Prayer for the Dead: A Detective Inspector McLean Mystery (11 page)

‘It’s for your own good, Anthony. That school’s just holding you back.’

The library is Gran’s serious room. I don’t normally go in there. The books are older even than she is, dusty and dry and covered in cracked leather. Some of them are written in foreign
languages like French and Spanish and Auld Scots. It’s where she has her writing desk, and the hidden cupboard with the whisky in it that she thinks I don’t know about. And it’s where I am summoned when I’ve done something wrong.

‘But all my friends are there.’

‘You’ll make new friends. There’ll be plenty of other new boys. The Grove is a fine prep school. Good enough for your grandfather and
father both.’

The sun is shining outside. It’s been a long hot summer so far and I’d really rather be out there playing than in this stuffy old room.

‘Dad went there?’ It’s been two years now since they left and never came back, mum and dad. I can still remember them as clearly as the moment they waved goodbye with promises they’d be home soon. It’s hard to imagine my father as a boy my age.

‘He did. And he made lifelong friends there.’ Gran has been sitting in one of the high-backed armchairs, but now she comes across and sits next to me on the sofa. ‘Oh, Tony. You’re so like him. You’ll do well there, believe me.’

‘But my friends—’

‘Will still be here when you come home for the holidays. And there’s plenty of those left. Term doesn’t start for another month yet.’

A month seems
a very long time. Too far in the future to really worry about. And I’ll be going to a place where my dad went. That has to be pretty cool.

‘Go. Play outside a while. It’s far too nice a day to be cooped up indoors.’

I don’t need to be told twice. It’s only when I’m at the door that I think to ask, ‘Can I go round to Norman’s?’

‘Norman Bale?’ Gran frowns in that way she has. ‘Yes. I suppose
so. It’s not far. Just be careful going up the road.’

I nod my understanding and rush out the door before she can change her mind.

A terrifying scream woke McLean from dreams of his childhood. He tried to sit upright, then realised he already was, wedged into the high-backed armchair in the library. Mrs McCutcheon’s cat was long gone, Emma’s postcard fallen to the floor where his
sleepy arm had dropped it. The windows were dark, just the light from the table lamp casting a small glow around him like a protective shield. The echo of that scream unsettled him, even if it was just in his mind. He strained to hear anything but the low, constant hum of the city and the occasional creak and groan of the old house settling around him.

Then it came again, different now that it
wasn’t being warped by sleep. A wailing, hissing noise from outside. Caterwauling, there was no other word for it. With a heavy sigh, McLean hauled himself out of the chair and went to see who was fighting whom.

A glance at the old clock in the hallway showed that it was ten to four in the morning. He’d not thought himself so tired, but he must have been asleep in the armchair almost five hours.
It didn’t bear thinking about that his alarm was going to go off in another two.

The kitchen was empty as he walked through it, then out the back door. The night was warm, a gentle breeze ruffling the leaves all around him as he let his eyes adjust to the darkness. Whatever had been screaming had stopped
for now, but as the night noises began to filter in, McLean could hear something unusual
from the end of the driveway, where it opened out on to the street.

Gravel crunched under his feet like explosions in a quarry as he tried to walk as quietly as possible in the direction of the noise. It sounded like someone was cursing under their breath, or having an argument with themselves, and for a moment McLean wondered if a tramp had decided his gateway was a nice warm spot to kip for
the night. He wished he’d brought a torch, then remembered he was still wearing his work suit. It wasn’t brilliant, but he always carried a pen light in his jacket pocket.

Green light reflected back off the dark, rubbery rhododendron leaves, the occasional flash of blue eye reminding him that wherever he went in his own home, he was never far from a cat these days. McLean played the torch around
the end of the driveway, trying to see into the shadows cast by the far-spaced street lamps in the road beyond. Something much larger than a cat let out a muffled ‘fuck’ and then a dark figure burst out of the bushes. For an instant it stood in the gateway, facing him, and McLean could see a pair of startled eyes peering out from a black balaclava. Then the man turned and ran. McLean made a half-hearted
pursuit out into the road, but he knew when he was outclassed. Whoever had been hiding in his bushes would have given a professional sprinter a run for his money. In no time at all he was at the road end, not stopping or looking back before he disappeared around the corner.

McLean stood in the gateway for a moment, staring at the empty spot where the running man had last been. His
hand went to
his pocket of its own accord, pulling out his phone. He had brought up the speed dial screen and was about to call the station when he was distracted by something rubbing against his leg. Mrs McCutcheon’s cat was standing beside him, looking pleased with itself. It looked up at him, blinked slowly, then sauntered off into the bushes. Well, he could take a hint.

The rhododendron leaves were thick
around the outside of the bush, but they soon gave way to a cave-like interior. McLean remembered it well from his childhood, the best of dens for a lonely child thrown out of the house to get some fresh air. Under the meagre light from his torch, it seemed smaller than his memory, and there was a pungent odour of human excrement that he wasn’t expecting. Careful where he put his feet, he swept
the torch back and forth until he located the source.

‘Seriously? Some drunkard took a dump in your garden and you think it’s important enough to get forensics involved?’

There hadn’t been much point in trying to get to sleep after the incident. McLean had made himself a large pot of coffee and sat in the kitchen until the forensic expert had turned up somewhere near six. She was new; he’d not
met her at a crime scene before. But obviously someone higher up the chain had warned her about him. Still, she’d understood the importance of the task, collected up the stool and promised him it would be analysed for DNA. Amazing how much information you could get from shit, had been her exact words as she left.

Getting into the station early, McLean had hoped he’d be able to immerse himself
in the Ben Stevenson case,
plough through the mountain of useless actions the investigation had thrown up so far. Unfortunately DCI Brooks was also an early riser, and he appeared to have daily updates from the forensic service fed directly to his brain. There was no other way he could have known, surely.

‘Half-three in the morning, dressed completely in black, with a balaclava over his head?’
McLean shook his own; this man was going to be in charge soon. Things never change.

‘If you thought there’d been a crime, McLean, you should have reported it. Not used your personal hotline to the forensic services to get you ahead of the queue.’

Pinching the bridge of his nose didn’t usually help relieve the stress of dealing with superior officers, but McLean found it did at least stop him
from resorting to violence. That rarely went well, and besides, Brooks had a reputation as well as bulk on his side.

‘I did call control, sir, and I also told them it was low priority. I’ve spoken to my neighbours, no one’s been burgled recently. If someone was casing the area, they’ve had a nasty surprise. Will probably try their luck somewhere a bit more downmarket. Grange or the likes.’

Brooks’ nostrils flared at the insult. McLean knew perfectly well where the DCI lived and how it fitted into the complicated hierarchy of the city’s social-climbing classes.

‘And just how does a forensic analysis of this crap help, then?’

‘Believe it or not, sir, they can get a good DNA sample from human excrement. Especially if it’s fresh, and I can
assure you this one was very fresh. If this
man’s on the database, we’ll know who he is.’

‘And then what? You going to try and do him for damage to your property because he shat in your bushes?’

‘No, sir. But I will make a note of it on file. Should he come to our notice again. Besides, I don’t think the crap was meant for my bushes.’

Brooks stared at him as if he were mad. ‘What on earth are you talking about, man?’

‘I’d have thought
it would be obvious. You want to shove shit through someone’s letterbox, you don’t really want to be carrying it around for too long. Well, not in a bag anyway.’

‘Letterbox?’ Brooks lumbered to a slow realisation. ‘You mean this was meant to be a warning? What the fuck for?’

The idea had come to McLean in the wee small hours, and he’d turned it over and over ever since, unable to let it go.
‘That’s what bothers me. I don’t know.’

‘Well you’ve pissed off enough people, I guess. Policemen tend to be a bit less direct, mind.’

‘Yes, I’ve found that. Was thinking of someone else who had shit shoved through their letterbox recently.’

‘Oh yes? Anyone I know?’

McLean hesitated. He’d not had time to ask Grumpy Bob to speak to Leith station about Madame Rose, and the more he thought about
it, the less keen he was on sharing anything about the medium with DCI Brooks. ‘It’s probably nothing, sir. I’ll let you know if anything comes of it.’

Brooks narrowed his eyes until they almost disappeared in the folds of flesh that made up his round face. Perhaps
he thought doing so would help him to read McLean’s mind, or maybe he was just trying to squeeze out a reluctant fart. Either way
he seemed to fail.

‘You do that, McLean,’ he said after a while. ‘And don’t go blowing the departmental budget on petty vandals. Bad enough chasing whoever did this.’ He waved a pudgy hand at the major incident room.

McLean thought of Ben Stevenson’s daughters and how pleased they would be to hear that the police were doing their utmost to bring their father’s killer to justice. He bit back
the retort he wanted to give, just nodded an acceptance of his superior’s crassness. Sometimes that was all you could do.

‘You got a moment, Bob?’

It was a stupid question, really. McLean had spent ten minutes searching the empty offices and unused incident rooms until he’d found the detective sergeant. Grumpy Bob was sitting in the corner of the CID room, feet up on his desk, head wedged against
the wall and giving his newspaper very close attention indeed. He slowly lifted it off his face, folded it and placed it on the desk before answering.

‘I could probably find some space in my hectic schedule, sir. What did you have in mind?’

McLean cast an eye over the rest of the CID room, looking for other officers lurking in the corners. It was empty, but this early in the morning that was
hardly a surprise. Even so, he felt uncomfortable letting too many people in on this particular piece of business.

‘You still on speaking terms with the duty sergeants down in Leith station?’

‘Some of them, aye. You looking for something in particular.’

‘Madame Rose. You remember her?’

‘Him, if I’m not mistaken. But yes. Has that shop down the Walk. Peddles fortunes and deals in old books.’

‘That’s the one. She helped out with Emma last year. Came to me yesterday asking if I could look into a little local problem she’s been having.’ McLean told Grumpy Bob the whole story, noting as he did that the old sergeant took his feet off his desk, sat upright and started to pay attention.

‘They killed a cat?’

‘Left the poor thing just inside the front door. Gave one of her regular customers
a terrible fright when he turned up for his weekly tarot.’

‘So what do you want me to do?’

‘Well, I know she’s spoken to someone at Leith a couple of times, but whoever’s doing this is being very cunning about it. Seems it’s never the same faces twice. Difficult for us to take it seriously.’

‘You sure he’s not just being paranoid. I mean, he’s not exactly dealing from a full deck, right?’

McLean slumped against the wall, the weariness of too little sleep fighting with his patience.

‘She, Bob. You’ve been on the equality and diversity training, right? Madame Rose might’ve been born a man, but she’s happier being a woman. She wants to be a she, who am I to tell her she can’t?’

Grumpy Bob paused a moment before answering. ‘Aye, you’re right. I was meaning more about the whole fortune-telling
thing, mind. Unless you’re telling me you believe in all that stuff too, now?’

‘You know me and belief, Bob. But this isn’t about me. It’s about Rose. She’s helped me more than once now, the least I can do is return the favour.’

‘You mean the least I can do?’ Grumpy Bob grinned. ‘You want me to have a word with someone at Leith?’

‘My guess is no one takes her seriously because of what she does,
how she dresses. Sure they’ll have taken down her complaint, it’ll be in someone’s PDA. But no one will have done anything about it. See if you can’t change that, will you?’

‘Consider it done.’ Grumpy Bob picked up his paper, and for a moment McLean thought he was going to drape it over his face and go back to sleep. ‘Tomorrow soon enough? I’ll be seeing old Tam Sykes then anyway.’

‘Tam’s still
working? Surely they put him out to pasture years ago.’

‘Aye, they did. But you know what us old coppers are like. He’s been helping out with some cold case reviews. Tam’ll have a word if I ask him, and it’ll be better coming from him.’

McLean recalled his strange meeting with the medium a few nights earlier. The more he thought about it, the more her secondary request – the almost afterthought
that he might be able to give a home to her cats for a while – seemed to be the thing she really wanted from him. Chances were the attacks on her house were not something the police would have much luck looking into.

‘Tomorrow’s fine. Just returning a favour really. And I get the feeling Rose can look after herself anyway.’