The Book of Souls (The Inspector McLean Mysteries) (22 page)

'Inspector McLean, does it bother you that there are so many similarities between both these deaths and that of Miss Kirsty Summers in the winter of 1999? I believe you were the detective who eventually brought that killer to justice.'

'Thank you Ms Dalgliesh. We're all aware of your theories here.' Chief Superintendent McIntyre stepped in before McLean could answer. If he could answer. The question had quite literally knocked him back in his seat, even as he had recognised the voice of the woman asking it.

'But surely it's an important line of investigation is it not?' Dalgliesh persisted. 'If there's the slightest possibility that Anderson didn't...'

'Anderson killed her. And the others before her. He killed them all.' McLean was surprised at the vehemence in his voice, the anger behind it. How dare this scrawny wee shite come in and even suggest that he'd got the wrong man? And why now?

'And yet here we are, nine years later, and two young women's bodies are found placed exactly the same way as all those others before. Killed exactly the same way. Will you at least be reviewing the old case files?'

McLean pictured the unopened cardboard box on his desk. He could feel McIntyre beside him gearing herself up to end the press conference. Her anger was almost like a wall growing between him and the collected journalists. But before the superintendent could speak, he leant forward, focussing solely on the scruffy woman in her leather coat as she sat a few rows from the front.

'Ms Dalgliesh, Donald Anderson was guilty. A jury found him guilty. We had incontrovertible evidence of his guilt. He even confessed, though that was just an attempt to get off on an insanity plea.

'But you're right, there are disturbing similarities between these murders and Anderson's. I'll be investigating those similarities very thoroughly.' He looked straight at Joanne Dalgliesh. 'Of course, my job would be a lot easier if his methods hadn't been made public in quite such intimate detail.'

*

McLean watched from the relative safety of the corridor as the reporters filed out of the briefing room. Only visitors with passes could find him here, peering through the wire-mesh toughened glass window. And, of course, serving police officers.

'I think that went as well as could be expected.'

He turned around to see Chief Superintendent McIntyre standing behind him, her uniform serving only to emphasise her seniority.

'You do? I was just about ready to strangle Dalgliesh in there. What the hell was she doing, dragging Kirsty's name into all this?'

McIntyre leant against the wall, perhaps trying to inject a little informality into the conversation. 'You know as well as I do that she's only trying to sell more papers. And there's a new edition of that book of hers, of course. Now Anderson's dead. She doesn't care whose feelings get trampled as long as she gets paid.'

'But you heard her, ma'am. She as good as said we framed an innocent man.'

McIntyre fixed McLean with an oddly puzzled stare, staying silent for a moment as if she was trying to make a decision. McLean could only seethe, glancing back to see the last of the journalists depart. No doubt some of them would be doing pieces to camera out in the street, but at least he'd been spared the added worry of TV recording the actual press conference.

'Come with me, Tony,' McIntyre said finally. He had to hurry to keep up as she led him back up to her office. Once there, he expected her to go straight to her chair on the far side of the desk, but instead she went to the bookcase in the 'informal' corner with the uncomfortable armchairs and the coffee machine. She made a good impression of a person trying to decide what to read in the bath that evening, then finally pulled out a fat, hardbound book that McLean recognised with a heavy heart. The cover bore a chilling photograph of Donald Anderson, and above it the legend 'The Christmas Killer,' subtitled 'Donald Anderson and the Book of Souls.'

'You really don't know what Dalgliesh is on about.' McIntyre clutched the book to her bosom. 'And I can understand that, Tony. From a personal point of view.  But you're a policeman. A detective. I know that it's painful. Christ, I can't begin to imagine just how painful, losing your fiancée like that. But you can't go on sticking your head in the sand. There's more than one opinion where Anderson's concerned.'

'Ma'am, Anderson is guilty. He killed all of those women. Not just my...'

'I know, Tony. I saw the evidence, and I trust your skills as a detective.' McIntyre pulled the book away from her and held it out for him to take. 'But not everyone else in the world does.'

McLean made no move to accept the book, so McIntyre forced it on him.

'Take it, Tony. Read it. I know it's going to hurt, and I know it's going to make you angry. But you need to understand where people like Jo Dalgliesh are coming from.'

~~~~

33

McLean had never really liked Joanne Dalgliesh as a person. Fifty pages into The Christmas Killer, he felt utterly justified in his contempt of her as a writer too.

For some unfathomable reason, the reporter had taken it upon herself to defend Anderson, seeing him as some victim of both a terrible miscarriage of justice and mental illness brought on by his upbringing. She didn't deny that he had killed Kirsty Summers in the winter of 1999, but the bulk of the book was a detailed exploration of the possibility that he might not have killed the other nine Christmas Killer victims.

 The book glossed neatly over the hard forensic evidence that had put Anderson away and focused instead on the mementos he had kept from his victims. Dalgliesh seemed to think that because none of these were individually conclusive, Anderson must have been fitted up for the earlier murders; Lothian and Borders taking the opportunity of Anderson's arrest to clear an embarrassing backlog of unsolved crimes. McLean knew himself that none of the mementos on their own meant anything; the first victim, Laura Fenton's St Christopher was a mass-produced piece that could have belonged to anyone. Rosie Buckley's ring had been a cheap piece of shit from Ratners the Jewellers, one of millions. And so on with all the other items found in the office behind the shop.

Even the strip of fabric from his fiancée's dress could have come from anywhere – the rest of her clothes had never been found. But he'd recognised it, slipped between the pages of that old book in Anderson's shop. It had been enough for a search warrant, and what the team had found in the basement had brought to a close the longest manhunt in the history of Lothian and Borders Police. That should have been the end of it, but for Jo Dalgliesh it was only the beginning.

Flicking through the book, McLean was struck by how little respect the reporter seemed to have for the victims and their families. She concentrated on the minutiae of the first nine murders, painting quick portraits of the victims that almost suggested it was their fault they were abducted and then describing their ordeals and fates as if writing a script for a slasher movie. No detail gleaned from the post-mortem reports went unmentioned, each cut and bruise lovingly teased out into a horrific scenario. It sickened him to read it, and sickened him more to know that many thousands of people, maybe millions, thought of such descriptions as entertainment.

Then he arrived at 1999 and the tenth abduction. Curiously Dalgliesh glossed over the forensic detail this time; either because she'd not been able to get a hold of the post-mortem report or because Anderson's guilt was unquestionable in this final case. Kirsty's blood had been all over his basement, after all. Instead she concentrated on Anderson himself. It was nothing McLean didn't already know: the lonely boy orphaned in the blitz; the evacuation to Wales and a cruel upbringing at the hands of a strict Methodist minister; the National Service in the Far East and unspeakable horrors witnessed; the retreat to a monastery in the Western Isles that then mysteriously burned to the ground; and finally the antiquarian bookshop in Edinburgh's Canongate.

 At this point the book stopped even being reportage and strayed into hagiography, as if Dalgliesh were slightly in awe of her subject. When she finally described in lurid, fabricated detail the impossible scene where Anderson plucked an innocent young Kirsty Summers from the streets and subjected her to a week of torture and abuse before callously cutting her throat, McLean slammed shut the book and threw it across the room. His hands were shaking, his whole body tingling as if he had a fever. He got up, paced about the tiny office. Looked out the window at the encroaching winter darkness, back at the book lying on the floor.

McIntyre was right; he had needed to read it. But that didn't make it any easier.

*

From the look of the whiteboard in the CID room, DS Ritchie had been far more successful piecing together Kate McKenzie's life than Audrey Carpenter's. Several different lines of enquiry spidered from the death-mask photograph towards neatly boxed handwritten notes. McLean peered at the one labelled 'Work,' seeing a list of names, presumably colleagues. Another box read 'Gym,' a third 'College' and a fourth had the title 'Gay Activism.' Underneath each were a series of names. It was going to be a bugger interviewing them all.

'You've been busy,' he said to Ritchie as she hung up the phone.

'It wasn't all me, sir. DC MacBride's been on the phone all afternoon chasing up names. We've arranged to go to her workplace tomorrow and start talking to her colleagues.'

'College?' McLean pointed at the other list.

'Yeah, she was studying law at evening classes. I spoke to her tutor, Dr McGillivray. He seemed quite distraught when he heard about her. Reckoned she'd have gone far. Very dedicated.'

'So I see.' McLean surveyed the board again, trying to work out what was missing. 'You spoken to Debbie again?'

'That was her on the phone,' Ritchie said. 'I left a message earlier. She's gone to stay with her parents in Balerno.  I said I'd pop out and see her tomorrow.'

'You know where you're going?'

'Oh, aye. I did my degree at Heriot Watt. Spent six months living in a nasty old council flat in Currie.'

'Ah, I did wonder how an Aberdeen girl could know her way around Edinburgh so well.'

'Five years of working in bars and living in the cheapest student digs I could find. You get to see a different side of the city.'

'Five years? What went wrong?'

'Wrong? An honours degree and an MSc? What's wrong with that?' Ritchie looked at him with a hurt expression, then added, 'Oh, I get it, you thought I flunked a year and had to re-sit. Well thank you very much.'

'That's not...' McLean stopped, he had to admit that was what he had thought. 'So what was your subject, then?'

'Sociology and anthropology. I was going to go to Borneo to study a tribe out there, but the money fell through. I was back home living with my folks, wondering what to do with my life. Dad was a beat sergeant, suggested I go in for the fast track.'

'And the rest, as they say, is history.' McLean motioned towards the whiteboard with an open hand. 'Well, anthropology's loss is our gain, I guess. But it's going to take us weeks to speak to all these people. Didn't you say MacBride was about?'

'Oh, he was here a couple of minutes ago. We've pretty much contacted everyone we can today. Had quite a team working here.'

'So where is everyone then?'

Ritchie nodded in the direction of the clock hanging over the doorway. 'Shift change. Grumpy Bob muttered something about going for a pint. I've never seen a room empty so quickly.'

'And you didn't go with them?' McLean raised a sceptical eyebrow. Ritchie treated him to an elfin smile.

'Oh, I'll be joining them all right. Just as soon as I've let the lead investigator know where we're all going.'

*

McLean was just walking out the back door of the station when a familiar face trotted up behind him. Emma Baird had a large canvas bag slung over one shoulder, weighing her down as if it contained all her worldly possessions.

'Anyone might think you liked us more than SOC.' He held open the door for her. 'You seem to spend that much time here.'

'I think it's because I'm the new girl,' she said. 'I always seem to get the job of carting stuff to the archives. Helps that I live nearby, I guess.'