Prayer for the Dead: A Detective Inspector McLean Mystery (5 page)

It’s remarkably easy to pose as a doctor. Hospitals are so busy, their staff turnover so rapid, all you really need is a white coat, a stethoscope, a smattering of medical jargon and you’re there.

The hard part is keeping it up for any length of time.
Sooner or later someone’s going to ask you to do something you don’t know how to do, or ask you a question you can’t answer. That’s when you need a quick-exit strategy.

I don’t really like hospitals. I died in one not so different from this. And yet here I am. Drawn to this place like a moth to a flame. Goodness flourishes here, amongst the wickedness and despair. It is a place where ordinary
people do extraordinary things, a place where souls are redeemed. That’s why I keep on coming back. God’s work, my sacred duty demands it of me. It is my refuge and my hunting ground both.

Everyone needs to eat. Watch them eating and you’ll see more of them than they’ll ever tell you themselves. I start with the staff canteen. Check out the late lunch crowd. It’s easy to spot the groups, the
med students who’ve been in it together since first year, the trainee nurses who’ll probably head into the private sector as soon as they graduate. These are not special people. They shine with a dull light at best. Given time and effort I might coax the goodness out of them, but time is a luxury I have never had. No,
somewhere in here there is one who is almost pure. I can feel him like an angler
feels the gentlest of tugs on his baited line. It is not sight or smell or touch that brings me to him; I do not taste the air like a snake, or listen to the voices clamouring all around. Instead this is a different sense, a knowing that guides me away from the crowd, off towards the edges of the room. God’s hand.

And there he is, alone by the window, playing idly with a plate of congealed spaghetti
bolognese, drinking occasionally from a stained white mug of cold coffee. His obsession oozes from him like a disease. Maybe that’s why his colleagues shun him. Whatever the reason, he is perfect. I can see his secrets writ large across his face. I know he is the one.

‘You mind?’ I ask as I sit down opposite him, slide my tray on to the table until it neatly lines up with his own. His look is
startled, wary, but I can see the interest there as well. He doesn’t know me, but that means he hasn’t been scorned by me yet.

‘New here, aren’t you?’

‘Aye. First week. Crazy place.’

‘A and E?’

I shake my head. ‘Geriatric care.’

‘Lots of that here. I’m in oncology. Specialise in terminal cases, lucky me.’ He holds out his hand. ‘Jim,’ he says.

I wipe my own hand on my purloined white coat
hurriedly before taking his. The touch is warm and dry, the grip firm. I sense the aura of near-perfection about him and know he will be saved. ‘Ben,’ I say. ‘Ben Stevenson.’

‘You seen Dan Hwei about?’

McLean looked across the incident room, hoping to spot the press liaison officer at one of the media desks. They were all empty, as was much of the rest of the room. Only Detective Constables Gregg and MacBride were in attendance,
along with a half-dozen support staff. So much for a major investigation.

‘Think he went off to DCI Brooks’ briefing.’ MacBride dragged his eyes away from his computer screen, and scanned the room as if only just realising there was almost nobody there.

‘He does realise this is a murder investigation?’ McLean asked. ‘What’s he briefing about, anyway?’

‘Some big drugs operation, I think. Been
working with Serious and Organised, or the NCA or whatever it’s calling itself this week.’ DC Gregg didn’t even look up as she spoke, just continued jabbing at her keyboard with two fingers. Obviously not happy at being left out of the action. Either that or she really was rubbish at typing.

‘Ah yes, I remember now. Thought we were getting a busload of detectives over from Strathclyde to work
on that.’

‘Chance’d be a fine thing.’ Gregg abandoned her typing and finally turned to look at him. ‘They keep dragging us over there to fill numbers. Not saying they don’t need the help, mind. But we’re not exactly overstaffed as it is.’

McLean held his hands up in mock surrender. Sandy Gregg wasn’t someone to mess with at the best of times. ‘You’ll not find me arguing with you, Constable.
Not much I can do about it, either. I was just looking for Dan.’

‘Anything specific you needed him for, sir?’ MacBride asked.

‘A phone number for Jo Dalgliesh, actually. Words I never thought I’d hear myself say.’

MacBride grabbed his mouse, clicked a couple of times, then scribbled a string of digits down on a Post-it note and handed it over. ‘It’ll be on your phone anyway, sir. She’s always
calling you, after all.’

McLean retreated to the quiet of his own office before placing the call. Not that the incident room was exactly overcrowded, but something about the act of talking to the press made him feel strangely guilty. Using his office phone meant that he could at least pretend he wasn’t giving Dalgliesh his mobile number, too. MacBride was right though; he’d changed it once before
and she’d still managed to get hold of the new number in a matter of days. Hours, possibly.

‘Aye?’ Dalgliesh’s telephone manner was in keeping with her general demeanour. McLean imagined her sitting at a cluttered desk, unlit cigarette dangling from her lip, leather coat still on despite being indoors.

‘Ms Dalgliesh?’ McLean asked.

‘Aye. Who is this?’

‘Detective Inspector McLean.’ He almost
added ‘Lothian and Borders’ but managed to stop himself at the last minute.

‘So it is. Well, well. What an unexpected surprise.’ Dalgliesh paused for a moment, the line crackling with gentle static. When she spoke again, her voice was flat. ‘You found Ben.’

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘Can’t think of any other reason why you’d phone me. He dead?’

‘I think it’d be better if I spoke to you in person.
It’s … complicated.’

‘Shit. No’ that body you found up at Gilmerton Cove?’ Dalgliesh muffled the receiver at her end, but McLean could still hear a string of colourful words. It stopped him asking her how she knew about the body long enough for him to realise it would be a wasted question. Guarding her sources, particularly within the ranks of the police, was second nature to the journalist.

‘You want me to come round the station?’ she asked after the air had cleared. ‘Only I’ve a meeting set up for this afternoon’s taken me months to arrange. Really don’t want to cancel it.’

McLean glanced at his watch. Almost noon. ‘No. I’ll come round to your office. I could do with stretching my legs a bit. Give me fifteen minutes.’

Never having been a fan of the press, McLean hadn’t spent much
time in the offices of the
Edinburgh Tribune
. He knew where they were though, just a short walk from the station, down towards Holyrood and the parliament building. A hot sun and humid air meant he was sweating by the time he got there, but the reception area was well air-conditioned,
bright and surprisingly modern. He gave his name to the receptionist, then waited while she phoned up to the floor
where all the hacks lived. Sooner than he was expecting the lift pinged and Jo Dalgliesh bustled out.

‘Fifteen minutes on the nose, Inspector. I’m impressed.’

McLean didn’t know what to say. He was taken aback by Dalgliesh’s appearance more than anything; couldn’t recall a time he’d seen her not wearing her trademark battered leather coat. Even more unsettling was seeing her in a skirt, cut
just below the knees, calf-length suede boots and a blouse that looked like it might have been fashionable in the 1980s. She even had a red silk scarf tied loosely around her neck. The only thing suggesting she might be a journalist with questionable ethics and not some well-to-do middle-aged lady off to tea at Jenners was the fact that she was carrying a battered notebook. That and the severe crop
to her greying hair.

‘Going to a party?’ McLean asked.

Dalgliesh paused a moment. ‘What? This?’ She half-gestured at her blouse. ‘Important meeting later this afternoon. Got to look my best.’

McLean let the obvious comment slide; scoring points off Jo Dalgliesh wasn’t why he was here, after all. ‘There somewhere we can go and talk?’

‘Sure. This way.’ She led him through a security door that
took them into a large, open-plan office. This was more the type of thing McLean had been expecting to see – a busy, barely organised chaos as dozens of journalists clattered away at keyboards or clustered around large screens discussing how best to frame their more lurid
stories. He recognised a few of the faces and some even smiled at him, warily, as he followed Dalgliesh through to a small
meeting room.

‘So, Ben,’ she said once she’d closed the door behind him and wound down the blinds covering the window that looked out on to the main office. ‘He’s dead.’

‘Yes. He’s dead. I’m sorry.’

Dalgliesh cocked her head to one side like a confused puppy. ‘You really mean that, don’t you? I’m sorry too. He could be a pain in the arse at times, but he was …’ She broke off as if unsure what
he was.

‘Do you know what he was working on?’

‘Not a Scooby, Inspector. Ben’s … Ben was very secretive when he had a project on.’

‘OK. What sort of things interested him? What might he have been working on that would take him out to Gilmerton Cove?’

Dalgliesh leaned back against the conference table that dominated the room, ran a scrawny hand over her face, frowned as if the effort of thinking
needed to be shown on the outside. McLean was fairly sure it was all an act, the pauses just a little too dramatic.

‘He loved a good conspiracy theory, did Ben,’ she said eventually. ‘Secret societies were his thing. Last time I saw him he was babbling on about the Beggar’s Benison and the Hellfire Club. But I got the impression his project was something different. How did he die?’

Always the
journalist. Well, she’d find out sooner or later. ‘He had his throat cut. Ear to ear. Deep, too.’

If she was shocked, Dalgliesh didn’t show it. But neither did she immediately scribble down notes in her book.
‘And you found him in a cavern behind a locked door. Least that’s what I heard.’

‘One of these days I’ll find out which constable is talking to you and he’ll be spending the rest of his
life directing traffic on the Gogar Roundabout.’

‘What makes you think it’s a he? Or just the one?’ Dalgliesh gave him a shark’s smile.

‘True enough. And you’re right. Yes, we found him in a cave behind a locked door. How he got in there is one question, but perhaps more pertinent is the fact that he appears to have gone there of his own volition, and died without a struggle. And his killer
left behind a little message for us, too.’

‘He did? Are you going to tell me what?’

‘That depends on whether you’re just going to print it all, or help us with our enquiries. If it’s the former, we’re done here. The latter and you’ll get an exclusive.’

Dalgliesh tried to look casually uninterested, but McLean could see that he had her attention now. Her back was straighter, her eyes bright,
even though they were narrowed in a suspicious frown. ‘What’s the catch?’

‘You don’t publish anything until we let it out.’ McLean saw the protest coming before Dalgliesh could even open her mouth to voice it. He raised a hand for her to wait. ‘I don’t mean you can’t write anything at all. You’ll get a story, and before anyone else out there. I just need to control how the details are released.
Don’t want our killer getting tipped off as to how close we are. Or how far-off.’

Dalgliesh considered for all of ten seconds. ‘OK. What do you want me to do?’

‘I want you to try to find out what he was investigating, who he was talking to, where he’s been the last few weeks.’

Dalgliesh stood, crossed the room to where McLean was standing. ‘Deal,’ she said, and stuck out her hand to be shaken.
For an irrational moment, he thought of refusing to take it. She was someone he would have happily seen hung upside down in chains in a dungeon, after all. But she was also as close to an answer to this case as he was going to find. Swallowing his pride, he took her hand, finding it both warm and surprisingly small.

‘You hold anything back, I’ll find out,’ she said.

‘Likewise, Ms Dalgliesh.’
McLean let go of her hand, resisted the urge to wipe his own on his trouser leg. ‘Enjoy your meeting. Good luck with the promotion.’

‘How did you …?’

‘All dolled up like that? And the man who owns this paper’s in town for a couple of days. First visit he’s paid to Scotland in a decade?’ McLean shook his head to suppress the smirk that wanted to spread across his face. ‘You’re not the only one
good at finding out things, you know.’