her cheekbones pushed up through grey skin as if trying to escape something terrible inside. And her hair, once spiky with a life of its own, now hung lank around her scalp, streaks of white mixed in with the black. But she was still Emma. There was a spark in her he recognized. Damaged, flickering, but there.

She reached up, lightly touched the side of his face, stood on tiptoes as she leaned forward to kiss him. And then she stopped, just inches away. A shudder ran through her, she dropped her head into her hands, started to shake. McLean went to touch her, but something stopped his hand before he made contact.

‘You’ll be OK.’ He tried to make the words as soft and reassuring as possible, but she still flinched at them, as if he’d slapped her. Mrs McCutcheon’s cat jumped down off the bed, scowled at McLean in a way that only cats can, and started to weave itself in and out of Emma’s legs until she bent down, stroked it, picked it up. The two of them stared at him until he felt uncomfortable. It didn’t take long.

‘If you need anything, just ask.’ He stepped backwards out of the room, leaving Emma to close the door behind him. Time, that was what Doctor Wheeler had said was needed. Time and stability. Well, he’d try to give her both,
but in the morning he was going to have to start looking for help.

Something woke him in the dead of night. One moment McLean was asleep, the next he was fully awake, staring up at the darkness and the shapes of his fading dream. He strained his ears, searching for the sound that had woken him. A cat yowling outside perhaps, or a car horn in the distance. He glanced over at the bedside table. 3.14 a.m., according to the red glow of the alarm clock. At the same time as he registered the meaning of the numbers, he heard the lightest of creaks, a floorboard outside his bedroom. And then the door latch clicked.

There was no light from the landing, just the feeling of air displaced. Soft footfalls on the threadbare carpet and then a body pulled back his duvet, clambered into bed beside him. Emma smelled at once familiar and deeply different. There was an antiseptic quality to her, as if after spending months in hospital her skin had absorbed the aroma completely. The arm that reached across his chest was stick-thin and bony. She pulled herself tight to his side, nestled her head against his shoulder, shivered slightly in her heavy cotton pyjamas. After a couple of moments, she started to mutter under her breath. He couldn’t make out the words, but she sounded scared.

McLean lay perfectly still, unsure quite what to do. There was nothing sexual in Emma’s behaviour, not like her earlier awkward advance. This was more like a child climbing into bed with a parent because something in the darkness has terrified it. He tilted his head gently, tried to listen to her voice. It sounded different, almost foreign. In
the dull glow of the alarm clock he could see that her eyes were tight shut. After a while, the words drifted away to silence, her breathing slowed and she relaxed into proper sleep. How long was it since he’d bade her good night? How long had she lain alone and frightened in a strange room? And how the hell was he going to get any sleep himself with her lying there? And yet he didn’t dare move, couldn’t bring himself to disturb her.

A flicker in the darkness, shadow upon silent shadow. His eyes darted to the dresser, sitting in front of the window. A different kind of black filtered in from outside, tinged with a distant orange glow of the night-time city. In its diffraction he saw an outline, the unmistakable shape of Mrs McCutcheon’s cat. There was no way he could see in the gloom, but he knew it was watching him.

Watching them both.

7

It had to come sooner or later, that much McLean knew. He wasn’t a betting man, but it was going to be either Ritchie or MacBride. Grumpy Bob could cope with pretty much anything Dagwood threw at him, and the newly promoted Acting Superintendent Duguid still had some small respect for Bob Laird. Either that or fear; Grumpy Bob knew where a surprising number of bodies were buried.

Bad enough Dagwood being in charge of CID, but until the Powers That Be decided how Scotland’s new Single Police Service was going to work, he was running the whole station – uniform, plain clothes and civilian staff. If he’d been insufferable before, it was as nothing compared to him now. Dagwood had always been of the ‘management by bullying’ school, and with no one to keep him in check, morale was taking a battering.

In a way, Dagwood had done him a favour sending him over to the SCU, although McLean knew damned well that had never been his intention. It meant that he didn’t have to deal directly with the man on a daily basis, although there was still a mountain of paperwork to get through. For some reason he couldn’t quite fathom, he seemed to be in charge of the overtime rosters for half a dozen investigative teams, even though he wasn’t actually running any of their investigations himself. Dagwood had
made it quite clear early on in his tenure that he didn’t trust McLean to run a sweepstake, let alone something as complex as a murder enquiry. Hence he had been placed under the watchful eye of DCI Dexter. Which was why he was currently sorting through sixteen sets of interviews, none of which yielded any useful information. DS Buchanan was supposed to be following up the lead on Malky the pimp, but so far he seemed to have gone to ground. The phone was a welcome distraction.

‘McLean.’

‘Umm. Sir. Sorry to call you. Didn’t really know who else I could ask.’

So Detective Constable MacBride had been the first to break.

‘What’s the problem?’ McLean set aside his report and leaned back in his chair.

‘I’m looking into a suicide. Apartment down in Trinity. Bloke hung himself.’

‘Hanged.’

‘What?’

‘Hanged, Constable. A picture is hung, a man is hanged. Who’s the senior officer in charge?’

‘Erm, that’d be me, sir.’

Bloody brilliant. True enough MacBride was a competent detective, but he was just a constable, and not long in plain clothes either. If there was a dead body, there should have been a detective inspector involved at the very least.

‘Where’s Ritchie?’

‘Dag– … Err … Acting Superintendent Duguid’s got her organizing the door-to-doors on the missing schoolgirl search.’

Which should have been uniform’s gig.

‘OK. What’s the problem with this suicide then?’ McLean rubbed his face and stifled a sigh. Looked at the reports in front of him, the mound of papers teetering over the edge of his in-tray. ‘No, forget that, Stuart. Give me the address and I’ll come have a look for myself.’

The posh bit might have been home to Edinburgh’s judges and lawyers, but time was you wouldn’t have dared walk through the back end of Trinity in uniform on your own. Even a pair of beat officers might find themselves in a sticky situation if the locals were in the mood for a fight. Parts of it were still bad, but the money pouring into Leith had begun to filter out sideways now, spreading middle-class civility like spilled extra-virgin olive oil as it went. Nowadays the violence stayed behind closed doors, more often emotional rather than physical though there was plenty of that too.