Torch (11 page)

He read the
threat out loud. ‘Is there anyone who might have it in for
you?’

‘Part of my job
is to give forensic evidence in court. I’ve helped put a lot of
people away.’

‘But have you
given evidence in an arson case?’ he insisted.

Rhona shook her
head. ‘A few, but it’s mostly sex crimes, murder, particularly in
cases of concealed or buried bodies.’

MacRae looked
thoughtful. ‘These emails... they started before you came to work
with me?’

They must have
started about the same time as the Glasgow fires. Rhona told him
so.

MacRae looked
puzzled. ‘The city centre fires are different from the house
fires,’ he said. ‘The house fires were lit to cover up
something.’

‘What?’

‘You’re the
forensic expert.’

‘The
pathologist thought the dead girl in the Princes Street fire might
have been raped.’

‘Not the
wanker’s style,’ MacRae shook his head. ‘Fire’s the sexual turn on.
The girl was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Somebody got to
her first. If she was raped, you’ve got two crimes to solve. I’m
only interested in this one.’

‘We had no luck
matching the DNA profile from the letter to the database.’

‘When the
wanker sent that letter he was effectively saying “Fuck you!” ’. He
knew we would try to match him and he knew we couldn’t because he
has no record.’

Whoever the guy
was they had nothing on him. Nothing but his threats.

‘Who is he?’
she said.

MacRae was
silent for a moment. ‘He’s fascinated by fire, to the point that he
shuts out everything else. To him it’s a powerful act of creation.
He wants it to go on growing. We kill it. So next time he has to
make it bigger and more powerful. One we can’t destroy.’

Silence settled
on the car. Outside was the hum of traffic and the wind, sweeping
down the street.

‘How did you
burn your back?’

MacRae didn’t
look surprised by her change of tack, as if he’d been expecting the
question.

‘I was
seventeen. There was a deserted warehouse where we hung out. We
would light a fire and sit round talking. Then one night I got
lucky. This girl I fancied came with us. She and I left the fire
and went into the shadows. That was when the explosion came. Mikey,
my pal was killed, his face blown away. The other two boys were
badly burned. The girl was shielded by me.’

‘What caused
the explosion?’

‘We had built
our fire over an old chemical tank. The concrete floor expanded and
had nowhere to go. It shattered throwing lumps round us. The tank
underneath was cracked. Whoosh!’ He made a face. ‘The most
memorable sex I ever had.’ He smiled cynically. ‘So you see.
He
could be me.’

‘MacFarlane was
right. You do know him.’

‘Not well
enough.’

Rhona was
silent for a moment. ‘Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe the fires were lit
for other reasons. Fraud, insurance? Maybe the letters are just a
wind up.’

‘MacFarlane’s
found no evidence of fraud. Anyway we’ve had a letter for every
fire,’ he said. ‘Either the letter writer’s lighting the fires, or
he knows who is.’

‘I wonder... ’
she said.

‘What?’

‘This person
knows fire like you,’ she hesitated. ‘Could he be a fireman?’

‘We’ve checked
out all current personnel.’

‘Okay. What
about someone who used to be in the Brigade? Someone with a grudge
against you.’

He shook his
head dismissively. ‘A long shot, but I’ll think about it.’

They lapsed
into silence until MacFarlane arrived five minutes later and they
joined him in Queen Mary’s pied à terre.

MacFarlane
gasped on his first deep breath inside the door. ‘I hope the
hospital authorities gave the Queen a bath. It smells like shit in
here.’ He shouted for a light and a constable arrived with three
heavy duty torches. The trio of beams swept the desolate scene.

‘Get your men
to look for anything inflammable. Petrol cans, anything like that.’
MacRae nodded at Rhona. ‘Come on.’

At the bottom
of the steps, torchlight revealed the room they had fought in,
followed by a long, unevenly floored passageway with openings on
either side.

Rhona sniffed.
‘Can you smell methane?’

MacRae turned
his torch on the roof. ‘We must be near the main sewer. It runs the
length of Princes Street.’

‘Would that
give someone access to all the buildings?’

‘No but it has
benching either side, so you can walk through it. The Brigade uses
it for training in sewer rescues. Pipes go up the buildings and
vent onto their roofs to avoid a build up of methane down here.
Dangerous stuff.’

Rhona didn’t
need reminding. Methane’s smell wasn’t its only undesirable
quality. Rhona was struggling to make sense of Jaz’s suspicions.
‘Why would the guy who attacked Mary want access to here?’

‘Who said he
did? Maybe he set Mary’s hair alight because she smelt bad. We have
no proof that he has anything to do with the fires at all.’

‘But he wanted
her out of the building. Jaz said so.’

‘Jaz told us
what Mary told him. Mary’s an alchie. Hallucination is her middle
name. She thinks she’s Mary Queen of Scots for God’s sake!’ MacRae
ended irritably.

What MacRae
said was true. There was nothing down here but a bad smell.

Rhona left
MacRae running his torch round the walls of the room while she
headed down the narrow passage, flashing her torch into each
opening. The floor was deeply uneven, sometimes dipping into a hole
that made her stumble, sometimes rising in a jagged edge of stone
that caused her to trip and grab at the wall. Despite the light
from the torch, her progress was slow. The rooms on either side
varied in size. Some were little more than a hole in the wall, some
opened onto larger areas. All were empty.

‘Rhona?’

‘Down
here.’

MacRae’s shadow
advanced before him, thick and black. Despite herself, Rhona was
glad he was there.

‘How far to the
end?’ he called in exasperation.

‘About five
yards. Then it peters out in a brick wall. Probably the foundations
of a building.’

‘So there’s
nothing?’ MacRae was as disappointed as she was. The torch swept
round the corner and onto her face.

‘Watch it!’
Rhona shouted, knowing it was too late. MacRae’s strides were at
least one-and-a-half hers. She had missed the hole, just off-centre
in the passageway. MacRae didn’t. He cursed as the torch hit the
floor and went out.

‘Thanks for the
warning!’

‘Are you
okay?’

‘Apart from the
broken leg, you mean?’

‘It can’t be
that bad.’

‘How the hell
would you know?’ He removed his leg from the hole and stuck his
head down instead. ‘I believe,’ he said, ‘I’ve found the source of
the smell.’

When MacFarlane
appeared minutes later he found them both on their knees.

‘This hole’s an
opening onto the main sewer,’ MacRae informed him. ‘Somebody’s
taken off the cover. There it is against the wall.’ He looked up at
MacFarlane. ‘Check with the Scottish Water. See if anyone’s been
down here recently.’

MacFarlane
nodded. ‘Where are you going?’

MacRae was
already poised over the hole.

‘To take a
look.’

‘Hang on Sev.
I’ll contact Scottish Water.’ MacFarlane looked worried. ‘We’d
better get one of them here.’

MacRae ignored
him and handed Rhona his torch.

‘I’ll give you
a shout when I’m down.’

MacRae dropped
through the hole.

Rhona held the
torch above the hole hoping he could make it out in the darkness,
then dropped it.

‘I’m going to
walk along a bit,’ he shouted up. ‘I won’t be long.’

MacFarlane
tried his mobile. ‘I’ll have to go up. I can’t get a signal
here.’

Rhona waited
until he was out of sight then climbed down the manhole after
MacRae.

Fifteen metal
rungs and her feet were on solid ground. To her right, dark water
flowed through a brick tunnel. They should have waited for
breathing apparatus, but she, like MacRae was too impatient. She
breathed in. Her throat was clear, her eyes didn’t sting. There was
methane, but it was at a manageable level.

MacRae’s
footsteps suggested he had headed left. Rhona swung her torch and
headed in the opposite direction.

Not far along,
another channel met the main sewer. Rhona followed it. The roof
here was lower and she had to keep her head well down, sweeping her
torch in a wide arc in front of her, trying to ignore the excited
squeakings of disturbed rats. Ten yards further, just as she was
deciding to turn back, she spotted a series of long thin blue lines
on the curved brick wall.

Rhona dropped
to her knees for a closer look.

Rhona reached
up and caught MacRae’s helping hand out of the manhole. MacFarlane
looked relieved at their reappearance.

‘You shouldn’t
have gone down there without breathing apparatus,’ Sev told
her.

‘You did,’ she
told him.

He shrugged.
‘Find anything interesting?’

‘Something was
dragged along one of the side sewers that run down to the Nor
loch,’ she told him. ‘I found fresh paint scrapings on the
wall.’

MacRae looked
thoughtful.

‘Scottish Water
don’t know about this opening. It’s not on their plan,’ MacFarlane
said.

‘I think we
should find out what’s been dragged along the benching,’ Rhona
insisted.

MacFarlane
looked puzzled. ‘What’s so special about a scrape of paint?’.

Rhona looked at
MacRae to see if he was thinking the same as her.

‘It’s not the
paint,’ she told MacFarlane. ‘It’s where it came from.’

Chapter
18

The train
wasn’t busy. Jaz would normally have hidden in the toilet and saved
himself the fare, but you couldn’t hide an Alsatian in a train
toilet. Anyway, it felt good to travel legally for once. He could
sit and watch the countryside go by instead of keeping an eye out
for an inspector.

Funding the
train fare wasn’t his only problem. He would have to work overtime
next week to pay the rent. Finding Karen’s killer was proving
expensive, what with feeding the dog and the time he was spending
off the job. But he didn’t care. Karen should never have died.

Outside,
Scotland threw itself past the window in a flurry of rain and the
odd beautiful moment when the clouds parted and the sun shone
through. They had passed the Highland boundary fault line and the
hills rose steeply wooded, on either side of the track.

Going north had
been a split second decision. He’d seen MacRae saying goodbye to
his wife and kid in the station and jumped the train. He’d been
thinking of bailing out of Edinburgh for a while anyway. Poking his
nose into the attack on Mary had brought him too much interest from
some quarters.

Jaz pressed his
face to the glass. The warmer air in the compartment had steamed up
the window. He wiped a patch and stared through, following the
skyline. Mist hung in tendrils among the sharp pine trees. Jaz
found himself remembering some of his favourite landscape
paintings, the images that had set him on course to Art College in
the first place. Soon, he promised himself, he would paint
again.

He’d got on the
train two carriages back from MacRae’s wife and kid, then walked
through. As he passed them, the wee girl had reached out to pat the
dog, but her mother pulled her back, telling her sharply that not
all dogs were friendly.

‘Your mum’s
right,’ Jaz said. ‘But this one is. Look.’ He made Emps offer a paw
and the girl had shaken it in delight. MacRae’s wife had softened
then and let her stroke the big head.

‘My gran’s got
a dog called Bess,’ the girl had confided in him. ‘We’re going to
see her.’

‘That’s nice,’
he smiled back.

He’d considered
sitting down next to them then thought better of it.

‘I’d better
keep going,’ he said. ‘Say goodbye, Emps.’

‘Emps. That’s a
good name.’

He told her it
was short for Emperor, then with an attempt at a smile at her
mother he moved on.

Settled in the
next carriage, he went over the other occupants of the train in his
head. Most of the voices were Scottish although he’d spotted an
American couple near the back of his carriage. There was no one
suspicious-looking. No one except himself.

When he spotted
Mrs MacRae gathering her luggage, Jaz got up and headed for the
door. The American couple were already there, bags piled up in
front of them. They all alighted together.

Jaz accepted
the American couple’s offer of a ride to the village, in the hope
that both the car that picked Amy up and the taxi would head in the
same direction. They did. He was only minutes into a conversation
about the beauties of Scotland, rain and all, when the car in front
took a left turn. Jaz asked his hosts to let him off fifty yards
further along.

‘But there’s
nothing here,’ the woman said looking round.

Jaz gestured in
the direction of a distant barn.

‘I can take a
shortcut across the fields,’ he explained. ‘Give Emperor some
exercise.’

It had been too
easy finding them, Jaz told himself as he eased into position in
the wet undergrowth within sight of the cottage. If he could find
them, anyone could.

MacRae’s missus
appeared at the door of the cottage an hour later followed by
another woman, obviously her mother. They had a short conversation
which Jaz strained to catch, but whatever they were saying they
didn’t want the wee girl to hear. Then the two of them headed for
the car parked in the drive and Jaz caught their last exchange.

‘You’ll have to
go back some time you know.’

MacRae’s wife
didn’t look convinced.