The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (50 page)

Doctor Austin went down like an expertly demolished building, crumpling into a tidy heap at Emma’s feet. She looked up at him, triumphant, and he saw some
thing in her eyes that had been missing since the day she woke up.

And then the chair beneath him gave a lurch to one side. McLean had no time to remember whether he’d put the noose around his neck or not. Arms flailing, he fell.

54

A quiet beeping sound roused him from the depths of blackness. McLean was aware of no dreams; there was just nothing and then the slow realization of noise. He tried to move, but something held him back. He was warm though, and the fear had gone. He couldn’t remember what the fear had been about. Something to do with his neck; his throat felt tight as if someone had tried to choke him. It was enough to know that it was over. He could relax now and let sleep wash away his exhaustion.

Later, he woke to a dull pain that seemed to run through his entire body. He didn’t open his eyes at first, just lay still and listened to the noises. It didn’t take long to work out that he was in hospital; the smell was as much a giveaway as anything. It was either that or he’d died and Hell was just like the Western General. With more effort than should have been necessary, he opened his eyes.

He could see that the room was darkened, the overhead lights dimmed and the blinds drawn. It still felt like he was staring into the sun. He blinked until tears ran down his cheeks, blurring everything including the plaster on his leg that anchored him to the bed. When he opened his eyes again, a familiar white-coated figure was leaning over him.

‘Back in the land of the living, Inspector? We were beginning to wonder.’

‘I …’ McLean coughed at the attempt to speak. His throat was as dry as a thirsty camel. ‘How long?’

‘We kept you sedated for a while. Had to get those bones set properly. There’s some metal pins in your leg now, will probably be a bit of a pain every time you go through airport security.’ Doctor Wheeler gave him a friendly smile, looked at her watch. ‘You’ve been under for about forty-eight hours.’

Two days. McLean let his head sink back into the pillows, tied to take stock of his injuries. His arms were stiff and sore, but unbroken. His left leg was fine, but the right was encased in plaster. Everything hurt, even blinking, and swallowing was such exquisite agony he almost passed out when he tried to clear his throat to speak again. Movement wasn’t impossible, just inadvisable for the time being, even if he had the energy. He tried not to think about needing to go to the toilet.

‘What happened?’ He vaguely remembered driving across the city. Had he been in an accident? Bloody typical to finally give in and buy himself a car, only to wrap it around a lamp post before he’d had it more than a couple of days.

‘You fell off a chair balanced on top of a trunk. That’s all anyone’s told me. You’ll have to ask Emma for the rest of it.’

‘She’s here?’

‘Hasn’t been away since you were brought in. I think she’s asleep in the waiting room. I’ll go and fetch her.’ Doctor Wheeler paused a moment. ‘She’s improved enormously, you know. I have to say I had my doubts about regression therapy, but it seems this time Eleanor has actually succeeded at something.’

‘This time?’ It was painful even forcing out a couple of words.

‘I shouldn’t really be gossiping.’ Doctor Wheeler pulled a chair closer to the bed, dropped wearily into it. ‘Who am I kidding? She bad-mouthed me for years.’

McLean kept silent. He might have said he was leaving a space for Doctor Wheeler to fill in her own time, but the truth was he didn’t think he could speak even if he wanted to.

‘She was my supervisor, when I was studying neurobiology. Gods, that was a fair few years back now.’ Doctor Wheeler shook her head in disbelief. ‘I thought she was brilliant. To be fair, she was brilliant. But completely self-obsessed. As long as you were useful to her, she’d tolerate you. But if you dared question her. Oof.’

Another pause. McLean looked sideways at the doctor. She was leaning right backwards, head tilted up to the ceiling, eyes closed. For a moment he thought she might have fallen asleep; couldn’t find it in him to be annoyed. If anyone looked like they needed a good kip it was Doctor Wheeler.

‘She got interested in the whole hypnosis thing about ten years ago. Maybe twelve. I read a couple of her early papers and it looked like she was onto something. But then there was a problem with one of her study groups. A couple of her students committed suicide. There was an investigation. The ethics committee got involved. I was about to head off overseas for a few years. Won a scholarship to study best practice in neurobiology around the world, would you believe. But dear old Eleanor put the
kybosh on that. Wrote to the head of the charity that was funding the trip, told him a whole load of lies about me.’

‘Why?’ McLean forced the word out in a hoarse whisper.

‘Because I was the one called in the Ethics Committee. Like I said, she can be a bit self-obsessed. She put her test subjects through the wringer without having any of the obvious safeguards in place. A couple of them just couldn’t cope.’

McLean didn’t know whether to be grateful that she was telling him this, or annoyed that she’d known it and let Doctor Austin treat Emma anyway.

‘Hanged themselves?’

‘What … ? Oh, no. One of them slit his wrists. John Phimister, that was his name. Poor old John. The other one jumped off the ferry from Rosyth to Rotterdam, somewhere in the middle of the North Sea. Half a dozen people saw him do it. That was Alastair Burns. Quiet chap. From what I recall, neither of them should have made it through the initial screening to be in the test group anyway. Eleanor just fudged the scores to make up the numbers.’ Doctor Wheeler straightened up in the chair, looked over at McLean. ‘Dear me, I’d not thought about any of this in a while. We patched things up about five years back, when she went into therapy rather than research. She’s a brilliant therapist, really. Just not an easy person to like. Sorry, Inspector. You must think me a terrible tell-tale.’

‘Not at …’ McLean got no further before his throat gave up in a spasm of painful coughing.

‘Rest, Tony. That’s what you need. Take it easy and I’ll go tell Emma you’re awake.’

McLean closed his eyes for a moment, his memory coming back in disjointed chunks, mixed in with the latest information on Doctor Austin. Brilliant or not, the hypnotist hadn’t done anything for Emma, so it must have been Madame Rose. The two of them had gone off for a walk. Was that all it took? And regression therapy. He recalled the first session with unusual clarity now. That was when it had all started to go downhill. He’d been tired, sure. Ever since Duguid had effectively doubled his workload. Or was it when Emma came home and started waking him in the middle of the night? But the rot had really set in after the first session with the monster. Doctor Austin.

He tried to sit up and immediately regretted it, winced through the pain lancing through his arm and leg as he looked across at the bedside table for his phone. Of course, it wasn’t there, and he wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway. He needed to talk to Grumpy Bob, or Ritchie. Even MacBride might understand. Collapsing back into the pillows, he stared up in frustration at the ceiling tiles. He knew now how they had all died: Duncan George, Patrick Sands, John Fenton, Grigori Mikhailevic, Caroline Sellars. Hell, probably even Jenny Nairn.

The problem was that it would be impossible to prove, and worse he’d probably be called insane for even suggesting it.

‘Oh my God. Tony. You’re awake.’

He barely had time to register the voice before she was
at his side. McLean stared up, his vision blurred by the overhead lights and for a moment thought he was looking at someone else entirely.

‘Kirsty?’ The word died in his throat. It couldn’t be Kirsty; she’d been dead more than a decade now.

‘Shhh.’ Emma knelt beside the bed, put one hand on his forehead, the other on his chest. ‘Caroline told me about your throat. The rope must have crushed your larynx or something.’

Doctor Wheeler hadn’t been lying when she had said Emma was much improved. The little-girl-lost eyes had gone and now her face glowed. Unless that was just a strange effect of the lighting. He’d seen it before, but only just realized how much her hair had changed, the spikes become gentle waves of darkest black, shot with here and there a few streaks of grey. That was why he’d thought it was Kirsty come for him. She looked just like her, even down to the mannerisms.

‘It’s nice.’ He lifted a weak hand, took a few strands between his fingers and felt how soft they were. ‘Suits you.’

Grumpy Bob was the first to show up from work, once word got out that he was fit for visitors. The old sergeant had brought a bag of grapes with him, which he proceeded to eat without offering any to McLean. Probably be too painful to swallow, what with his neck and everything, was all he gave by way of explanation.

‘You any idea how long you’re going to be in here for?’

‘Day more. Maybe two.’ McLean poked at the cast on his leg. ‘Don’t think I’m going to be back at the station for a while though.’

‘Probably for the best. Gives the rumour mill time to burn itself out.’

‘Oh Christ. What are they saying?’

‘Well, the best one I’ve heard yet is that you were indulging in some weird auto-asphyxiation erotic thing. Apparently you’ve always been into that sado-masochistic stuff and the only surprise is you’ve not hurt yourself this badly before.’

McLean tried not to laugh. Laughing hurt too much. ‘What’s the worst? I bet it can’t top that.’

Grumpy Bob’s grin disappeared. ‘Aye, well. Mebbe. A couple of folk think the job was getting too much for you and you tried to hang yourself.’ He pointed at McLean’s neck. ‘You might want to wear a cravat or something til that rope burn’s gone down a bit.’

Reflexively McLean’s hand went up to his chin, fingers lightly brushing the bruised skin just below. He didn’t have to guess who those folk were, or what the fallout from their supposition would be. ‘I guess I’m going to have to come up with a better story then. I really don’t fancy being pensioned off.’

‘They’ll not do that, Tony. We’re short enough good detectives as it is.’

There was an uncomfortable silence then, while Grumpy Bob continued to munch his way through the grapes. In all their years working together, it was the first time McLean had seen the sergeant eating fruit.

‘You found Mikhailevic’s body? Out in Gilmerton?’ Had he told anyone about that? It was all such a blur, he could hardly remember.

‘Aye, once we’d worked out what you were blethering on about. Almost as bad as the other lad, Sands. The Doc reckons he’d been hanging the longest, which just makes things even more complicated.’

‘Not really. He bought the rope, after all.’ McLean had already joined up all the dots in his head, but then he’d had a long time to think about it. ‘What happened to Doctor Austin?’

‘Who?’ Grumpy Bob spoke through a mouthful of half-chewed grape.

‘Doctor Austin. The hypnotherapist. Emma clocked her a good one with that book.’ It was one of the few clear memories McLean had of the whole afternoon of what he was coming to refer to as ‘the incident’.

‘Oh, her.’ Grumpy Bob wiped at his face with the back of his hand. ‘She’s not going to press charges.’

It took a while for McLean’s brain to catch up with this. ‘She’s … what?’

‘Way she told it, she could understand why Emma walloped her like that. Thought she was attacking you, whatever.’

McLean dropped his head back into the pillow, spoke to the ceiling. ‘She was the one who killed them all, Bob. All of the hangings, probably Jenny Nairn too. They all came through her study groups at that college. She picked them out, marked the ones who were depressed, did something. I don’t know how. Made them hang themselves. She nearly killed me too. That’s why she was round the house in the first place.’

Grumpy Bob was halfway through scrunching up the
empty paper bag that had contained his grapes, prior to throwing it at the bin and missing. He stopped, mouth hanging slightly open. ‘You what?’

‘Hypnosis, Bob. That’s what she did to them all.’

‘Don’t be daft, sir. You can’t hypnotize someone into doing something that’ll harm them. Something they don’t want to do.’

Uncomfortable thoughts hovered around McLean’s consciousness. He concentrated on the central strand of his theory. Worry about the ramifications later. ‘That’s the whole point. They were all of them severely depressed. They all wanted to kill themselves. She latched onto that, fed on it somehow.’ Like she was being controlled by something larger, more deadly. Something he didn’t want to think about.

Grumpy Bob stared at him for a while before saying quietly: ‘So how did she get her claws into you?’

‘Come on, Bob. Time was you and old Guthrie wouldn’t leave me alone for five minutes. Back when Kirsty died. It was subtle, I’ll give you that, but you roped all my friends into suicide watch too.’

‘Aye but you pulled through, didn’t you? You’re no more suicidal than my finger.’ Grumpy Bob waggled it, just in case, then threw the bag at the bin. Missed.