The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3)
Read The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) Online
Authors: James Oswald
James Oswald
THE HANGMAN’S SONG
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Acknowledgements
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PENGUIN BOOKS
THE HANGMAN’S SONG
James Oswald is the author of the Inspector McLean series of crime novels:
Natural Causes
, top ten bestseller and the bestselling Richard and Judy summer pick of 2013;
The Book of
Souls
and
The Hangman’s Song
. He has written an epic fantasy series,
The Ballad of Sir Benfro
, also published by Penguin, as well as comic strips and short stories.
In his spare time, James runs a 350-acre livestock farm in north-east Fife, where he raises pedigree cattle and New Zealand Romney sheep.
This one’s for Zos, Dregs, Fergus, Felix
and of course
‘Doctor’ Eleanor Austin
1
‘The important thing is to get the drop right. Nothing else matters, really.’
He stands on tippy-toes, balanced on the precarious chair, hands behind his back like a good boy. His fingers are trembling slightly, as if in anticipation, but he’s not struggling. I knew he wouldn’t. Not now. He wants this, after all.
‘Of course, to work that out I need to know your height, your weight, your build.’
I tug at the rope. Good, stout hemp; none of that nylon rubbish for a job like this. Getting it over the beam was a struggle, but now it’s secure, ready. His eyelids flutter as I slip the noose over his head, gently snug it around his neck past his ear, let the excess loop over his bare shoulder.
‘Height? No, height is easy, as long as you’re not wearing platform shoes. Clothes can be deceptive though, make a thin man seem fat. And then there’s build.’
He doesn’t respond, but then why would he? He’s not here any more. I can see the movement of his eyes under closed lids, the flick, flick, flick as he watches something far off in his mind. I reach out, run the backs of my fingers down his cheek, his arm, the muscles of his taut stomach. He is young, so young. Barely a man yet and the world has already dragged him down. Young skin is so
soft and pure, not corrupted by the cankers and blemishes of age. A pity the same cannot be said of young minds. They are so fragile, so hopeless.
‘Muscle is so much denser than fat. A well-muscled physique will weigh more than a lazy body. It is essential to take that into account.’
The spirit shivers in me, drinking deep from the well of despair that fills this room. There is nothing here worth saving, only the joy of release from a life not worth living.
‘A handshake is usually enough. You can tell so much from a person’s hand, their grip. I knew as soon as I met you how long a piece of rope we would need.’
I let my hand drop lightly down, stroking him with my nails. He rises to the occasion, ever so slightly, a soft moan escaping from his lips as I reach in, cup his barely dropped testicles, tickle them with my fingertips. The touch is both exhilarating and revolting, as if some tawdry sex act could ever be as intimate as what we have, this man child and me.
He shivers, whether from cold or excitement I will never know. I withdraw my hand, take a step back. One second, two, the pressure builds as the spirit rises within me. I see the rope, the knot, the chair, the table. Clothes neatly folded and placed on the bed a few feet away.
There is a moment when I push the chair away. Anything is possible. He floats in the air like a hoverfly, trapped in that instant. And then he is falling, falling, falling, the loops of rope untwining in lazy, slow-motion rolls until nothing is left.
And then.
Snap.
2
‘You sure about this, Tony?’
Detective Chief Inspector Jo Dexter sat in the passenger seat of the Transit van, staring out through a grubby windscreen at the industrial wasteland around Leith Docks. Street lights glowed in orange strings; roads to nowhere. The first tinge of dawn painted the undersides of the clouds, marching north and east across the Forth to Fife. The high-rises that had sprung up along the northern shoreline were dark silhouettes pocked by the occasional light of a shift-worker coming home. This early in the morning there wasn’t much activity, least of all from the dark bulk of the freighter they were watching. It had docked two days ago, a routine trip from Rotterdam bringing in aggregates for the new road bridge. As if they didn’t have enough rock and sand in Scotland already. A team had been watching around the clock ever since, acting on information thought to be reliable. Beyond the unloading of a large quantity of gravel, nothing interesting had happened at all.
‘According to Forth Ports, she sails on the tide. In about two hours’ time.’ Detective Inspector Anthony McLean checked his watch, even though the clock on the dashboard told him it was almost five in the morning. ‘If nothing happens before then, we’ve been played for fools. I dare say it won’t be the first time.’
‘Easy for you to say. You’re not the one having to justify the overtime.’
McLean looked across at his companion. He’d known Jo Dexter of old. She’d joined up at the same time as him, but had hit the promotion ladder early. McLean was happy for her, though he preferred his own niche; a career of chasing prostitutes and pornographers had hardened Jo Dexter’s once pretty features so that she looked far older than her thirty-nine years. Vice did that to a person, he’d been told. And now he was finding out first hand thanks to bloody Dagwood.
‘Well, you’re the one reckoned the tip-off was good.’ The temperature dropped by several degrees. Even in the darkness, McLean could see that this was the wrong thing to say, no matter how true it was. The letter had appeared in his in-tray on the first day of his secondment to Jo Dexter’s team in the Sexual Crimes Unit. It didn’t have a stamp on it, and no one knew how it had got there. Nevertheless, the information in it showed that whoever had written it knew a great deal about the sleazy underbelly of Edinburgh’s sex industry, and the final nugget had concerned a highly organized people-smuggling operation and this very ship.