The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (9 page)

‘About bloody time. Come in and shut the door.’

McLean did as he was told, approaching the desk like a man who wasn’t in fear of his life. Better to close on your enemy fast.

‘The Leith suicide. Did I not make it clear I wanted it wrapped up quickly?’

McLean nodded, said nothing.

‘And yet you asked DS Laird to go and check it over again today.’

McLean shifted slightly, stopped himself from fidgeting. Again said nothing.

‘And now I hear you’ve taken DC MacBride and DS Ritchie down to the mortuary for … what exactly?’ Duguid’s scowl deepened. ‘For Christ’s sake. You’re meant to be working with Jo Dexter in the SCU. Is Edinburgh so chaste you’ve got time to go nosing into every suicide?’

‘It –’

‘There’s plenty of work for all of us without you sniffing out more, McLean. Don’t go complicating things. It’s a simple case. Young man couldn’t face it any more, hanged himself. End of.’

‘It wasn’t a suicide sir.’

Duguid’s stare hardened, his face starting the journey from red to purple.

‘What the fuck are you talking about? There was no evidence of foul play. I’ve read the report. Have you?’

‘Sir, I’ve just been talking to the pathologist. There’s no trace of fibres from the rope under his nails. He didn’t
touch it. That means at the very least he had an accomplice. Someone helped him.’

Duguid let out a noise halfway between a sigh and a roar. ‘It’s never easy with you, McLean. You can’t leave well enough alone, can you.’

McLean held his tongue. No point deliberately poking the bear, especially now he was in charge.

‘I don’t know what arrangement you had with Jayne McIntyre, but from now on it will be proper channels. You understand? No new investigations without approval. We don’t have the manpower to go playing every hunch. You know our budget’s being cut like everyone else’s.’

‘I understand, sir. Which is why I came to see you as soon as I knew there was something amiss.’

‘Dammit, McLean. Are you listening?’ Duguid thumped the desk in time with his words. ‘Proper channels. You report to DCI Brooks. He decides whether or not to take it up with me. You deal with the sergeants, they deal with the constables. Chain of command. Christ, what did they teach you in Tulliallan?’

How to think for myself. Obviously a lesson you missed.

‘I’ll speak to DCI Brooks right away, sir.’

‘No, McLean, you won’t.’ Duguid slumped back into his expensive leather chair. ‘You’re here now. I’m not so bloody stupid as to send you off around the houses. Brooks will only come bleating back to me like the rest of them.’

‘It won’t take much manpower, sir. DC MacBride’s done a good job so far. He and Bob Laird can do the legwork. I’ll keep an eye on progress, make sure they’re not
spending too much time on it. We just need to find out a little bit more about the victim. Speak to his friends, fellow students, tutors.’

‘Contrary to what gets said in the canteen, I do know how to run an investigation, McLean.’

Yes. And it mostly involves having someone else do all the work and then taking all the credit. ‘Sorry, sir. I just meant it shouldn’t take more than a few days.’

‘Make sure it doesn’t.’ Duguid nodded a dismissal and turned back to his laptop. McLean breathed out a silent sigh of relief and turned to leave.

‘Oh, and McLean?’

‘Sir?’

‘Don’t think this gets you off Sex Crimes. You want the work, fine, but you’re reporting to DCI Dexter as well as John Brooks. Don’t come running to me if they expect you to work twenty-four hours a day.’

11

He’s happy to get out of the club. Pounding noise they call music, strobe lights threatening to induce epilepsy, drinks costing half a day’s wages for a single round. He’s never seen the attraction of the places. You can’t even talk to anyone; it’s all by eye contact, a smile, a nod. Is it any surprise a bloke can get confused? Take the wrong message from a throw of the head?

Not that it’s a problem this time. There’s a crowd of them leaving all at once, bubbling out into the cool night street like school kids at the bell. Only they’re school kids with a nice dull alcohol fug and ears that don’t hear too well, enveloped in a warm fuzziness that’s almost unsettling. There’ll be whining in the morning. Tinnitus by the time he’s forty, if he’s that lucky.

He doesn’t really know where they’re going. Christ, he doesn’t even know half of the people in the group. But there’s Kizzy and Len and a couple of girls he recognizes from the college. The others all seem friendly enough. Either that or they’re on something. Someone mentions a place nearby. Was it another club or someone’s house? He hopes it wasn’t another club. He couldn’t really face that.

Maybe it’s the cold air, but he can’t really focus on anything. Or is it that he can only focus on one thing at a time? He doesn’t feel drunk. Not like he’s felt drunk before. Not like those wild undergrad days when he’d
stagger back from the pub in the wee small hours, stiff-legged, trying to use the lines between the paving slabs to keep himself straight. Usually failing. And besides, he hardly had anything. Couldn’t really afford it. But there’s the group, and then there’s a house. A bottle getting passed around. Wine? Laughter, smiling faces. Blink and he’s somewhere else. Blink and there’s a hand on his forehead, eyes gazing deep into his own. Blink and they’re still there, burrowing into his soul. Blink.

Home. His home? Yes, he thinks so. Or is this a dream? It feels a bit like a dream. Is there someone here with him? He can’t see anyone, but he can hear a voice in his head calming him, reassuring like his mum that time he had the flu. Maybe that’s it; he’s got the flu. That would explain why he’s naked. Getting ready for bed. Sleep would be good; sleep cures everything. There’s no worrying about the lack of cash when you’re asleep. No fretting about the bills mounting up, the drudgery of a life that’s fallen so far short of all the promises he was made. No wondering when the axe is going to fall. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to sleep for ever. To fall into that warm, sweet, dark embrace and never leave.

The ground far, far away. His feet on a precarious chair. Hairy like a Hobbit. There was a girl once, long ago, said she loved him for his feet. But she left him all the same. What would she think of those feet now? Those hairy legs?

The voice calls to him. Is it her? It tells him to step off the chair. Just jump off and everything will be fine. There’s something around his neck, a light pressure resting on his shoulder, brushing the skin of his naked back. But that’s
OK. He doesn’t need to worry about that. He doesn’t need to worry about anything any more. Just a quick bend of the knees and jump down to the ground. Falling, falling, slow like they decided they didn’t need gravity after all.

12

‘Jesus wept. What is that smell?’

McLean stood at the entrance to a narrow alleyway running down the back of an anonymous row of prefab concrete garages. It was a place where things went to die: bits of old car, rusted beyond recognition; rotting mattresses, springs escaping like metal insects; an exercise bike bent as if it had been in a collision with a truck; the inevitable purloined shopping trolley. Mostly it was decaying black bin bags, ripped open by seagulls and urban foxes. Chip pokes, foil containers scraped clean of their biryani and saag aloo, pizza boxes stained with grease. Here and there a used condom, as if this foetid hole were the perfect spot for a bit of romance. And in amongst it all, thrown out with the rest of the trash, the decomposing body of a man.

At least, he assumed it was a man. It wasn’t easy to tell from what was left. No doubt finding them tastier than rancid pizza, the foxes had taken his fingers down to stubs, and something had eaten away at his face. It had to be a man’s body, though. No self-respecting woman would dress up like that.

‘Putrefaction, Tony. Enzymatic breakdown of the body’s cells. Bacterial decay. And I dare say the garbage doesn’t help.’ Squatting close to the dead body, the city pathologist, Angus Cadwallader, lifted a flaccid arm and
inspected what was left of a hand. McLean stayed put at the end of the alley, to avoid contaminating the crime scene, of course. Although if truth be told he was more worried about ruining his shoes. He doubted forensics would get anything useful from here.

‘What’s the prognosis then? You think you can save him?’

Cadwallader levered himself back up to his feet and picked a careful route back from the body. His white overalls were stained a riot of greens and browns around his legs, black wellingtons slimed with things best not thought about. ‘I can’t be hugely accurate until I get him back to the mortuary, but given the weather we’ve been having lately and the state of the insect life living inside his mouth, I reckon he’s been there at least a fortnight.’

McLean took a step back and turned slowly on his heels. The garages were surrounded on all sides by squat, six-storey tower blocks. Ugly concrete and pebble-dash, each apartment with a wide balcony affording views across the Forth. Or the back of the next block if you were unlucky. At least half of the balconies had washing draped on airers or dangling from railings. Many hundreds of people lived here, looked out these windows, saw what was going on. For two weeks, no one had come forward to report the rotting corpse chucked out with the bin bags.

‘He was covered up, aye?’ McLean asked the uniform sergeant who’d first greeted him when he’d arrived on site.

‘Reckon so, sir. That many foxes round here these days, they must’ve dug down and pulled him up.’

‘How’d we find out about him then?’

‘Anonymous tip-off. Probably someone round here got
sick of the stench.’ The sergeant nodded in the direction of the nearest flat as another squad car drew up. A couple of uniforms were trying to placate a small mob of garage-owners, no doubt anxious to know when they could get back in and dispose of all the stolen goods and pirated DVDs that were hidden inside. It might be an idea to use the body as an excuse to search all the lock-ups in the close, but they’d need a lot more manpower if they were going to do that. A riot squad too.

The short figure of DCI Jo Dexter climbed out of the squad car and ducked under the cordon tape. McLean watched her size up the whole site as she approached. Her eyes darted from tower block to parked car to garage and finally to the group of people standing at the opening to the narrow alley.

‘One for us, Tony?’

‘Not sure. I thought you might want to take a look. It’s not pretty, mind you.’

Dexter gave him the sort of look his grandmother had reserved for the times he said something really obvious. He held the stare for a couple of seconds before conceding defeat.

‘Over here then.’ He pointed at the alleyway and the two of them stepped carefully into the shade, as close as they dared.

‘He’s certainly dead,’ Dexter said. The body lay on its back, sprawled almost as if it had fallen into the soft embrace of the bin bags. Or more likely been thrown.

‘SEB haven’t been yet. Not sure I want to be the one to tell them they’ve got to go through all this shit.’

‘Waste of time anyway. He wasn’t killed here.’ Dexter
inched closer, testing each footfall as if she were creeping over thin ice. ‘Why’d you think it was something for us?’

‘The jacket he’s wearing. Look familiar to you?’

Dexter took one more step forward. Swore. It could have been because she’d trodden in something that meant her shoes would have to be incinerated, or it could have been that she, too, had been looking through mug shots that morning.

‘Malky Jennings?’ McLean asked as they both retreated from the alleyway.

‘Malky fucking Jennings,’ Dexter echoed. ‘Either that or someone’s nicked his clothes.’

‘Subject is male, Caucasian. One metre seventy-three tall. Extensive damage to the extremities, most likely from wild animals. Decomposition consistent with having been dead for at least two weeks, given current weather conditions.’

McLean stood some distance off from the examination table as Angus Cadwallader dictated his observations into the microphone slung from the ceiling. Doctor Peachey was on hand as witness to the proceedings, with Doctor Sharp assisting as she ever did. He felt like a gatecrasher at a very exclusive party.