The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (8 page)

‘I’ve been working with Stu– … DC MacBride on the suicide case. You know.’ Ritchie leaned against the door, still not actually entering the office.

‘I visited the scene, yes.’ And got a bollocking for it. ‘What did you make of it?’

‘The scene? I think he’s right. There’s something odd about it.’

‘But you can’t be more specific, right?’

‘Yeah. And that’s what’s bugging me.’

‘You want to go deeper? Do a profile on the victim?’ McLean dug around in the recesses of his memory for
anything specific about the case. Came up with less than he’d have liked. ‘Did we have a name for him?’

‘Grigori Mikhailevic, according to his neighbour. Lithuanian. Of Russian descent if that name’s anything to go by. Apparently he was over here studying accountancy. I guess that’s enough to turn anyone to suicide.’

‘Family?’

‘Working on it. I’ve put in a call to the embassy, but you know how long it can take to get a response these days, especially if they think it’s a suicide.’

‘You haven’t told them you think it’s suspicious?’

‘Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it. I can’t.’

Ahh. So that’s what it’s about. ‘Let me guess.’ McLean raised a finger in the direction of the ceiling and the floor above. Not that the office in question was immediately over his own; that would have been far too demeaning for Dagwood.

‘As far as he’s concerned it’s a simple case of suicide. He’s already chewed MacBride’s ear off once for even calling out SEB without asking first. Wants it written up and filed away ASAP.’

And they made this man acting superintendent. Put him in charge of an entire station. McLean slumped back in his seat, resisted the urge to bury his head in his hands.

‘I know. He chewed me off a strip just for going along to have a look.’

‘He does know that any dead body has to be investigated for foul play?’ It was a question, but not one that should have needed answering. McLean just shrugged.

DS Ritchie looked over her shoulder into the empty
corridor beyond, as if expecting the object of their scorn to appear at any moment.

‘I’ve not been here long, sir. But if you want my opinion, I think he’s struggling to cope. He shouldn’t even have been made up to super, let alone put in charge.’

‘You won’t find me disagreeing with you, Kirsty, but there’s not a lot I can do. I’m just a humble detective inspector. It was hard enough dealing with him when he was just a DCI himself.’

‘What about McIntyre? Is there nothing she can do?’ There was a desperation in Ritchie’s question, like a small child about to scream ‘but it’s not fair!’

‘Last time I spoke to Jayne she was running to stay still. The phrase “poisoned chalice” comes to mind. This whole Police Scotland is a bugger’s muddle and no mistake.’

‘Aye, I thought as much.’ Ritchie’s face dropped, as if the last hope had died and unremitting hardship was the best she could expect from now on.

‘What’s he got you doing, then?’ McLean asked.

‘Anything. Everything. Mostly running around after DI Spence. That and responding to every petty burglary call that comes in like I was a beat constable. Not much actual detecting, though.’ Ritchie nodded at McLean’s desk. ‘Paperwork. Lots of it. Beginning to wish I’d stayed up in Aberdeen.’

McLean looked at the piles on his desk, up at the clock on the wall. He’d been reading for at least three hours. Wasting time. ‘Is MacBride about?’

‘Down in the canteen last I saw him.’

‘OK. Go and get him. I’ll meet you out the back in ten minutes.’

‘Where’re we going?’ The spark of intrigue in Ritchie’s face was worth the trouble McLean knew he was inevitably going to get himself into.

‘The City Mortuary. Let’s see if Angus has had a chance to look at this dead Lithuanian student.’

McLean paused at the door to the CID room where all the detective sergeants lived, wondering whether going in was a good idea or not. Sooner or later word would get upstairs, and then there’d be consequences. On the other hand, if his instinct was right, and young MacBride’s hunch was good, there was every chance a murder was about to go uninvestigated just so the crime statistics would look good. A sophisticated and well-planned murder at that, which meant either that there was more to Grigori Mikhailevic than was immediately apparent, or someone had acquired a taste for killing. Neither option was particularly appealing.

Or, of course, it was a suicide and he was going to look a right tit.

A series of desks cluttered up most of the space, reminding him more of a school room than an office. Perhaps it was the way they all faced the whiteboard wall. Or maybe it was the mixture of the hard-working and the semi-comatose sat at those desks that reminded him of hot summer afternoons and Latin declension. Detective Sergeant Carter was in earnest conversation with some uniform PCs and barely looked up as he walked in. A couple of other sergeants glanced around from their desks, phones clamped to their ears, eyes slightly wide with the fear of being caught looking at naughty pictures
hidden inside a textbook. Both of them hung up without a word when they saw who it was had interrupted their afternoon; no bollocking from Dagwood today, no need to pretend they were busy.

McLean spotted his quarry over in the corner, feet up on his desk, face bathed in warm sunshine from the large window. Grumpy Bob had the look about him of a man who has fallen asleep reading a report. His balding head was tilted back, mouth slightly open, eyes tightly shut, but as McLean approached, before he could even say anything, the detective sergeant had swung his legs off the desk, scooped up his report and begun leafing through the upside-down pages. Then he saw who it was.

‘Oh, it’s you, sir. I thought …’

‘Dagwood that bad, is he?’

‘Don’t get me started. He pops in here about once every bloody five minutes. No wonder he never gets anything done.’

‘Well, you never know. HQ might even choose someone before Christmas. Then again, they might decide to make his position permanent.’

‘Oh Christ. Don’t.’ Grumpy Bob groaned at the thought. Behind him, McLean heard several others.

‘You got a moment, Bob?’ he asked.

‘If it gets me out of here, aye.’

‘Well, it might. You know that suicide DC MacBride’s been investigating?’

‘Aye.’

‘Well I want you to have a look at it too. Go over his report. Stick your nose in at the scene if SOC are finished with it.’

‘Give it the benefit of my many years of experience, you mean.’

‘That’s the one. Just keep it low profile.’

Grumpy Bob raised his eyes heavenward and frowned. ‘I take it this is not a sanctioned use of investigative resource.’

‘Not exactly, no.’

‘Nae bother, sir. I’ll get right on it. Got to be better than wading through all this pish.’ Grumpy Bob thwapped the sheaf of paper down on his desk. ‘New procedures for community policing, my arse.’

‘Aye, well. You can get off it and go have a nosey. On the quiet’d be best, but if Dagwood finds out and kicks up a fuss, tell him I sent you.’

‘Oh, don’t you worry about that, sir. I will.’

Hidden away down the Cowgate in the bowels of the Old Town, the City Mortuary was an easy place to overlook. That might have been the idea behind putting it there, of course. No one likes to be confronted by their mortality. A fresh breeze blew in off the Firth of Forth, whistling as it picked up speed down the narrow, canyon-like confines of the street. Throwing rubbish around their feet like playful paper dogs as they approached the entrance.

McLean held open the door, then followed Ritchie and MacBride into the air-conditioned lobby. The little party barely got a nod from the security guard; he’d seen them often enough before. They scribbled their names on the visitor pad anyway, before heading into the cool interior.

Angus Cadwallader was two-finger typing at an ancient computer in the office off the examination room when
McLean rapped his knuckles on the open door. The pathologist looked around, peering over half-moon spectacles, eyes taking a while to regain their focus before a broad smile spread across his face.

‘Tony. It’s been ages. I was beginning to think I’d done something.’ He cast an eye over McLean’s shoulder to the two officers standing behind him. ‘The team’s all back together, I see.’

‘Not quite. Grumpy Bob’s off down to Trinity. I thought the rest of us deserved a break from the office. Wondered if you’d had a chance to look at our Hanged Man yet.’

‘And you decided to walk rather than phone? Things must be bad.’ Cadwallader grabbed a pair of latex gloves from a box by the door, then led them through to the cold store. A bank of stainless steel refrigerator doors, about two foot square and each with a heavy handle, were set into one wall. Behind each, a body awaited, ready to give up its secrets.

‘This one, I think. A pity Tracy’s not here. She knows where everyone is.’ Cadwallader opened a door, slid out a long shelf with a corpse on it, draped in a white sheet. Rolled back, this revealed the face of the young man McLean had last seen dangling from a stout hemp rope. His face was still distorted, his neck mottled with bruises.

‘Grab that trolley will you, Constable.’ Cadwallader pointed across the room. Startled, DC MacBride complied, and together they transferred the cadaver on its tray to the examination table through in the next room.

‘You’ve done him already,’ McLean said as the pathologist rolled the sheet down further. A brutal Y-shaped incision across the dead student’s chest and down to his
crotch had been sewn up with delicate care, no doubt the work of the missing Doctor Sharp.

‘Yesterday. I’m still waiting on the results of the tox screening to come back. I was making a start on the report when you arrived.’

‘The edited version?’ McLean nodded at the young man on the slab, wondering why Cadwallader had wheeled him out.

‘In a word, odd.’

‘Odd?’

‘Yes. Odd. I couldn’t put my finger on it at first. But see here.’ The pathologist lifted one of the dead student’s hands up, splayed out the fingers. They were puffy and red where blood had pooled in them as they hung at his sides after death, but otherwise they looked well enough kept. The nails were trimmed neatly but would have needed doing again in a week or so. Had their owner not died.

‘What am I looking at?’ McLean asked. Behind him he could sense DS Ritchie leaning in for a closer look. No doubt DC MacBride was backing off. No fan of the dead, he.

‘It’s what’s not there.’ Cadwallader put down the hand and picked up the other. Here the fingernails were pared right back, the pads of the fingers thick.

‘A guitarist.’ McLean turned to MacBride, surprised to find him watching closely. ‘Was there a guitar in the flat, Constable?’

‘I think so, sir. I can check.’

‘You’re missing the point, Tony. Either that or being deliberately obtuse.’ Cadwallader put the hand back down, rolled the white sheet back over the body. ‘I’ve checked
those hands thoroughly and there’s no sign of any damage to the fingers. No splinters or wood fragments at all. It’s just about possible he might have got that rope up over that beam without damaging his hands, but it’s unlikely.’

‘It’s not much to go on though, is it?’

‘On its own, no. But you saw his nails. They were quite clean, but it’s amazing what gets left behind even after a good scrub. I could tell you a fair bit of his history over the twenty-four hours leading up to his death going by what was under those nails. Probably longer if I had the time and resources. But there was one thing very notable by its absence. No hemp fibres.’

For a moment McLean wondered what cannabis residue had to do with anything, but then the penny dropped.

‘The rope.’

‘Exactly, Tony. The rope. Your man there may have hanged himself, but if he did, then someone else put the rope up over the beam and around his neck.’

10

News had obviously run ahead of him. McLean could tell by the way the few other plain clothes officers he met on his way up to the third floor looked at him like he was a marked man. It was a stare he was all too familiar with; that mixture of anger that he’d poked the hornets’ nest and relief that the little buggers were going to be focusing their attention on someone else for a change.

Duguid’s office door was open, and McLean almost walked straight in as he would have done back when Jayne McIntyre was in charge. A self-preserving sixth sense stopped him. That and a quiet ‘ahem’ from the desk to one side of the door. He looked around to see a pale-faced constable manning the barricades.

‘He’s, um, expecting you, sir.’

McLean raised an eyebrow. ‘Anyone else had a strip torn off yet?’

‘I couldn’t say, sir. DS Laird was in earlier though.’

Poor old Grumpy Bob. Well, he’d been dealing with the likes of Dagwood for long enough to develop the necessary thick skin. McLean took a deep breath, then advanced upon the open doorway. Across the room he could see the object of his scorn hunched over his desk, peering myopically at the screen of a tiny laptop computer. He rapped lightly on the door frame. Acting Superintendent
Charles Duguid stopped what he was doing, looked up and scowled.