Early morning, and McLean sat at his desk, squinting at the screen of his laptop. The sun streaming in low through the window that formed one entire wall of the room made it almost impossible to see the words of the email. Sadly, he knew that wouldn’t wash as an excuse. He’d realised that it would only be a matter of time before the first of the chief superintendent’s invitations came in, but had hoped he’d be given more than a few hours’ notice. A function at the North British Hotel wasn’t exactly onerous, but that same evening? Had to be a mistake, surely. He couldn’t be expected to jump so quickly, not even if the station chief commanded it.
Frustrated, he picked up the desk phone and after a couple of abortive attempts managed to find the right number. The chief superintendent herself didn’t answer, of course. She had secretaries for that. In some ways that made things easier.
‘Chief Superintendent Elmwood’s office. Helen speaking.’
Helen. McLean tried to picture the woman. Short, mid-fifties, dark hair going chaotically grey, nice smile. ‘Hi Helen, it’s Tony McLean here. About the chief superintendent’s email. I wonder if I could—’
‘Ah yes, the Safe Streets Committee. Gail was particularly keen you join her as the representative of Specialist Crime Division.’
‘But it’s this evening.’
‘That’s right. Seven o’clock sharp. Gail will meet you there.’
‘I . . . But . . . Wait. She’s going to this thing anyway? Why do I need to be there?’
‘As I understand it, Detective Inspector, there’s always a representative from plain clothes at these functions. The chief superintendent is attending because she feels the need to engage with the community as much as possible. You know how it is, surely? She’s come up from England and that can put people’s backs up a little. Helps to have a local on hand to smooth the waves, as it were.’
‘Could I possibly have a word with her? I had . . .’ He was going to lie and say plans, but before he could get the word out, Helen had interrupted him again.
‘I’m afraid she’s over at Gartcosh in meetings all day. You could try her mobile, but I suspect it will be switched off. You know how annoyed the chief constable gets when he’s interrupted.’
Bloody marvellous. McLean rubbed at his forehead as if that would make the inevitable easier to accept. It didn’t really help.
‘Seven o’clock, Detective Inspector. It shouldn’t last more than a couple of hours.’ Helen’s voice was cheery but insistent, and he was beginning to reconsider the merits of her smile. Before he could say anything more however, she had hung up, leaving him with a quiet hissing on the now dead line.
He sat there, head in hand, phone to his ear, for what felt like an age but was probably only a few tens of seconds before a light knock at the open door distracted him. For a moment he wondered whether it was Helen come down the corridor to apologise for her rude behaviour, but instead he was greeted by a worried smile from Detective Sergeant Harrison.
‘Morning, sir. Hope this isn’t a bad time?’ She put a light inflection at the end of the sentence as if she meant it as a question, or had turned Australian.
‘Nothing I can’t cope with.’ McLean put the phone receiver back in its cradle. ‘Morning, Janie. This about the building site accident you texted me about at crack of sparrow?’
‘Aye, sir. Didn’t know whether to call you out or just let you know. Decided I could handle it for now, but you might want to have a look for yourself. It’s . . . weird.’
‘Weird?’ He tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice. There’d been too much weird about recently and the last thing he needed was even more. ‘Remind me where it was again?’
‘Up Liberton Brae. You know, the new apartment block?’
McLean did. It was an eyesore, but then so was the building he was sitting in. ‘How bad?’
‘One dead. Name of Don Purefoy. He’s . . . was the sales rep for the development. Nobody’s really sure why he was out on site last night, but the poor sod got crushed by a rockfall. One of those big steel mesh things filled with boulders?’
‘Gabions?’
‘Aye, that’s the word. Seems one of them failed, spilled out all the rocks just as Purefoy was walking past. Talk about bad timing.’
‘And you suspect it’s more than just an accident?’
‘Well that’s the thing. I’ve spoken to site security and the head engineer. They can’t see how it can be deliberate, and looking at it I can see what they mean. Guy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And these were big rocks, see?’ Harrison held her hands wide enough to explain how they might easily have killed a man.
‘But you don’t like the smell of it, right?’
‘I guess it all just looked too neat. The way it happened. When they found him he was on his back, arms wide. Huge boulder on his chest, a couple more either side of him. But somehow the rockfall managed to miss his head.’ A slight shudder ran through Harrison’s frame. ‘And there was no blood, no shattered bone. You’d think it’d be like a car crash, but no. Looked more like that one big rock had been placed on top of him. Only there’s no way it could have.’
McLean rubbed at his face, finding a rough patch on his jawline the morning’s hurried shave had missed. He’d be a right mess come the evening. Ah well, that’s what happened when you sprang surprises on him, and the sooner the chief superintendent worked that out, the better.
‘We’ll need a report for the PF anyway, so might as well get started on that. I take it Health and Safety are investigating too?’
‘Arrived just as I was leaving, sir. As did the pathologist.’ Harrison checked her watch. ‘Body should be at the mortuary by now. They had to bring in heavy machinery to move the boulder first.’
McLean took a moment to gather his wits. They needed another investigation like a hole in the head, but he was prepared to trust Harrison’s instinct on this. If she thought something was amiss, then he wasn’t about to stop her finding out what, and how. It’s what he would have done, regardless of whatever his superior officers told him.
‘OK, Janie. Gather up as much intel on the dead man as you can. We can decide how to proceed once the post-mortem’s done.’ He stood up, shrugged the stiffness out of his shoulders and came to join her at the door. ‘Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go see someone in the basement.’
The noise and bustle decreased to almost nothing as McLean descended into the bowels of the earth, a welcome silent calm falling over him with each step downwards. How much nicer it would be if he could leave all the office politics and unnecessary bureaucracy behind, find himself a permanent desk in the Cold Case Unit. Spend his time poring over dusty archives and chasing down long-forgotten clues.
‘The Detective Inspector returns. There goes my morning.’ Ex-Detective Superintendent Charles Duguid looked up from whatever he’d been reading, slowly taking off his spectacles like some disappointed teacher as McLean stepped into the room. Maybe working live cases upstairs wasn’t so bad after all.
‘Grumpy Bob not in?’ he asked, scanning the empty desks.
‘Detective Sergeant Laird has gone off in search of decent coffee.’ Duguid picked up his mobile phone, glanced at the screen, then put it back down again. Presumably checking the time, since there was no chance of a signal surrounded by so much stone and so deep underground. ‘He’s a creature of habit, so I reckon he’ll be another five minutes. Was there anything in particular you wanted him for? Only he’s meant to be sorting out the witness statements for a hit and run in ’ninety-five we never got to the bottom of.’
‘Just something peripheral to the old lady we found dead out in the woods on the Bairnfather Estate. He might not have had time to look at it yet if you’ve got him working something else.’
Duguid polished his spectacles with a red spotted handkerchief for a moment, his expression impossible to read as ever. ‘Heard about them knocking you back to DI. I’m guessing you’re not too upset about that.’
‘Means I can pass the paperwork further up the line. Spend more time actually trying to solve cases rather than telling other folk what to do, then telling them again when they do it wrong.’
‘Ha. As if you’d ever delegate anything important, McLean.’ Duguid leaned to one side and retrieved something from the floor. When he placed it on his desk, McLean recognised the box he’d found under the stairs in Cecily Slater’s cottage.
‘Grumpy Bob, on the other hand, has no such qualms.’ The ex-detective superintendent lifted the lid off and took out the top few items. McLean stepped forward for a better look as Duguid laid them out on the desktop. There were a couple of photographs of the house, one black and white, one colour; a series of letters written in neat but tiny handwriting; some newspaper cuttings, their paper yellow and brittle with age; and a small leather-bound diary with the date 1943 tooled in gold on the cover.
‘It tells an intriguing tale.’ Duguid picked up the black and white photograph. It wasn’t one McLean had seen in his cursory look through the box, but now he studied it he could see that the house was only a background feature. The foreground consisted of a group photograph, slightly blurred, of perhaps fifty girls lined up in rows. They varied in age considerably, the youngest sitting cross-legged at the front, the oldest on chairs directly behind them and a third row of teenagers standing at the back.
‘Burntwoods was a boarding school?’ McLean took the photograph and held it close, peering at the faces as if he might somehow recognise a young Cecily Slater even if the focus meant most of the features were blurred.
‘Not exactly, no. It belonged to a lady called Mirriam Downham. You’ll remember the Downham Trust?’
It took him a moment to make the connection, coming as it did rather out of context. ‘The shelter for abused women?’ McLean thought back to the last time he’d worked with Vice, or the Sexual Crimes Unit if he was being formal. The Downham Trust had been occasionally helpful in getting sex workers away from violent and manipulative pimps, battered women away from their abusive husbands and boyfriends. They ran a women’s refuge south of the city, one of many dotted around the whole of the UK.
‘That’s part of what they do, and apparently it all began at Burntwoods. From this photograph it’s clear that they took in children as well, gave them some kind of formal education. According to this, though . . .’ Duguid fished out one of the newspaper cuttings ‘. . . the house burned down in 1930 and was never rebuilt.’
‘Really – 1930? But this photograph.’ McLean looked at it again, trying to find any clue that it had been taken in the forties, when Cecily Slater was supposed to have been there. Turning it over, he saw the neatly inked words ‘Burntwoods – Summer 1943’ in a stamped box that included the name of the firm of photographers, Carnegie and Sons, Dundee.
‘That’s a mystery in itself, although there’s no date on that newspaper clipping so it’s possible they rebuilt after all. Certain, I’d say, given the other photograph.’ Duguid passed it over, and McLean saw the house in colour this time, albeit faded like the few pictures he had of his parents. Like those, this one seemed to have been taken by an amateur, and it showed a young woman posing in the foreground. It was difficult to be certain, but he’d have put her age in the mid-twenties. He flipped the picture over to see the words ‘Cecily – August 1956’ written in heavy pencil.
‘Cecily Slater would have been what . . . twenty-five then, so that makes sense. I expect she went back to see someone, maybe? What about that?’ McLean pointed at the diary.
‘That?’ Duguid picked up the slim notebook and flipped through the pages, then handed it to McLean. ‘I’ve neither the time nor the inclination to read the daily outpourings of a twelve-year-old girl. Bob’s had a wee look, but the writing’s tiny and it’s hard to make much sense of any of it. Some’s written in a kind of code, too. There’s more in the box here. Every year from ’thirty-eight to ’forty-six. They’re all Cecily Slater’s, and they all have Burntwoods written in the front cover as the address.’
‘Eight years. And she was still going back ten years later. She must have had some attachment to the place. Might explain why she preferred to live alone, out in the woods. Never married or had kids. All the locals thought she was a witch.’
‘You think she was abused? As a child?’
McLean shrugged. ‘It’s possible. Maybe I’ll ask Lord Bairnfather when I interview him.’
Duguid grinned, not something McLean could ever recall having seen before.
‘Now that’s one interview I’d like to sit in on.’