Prayer for the Dead: A Detective Inspector McLean Mystery (34 page)

‘Jeez. You really haven’t got anything on this guy, have you.’ Dalgliesh’s tone was her normal mix of sarcasm
and disdain. McLean wondered whether the silence had been her muting her phone so she could have a lung-loosening cough. It would certainly take more than impassioned words to get through to her. A pickaxe, maybe.

‘Like I said. We don’t even know if it’s a guy. Don’t even know if the three killings are by the same person.’

‘Don’t know shit?’

It was meant to be a joke, albeit in poor taste.
McLean couldn’t bring himself to laugh, though. It was too close to the truth for that.

If McLean thought the hospital had been depressed after the death of Maureen Shenks, it was nothing compared to the shock running through the place following Dr Whitely’s demise. It was true that people seldom spoke ill of the dead, and especially not
of those who had died young and violently. Even so, it was hard to square the universal sorrow and expressions of admiration with the image he had built in his head from visiting the doctor’s flat.

They had commandeered the same small room at the back of the old building, and were working through interviews with all of Dr Whitely’s colleagues and associates. One of the first jobs had been to
draw up a list of names, but as they worked through it, so it grew.

‘I never realised quite how many doctors and nurses passed through this place.’ DS Ritchie flipped through her printed list, now much amended with scribbled names. ‘And that’s before we even get to the admin staff, cleaners, porters. Christ, it’s never-ending.’

‘Just as well he didn’t have much of a social life then.’ McLean
slumped back in his seat, not quite sure why he’d decided to come and help out with the interviews. Jayne McIntyre was meant to be heading up the investigation, after all. And this kind of background stuff was sergeant work, really. On the other hand, the thought of going back to the station filled him with gloom; the Ben Stevenson
investigation had gone cold and things didn’t look much better
for Maureen Shenks. This at least had the benefit of being a new case, even if it was beginning to look rather too much like the other two. Random, brutal, and with a disturbing lack of forensic evidence to work with. He’d leapt at the chance to take it on while McIntyre got back up to speed.

‘Who’s next?’ he asked.

‘Dr Stephanie Clark. Another specialist in paediatric oncology, apparently.’
Ritchie ran a finger over the relevant line in her list. ‘Sounds fun.’

‘Laugh a minute, I’m sure. OK. Let’s get her in.’

Dr Clark was younger than McLean had been expecting. He wasn’t sure why, but for some reason he’d pictured a serious woman in her mid-fifties, greying hair cut short or tied in a workmanlike bun. But the woman who presented herself at the door to the makeshift interview room
at her appointed hour was probably the same age as DS Ritchie. She was tiny, too. Not much over five foot, and proportioned like many of the children she treated. You wouldn’t have mistaken her for a child, though. Her eyes gave the game away. That and the air of weariness that seeped out of her.

‘Would you say Dr Whitely was under a lot of pressure?’ DS Ritchie asked the question. They had established
something of a routine now, with the sergeant doing most of the work. McLean would sit back and watch, only occasionally adding something. He really didn’t need to be there at all.

‘Show me a doctor here who isn’t.’ That was the other thing that gave Dr Clark away. Her voice was deeper and more mature than the teenager she might be mistaken for. She paused as if expecting some sympathy before
carrying on. ‘But no. I wouldn’t have said Jim was any more stressed than any of us. Last time I spoke to him he didn’t seem much different from every other time.’

‘What about his work? Had he lost any patients recently?’

That brought a frown. ‘That’s a harsh way of putting it.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it to be.’ DS Ritchie fidgeted with her list. ‘I’m just trying to get a picture of his
mental state. Find out if there was anything that might have tipped him over the edge.’

‘You think he committed suicide?’ Dr Clark gave her a look that mothers give children who have done something particularly stupid. ‘Well you can scratch that one off your list. Jim would no more take his own life than he’d take one of his patients’.’

‘So we’ve heard, but it’s always good to have it confirmed
from multiple sources. Did you know he was very interested in cutting-edge research?’

Dr Clark nodded. ‘That was Jim. Always had his head in a paper. He was fascinated by all the new therapies coming through. If there was one thing that got him down it was the difficulty he had persuading the board to let him trial some of them.’

Something clicked in McLean’s mind. ‘Not easy then, I take it.’

‘Christ no. I mean, fair enough, some of the stuff he was on about has only just been trialled in the lab. You can’t go
using that kind of stuff on sick kids, however desperate they are.’

‘Did you think he might try, though? Maybe as a last resort for someone terminal?’

‘And risk losing his job? Being struck off the medical register? Going to jail? I don’t think so. That wasn’t Jim at all.’
Dr Clark shook her head again, the faintest of smiles crinkling the corners of her eyes at some memory. Then a frown washed it away. ‘Mind you, he was talking to that research chap.’

‘Research chap?’ DS Ritchie asked. She leafed through her ever-growing list of names.

‘Yes. Last few weeks, I think it was. I saw them together at the Royal Infirmary too. Here a couple of times. Some researcher
from the university, probably.’

‘And does this researcher have a name?’

‘I guess he probably does. Can’t say I know it though. Never talked to him myself.’

‘As far as I know Jim wasn’t working on any research programmes. Don’t think he’d have had the time, to be honest, what with his work here and at the Royal.’

The last interview of the day, or at least McLean sincerely hoped it was the last
interview of the day. Whitely’s boss lounged in the chair on the other side of the table from him and DS Ritchie. He was a fat man, that was perhaps the kindest way of putting it. An administrator rather than a physician, though McLean had met plenty of large doctors in his time. He burst from his ill-fitting suit as if he had been smaller that morning and mysteriously swelled with the day. Perhaps
he would go home soon and explode.

‘So he wasn’t running any clinical trials? New therapies that could only be tried out on terminal patients?’

‘Good lord, no. Where did you get such an idea? We can’t do stuff like that.’

‘But he was talking to a research scientist. There’s at least half a dozen doctors and nurses here saw him.’

‘News to me.’

‘So you’ve no idea who this fellow is, then?’
DS Ritchie pitched in with the question. She had her list of names, most neatly ticked off, and was poised to add yet one more to the collection of handwritten additions at the bottom.

‘Absolutely none. It’s the first I’ve heard of it, to be honest.’

McLean leaned forward, resting his arms on the table. ‘Do you do much research here?’

‘Sure, we run trials with the major drug companies, universities.
It’s all above board though. We’ve ethics committees coming out of our ears and nothing gets tried out until it’s been thoroughly lab tested.’

‘So it’s very unlikely Dr Whitely would have been involved in some unofficial work. Maybe keeping it under the radar until it could be shown to be effective. Doing stuff off site?’

‘You really don’t understand how this all works, do you Inspector?’ The
fat man squeezed himself forward, risking the buttons on his jacket. ‘You can’t just set up a trial, draft in a few terminally ill kids and start pumping them full of experimental drugs in the hope they might magically get better. There are procedures. Consent needs to be given. Risk assessments. Cost–benefit analyses. And
meetings – God, you wouldn’t believe the amount of time I spend in meetings.
Even getting agreement between two doctors working with the same patient can be a struggle sometimes. The idea that Jim might have been doing anything without approval is laughable, really.’

He is undecided now. I can see the change in him as clearly as if he’d painted his face. The sweet brightness of his certainty is being dulled by some terrible indecision. Have I left him too long, taken my eye off the prize?

He goes about the daily business
of the church, unaware that he is watched. And perhaps that is another sign. Here, in the house of the Lord, how can one not always be aware of being watched? He is all around us, in us, even though the lines of wooden pews have been moved to the walls, the central nave filled with ungainly rods of steel.

This has always been a place of awe. Its builders understood the grandeur they were trying
to capture. The vaulted ceilings echo His ineffable silence; the stained glass casts everything in hellish hues as if to remind us of the perils of sin. Yet now the windows are obscured, the arches lost in a forest of rusting steel. The echoes are muffled by heavy wooden scaffold boards.

And he is humming.

I came here to pray, as I have done every day of my life. As my mother and father did
before me, my grandparents before them. We have kept this parish alive, kept faith with God in this place. It is sacred ground no matter the signs outside declaring it dangerous to enter. No harm can come to any in here save that the Lord ordain it.

At first I think it is a hymn he is humming as he attends
to the altar, but the notes distort and mutate into something that might have been playing
on the hospital radio the last time I was there. This man who I had thought godly has become corrupted. So quickly, so thoroughly, it is hardly surprising I did not notice it before. And yet as I study him from my place in the shadows, I can see still that glimmer of purity, the spark that first alerted me to him as sure as the flame attracts the moth. It is not too late to save him, but I must
act swiftly now. Decisively.

I study him, watch him go through the same ritual I have seen a thousand times before. No, ten thousand times. I know when he will kneel, when he will bow his head and begin to pray.

Silently I move through the shadows until I am standing just behind him. Head down, his neck is exposed, the starched white of his collar showing clearly under the black fabric of his
shirt. He has a smile on his face as he prays, and I understand what has happened. His body has been corrupted, but his soul is still pure. It can still be saved.

He turns at the last minute, perhaps sensing my presence and wondering if God has come down to bless him in person. Surprise widens his eyes, but it is short-lived. Needle slips effortlessly into exposed flesh and he tumbles gently
forward to the floor.

The ringing phone stirred McLean from a fitful doze. He’d nodded off at his desk, an all-too-frequent occurrence these days, it seemed. He wondered idly if it was just a symptom of getting old. More likely the fact that he averaged around four hours’ sleep
a night. And broken, troubled sleep at that.

A glance at the number on the screen meant nothing, but at least it wasn’t any of the journalists he’d put in the address book for the purposes of avoiding their calls. He thumbed the answer button and held the phone up to his ear.

‘Yes?’

‘Is that McLean? The polis man?’ Thick Edinburgh accent he couldn’t immediately place. Those last words definitely
pronounced separately, as if that’s how the speaker would spell them.

‘This is Detective Inspector McLean, yes. Can I help you?’ No point asking a name if it wasn’t immediately offered. The caller had his number from somewhere; might as well try to find out what he wanted first, then get to the bottom of who exactly he was.

‘You lookin’ for a man. Hanging around the bookies up Gilmerton way.’

The pieces dropped into place. The gambler studying the form, addicted, and not very successful by the look of
him. McLean had given him a tenner and his card. No doubt the one was long gone, the other kept a hold of until it might be useful. Or he was desperate enough.

‘That’s right. Have you seen him?’

‘Not sure. Might’ve done. Up at the hospital.’

‘Hospital?’

‘Aye, y’ken the new one over
at Little France.’

‘The Royal Infirmary. I know it.’

‘Well, I was up there yesterday getting my scrip, ken? An’ I was sure I saw that same chappie youse was asking about? Only he was all togged up in the white coat an’ stuff.’

‘It’s Keith, isn’t it? I remember now.’ McLean had been racking his brain for the man’s name, sure he knew it as soon as he’d placed him. The silence at the end of the
phone was ominous.

‘Look, you’ve been a great help, really.’ McLean decided to go for broke. If nothing else, at least he had the man’s phone number now. ‘But it’s possible you could be even more useful.’

‘I’m no’ coming anywhere near a polis station.’

‘I wasn’t going to suggest anything of the sort.’ McLean had been, but it was obvious that wasn’t going to work. ‘I can meet you somewhere,
but I’d really like you to sit down with an e-fit specialist. Get us a better description of this man you saw.’

Another long pause, then Keith spoke again. ‘I don’t know. I’m that busy, y’ken.’

Unemployed, disability benefit going on the horses. Very busy. ‘We could meet up at the bookies, if that’d be
easiest?’ McLean didn’t explicitly say there’d be another ten-pound note in it, but the offer
was there.

‘Aye, OK. When?’

He looked up at the clock on the wall. Half-past two. Twenty minutes to find someone trained in the software, half an hour to get out to Gilmerton if the traffic wasn’t too bad. ‘Say half-three?’

‘No, his eyes were wider apart than that. Aye, about there no?’

The bookies was busier than it had been the last time he’d been here, maybe because the police had finally
packed up and gone from the caves around the corner. McLean had tried to find DS Ritchie, then DC MacBride, but both were away on errands for DCI Brooks. Casting around for someone else with e-fit training had produced the unlikely figure of DC Sandra Gregg, which meant he’d had his ear bent about her new house and how they were struggling to persuade the insurers to cover the cost of replacement
goldfish, all the way from the station to Gilmerton Cove. He felt a certain responsibility for the accident that had seen her old terrace house destroyed in a gas mains explosion at the start of the year, so listened as attentively as he could manage. Fortunately Keith had been waiting for them, no doubt hoping to get the job over and done with so he could continue his pursuit of the perfect six-way
accumulator.

‘He was clean-shaven. Mebbe just a hint of stubble.’

To give her her due, Gregg was quick and efficient with the software, pulling up menus and swapping facial features
around with a practised ease. It was just a shame that Keith wasn’t the most reliable of witnesses. He changed his mind considerably more often than his underpants if the vaguely unwholesome aroma coming off him
was anything to go by.

‘That him?’ Gregg tapped at a couple of keys and the screen on her laptop filled with a mugshot.

‘Aye, that’s pretty close. Mebbe didn’t look so much like a crook, mind.’

‘We can tidy him up, put him in a suit. You saw him at the hospital, right?’

‘Aye. Looked like a doctor wi’ one of them white coats and ear thingies.’

‘Stethoscope?’

‘Aye.’

McLean tapped the man
gently on the shoulder, dragging his gaze away from the screen. ‘You’ve been a great help, Keith. Thank you.’ As he got up from the cheap plastic chair in the corner of the bookies, McLean held out a hand to shake. He’d palmed the twenty-pound note earlier and was unsurprised when Keith took it with just the barest of nods, headed straight to the counter to get his unsatisfying fix.

‘We done
here, sir?’ Gregg asked, starting to pack up the laptop. McLean looked past the cashier to the door leading to the manager’s office. Someone was supposed to have come out here and gone through the whole e-fit process with him too, but if it had been done he’d not seen the result.

‘Not quite, Constable. Someone else we need to speak to.’

‘You sure these are the same person?’

It had taken a lot
less time to run through the e-fit procedure with the betting shop manager than it had with Keith, but the results hadn’t been all that promising. If you squinted at the two images painted side by side on the small laptop computer screen, and maybe smeared grease over your scratched spectacles, then there was a passing similarity between the two. Looked at more analytically though, it was hard
to accept that they were even related.

‘I guess DS Ritchie was right when she said this was a straw-clutching exercise.’ McLean put the key in the ignition and fired up the engine. Frowned as he looked out the windscreen to find a large white splat of bird shit on the once-shiny bonnet.

‘Pretty much everything to do with this case is clutching at straws, you ask me.’ DC Gregg sat in the passenger
seat in much the same way as DC MacBride, trying hard not to actually come into contact with any surface in case she somehow damaged it. McLean was going to have to do something about that soon.

‘You know anything about cars?’

Gregg looked at him askance, thrown by the non sequitur. ‘Cars?’

‘You know, four wheels, engine, makes vroom-vroom noises.’ McLean pulled away from their parking space
at the kerbside perhaps a little too enthusiastically, underlining the point.

‘Not much. That’s more Ritchie’s thing.’

‘You’ve got a car, though?’

‘Aye. Barry has one with the work. No’ as nice as this, but it’s comfy enough. Why you asking?’

‘Just looking for suggestions. I can’t really drive this around all the time. It’s been smashed up once already and I don’t want that happening again.
Been a while since I last read a car magazine. There’s never time to go to a garage, and frankly I could do without the sales patter.’

Gregg didn’t answer, and they fell into an uneasy silence as McLean drove across town in the direction of the Royal Infirmary. He didn’t know the hospital as well as the Western General at the other end of the city, neither was he recognised by any of the staff,
which made tracking down someone helpful more difficult than it should have been. Eventually they were directed towards the admin offices and HR department, where a harassed-looking young woman peered at McLean’s warrant card before letting out a heavy sigh.

‘Aye? What is it now?’

‘Wondering if you knew which member of staff this was.’ McLean nudged DC Gregg, who opened up the laptop computer
and showed the mugshot they’d teased out of Keith the punter.

‘Have you any idea how many people work in this place?’

‘He was wearing a doctor’s white coat, had a stethoscope round his neck. I reckon that probably rules out most of the support staff.’

‘Still leaves several hundred medical staff. Assuming it wasn’t someone in fancy dress. Or a student.’

‘Well could you at least look at it?’
McLean could put up with only so much whining, even if he knew that antagonising human resources was never a good idea.

‘OK.’ The young woman sighed again and made a show of studying the image. ‘Not very realistic, is it?’

‘I appreciate that, and I wouldn’t bother you if it wasn’t important. So it doesn’t ring any bells?’

‘No. Sorry.’

‘Right. Well. Thanks for looking. If I email it over, could
you send it around everyone in the hospital? If anyone recognises him it could be crucial to solving a particularly unpleasant murder.’

That finally seemed to get the young woman’s attention. The yawn she had been hiding badly disappeared in an instant, her eyes widening in surprise. ‘Murder?’

‘Yes, murder. So I’d quite like to get access to your CCTV footage as well.’