The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (6 page)

The address was for a small development just off the Ferry Road. McLean couldn’t really tell what the building had been before it had been gutted and turned into flats, only that it had never been intended for habitation. Whoever had done the work had been looking to maximize profits though; the individual apartments were tiny.

An ambulance blocked the entrance to the parking bays behind the building, so McLean left his car on a double yellow line behind a familiar mud-and-British-Racing-Green Jaguar with a ‘Doctor on Call’ sticker shoved in the windscreen. A pair of bored-looking paramedics were loafing around at the bottom of a set of stone stairs leading up to the first floor of the old building. They nodded
at McLean as he passed, either recognizing him or not caring if anyone approached what might be a crime scene. At the top of the stairs, a uniform PC guarded the door with almost as much professionalism. She struggled to attention as she saw him.

‘Inspector. Sir. I’m sorry. No one told me. I thought …’

‘Don’t worry. I’m not really here.’ He stopped, looked around. Saw no battered white Transit van. ‘And neither’s SEB by the look of things.’

‘They’re on their way, sir. ’

‘What’s the situation, then? Who found the body?’

‘I’m not sure, sir. You should probably see DC MacBride. He’s inside with the pathologist.’

‘Body’s still here, I take it.’ McLean nodded at the paramedics, didn’t wait for an answer.

The door opened onto a narrow hall. Little more than a corridor with delusions of grandeur. There appeared to be four apartments shoe-horned into this tiny space, but only one had a gaggle of people clustered around its open doorway. McLean recognized Tracy Sharp, assistant to the city pathologist, Angus Cadwallader. No doubt the man himself was inside.

‘Is it safe to go in?’ McLean stopped at the door, peered through. Doctor Sharp might have been wearing a white coverall, but the assembled constables were in uniform. No latex gloves, no over-boots.

‘Don’t think you could contaminate the scene any more than it’s already been, Tony. Come on in.’ Angus Cadwallader stood in the middle of a small, open-plan apartment. There wasn’t much in the way of furniture, just a futon, a couple of bookshelves and a desk shoved into one corner.
The chair that should have gone with the desk lay on its side in the middle of the floor alongside a small table. Above it, the old roof was opened up, exposing sarking board, purlins, joists and beams. A stout rope had been slung over one of these, its other end wrapped in a professional-looking noose around the neck of a naked and very dead young man.

Death had not been kind to him. His eyes bulged, and a swollen blue tongue poked out between his lips, shiny crinkles of saliva running off it down his chin and onto his chest as if slugs had been crawling over him. The shock of the hanging had loosened his bowels and made a nasty mess of the threadbare rug that covered the polished floorboards.

‘So, a suicide then.’ McLean wrinkled his nose as he got closer.

‘Certainly looks that way,’ Cadwallader said. ‘No sign of a struggle, no obvious marks to suggest he was forced. His hands aren’t tied.’

McLean peered closer, and sure enough the young man’s hands hung loosely by his side.

‘Was there a note?’

‘On his computer.’ This from DC MacBride, who was hunched over the desk. He was wearing latex gloves, McLean noticed.

The computer was a small laptop, tethered to the desk by an external keyboard and mouse. The desk itself was as far removed from McLean’s own as to hardly warrant the same name. It was tiny, like everything else in the apartment, and it was as tidy as a cleaners’ convention. There were no papers strewn across it, no piles
of reports in the in-tray awaiting attention. No in-tray for that matter. Just a clear expanse of fake wood. He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, squeezed his hands into them and slid open the top, narrow drawer.

‘I had a look already,’ MacBride said. ‘There’s not much to see.’

It was true. The drawer held pens, neatly lined up and sorted into colours. A pair of small scissors, a stapler, a ruler. Nothing out of the ordinary. The drawer below yielded a lined A4 writing pad and some envelopes. The bottom drawer held a hole punch and a couple of power adaptors for mobile phones, the cords neatly tied as if they’d never been used.

‘What about this message then?’ A screensaver image looped and twirled mesmerically about the screen until MacBride nudged the mouse. The image steadied to a word processor, a few words typed out, the cursor blinking as it waited for more.

Ive had enugh. There’s no reasen too go on. The world hates me well it can do without me now. To whoever finds me, Im sorry. Good bye
.

‘That it?’

‘That’s all there was when I got here.’

‘We know who he is?’ McLean looked back at the naked man.

‘Neighbour says he’s Grigori Mikhailevic. Doesn’t know him well.’

‘That who found the body?’

‘Aye. Door was open as she walked past. Says she didn’t come in, and I’m inclined to believe her.’

‘Where’s she now?’

‘Back in her flat. PC Gregg’s with her.’

Sandy Gregg. Poor woman. Well, at least she wouldn’t have to do any talking. McLean looked around the apartment. It wasn’t just the desk that was tidy; everything had a place and everything was in its place. What little furniture there was sat square, aligned with the walls. Even the table upon which the chair had been balanced was centred neatly. Perhaps that was a necessary adaptation to living somewhere so small, but he’d seen places smaller still where chaos had been allowed to reign. No, this was the apartment of a tidy man. Meticulously tidy. Anally retentive, as the Freudians would have it. And there he was, hanging from a stout hemp rope slung over his own beam.

‘We’re done here, if you want to cut him down.’ Cadwallader straightened up from his crouch with an audible popping of bones.

‘Your crime scene, Constable. I’m not here, remember.’ McLean nodded at MacBride.

‘Oh. Right. Yes. Carry on, Doctor Cadwallader.’

‘Any more thoughts, Angus?’ McLean asked.

‘Well, if it wasn’t suicide it was a very good fake. If I had to put money on it now, I’d say he killed himself. I’ll run blood tests in case he’s been given something to make him compliant, check one or two other things at the PM. But I’m not seeing any evidence of foul play here.’

‘But you think there’s something fishy.’ McLean turned to DC MacBride.

‘It’s hard to put my finger on it, sir, but there’s something
not right. I’d like to look into it some more, but you know what Duguid’s like. He’ll want this written up and forgotten by the end of the day.’

‘We wouldn’t want you going out and finding new crimes to investigate. Just think what that would do to the statistics. Let alone the budget.’

‘I don’t know, sir. It’s just …’

‘I think you’re right, there’s something hooky here. This is a man who arranges his pens by colour and lines things up so they’re nice and square. There’s no mess in here at all, no clutter. That sort of person doesn’t hang himself, it’s too prone to things going wrong. That sort of mind isn’t normally suicidal at all. More likely to be homicidal, especially if the neighbours don’t put their recycling in the right bin.’

‘So you think I should keep looking?’

McLean watched as the two paramedics manhandled the body onto the stretcher they had wheeled in, careful to avoid the mess on the rug.

‘Yes. And I’d start with that laptop. The note’s a joke. It’s impersonal, could’ve been written by anyone. And it’s riddled with typos and spelling mistakes. I’ll bet you a purple beer token there’s not a single error in any of the other documents on there.’

8

The door to Chief Superintendent McIntyre’s office was closed; that was the first thing that McLean noticed. For three years it had stood ajar, no barrier between the chief and those who worked under her. Janice’s desk now stood unattended and cleared of anything that might be deemed personal. Jayne McIntyre’s open-door policy had been one of the few positive things about the station, but now she had moved to better things, or at least he hoped so. Anything to do with the setting up of the new Police Service of Scotland was a double-edged sword. McLean couldn’t begrudge her the chance to progress up the greasy pole, but there was part of him that wished she was still here, or at least that the person who’d been promoted to fill her shoes was less red-faced, balding and generally useless.

Taking a moment to compose himself, he knocked quietly on the door, waited for the gruff ‘enter’ and then did as he was bid.

Acting Superintendent Charles Duguid had taken no time to impose his own lack of style on McIntyre’s office. The casual area, with its bookshelves, coffee machine and curiously uncomfortable armchairs, was gone, replaced by a wall of whiteboards and a long conference table. The pictures on the wall were gone too, presumably to Tulliallan. Neutral ground for the new HQ so that no one region
could dominate. As if that wasn’t going to happen anyway. Duguid hadn’t bothered to replace them yet, no doubt finding comfort in the discoloured patches they had left on the walls. The desk itself was the same one McIntyre had used, but where under her tenure it had usually been heaped with papers, reports and other signs of busy-ness, now it was almost clear. And behind it, scowling at McLean as he finished his telephone conversation, the man of the hour.

‘What is it, McLean?’ Duguid made no effort to hide the impatience in his voice.

‘You wanted to see me, sir. The duty sergeant –’

‘That was hours ago. Where the hell have you been?’

McLean suppressed the urge to look at his watch. He was fairly sure Sergeant Dundas wouldn’t have sat on the message for more than a few minutes, and he’d been in his office for the past two hours trying to make some sense of the overtime figures foisted on him by one of Duguid’s own investigations.

‘Well, you’re here now, I suppose.’ Duguid leaned back in his enormous leather chair. That was new, and expensive by the look of things. A pity he hadn’t bothered to provide one on the other side of the desk. McLean stood with his hands behind his back, trying not to let his temper rise. That was, after all, exactly what Duguid wanted.

‘I’ve been reviewing your cases since your promotion.’ Duguid nodded towards a closed brown folder that was pretty much the only thing on his desk. There was nothing on the outside to indicate that it was what he said it was, and judging by its thinness, it was more likely a review
of Duguid’s own caseload, but McLean said nothing. He knew better than to provoke the beast this early in the conversation.

‘Not much of a clear-up rate, is there. Not many arrests and convictions. When was the last time you gave evidence in court?’

‘A couple of years ago. The Broughton Post Office raid.’

‘You were still a sergeant then.’ It wasn’t a question. McLean resisted the temptation to add ‘Detective.’

‘So, since making inspector you’ve put how many criminals away?’

That depends on how you count, doesn’t it? The drug bust that gave you your bloody promotion was effectively down to my lead, so you could say something of the order of two dozen awaiting trial just at the moment. And there’s the small matter of the forensic photographer who was posting crime scene photos on the web. I caught him, but you took the credit for that one, even after you’d tried to pin it on someone else. McLean bit back the obvious retort.

‘There’s Christopher Roberts. He’s in remand right now. The PF’s finalizing the case.’

‘Ah yes. Roberts. The unlikely child snatcher. He claims he was coerced, I understand. Put in an impossible position by a very powerful and influential man. A man who should have been arrested for murder, abduction and many other things. What happened to him, McLean?’

‘As I understand it, sir, his bodyguard killed him. Poetic justice, I’d say.’

‘Of course you would. And no doubt you’d say it was
poetic justice that the bodyguard died a week later in hospital. You were the last one to visit him before that, I’m told. And the doctors aren’t really sure what killed him.’

Don’t rise to it. Don’t give him the satisfaction.

‘If you’re unhappy with my performance, sir –’

‘Of course I’m bloody unhappy with your performance, McLean. Why do you think I asked you here?’

Because you’re a prize arse who likes to bully people and I’m the only one who dares to stand up to you? ‘I assumed it was to allocate me a new case, sir. I understand there’s a gang of pickpockets have been working the festival. Organized, probably East European and tied into something larger. I know it’s sergeant work, but then I don’t really expect anything more complicated from you, sir.’

Duguid’s already florid face reddened. ‘With that attitude, McLean, it’s hardly any surprise. You’ve no respect for authority, and every time you start investigating someone they end up dead.’

‘With respect, sir –’

‘Don’t give me any of that shit. Gavin Spenser, dead. Alison Kydd, dead. Needy –’ Duguid broke off. So that was it. Three months on and still the enmity. Forget the fact that Sergeant John Needham had abducted, raped and murdered three women, tried to kill a fourth. He was an old-school copper and they stood up for one another.