McLean had Stringer drive him back across town to Fielding’s address, which was just as well since there was nowhere to park anywhere nearby. A forensics van, a couple of squad cars and Angus Cadwallader’s British Racing Green Jaguar were parked on a double yellow line outside the soulless modern glass-walled apartment block, and a pair of uniformed constables were busy diverting pedestrians from the front door.
‘Morning, sir. It’s the third floor you’ll be wanting,’ one of the constables said to him before he could even present his warrant card. He struggled to remember her name, even though he knew she was friends with Harrison. Settled for a nod of the head and ‘thanks’, before going inside.
The ground floor of the building was given over to high-end retail space, on one side an expensive office furniture showroom, on the other what McLean would have called a barber’s shop, except that it seemed far too clinical and modern for that. Both had their own entrances, leaving a wide foyer for the residents to access their apartments on the upper floors. At the far end, windows looked out on to a small plaza hemmed in by more tall glass buildings. A door with a security keypad beside it opened on to stairs, and opposite that another door was marked ‘Security’. McLean tried the handle, but it was locked. He thumbed the button to call down the lift, but before it arrived, the door to the stairwell clicked open and DS Harrison appeared.
‘Jay told me he’d dropped you off, sir.’ She held the door open for him. ‘We’re keeping the place locked down for the moment. At least until the pathologist’s had a chance to see whether it’s suspicious or not.’
‘How is it not suspicious?’ McLean asked. ‘He’s dead, didn’t you say?’
Harrison half shrugged, half shook her head. ‘It’s . . . weird, sir. And there’s more. She . . .’ She stopped talking as a paramedic came down the stairs towards them. ‘Best if I tell you after you’ve seen.’
‘How was he found? I didn’t think there was a Mrs Fielding.’
‘There’s no’,’ Harrison said. ‘But he has a cleaner come in every morning after he’s gone to work. She’d already done most of the flat before she found him in the bedroom.’
‘That’s going to please forensics if it comes to it. Nothing like a nice, freshly cleaned crime scene to work with. The cleaner still here?’
Harrison shook her head. ‘She took a bit of a turn. Kirsty— DCI Ritchie said to send her home with a constable after I’d spoken to her. We’ll follow it up once the doctor’s given her the OK.’
‘Is Ritchie in charge then?’
‘Aye, sir. She’s upstairs wi’ the pathologist. Think they’re waiting for you to show up, actually.’
Intrigued, McLean followed the detective sergeant up the next two flights of stairs and out on to a wide hallway. There were only two apartments on this level, Fielding’s being the one with its door wide and a couple of uniformed officers standing outside. One of them held a clipboard, and the other handed him some paper overshoes and a pair of latex gloves ‘just to be on the safe side’.
‘I’ll wait out here, sir,’ Harrison said as McLean signed himself in. He pulled on the overshoes and snapped on the gloves, glad not to have to go for the full paper overalls, hood and mask. Then with a last glance over the hallway, he stepped inside.
From his encounters with the lawyer before, McLean had come away with the impression of a man who spent money to show that he had it, rather than from any innate sense of taste. The apartment only served to reinforce that appraisal. It was expensive, largely open-plan and filled with sleek, modernist furnishings that were a vulgar expression of wealth over comfort. The wall opposite the entrance was glass from floor to ceiling, looking out on to the street through vertical blinds. Across the road, an old church stood empty, its windows boarded up, its walls scrawled with graffiti. From this height, he could see down into the remains of a graveyard, which perhaps wasn’t the nicest of views, but at least meant the neighbours were quiet.
Noises from an open door reminded him of why he was here. McLean turned slowly, taking in the room, looking for anything that might have been out of place. Then he remembered that the cleaner had already been through this main space, so it was unlikely there would be any clues to be found. It certainly looked like a room that nobody really lived in.
The bedroom would have been large by modern city apartment standards, but with several people in it including the deceased, it felt small. Sharing the same glass wall as the main room, the blinds on this side of the divider had been closed, leaving only the light from an overhead fitting and a couple of bedside lamps. All attention was on the king size bed and the figure lying sprawled on it. As McLean took in the scene, it wasn’t hard to understand why.
Tommy Fielding lay naked on top of his sheets, one hand spread limply over his crotch, as if covering his modesty even in death. The other hand reached up behind his head, where a silk tie had been fastened round his neck, then looped over the bed frame, the free end draped over his half-curled fingers. His dead eyes stared at the ceiling.
‘Well that’s not exactly how I imagined starting my day,’ McLean said. All eyes turned towards him, except for the pathologist, who was bending over the body, peering at Fielding’s head.
‘You got the message then, Tony.’ DCI Ritchie stood on the other side of the bed, arms folded, face sombre.
‘Aye, I was out talking to this one’s boss.’ He nodded at the body. ‘Was going to be speaking with him next, but I guess that’s not happening now. What’s the story? He do this to himself?’
Cadwallader stood upright with a great deal of groaning, then turned slowly to face McLean. ‘Hard to say without having a more detailed look at him in the mortuary. Certainly looks like a bit of auto-erotic asphyxiation gone wrong. I think Kirsty has other ideas, though.’
McLean looked to the DCI for clarification. ‘How so?’
‘There’s just a couple of problems. Here.’ Ritchie led him to a half-open door, beyond which was an en-suite bathroom. The large mirror above the basin was clear until she reached a latex-gloved hand for the tap and turned it on. Steam billowed up from the scalding hot water, misting the glass and revealing letters, words.
‘. . . ying breath I cur . . .’ McLean turned his head to one side as if that would make more of the message readable.
‘With my dying breath I curse thee.’ Ritchie switched off the tap. ‘Don’t want to upset the forensic techs any more than necessary. We’ll get them to analyse that. Maybe pull some prints from the glass.’
‘You said a couple of problems. I take it that’s only one of them, then.’
‘Aye, and not the worst.’ Ritchie gave a nod of her head to indicate they leave the room. ‘Come on. I’ll fill you in.’
McLean followed Ritchie out through the bedroom, casting one last glance at Fielding as he went. The words on the mirror could have been a sick joke for all he knew, more than likely a misdirection. But something about them struck a chord, as did the fact that Fielding, like his three associates Whitaker, Purefoy and Galloway, had died in what appeared to be an unlikely and unfortunate accident. He didn’t like coincidences at the best of times, but four deaths went far beyond that.
He wanted to ask who had found the message and how, but Ritchie led him to the far end of the apartment’s main open-plan living space before he could speak. Fielding’s work area was sparsely furnished around a modern steel and glass desk and a chair that looked like it couldn’t possibly be comfortable to sit in. A slim laptop computer lay open on the desk, a few reports and printouts beside it. Fielding’s briefcase sat on the floor, open, and McLean could well imagine this was an area the cleaner might have been told to leave alone. Either that, or the lawyer would normally have packed all this stuff away and taken it with him to work. If he’d not been dead, and all.
‘What’s going on here, Kirsty? Why’s nobody want to talk in front of civilians?’ McLean tapped a latex-gloved finger on the desk, partly distracted by the names printed on the report folders.
‘Fielding did have a visitor last night. But it’s complicated.’
‘Complicated how? Why haven’t they been brought in for questioning already?’
Ritchie gave him a look far more old-fashioned than her years. ‘Because his visitor was Gail, Tony.’
‘Gail? Wait. Gail Elmwood?’ McLean asked the question even though he knew it was stupid.
‘I know. It’s mad, right? But they were seen. The two of them came back here last night. Together.’
‘But she hates him.’
That got him a raised eyebrow, or what passed for an eyebrow on Ritchie’s face. She’d lost both of them rescuing him from a fire several years ago and they’d never really grown back afterwards.
‘Hates him? Who have you been talking to?’
McLean gave her the briefest of rundowns on what he’d found out, first from Dalgliesh and then from Simon Martin. ‘Of course, it might all be bollocks, and I can’t believe she’d have got the job in the first place if she was as corrupt as some folk think. Martin’s got an axe to grind, even if he says it’s all water under the bridge. It’s fair to say she’s known Tommy Fielding a long time, though. Now you’re telling me they met last night and that’s him dead. Does she know?’
‘That’s the million-dollar question now, isn’t it, Tony?’ Ritchie ran a weary hand over her short-cropped hair, let out a sigh. ‘I’ll have to speak to her. Or maybe ask Jayne to.’
McLean nodded his understanding. As long as it wasn’t him breaking the news. He glanced down at the reports on the desk.
‘I’ll speak to his colleagues, will I?’ He remembered to phrase it as a question to his DCI, reaching out and picking up the top folder as he spoke. Someone was going to have to take on Fielding’s caseload anyway.
‘Aye, might as well. Let’s get an idea of what he was doing in the past forty-eight hours.’ Ritchie smacked herself on the forehead with the heel of one hand. ‘Fuck, he’s mates with the chief constable, isn’t he? We’re going to have to make sure this is done absolutely perfectly.’
McLean only half noticed. The writing on the front of the second folder had been obscured until he’d picked up the first, but now he could read it quite plainly. A name that was almost too convenient to have been left here by accident.
Cecily Slater.
By the time he made it back down to the ground floor of the building, the door to the security room was slightly ajar and light shone from within. McLean tapped on the wood, before sticking his head through the gap to find DS Harrison and an elderly gentleman in the ill-fitting uniform of a private security firm. The detective sergeant stood while the man was seated, both looking at a couple of flat-screen monitors showing security camera footage.
‘Anything interesting?’ he asked as Harrison looked around to see him.
‘Aye, sir. Harry here was just making a copy for us.’
The elderly security guard twisted in his seat, greeted McLean with a smile and a nod, then went back to what he’d been doing.
‘It helped that your lovely colleague here knew what time Mr Fielding and his friend left the Scotston Hotel.’ The guard tapped a couple of buttons and the right-hand screen flickered to reveal an image of the lobby, a timestamp in the corner ticking up from half past nine the night before. It didn’t take long before the image showed the front door swing open and two people walk in. If he hadn’t been able to see their faces, McLean might not have believed that it was the same Tommy Fielding and Gail Elmwood he had heard such lurid tales about. They clung to each other like teenage lovers, almost stumbling to the lift and chatting animatedly as they waited for it to arrive.
‘Nothing much happens for about an hour.’ Harry the guard tapped the keys again, the only thing on the screen that changed being the timestamp. After a moment, the lift door opened and Elmwood stepped out alone. She paused for long enough to straighten her jacket and roll her shoulders, then walked to the door and out of the building.
‘Is that the only camera? There’s nothing on the landing upstairs?’ McLean asked.
‘Oh, aye. I’ll put that up next, but it’s much the same thing.’ Harry the guard tapped his keyboard with two crooked arthritic fingers. The screen jumped, this time showing the wide corridor that served the two flats on the third floor. McLean watched as the couple went to Fielding’s front door, and then inside.
‘Again, there’s nothing happens until about an hour later.’ Harry tapped and the screen jumped once more. A couple of seconds, and Fielding’s door opened. Elmwood stepped out, pulled the door closed behind her without looking back, and headed for the lift. It must have still been sitting at the third floor as she barely had to wait at all before it opened and she stepped inside.
‘Well, at least we know what time she left. And he didn’t wave her off or anything.’ McLean stared at the screen, the scene unchanging save for the slow ticking timestamp in the corner. ‘What about the other flat on that floor? Nobody come and go last night? Have we spoken to them?’
Harry tapped his keyboard a final time, reached forward and plucked a memory stick from the slim box underneath the screens. As he handed it over, McLean noticed it bore the same logo as the one on his uniform.
‘Nobody there just now, sir. Terrible story, it was. Young lad, nice chap but more money than sense. Seems he lost control of his car up the road there.’ Harry the guard nodded his head in the vague direction of the Lothian Road and Tollcross. ‘Such a terrible waste.’