Dead Men's Bones (Inspector Mclean 4) (10 page)

The
tattooed man incident room was quiet; no one in that early in the morning. Not as if there’d been a great sense of urgency about the case to start with, but with the Weatherly investigation across the corridor killed by edict from on high, there was even less enthusiasm in CID than normal. It didn’t help that they weren’t even called CID any more. Not really sure what they were one day from the next.

McLean scanned the whiteboard and the scant information on it. There were more questions than answers, perhaps unsurprisingly. They still didn’t even have an ID for the man, even if the tattoos meant they were inching ever closer. He needed to get MacBride or Ritchie on to chasing up those DNA results; sort out getting Eddie Cobbold down to the mortuary, if Angus could be persuaded. Then there was the small matter of finishing up the Weatherly report and prepping for what would undoubtedly be a fun press conference.

He was mid-yawn when the door opened, revealing the crumpled form of Detective Sergeant Laird. You could put Grumpy Bob in a perfectly pressed suit first thing in the morning and he’d still look like he’d slept in it by coffee time. Chances were he had.

‘You look as tired as I feel, sir. Thought that would
have been a load off your mind.’ Grumpy Bob nodded his head in the direction of the main incident room.

‘If only it were that easy, Bob. Sure, we’ve got enough to satisfy the PF, but I don’t think the press’ll be that happy.’ McLean leaned against the nearest desk, taking the weight off his aching hip. ‘Damn, this is why Dagwood gave me the case in the first place. He knew it wouldn’t be long before someone shut it down. Didn’t want to be the one standing up in front of the cameras, telling the world how little we care.’

Grumpy Bob let out a sound that might have been a harrumph. ‘You give him credit for more than he’s due.’

‘Not this time. He warned me at the start. No. There’s something more going on here.’ McLean unfolded the slim brown envelope he’d already shown to Duguid, handed it over. Grumpy Bob took it, pulled out the sheaf of photographs and shuffled through them. His eyebrows shot up at the first, then tightened into a frown and finally a scowl as he reached the last.

‘Do I want to know where you got those?’ He handed the envelope with its disturbing contents back.

‘Special Branch, at a guess. Or whatever it’s calling itself these days.’ McLean told Grumpy Bob all about his visit, and about the clues at Weatherly’s flat that DS Ritchie had uncovered. ‘It’s all bloody politics, and you know how much I like that.’

‘I’d back right off if it was me. Photos or no photos. Sounds like you’ve two factions gearing up for a fight up in the high corridors. You don’t want to be stuck in the middle of that.’

‘Well, it’s not as if I haven’t got anything else to do.’
McLean stepped closer to the whiteboard, eyes skimming over the words in the hope that some answer might present itself. He still had the photographs in their envelope, noticed he was tapping them against his thigh. Willed himself to stop.

‘Talking of Ritchie, you any idea if she’s coming in today?’

Grumpy Bob shook his head. ‘Haven’t heard. Not like her to call in sick.’

‘She’s been out of sorts all week. Ever since we went to see Weatherly’s house in Fife.’ McLean shuddered as the image of the two dead girls lying side by side in their bed swam up into his mind. He couldn’t stop himself from opening up the envelope and pulling out the first photograph, staring at the image of Andrew Weatherly walking in the park with young Joanna and Margaret. They were all holding hands, swinging off his arm, but the woman holding on at the other side, completing the family picture, wasn’t Morag Weatherly. Jennifer Denton looked every inch the mother of the children, not the stern PA they had interviewed just the previous day.

‘Don’t, Tony.’ Grumpy Bob laid a hand on McLean’s shoulder. ‘You’re only doing what they want you to. Let it go. Concentrate on this.’ He pointed at the whiteboard.

‘You’re right, Bob. As ever.’ McLean shoved the photograph away. So Weatherly’s relationship with his PA was more personal than assistant. It hardly made any difference to the outcome of the case. Just made it all the sadder, and perhaps went some way towards explaining her attitude to their investigation. Of course, there were the other photographs and the story they told. Secrets
he’d been given that would surely also be finding their way into less sympathetic hands. How long before the gutter press got hold of them? And what would it mean for him when they did?

‘Christ, what a mess.’ McLean picked up the marker pen, underlined ‘tattoos’ and put a question mark beside it. ‘See if you can find MacBride can you, Bob? I need to get this Weatherly report out of the way. Then we’re going to have a little trip to the mortuary.’

‘Well, that’s not something you see every day.’

Eddie Cobbold rocked back on his heels, recoiling from the sight in front of him. The city mortuary, late morning. McLean had arrived a few minutes before DC MacBride and the tattoo artist, hoping to have a moment alone with Cadwallader. The pathologist could be prickly when it came to letting civilians anywhere near his bodies. Unfortunately Angus was nowhere to be found, so Tracy had kitted them out with overalls and shown them into the examination theatre. The body had been waiting, covered up with a white sheet. Tracy had so far only revealed the man’s head.

‘It gets worse, I can assure you.’ McLean recognized the voice without turning. Angus Cadwallader crossed the room from the far entrance with long strides, arriving at the opposite side of the examination table, where his assistant was already standing. It felt stupidly like some kind of Wild West stand-off, the medics facing the detectives over the dead body.

‘Morning, Angus.’ McLean decided to go for the
direct approach. ‘This is Eddie Cobbold. Eddie, Angus Cadwallader.’

‘Yes, yes. Pleased to meet you and all that. Now can we get on with this? Only I’ve a stack of examinations to do and this fellow’s bed blocking.’

‘I thought it best if we didn’t start without you.’ McLean saw the glint in his old friend’s eye and realized that the irascibility was just for show. He too wanted to know the secrets of the tattooed man.

‘Well, I’m here now, so shall we start?’ Cadwallader nodded to Dr Sharp beside him. ‘Tracy.’

She pulled back the white sheet with a practised ease, folding it neatly as she went, revealing the dead man in all his glory. McLean had seen him as he was pulled from the water, and again when the initial post-mortem had begun. He’d seen the photographs as well, but still the sight of the man, up close and personal, was a shock.

‘Whoa!’ Eddie let out the word with a long whistle, ran a hand through his close-cropped hair in surprise.

‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ Cadwallader leaned over the body, picked up an arm, turning it to expose the palm of the hand, covered like the rest of the body in swirls and spots of black ink. ‘I’m told that’s a particularly sensitive spot.’

‘It is. Horribly painful.’ Eddie peered at the hand. ‘Can I touch?’

‘You’ve got gloves on?’ Cadwallader asked. Eddie held up his hands to show that he did.

‘Be my guest. I’m keen to hear what you think.’

McLean took a couple of steps back as the pathologist
and the tattoo artist huddled over the dead man. MacBride, he noticed, hadn’t come anywhere near.

‘You rather be outside, Constable?’

‘I’d rather be anywhere, frankly, sir.’

‘Sensible chap. Why don’t you head back to the station? I can take it from here.’

MacBride didn’t even protest, just nodded a pathetically grateful ‘thanks’ and fled. By the time McLean turned his attention back to the examination table, Eddie and Angus were side by side, the tattoo artist manipulating the dead man’s leg as he pointed out things of interest.

‘See here, the scabs are well formed and even, so that’s probably been done a couple weeks back. This swirl here, connects in there, that’s newer.’

‘Any idea what any of it means?’ McLean asked.

‘Means?’ Eddie looked up at him. ‘Haven’t a clue. I can tell you what’s old and what’s new. What it means is for the nutters to decide.’

McLean looked at the painted flesh. He could hardly make anything of it at all. ‘When you say old, how old do you mean? Days, months?’

‘Oh no. Years. There’s a couple of places. Here, look.’ Eddie moved up the body to the man’s right shoulder, twisted the dead skin around and pointed at a spot not a million miles from the location of McLean’s own misguided tattoo. ‘This is pretty much the first place most people get done. Our man here’s no different. There’s markings here underneath the new work, and it’s fitted in around it, too. Have you got a magnifying glass or something, Doctor?’

‘Angus,
please.’ Cadwallader took the glass from the tray presented to him by Tracy and handed it over. ‘Can you show me?’

The two of them bent to the task, and McLean took a step back again. From what he could hear of the conversation, they were arguing over exactly what form the original tattoo took. It was cross-shaped, but there were wavy lines to either side of it as well. Unless they were something different.

‘A dagger maybe,’ Eddie said after a while.

‘Yes. A dagger. And these look like wings?’

McLean pulled out his phone, checked to see if he’d got a decent signal. There was Wi-Fi in the building, but he didn’t have the password. The browser worked slowly as it processed first the search results for the query, then downloaded the photograph he was looking for. Eddie and Angus were still arguing over what was old and what was new by the time he’d found it.

‘Is it anything like that?’ He held up the phone for them both to see. Cadwallader peered over the rim of his spectacles, squinting, as if that would make the image clearer. McLean stepped closer, handed him the phone. Eddie looked in over his shoulder, then back at the dead man.

‘Yup. That’s it.’ He too squinted at the tiny image on the touch screen before reading out the words. ‘ “Who Dares Wins.” That’s the SAS, isn’t it?’

McLean nodded, took his phone back. ‘Have a look on his other shoulder, maybe a forearm.’ He tapped the screen again, waiting while the next image came up. ‘See if you can’t find one of those as well. Wings from the
Parachute Regiment. There’s more Paras in the SAS than any other regiment. If you can find that, I’m guessing our man here was a soldier once, rather than a numpty with a military fetish. And if that’s the case, we should be getting a hit on the DNA database soon.’

He
wanted to get straight back to the tattooed man incident room, and make a start on collating information about ex-military Missing Persons. McLean had a couple of contacts he could phone to make more discreet enquiries too; if the man really was ex-SAS then that could narrow the field right down. He wanted to do all of these things, but he had to finish the report on the Weatherly investigation first or face the wrath of Dagwood.

DC MacBride had made a good job of pulling everything together. There were transcripts of all the interviews, a detailed forensic report, the pathologist’s findings. Normally he would have expected a sergeant to write up the bulk of the report for him, but DS Ritchie was still off sick. No point dragging in Grumpy Bob; even less giving it to DS Carter, only to have to do it all over again. So it was down to him.

It was nice to have a simple task for a change. The facts of the crime weren’t complicated, for all that they were terrible and tragic. It was only the reason behind them that was a mystery. McLean picked up the slim brown envelope given to him by the man from Special Branch. A possible answer to that mystery lay inside, but only a partial one. And he wasn’t so naive that he couldn’t see the hook and line attached to this particularly juicy
worm. They wanted him to look into this, wanted the apple cart upset. He just couldn’t quite work out why.

McLean turned his attention back to the report, staring at the cursor flicking on and off on his screen. The brown envelope was still there, the photographs still inside. Some things you just couldn’t resist.

He pulled them out, turned the first face down and concentrated on the second. It showed Weatherly and Jennifer Denton, in flagrante delicto as the more prudish papers might have put it. The third and fourth photographs were similar, presumably taken at the same time, and established the fact that Andrew Weatherly was peculiar in his sexual peccadilloes, while Jennifer Denton was extremely accommodating. For all that it was sordid, and he felt rather tawdry being a voyeur at the party, the phrase ‘consenting adults’ was never far from his mind as he studied the images. Of course, Morag Weatherly had most likely not consented, but adultery was a crime for the priests to deal with, not him.

He concentrated on the background in each of the images: the bed, the windows, the position of the camera. This was not something Weatherly had done for himself; that much was obvious. It looked like the whole event had taken place in his bedroom in the New Town terrace house, but McLean would have to go back and check to be sure.

Then he turned to the next set of pictures.

He’d recognized where these had been taken from as soon as he’d seen them. Stills from the CCTV cameras in the house in Fife, they were of sufficient quality to see what was going on. McLean hoped that the girls had
been away, perhaps staying in Edinburgh with their mother, while their father indulged in what could only be described as an orgy. The date stamp in the bottom corner of each photograph put the event back in July, and some of the young women participating looked hardly old enough to be legal, but that wasn’t what had struck him most about the photographs. The first thing he noticed was that these were stills from a video. That meant that somewhere out there someone had the full tapes. There were at least half a dozen middle-aged men involved in the antics, possibly more, although he didn’t really want to study the pictures too closely to find out. The images were grainy, chosen for angles that made it impossible to see faces, or deliberately obscured. Who had they been, these men, and what were they being asked for to make these pictures disappear?

It was the last photo that puzzled him most, though. The man had stamina, that much McLean could say for Andrew Weatherly. The other thing he could say, which hadn’t been evident from the security tape that they had found, was that he had at least one hidden video camera in his bedroom. If there was video of this swinger’s party back in July, then there might equally be footage of the night he had walked into the room and shot his wife in the head.

McLean turned the last photograph face down on to the pile, picked the whole lot up and shuffled them back into their envelope. He pulled open one of the drawers of his desk and shoved the whole lot in there, closing it with a grunt of effort, then locking it.

The report was still on his computer screen, the
cursor still blinking. He stared at the meaningless words, trying to concentrate on the facts. Describe what they’d found. Make no suppositions. Hand it all over to the Procurator Fiscal and move on.

Who was he kidding? He unlocked the drawer, pulled out the envelope, hit ‘Save’ on the document he’d been working on and headed out of the room.

‘I thought the investigation was closed now. Isn’t that what the Chief Constable said?’

Interview room one, the nice one with an actual window and a radiator that was working. Jennifer Denton sat upright like an A-grade student from finishing school. Today she was wearing dark clothes, widow’s weeds. She looked very pale, but McLean could see that was as much to do with foundation as the stress she was under. Nobody’s skin was that flawless and white naturally.

‘We’re just crossing the last few Ts and dotting the Is, Miss Denton. The Procurator Fiscal needs a report, even if it’s not going to be taken any further than that.’

The slump in Miss Denton’s shoulders was minuscule, but McLean noticed it nonetheless. It confirmed his suspicions.

‘So what do you need to know, Inspector?’ The tired ghost of a smile flickered across her lips and crinkled the edges of her eyes. She was older than she looked, all made up.

‘You were having an affair with Andrew Weatherly.’

‘I—’

‘Please. Don’t insult either of our intelligences by denying it.’ McLean cut off the protest written on Miss
Denton’s face. ‘The fact of it isn’t all that important. You’re not under any suspicion, Miss Denton, but you were very close to Mr Weatherly. Closer even than his wife, I suspect.’

‘Ha. Morag and Andrew were never close. Not for the last ten years, at least. I don’t think there was any love in their marriage before that, even.’

The sudden bitterness in Miss Denton’s words came as a surprise, as if this were something that had been festering within her for years.

‘What makes you say that?’ McLean asked.

‘Supermodel, the papers called her, but she was more of a gold digger. Hardly did any modelling, then stopped altogether as soon as she was married. Drew was happy enough with that, she was his trophy wife. If it wasn’t for the girls, well, I’d have believed it if you’d told me they’d never even had sex.’

‘You think Weatherly found out his daughters weren’t actually his?’ Grumpy Bob asked the question, but it had crossed McLean’s mind, too.

‘What?’ Miss Denton looked momentarily puzzled. ‘No. I mean, of course they were his. I didn’t mean …’

‘It might be a motive, I guess.’ McLean spoke to the room. ‘Weatherly finds out that his wife cheated on him and the result was the two girls he’s doted on their whole lives. That would make him angry, maybe enough to kill them all. Then when he realizes what he’s done—’

‘That’s ridiculous. Drew would never have done a thing like that.’

‘Are you sure of that, Miss Denton? Can you really know a person that well?’

‘Drew
wasn’t impulsive, Inspector. He didn’t get angry. Not like that. And besides, he loved his daughters.’

McLean recalled the first of the photographs he’d been given. A happy family, the father and mother walking with their daughters swinging on their arms. Only it wasn’t their mother they were laughing and playing with.

‘It’s no matter. We’re not here to speculate about why it happened,’ he said.

‘Then why are we here, Inspector?’ Miss Denton fixed him with a stare that was more her old self. ‘More to the point, why am I here?’

‘I need to know Mr Weatherly’s movements on the day … well, you know. You’ve already given us his official schedule, but I think there’s more you’ve not told us. Were you planning on joining him later that evening? He was alone in his city house, after all.’

Miss Denton let her gaze drop to her lap. McLean could see the hair where it thinned on the top of her head, the grey strands more noticeable at this angle. They probably had a note of Miss Denton’s age somewhere in the files, but he couldn’t remember it. The more he studied her, though, the more he saw of the effort she put in to looking young. Was she frightened that Weatherly would trade her in for a new model? Given the photographs he’d seen, McLean thought that unlikely. The politician obviously had access to as much young flesh as he wanted, and was happy to share it with his influential friends.

‘Yes, Inspector.’ Miss Denton fixed him with a steady stare, daring him to judge her. ‘I would go around most evenings Drew was on his own in town.’

‘You
have your own key, we know that already. So you went round, what time?’

‘Ten. No, it must have been nearer half past.’

‘That late?’

‘I have a life, friends outside of work and … you know.’ Miss Denton’s glare intensified.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to imply. Anyway. Half ten. And Weatherly wasn’t there, I take it.’

‘No. The house was empty. Car was gone from its usual spot out front, too. Stupid idiot had even forgotten to set the alarm, but that’s not as unusual as you might think.’

‘Absent-minded, was he, Mr Weatherly?’ Grumpy Bob shuffled in his seat, grimacing slightly as something caught in his trousers.

‘Drew tends to get preoccupied. When something gets lodged in that brain of his, he forgets everything else.’ Miss Denton looked at her hands again. ‘Forgot, I should say.’

‘Would he not have phoned you? Texted, maybe? Just to save you the trip over, if nothing else.’

‘Heavens, no. It wouldn’t have occurred to him. And besides, my flat’s not far. Five minutes’ walk.’

‘Did he have any other meetings planned that evening?’ McLean asked. The question seemed to confuse Miss Denton, as if she couldn’t imagine a world where she didn’t know everything her boss was supposed to be doing. At least two weeks before he did.

‘No, Inspector. He didn’t. He had some reports to go over, which is another reason why I wasn’t going to go round until later, when he’d finished.’

McLean
paused, considered the envelope and its contents lying unopened on the table between them. Was there any point in confronting her with the photographs? She’d already admitted to having an affair with her boss, and any investigation coming from them would be a matter for Jo Dexter in Vice. Not his responsibility, and if he was being honest not somewhere he much wanted to go.

‘In which case, I’ve no further questions.’ He stood, holding out his hand to shake. Miss Denton didn’t seem to notice for a moment, then struggled to her feet.

‘Thank you for coming in.’ He felt her small hand in his, warm and slightly damp with sweat. It wasn’t overly hot in the interview room, but it could have been the dark, heavy clothing she was wearing. ‘Detective Sergeant Laird will find someone to take you home.’

He stood and watched as she gathered herself together, slung her small handbag over her arm and walked towards the door that Grumpy Bob was preparing to open. Only as she was about to leave did he speak again.

‘I’m sorry for your loss, truly. And I’m sorry I had to bring it up.’

Miss Denton nodded her understanding.

‘I’m afraid the next few days and weeks are going to be hard,’ McLean continued. ‘It’s not taken me long to find out about you and Weatherly. It won’t take the press long either. And not just about that.’

He watched her face as he spoke the words, seeing not shock but a tired resignation pass over her. She nodded once more, then turned and left.