The Hangman's Song (Inspector Mclean 3) (51 page)

McLean didn’t argue the point. Instead he just stared at the ceiling. ‘That’s the problem though, Bob. It never goes away. You can bury the past, or lock it away in a little room in your mind. But it’s always there. And she brought it all back out. I couldn’t work out why I was so tired, so pissed off at everything. I thought it was Dagwood being in charge, and working at the SCU. Pete Buchanan’s death
didn’t help either, but all the while it was Doctor Eleanor bloody Austin messing with my head.’

Another long silence as Grumpy Bob digested the information, weighed it and found it wanting.

‘You might want to keep that theory to yourself.’

‘I know. Might as well write my resignation letter otherwise, eh? Think I’d rather act my way through a dozen therapy sessions with Matt Hilton.’

‘That few? You’ll be lucky.’

‘Aye, well. It still leaves the problem of Doctor Austin. Who’s she going to go after next?’

‘I’ll get the lad onto firming up that connection between all the victims, then. If they can all be tracked back to her, we’ll get her in for questioning.’ Grumpy Bob blew out his cheeks, then let the air out in a long low whistle. ‘Not sure what we can do about her, though. I mean, how the hell do you prove she did something like that?’

The chair still sat outside the ICU room where Magda Evans was recovering, but it was unoccupied as McLean clumped his way down the corridor, trying to get to grips with crutches. He remembered a time at boarding school, back in the eighties, when one of the boys had come back with his leg in plaster. He’d been the cool kid for a while, deciding who did or didn’t get to sign his cast and speeding along on his crutches. Teachers couldn’t tell him off and even the bullies hesitated to pick on him, at least for the first couple of weeks. Every boy in the school wanted a broken leg and a plaster cast then. Now, thirty years on, he really couldn’t understand why. It was a pain, quite literally.

He paused at the door. The chair looked very inviting, but lowering himself into it for a rest was almost as difficult as standing, and then he’d have to get back up again. Emma was coming to pick him up in an hour or so, after which there would be the fun of stairs to learn about.

Who was he kidding? McLean knew damned well why he’d come this way in the first place, and the fact that there was no police officer on guard was hardly his fault. He knocked lightly on the door, then pushed it open.

Magda was healing, that was about as much as you could say. Her face was still a mess of bruising and cuts, only now the swelling was almost gone, just the colours remaining. Yellow and purple and grey, slashes of dark red hatched with black stitches. She was watching the television hung on the opposite wall, but her eyes flicked across to him as he clumped awkwardly in, up, down, widened in surprise. She barely moved her head, he noticed.

‘Wha’ ap’n you?’ Magda struggled with the words, the stitches tugging cruelly at the slashes to her mouth and cheeks.

‘Someone tried to hang me.’ McLean reached up for his neck where the rope burn still stood proud. His throat was less painful now, at least for talking. Eating anything solid would have to wait a week or two.

‘Why?’

McLean manoeuvred himself to the end of the bed, wedged the crutches up against the frame so he could rest his weight on them for a moment.

‘It’s not important. I wanted to talk about you, not me.’

Magda said nothing, just stared up at him from her ruined face.

‘They told you about Pete Buchanan, aye?’

She blinked her eyes in the most minimal of nods.

‘Nasty way to go. Let me tell you.’ He rubbed at his neck again. ‘Did they tell you about the bat we found in your apartment?’

Another nod, and this time McLean saw the wince of pain that went with the movement. Nerve damage from the attack, likely to leave her in permanent pain. At least that was what Doctor Wheeler had said.

‘It was DS Buchanan who did this to you, wasn’t it.’

McLean waited for the nod. For a long while Magda just stared at him, then finally she blinked. ‘Eff.’

‘He killed Malky Jennings too. No, you don’t need to answer that one, we know that. I’ve just been trying to work out what your angle on the whole thing was. Took me a while, but I’ve had nothing much else to do these last couple of days. So here’s my idea of what was really happening.’ McLean shuffled slightly to ease the pressure on his wrists. How the hell did people use crutches for more than ten minutes at a time?

‘We know you’d had enough of Malky. You tried to get away a couple of times, but that didn’t work. The police were no help either. Can’t say I’ve got much time for the Devil You Know approach myself. It wasn’t just you, either. All those other girls, the Eastern Europeans who’d been brought over here with promises of good jobs, learning English, sending money back home? Yeah, I know how it goes. So you decided to do something about it. It was bloody clever, too. Get Buchanan on your side. Not sure how, not sure I want to know how. He kills Malky because he thinks he’s your protector now. But you keep
the bat, hidden away somewhere safe. I’m guessing you’ve been creaming money off Malky’s operation too. Maybe some drugs as well. Am I warm?’

Magda said nothing, just stared at him. Her eyes were all he needed to see though. He could read the relief when he got it wrong, and so far there’d been none.

‘You organized the boat, too. Anyone who wants to go home. Something like that anyway. The only problem is we got wind of the whole thing and rounded you all up. I’m guessing Buchanan wasn’t best pleased when he found out you’d tried to do a runner. What was the plan, anonymous tip-off as to where the bat was hidden once you’d made it to safety? Drop him in the shit?’

Magda blinked again. ‘Aw ee zerrved.’

‘You won’t find me disagreeing with you there.’

‘Appens ow?’ Magda grimaced as she tried to form the question.

‘To be honest, I don’t know. Not my case any more. We’ve got Buchanan for Malky Jennings’ murder, so my boss is happy. But you were an accessory to that, at the very least. I can’t see a judge letting you off. I might put in a good word, plead mitigating circumstances. Not quite sure how I feel about being played right now. Still, it’s going to be a while before you’re fit to stand trial, and there’s the small matter of it being a police officer who tried to kill you.’ McLean let that last thought hang in the air. He really wasn’t sure he could stay angry with Magda Evans. Not after what had been done to her.

‘Ugger girls?’ This last word gurgled up from deep in Magda’s throat like a death rattle.

‘Clarice Saunders has taken them under her ample
wing. I know everyone laughs at her, but her charity does good work. They’ll be given shelter, re-housed, sent home, pretty much whatever they want. No one’s going to charge them for being on that boat.’

‘Goog.’ Magda blinked once more. A single tear formed in the corner of each eye before trickling into the scabs on her ruined cheeks.

PC Jones was back in his seat when McLean let himself out of the room a few minutes later. He looked up, startled.

‘Inspector, sir. I didn’t … You shouldn’t have been in there.’

‘Relax, Reg. I wasn’t in there.’

‘I … But …’ He pointed at the door as it clicked shut.

‘And you weren’t nipping off to the toilet without anyone to cover for you.’ McLean smiled, then clunked off down the corridor back to his room.

55

It was a small cemetery, tucked away on a piece of land the property developers would have paid a king’s ransom for, were it not for the bodies interred beneath the grass. McLean knew it well from his childhood. Summer days spent exploring the green spaces beyond the garden of his grandmother’s house. Out through the little gate in the wall at the back, and you could almost imagine you’d left Edinburgh behind. At least it had been like that back then. Nowadays there was always the roar of traffic, and more and more people. The lock on the gate was rusted solid too, so you had to go around the long way.

Emma led them through the gravestones, once more forgetting that on crutches he couldn’t move all that quickly. Not over this uneven ground, for sure. The grass could really have done with a mowing, and the bramble vines seemed determined to trip him at every turn. He wasn’t labouring as much as Madame Rose though. The transvestite medium was not built for speed, more of a taxi ride kind of person. McLean got the feeling he was going to have to pay him, her, whatever, a fairly large sum, but it was worth it just to see Emma so much improved.

And now, if the two of them could be believed, he was going to find out how it had been done.

‘Here we are. This was the first one.’ Emma had stopped
in front of a gravestone, fairly new in comparison to those around it. McLean shuffled an awkward route through the undergrowth until he was standing next to her and could read the words carved into the stone.

In Loving Memory

Rosie Buckley

12-7-1972 25-12-1998

Taken Before Her Time

A cold weight settled in the pit of McLean’s stomach. ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

‘Far from it, Inspector.’ Madame Rose lumbered up alongside the two of them. ‘This is the final resting place of Donald Anderson’s penultimate victim. It took me a long time to track her down, and quite by chance Diane Kinnear is buried just over there.’ The medium pointed towards the edge of the cemetery, where it gave way to mature woodland.

‘What … ? I don’t understand. What’s this got to do with anything?’

‘This is everything, Inspector. This is what has been causing Emma all her problems.’ Madame Rose laid a large hand on the headstone, her ornate rings clinking lightly against the granite. ‘I have to admit I was wrong, and that’s not something that happens often. I thought Donald’s book had taken a piece of Emma’s soul. Turns out that wasn’t the case.’

‘They’re all here. With me.’ Emma tapped the side of her head and twirled her finger like a schoolgirl indicating looniness in one of her chums. ‘Well, apart from Rosie
and Diane. They’re gone now. And the others are much quieter. Makes it easier to think.’

McLean looked sideways at Emma, standing beside him. She reached out and took his hand, a simple gesture but not one he could remember her having done before. They’d not really known each other that long, and were both too old for the teenage infatuation that could not bear to be physically separated for more than a few seconds. It was more like the touch of an old friend, a re-acquaintance with someone he’d loved a long time ago and not seen for years. And as he thought it, so the wild story that Madame Rose was spinning began to take on another layer.

‘When you destroyed the book in that fire, you set free all the souls it had trapped down the centuries. Every victim, everyone who tried to read it and was found wanting. They were all in there and they all had to go somewhere. I thought they’d just passed on, gone beyond the veil. Maybe some did, but many of them followed that small piece of Emma back to her. I can’t blame them, Inspector. They were scared, traumatized beyond anything you can imagine. Some of them have been trapped inside that book for centuries. They took refuge in Emma, and in the process very nearly killed her.’

He didn’t believe it. There was always a rational explanation; that was what he had been trained to look for, after all. But there was no denying the difference in Emma; the slow transformation of the past couple of months. She’d changed as she’d recovered from her time in a coma. His own preoccupations had stopped him from seeing it, per
haps. Now there was no denying how much she looked like her.

‘Kirsty.’ The word was barely a whisper. For some reason he found it hard to speak. Had he not been propped up on the uncomfortable metal crutches, he would probably have sunk to his knees there in the damp graveyard.

‘She loved you so much. She still does.’

‘She’s in there somewhere, isn’t she.’

Emma nodded, and it was a punch to his gut. Never mind what Doctor Austin had done to dredge up his past, with that one simple movement he was transported back to the darkest days, the dawn of the new millennium when only his innate stubbornness had kept him from taking his own life.

‘Which is why I have to leave.’

If he thought nothing could shock him more, Emma’s words proved him wrong. ‘Leave? Why?’

‘I have to free them all. I’ll never be right until they’re gone, and they need this.’ Emma pointed at the headstone and its simple, terrible inscription. ‘Their deaths were so violent, they need to be reunited with their mortal remains before they can accept what happened and move on.’

‘But … How many? How long?’

Emma bowed her head, as if the weight of all those souls was almost too much to bear. ‘I don’t know.’

She came to him in his room that night, as he lay awake staring at the ceiling. The dull ache of his mending leg made sleep difficult, as did the long hours of sitting around doing nothing each day. Enforced rest didn’t suit him well.

He didn’t look at her, knew the drill. Just shuffled across to one side of the bed to make room. He’d hoped that the night terrors were lessening now; Emma had certainly seemed much more composed, more adult. If not really anything like her previous self. The selfish part of him wondered if this meant she would stay.