The Book of Souls (The Inspector McLean Mysteries) (16 page)

'I'm afraid you can't park here, sir,' the PC said as McLean opened the door and started to get out. 'Police business.'

McLean fished out his warrant card and held it up. 'It's OK, constable. I'm supposed to be here.'

'Sorry, sir.' The constable looked from the warrant card to McLean's face and then to the bright red sports car. 'I didn't think...'

'Fair enough, it's not your average detective inspector's car.'

'Erm... What is it?' The constable asked, then added: 'Sir?'

'This is a nineteen sixty-nine Alfa Romeo GTV, and it really doesn't like salted roads.' But needs must, even if he could hear his Gran tutting her disapproval from her grave.

'She's a beauty, sir. Had her long?'

'She?' McLean raised an eyebrow. He'd not really thought of the car in such terms, but it seemed oddly appropriate. 'My father bought it in sixty-nine, so you could say it's been in the family a while. Now I believe there was something about a body?'

The constable's face darkened. 'Yes, of course, sir. Up the burn a-ways.'

McLean followed him across the car park then along a short path that ran parallel to the road. He could hear the water babbling over rocks some way below the path, and up ahead, through a gap in the spindly winter trees, narrow concrete and steel bridged the water. Just before it, someone had broken a rough path through the undergrowth and marked it off with blue and white Police tape.

'Down there, sir. I'll stay up here.'

'That bad is it?'

'It's... Well... There's not a lot of room.'

McLean nodded his understanding. The young constable couldn't have been long out of training college, so there was every chance that this was his first body. Based in a quiet station like Penicuik, it was unlikely he'd ever encounter many. Lucky sod.

The path was slick with recent rain. McLean had to hold onto branches overhead to stop himself tumbling down and into the cold brown water. His new shoes might have been comfortable, but they had no grip on their soles to speak of. Through the scrub, he saw a small group of people and recognised Detective Constable MacBride amongst them. And there, at their feet, the victim.

She lay on her back, face staring sightless at the darkening sky, hair waving like seaweed in the flow. Arms outstretched in parody of crucifixion. His eyes transfixed by the familiar, horrifying sight, it was a while before McLean noticed the neat slash across her throat that had almost certainly been the cause of her death.

'Not the most pleasant way to spend the afternoon, Tony.' Angus Cadwallader shifted around slightly, affording him a better view. 'But that's the price we pay for our professions.'

'Who found her?' McLean asked.

'A fisherman, headed up for the loch,' MacBride said.

'What? On a Sunday?'

'Aye, well. They've got him up at the car park if you want a word.'

'You've interviewed him?' MacBride nodded.

'Then you can let him go. Just make sure we can get back in touch. And ask him to come into the station tomorrow to give us a full statement.'

The detective constable hurried away with obvious relief, and McLean stepped carefully into the position on the bank he had been occupying. Cadwallader sported a pair of fishing waders, his assistant thigh length galoshes that were just about adequate for standing in the flow. They both looked chilled to the bone, but nothing like as bad as the dead woman.

'How long have you been here?' McLean asked.

'About half an hour. I don't think the call's long in.' Cadwallader bent down the better to examine his subject, then stood up again. 'Where're those bloody lights. I can hardly see a thing here.'

As if in reply, twin arc lamps banged into life directly overhead and a voice called down: 'That better, doc?'

McLean didn't hear what Cadwallader muttered in reply; his attention was on the young woman. Like long-gone fireworks overhead, the details came to him in flashes. Plastic cable ties fixed her wrists to two rusty metal poles bashed into the riverbed. A third, at her feet, wobbled dangerously in the flow. Water bubbled up between her pale white legs and that neatly-trimmed dark triangle. Washed over her flat stomach and barely noticeable breasts. Gurgled around the raw gaping wound that was her throat. Billowed her hair out around her head like an auburn halo.

'I can't tell you anything here, Tony.' Cadwallader levered himself out of the water and helped his assistant join him on the bank. 'She's been in the water too long to give you an accurate time of death, but it's at least twelve hours ago.'

~~~~

24

He sits towards the front of the courtroom; media attention has waned and the public have lost their appetite for the spectacle. No doubt they'll be back for the verdict and sentence, but for now this farcical drama is played out to judge, jury and few else. Donald Anderson sits in the dock, his face impassive. Two burly constables stand behind him, but it's inconceivable that this slight, mild-mannered man would do anything untoward. Never abduct women, one a year for ten years, rape and torture them in the basement underneath his respectable antiquarian bookshop, then murder them when he has grown tired of them. Never wash down their battered bodies and stake them out in fast-flowing water, under a bridge where they will be easily found.

'The psychosis is not that unusual, though of course not often seen in such an extreme example.'

He focuses on the man in the witness box. Dr Matthew Hilton. A psychiatrist occasionally used by the police to create profiles of murderers. If memory serves, Hilton originally suggested that the Christmas Killer would be in his mid-forties, a frustrated underachiever with below average intelligence either living with an elderly, domineering parent or abused by one who has subsequently died. Somehow that doesn't quite tally with the sixty-plus wealthy bookshop owner standing in the dock.

'The trigger for the behaviour is often obscure, hidden deep in the subconscious. Perhaps a traumatic event in childhood, long suppressed, is brought out by a chance occurrence in later life. The violence is compartmentalised along with that suppressed memory, and so the patient genuinely feels that those acts are perpetrated by another person.'

The Patient. Hah. Murdering rapist bastard more like. Or is it all part of Hilton's act? Label the accused as a loony and you're halfway towards persuading the jury that's what he is.

'Faced with the realisation of what he has done, the true horror of his crimes, he constructs a false reality around him, based on his life and work. Thus we have a fixation with an ancient book, somehow possessing the soul of any man who reads it and forcing them to do unspeakable things. It's quite a wonder how inventive the human mind can be.'

He slumps back in his hard plastic chair, looking from the smug face of Hilton, to Anderson, to the judge and then the jury. Are they buying into this bullshit? Will they acquit on grounds of diminished responsibility?

'So in your opinion, Dr Hilton, Donald Anderson cannot be held responsible for his actions. He is, in short, insane.' This from the counsel for the defence. Sneaky little shit of an Advocate. How can he sleep at night, knowing he's defending a monster?

'He's psychotic and delusional. I'd say classic schizophrenic.' Hilton turns to face the jury, letting a smile play across his features. 'I don't like the word, but it is one which most lay-people understand, so yes, I'd say Donald Anderson is insane.'

~~~~

25

'You seem very tense, inspector. Could it be that my profession puts you on your guard?'

McLean sat in Chief Superintendent McIntyre's office, on one of the comfy-looking but surprisingly hard armchairs in the informal side of the room. The chief superintendent herself had gone to a meeting at Force HQ, and her door, normally open to all, was firmly closed. In the other chair, smiling with his mouth but not his eyes, Professor Matt Hilton tapped an idle pencil against his hand.

'I don't know if you're aware,' McLean said. 'But we found a body out in the Pentland Hills last night. Young woman, throat cut, staked out in a running burn, under a bridge.'

'Yes, I had heard. And you found another one a fortnight ago.' Hilton had chubbed up a bit since last they had met. His hair was unfashionably long, tied in a greying ponytail that snaked down his back and seemed to be sucking everything from the front, as if it had been pulled too often by the school bullies.

'And yet you wonder why I seem a little tense?'

'Ah. You see the actions of a copycat, aping Donald Anderson. I can imagine that brings back all sorts of unhappy memories. How does that make you feel, inspector? Or may I call you Tony?'

'No, inspector works fine for me.' McLean forced himself to relax, though every instinct in his body screamed for him to get up and leave the room.

'So it makes you feel isolated. Persecuted.'

'I think the word you're looking for is frustrated, Hilton. I'm supposed to be investigating a double murder. I don't even know the identity of the second victim yet, and I'm stuck in here with you because my superiors think I might be under intolerable stress. I've been on enforced leave for two weeks. That's two weeks during which time I might have been able to catch this sick bastard. Then it would have just been the one set of distraught parents I needed to explain myself to. That's your stress right there. Not being able to do my job.'

'And you don't think Sergeant...' Hilton shiffled through his notes for a moment. 'Sergeant Laird is up to the job? I understand you've worked well with him in the past.'

'Bob's a good detective, but I like to think two pairs of hands is better than one. Besides, he didn't work on the Anderson case. I did.'

'Neither did he lose his fiancée to the Christmas Killer. But you did.' Hilton's pencil stopped its tapping. 'And now, just a few days after Anderson dies, someone starts killing using his methods. I ask you again, Tony. How does that make you feel?'

'It makes me bloody angry that people can publish books telling the world in great detail what those methods are. How do you think this new killer knew how Anderson killed and disposed of the bodies? How do you think he knew what Anderson did to his victims before he killed them? That bloody book which you and Jo bloody Dalgliesh cobbled together.'

'Anger. Good.' Hilton hitched his smile up a little higher, but it still couldn't reach his eyes. 'And then the day after the first victim is found, you start seeing Anderson in crowds. This despite knowing that he's dead. You went to his funeral, I understand.'

'His burial. There's a difference.'

'Indeed. Tell me. Why did you go to Anderson's... ah, burial?'

'Maybe I just wanted to make sure the bastard was dead. I think you psychobabblers call it looking for closure.'

'Hmmm. And did you find closure? I'd suggest not, given your rather irrational behaviour in a department store the other night.'

McLean suppressed the urge to scream. Tried to remind himself that these sessions were meant to help. And that if he didn't play along, they'd continue for a very long time.

'What do you think you'd do?' he asked. 'You've just found out that someone's been murdered using exactly the same MO as a notorious serial killer who's recently died. Then you see someone in the street who looks exactly like that serial killer. Wouldn't you give chase?'

'In the street? Give chase?' Hilton flipped through his papers again. 'I thought you said you saw him in John Lewis. In the Christmas Decorations department. Seems very apt, really.'

McLean ground his teeth to stop himself from saying any more. He'd completely forgotten that he'd not mentioned the first Anderson sighting to anyone.

'Anyway,' Hilton added. 'On top of all this, your tenement then burns down. I'm told the fire started in a neighbouring apartment that was being used as a cannabis farm. That must be a bit embarrassing, mustn't it.'

'Very.'

'There's no suggestion that you knew about the operation, of course. In some ways it might have been better if you had.'