Prayer for the Dead: A Detective Inspector McLean Mystery (4 page)

‘Nobody’s been in there. It was all locked up.’

They’d commandeered the library just around the corner from the little house that hid the entrance to the caves. Soon everything would be moved down to the station, where DC MacBride and Grumpy Bob were busy
setting up a major incident room. For now, McLean wanted to get the few witnesses interviewed as soon as possible.

‘Locked up? What do you mean?’ He was sitting in a small alcove formed by the bookshelves. Across a wobbly table from him, the tour guide from the visitor centre looked nervous and pale, picking at her fingernails and occasionally sliding her spectacles up her nose.

‘Do you know
anything about the cove?’ she asked. McLean shook his head. ‘Well, it’s an old site, goes back at least a couple of hundred years, probably a lot more. There’s passages leading off in all directions from the main complex, but they’re all collapsed, or filled with rubble. We’d love to excavate them all, only, well, money’s not exactly free-flowing for something like that. And being off the beaten
tourist track, we don’t make as much as we’d like. There’s the problem that some of them go underneath the main crossroads, too. The engineers get nervous.’

‘But you did open up that cavern. The one where we found the body.’

‘There’s a team from the University Archaeology Department. They’ve been coming out for a while. Using the place to test kit, that sort of thing. They got some money together
and were going to do a survey of the blocked tunnels. They opened up that cavern a couple of months back, put the metal door in to keep it sealed off from the public until we could work out if it was safe or not.’

‘So no one could get in there?’

‘Not unless they had the key. And they’d have needed other keys to get into the caves in the first place.’

‘So who has the keys?’

The tour guide pushed
her spectacles up her nose again. ‘I have a set for the visitor centre and the caves. My son’s got one too, and there’s a spare set at home. I don’t know which of the archaeology team had their keys, but I’ve never had one. They couldn’t get to the door without me or my son letting them in first.’

McLean glanced over to where the archaeology students were sitting. They didn’t look old enough
to be at university. But then when he’d been that age he’d not looked old enough to be at university either.

‘I’ll be speaking to them next,’ he said. ‘But I’m trying to put together a timeline. When were you last open?’

‘Us? It’s the peak season. We’ve been open every day over the summer.’

‘What about that cavern, then?’

‘No, that’s been locked, and the archaeology team’s been off for a couple
of months. Don’t think anyone’s been in there since June. Well, apart from …’ The tour guide swallowed hard, her face going pale.

‘Could someone have come down on a tour, hidden and
stayed in after you locked up for the night?’ It was a long shot, McLean knew, but he had to ask.

‘I don’t think so. We do a head count, same number in and out. And I always take a walk around the caves last thing,
before we lock up and go home. There’s nowhere down here you could hide, really.’

‘Except that locked cavern. If you had a key.’

‘I guess so. Was he there long, do you know?’

The question brought McLean up short. It was the nub of the investigation, after all. Rigor mortis had been and gone, and the core body temperature was the same as the cave, which meant the death hadn’t occurred in the
last few hours, but beyond that Angus had only offered the vaguest of guesses. Given the conditions in the cave the poor bastard could have been lying there weeks.

‘We’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, I’m afraid we’re going to have to shut you down for a while. At least until forensics have processed the scene.’

‘I guessed as much, soon as I heard what they’d found when they opened
up the door.’ The tour guide’s face told the story eloquently. It was a small tourist attraction and this was peak season. The loss of income would hit them hard.

‘I’ll try to get them to go as quickly as possible,’ McLean said, although he knew he wouldn’t. ‘Just one last thing. You were first in this morning, right? Before the archaeologists turned up?’

A simple nod by way of answer.

‘Did
you notice any blood on the floor? Any sign that anyone had been there since you left last night?’

‘Blood?’ The tour guide’s face turned pale. ‘No. I don’t
remember any blood. Just the poor wee lad running out down the passageway. He was sick in the well, you know.’

It didn’t take McLean long to work out which of the archaeology team had thrown up down the well. His name was Eric and he still
had a stain of vomit down the front of his T-shirt. Should really have been sent home to clean himself up. His pale face had a sheen of sweat on it that made him look only slightly more healthy than the dead body even now being carefully removed from the cavern somewhere beneath their feet.

‘You were the first into the cave, am I right?’

The student swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing like some
alien life-form trying to escape through his neck. Had anyone thought to offer this lot a mug of tea? McLean looked around the library for a constable to send off in search of something suitable, but could see no one close by.

‘Was dark in there. Smelled bad.’

McLean’s attention was drawn back to the young man. ‘Stale? Like it hadn’t been disturbed for a while?’

‘No. It was like bin bags. Rotting.
Something else, too.’

‘There were no lights in there?’

‘No. We only opened the cave up recently. Hadn’t had time to survey it properly. Got some temporary arc lights in there, but we took them away with us for the summer. I was rolling out the extension cable so we could set them back up again.’

‘When did you see the body?’

‘The body. Yes.’ The young man’s eyes went out of focus for a moment,
the alien trying to burst out of his
neck again. McLean thought he was about to be sick, readied himself to get out of the way. It wasn’t necessary.

‘Couldn’t work out what it was at first. I mean, there wasn’t meant to be anything in there. Wasn’t when we left it. If it’d been a new cave I might’ve expected a skeleton, maybe. There’s a story about old man Paterson being buried somewhere in there.’

‘Paterson?’ McLean wrote the name down in his notebook.

‘Oh yeah. That’s right. You’ve never been to the cove before.’ Eric seemed to recover some of his composure once he had a task to concentrate on. ‘Tradition was it was built by a blacksmith, name of George Paterson, back in the early eighteenth century. He lived in it, for sure. Used it as an illegal drinking den for a while and claimed
he dug it all out himself. But it’s much older than that. He probably found it, cleared it out and used it. No way he actually built it, though.’

‘So who did?’

‘Well that’s the mystery, innit? No one knows right enough. There’s all manner of weird conspiracy theories. Why we were digging out that tunnel, wasn’t it. Trying to put a bit of science behind it all.’

‘So, the body.’ McLean nudged
the interview back on track.

‘Yeah. It was weird. And the light wasn’t good. Thought it was a rock formation or something. Anyway, Ali was coming up the tunnel behind me with the big lamp, so I had to go in properly.’

McLean wondered whether that was correct protocol when exploring caves just a few feet beneath houses and a busy street, but kept it to himself.

‘He plugged in the lamp. Shone
it up at the ceiling like I’d done, then over to the body. I’d got a bit closer to it by then, and when the light hit it I could … oh God … his throat.’

McLean was on his feet quickly, but not quickly enough. Someone obviously had given the archaeology team tea, and biscuits too. Second time around they didn’t look anything like as appetising. Even less so spattered over his shoes.

‘His name’s Ben Stevenson. He’s a reporter with the
Tribune
. Sometime colleague of our old friend Jo Dalgliesh.’

McLean stood in Detective Superintendent Duguid’s office, and not for the first time wished there were more chairs in the place. The afternoon
sun shone through the long glass window wall, making everything uncomfortably warm and humid. Duguid had his jacket off, draped over the back of his expensive leather executive’s chair, shirtsleeves rolled up. McLean had just walked from the car park at the back of the station, up several flights of stairs. He was short of breath, and sweat was beginning to trickle down his back.

‘And someone
cut his throat open, eh? Going to be hard narrowing down the list of suspects for that one.’

McLean ignored the attempt at humour. Duguid’s mood had lightened considerably since he’d announced his retirement, but it was still hit and miss. ‘The thing is, Dalgliesh approached me just a couple of days ago. Wanted to know if I could look into his disappearance. Seems he was on to some big story,
then just disappeared.’

‘Dalgliesh asked you for a favour?’ Duguid grinned in an oddly simian manner. ‘Which part of her anatomy did you tell her to shove that into?’

‘Actually I said I’d see what I could do. Was on my way to an important meeting, so anything to get rid of her, really.’

‘Well it’s not going to be so easy next time. You’ll need to speak to her, get as much detail as you can
about what this Stevenson fellow was working on. Trace his movements over the past few weeks.’

McLean suppressed the urge to remind Duguid that he knew how to carry out an investigation.

‘You want me to work with her, sir?’ Just asking the question was enough to send a shudder down his spine.

‘Makes sense. She came to you, after all. And you’ve got history.’

‘If you mean by history she wrote
a book about the man who killed my fiancée and I’ve hated her ever since, then I guess you’ve got a point.’

‘Don’t be such a drama queen, McLean. She’s a useful asset for the investigation or she’s a pain in the arse making life difficult for us. Which would you rather have?’

Put like that McLean had to admit that the detective superintendent had a point; that old saw about keeping your friends
close and your enemies closer. It didn’t make it any easier to accept, though. Still, if Duguid was going to make life awkward for him, he could just as easily do the same.

‘You going to be Gold on this one, sir?’

‘Christ. You think it’s that important?’

As excuses went, it was a bit rubbish. So Stevenson was a reporter, and one who’d gone for one of their own when he’d exposed lurid details
of Chief Superintendent McIntyre’s private life that were, as far as McLean could see, none of anyone else’s business. But even so, he’d died violently. There was no denying it was murder, and there was nothing domestic about it either. Protocol dictated that it be classed as a major incident.

‘You’re right, of course. It’s got Cat A murder written all over it. I’ll have to take charge, I guess.’
Duguid ran an over-large hand through his sparse hair. ‘Still, keep it as low-key as possible for now. Not that it’s going to be easy, him being a journalist and everything.’

‘Grumpy Bob and MacBride are setting up the incident room.’ McLean turned to leave, was almost at the door before Duguid spoke again.

‘You’re going to make it complicated again, aren’t you McLean?’

‘A body with its throat
cut, hidden in a secret cavern underground and no obvious idea how it got in there?’ McLean stood in the doorway, enjoying the faint breeze wafting in from the corridor outside. ‘I don’t think even I could make it any more complicated than that.’

It was always cool in the city mortuary, but that was about all it had going for it on the positive side. Cool and dry. Summer had been warm, but the
past three weeks had seen almost endless, miserable rain. McLean thought he might have been starting to grow gills, and he couldn’t remember a time when his feet hadn’t been damp. Of course that was mostly his own fault for insisting on walking everywhere.

The silence in the mortuary was a plus, too. He had to admit that as the doors swung closed behind him, cutting off the splashing roar of
traffic from outside. There was only the gentle swish of air through the ductwork, the occasional far-off clatter of a dropped specimen tray or the squeak-squeak-squeak of an un-oiled trolley wheel as another departed soul was taken from the cold store to
the place where all their most intimate secrets would be revealed.

He took his time walking to the examination theatre. The journey from the
station had been leisurely, too. McLean liked to think while he walked, helped by the rhythm of his feet on the pavement, but this time it had been difficult to focus. A man had been murdered, of that there was no doubt. He needed justice, deserved it as much as anyone. And yet this man had been a thorn in the side of many a police officer over the course of his journalistic career. He was part
of a pack more interested in salacious detail than important fact, favouring spectacle and hype over solid investigative journalism. He was a hack and proud of it – or rather, had been a hack and proud of it. It was hard then to drum up any great enthusiasm for catching his killer.

McLean had seen it in the eyes of the junior officers at that morning’s briefing, and in the eyes of some of the
more senior officers during informal meetings the night before. It annoyed him that they could be so childish, these professional grown men. And it annoyed him that he got annoyed at what he’d known he would face, as soon as the identity of the dead man was confirmed. So the thoughts had gone around in his head, always bringing him back to the wrong questions, stopping him from focusing on the killer
rather than the victim.

‘Ah, Tony. You made it then.’

McLean looked up, surprised to find he was already at the examination theatre. Angus Cadwallader stood on one side of the table, his ever-present assistant Tracy on the other. Between them lay the mortal remains of Ben
Stevenson, already well into the post-mortem examination process.

‘I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to.’

‘Well, you don’t
have to attend, you know. Dr MacPhail’s here to verify my findings and it’ll all be in the report.’

Cadwallader sounded almost hurt as he spoke. McLean wondered if he, too, was upset at the imposition this man’s murder had put upon him. Then he realised just how stupid that sounded, shook his head to try to rid himself of the malaise he’d picked up at the station. It helped, a bit, although it
got him a strange look from the pathologist.

‘You know I prefer to get the news first-hand, Angus.’ McLean stepped a little closer to the examination table, saw that Stevenson was already open, stopped before he could see what was inside.

‘Well, we’d better get stuck in then.’ Cadwallader grinned at his pun, then added to it by reaching into the dead man’s torso and carefully lifting out something
slippery. Tracy was ready with a plastic container that looked suspiciously like it might once have contained ice cream. Newly filled, she placed it on a nearby set of scales and noted something down.

‘You’ve done the exterior examination already, I see,’ McLean said. ‘Any clues you might want to share?’

‘All in good time, Tony.’ Cadwallader pulled out something else and handed it to Tracy to
weigh. ‘I need to finish this. Then we can discuss what happened to the poor fellow.’

McLean opened his mouth to reply, then shut it again. Cadwallader was right, of course. If he’d arrived on time,
then he could have listened as the pathologist detailed his examination for the microphone hanging above the table. Coming in late and expecting his old friend to stop, switch off, talk about what
he’d already just talked about and then start all over again was really a bit much to ask. And besides, if he was busy pulling stuff out of the poor man, there couldn’t be all that much longer to go.

‘Cause of death was almost certainly the cut to the throat. It’s very deep. Almost took the poor man’s head off. He’d have lost consciousness very quickly, bled out in a matter of minutes.’

Half
an hour later and they were sitting in the shared office that opened on to the examination theatre. Cadwallader had taken off his gore-smeared scrubs and was even now climbing into a new, clean set, ready for the next body to be wheeled in. Outside, Tracy was busy putting the removed organs back into Ben Stevenson’s torso and sewing him up with her large, neat stitches. Dr MacPhail had wandered off
in search of some lunch.

‘What about ligatures? Was he tied up?’

‘There’s marks around his wrists, but they’re very light. He never fought against them. And there’s nothing around his ankles, so he wasn’t tied up. He could walk.’

‘Forced at gunpoint, maybe?’

‘It’s possible, I suppose. That’s your department, though. I’m more interested in what I could find on him.’

McLean said nothing, just
leaned against the desk and waited for Cadwallader to decide his audience was ready.

‘First off, his knees were marked where he’d been kneeling on the ground for a while. He was wearing trousers,
but the rough surface had puckered his skin before death. There were similar marks on his forehead.’

‘So he knelt right down, put his head to the ground. Praying?’

‘That sort of posture, at least.
But he’d have had to have knelt that way for some time. Ten, fifteen minutes. Maybe more.’

‘There was blood on the cave wall. Do we know if it was his?’

‘It was, yes.’ Cadwallader reached for a sheet of paper on his desk, picked it up and waved it around as if that made everything clear.

‘So that would have been done by the killer. After Stevenson was dead.’

‘If not by the killer, then by
someone with him.’

‘Let’s not complicate things any further, shall we?’ McLean said. ‘Bad enough we’ve got a body in a cave and the only way in is through a locked door with only one set of keys.’

‘Yes, well. You’ll have to puzzle that one out, I guess. There’s one thing you might find interesting though.’

‘There is? What?’

‘He was wet.’

‘Wet?’

‘Soaked right through. His hair’s quite short,
but it was damp at the roots. It was damp in the cave, of course. The whole bloody city feels like it’s underwater. But damp air wouldn’t soak him through.’ Cadwallader paused a moment as if trying to remember. ‘No, it was Tracy who noticed it first. When she was taking off his clothes and bagging them up for the forensics people. They were damp as well,
you see. His trousers were almost dry,
but his underpants were still wet. Like he’d been starting to dry out. His body heat would have driven most of the moisture off eventually, but of course he started cooling down the moment his throat was cut.’

‘How long was he down there? Can you hazard a time of death?’

Cadwallader smiled, that evil glint in his eye that McLean knew meant nothing but trouble.

‘Difficult case, you know. The
temperature down there was cool, and very stable. No rodent damage either, and very little insect life on him.’

‘So it was recent?’

‘That’s what I thought at first. Oh, a few days, of course. Rigor mortis had been and gone, and what little blood he had left had settled on the side where he was lying. But there’s a few other tests we can do, and they all suggested he’d been there longer.’

‘Longer?’
McLean felt the familiar unpleasant cold sensation in his stomach that always came when things were about to get weird.

‘Best guess is about three weeks,’ Cadwallader said. ‘Could be four, but certainly not less than eighteen days.’