60

‘Isn’t there supposed to be a constable on the door?’

McLean stared up at the dark facade of the terraced house, searching for any sign of life. It was late enough that most people would be home by now, but not so late they’d be in their beds. On the other hand, a lot of these big houses were empty, bought as investments or tax boltholes by wealthy bankers and foreign plutocrats. Even so, the street felt unnaturally quiet as he parked the car and climbed out, not helped by the thick haar that drifted eerily past the street lights.

‘Should be, sir. You want me to get on to Control about it?’ Harrison asked.

McLean nodded, leaving the detective sergeant to make the call as he crossed the road and approached the front door. He could see only the reflected street lamps in the glass of the windows, no lights on inside. Only the incongruously modern doorbell and intercom at the front door was illuminated. He climbed the short flight of stone steps, peering down into the light well of the basement level. Nothing obvious in the shadows below, so he pushed the button.

No answer, and no sound from within. Given the thickness of the door, and the fact there was an inner porch to further insulate any sound, it wasn’t surprising he could hear nothing, but McLean pressed the button again, straining his ears for any sound just in case.

‘Apparently there’s been a bit of a barney at one of the pubs on Brunton Street, sir. Constable Peters was on duty here, got called off to help out. Somebody must have OK’d that, I guess. Apparently patrols have been coming down here regularly just to keep an eye on things.’

That would explain it, although McLean wasn’t happy about the situation. He pressed the button again, and still there was no response.

‘Heavy sleeper?’ Harrison suggested. McLean doubted it. He pulled out his phone, found the number and dialled. A moment’s pause, and then he heard the tone through his handset.

‘Is that ringing inside?’ Harrison leaned forward, pressing her ear to the door. ‘I think I can hear a mobile ringing in the hall.’

McLean thumbed the screen to end the call.

‘Stopped now,’ Harrison confirmed. ‘That’s not good, is it?’

‘Not really, no.’ McLean tried the door, but it was locked. ‘Get on to Control again, can you? This is a rented property, so the agency should have a spare key. If they can’t get it here in fifteen minutes, we’ll use one of our own big red ones.’

‘It’s a bit late, isn’t it?’ Harrison said, but made the call anyway.

McLean pressed the doorbell again, then called Elmwood’s phone. Now that Harrison had pointed it out, he too could hear it ringing, the tinny noise echoing in the large hall. He let it carry on until it kicked into voicemail, then hung up. A few metres along the pavement, a gate in the iron railings opened on to steps leading down to the basement. It reminded him curiously of the tiny flat where Steve Whitaker had met his grisly end, only the light well here was considerably larger. There was no entrance to the house, only three windows all with shutters closed. Dead leaves littered the flagstones as he walked from one end to the other, and as he trod through them the rustling noise brought to mind winters past, heavy coats, woolly hats and bonfires.

Bonfires. McLean sniffed the air, catching the faintest whiff of smoke. Or was he imagining it? He kicked up a few of the leaves, in case it was their decay that he could smell. But that was a different scent. He walked to the nearest window, felt the glass for warmth. An old wooden sash, it wobbled slightly as he pressed against it, but it was firmly locked against intruders. As he turned away, he thought he heard a noise, faint as a whisper, like the cracking of dry branches underfoot. He stopped, straining to hear anything over the omnipresent dull roar of the city. Even muffled by the haar, it still made focusing on any particular sound all but impossible. Had he imagined it? The night was certainly one for playing on his fears.

‘Twenty minutes is the best they can do,’ Harrison said as McLean emerged from the steps back out on to pavement level. ‘Lucky one of the secretaries was working late.’

‘Call in a squad car with a big red key anyway.’ McLean climbed the steps to the front door again, bent to the letter box and pushed it open. Beyond, he could see only the dark shapes in the unlit front porch. The inner door was closed, only blackness beyond. Once more he thought he heard something, turned his head to listen through the opening. His fingers slipped and with a clatter, the flap sprung shut. The noise rang loud, blotting out anything else.

‘Can you hear movement inside?’

Harrison pressed her head to the door, paused for a few seconds as McLean’s hearing slowly came back. When she stood up again, she shook her head.

‘Quiet as the grave. But this place gives me the creeps anyway. Of all the houses in the city she could have chosen to live in, why pick this one?’

McLean knew what the detective sergeant meant. Harrison had almost died in this house, touched by something neither of them were quite prepared to accept could exist. What other trouble awaited them within its forbidding stone walls?

‘Here.’ He pulled out his car keys and handed them over. ‘You go wait for back-up or this late working secretary to turn up.’

Harrison looked at him suspiciously, but took the keys anyway. ‘What are you going to do, sir?’

‘There’s a mews entrance up the way.’ McLean pointed to a gap in the terrace further along the street. ‘I’m going to have a quick look around the back.’

‘Shouldn’t we both wait?’ Harrison’s tone wasn’t exactly hectoring, but for some reason it put McLean in mind of his grandmother when she’d been less than impressed with something he’d done. He knew he should heed her advice.

‘Just going to have a quick look,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

The haar that had drifted in off the Firth of Forth thickened as McLean made his way along the street and down the narrow entrance to the mews. There were no street lamps here, and the few lit windows at the backs of the houses added an ethereal glow that only served to deepen the shadows. The air hung heavy with the scent of damp stone, oily cobbles and leaf mould, and somewhere on the edge of it all, he caught the smell of wood smoke. Most likely someone nearby had a wood burning stove in their house. This part of the city was meant to be a smoke free zone, but that didn’t necessarily mean the local residents all followed the rules. These were wealthy people, and experience had taught him they were the ones most likely to ignore petty things like not burning logs brought down from their second home in the countryside. Unless it was someone else doing it, in which case they would complain loudly to the authorities.

It was hard to tell from the back lane which of the houses was which. The upper storeys were lost in the swirling fog, and the squat coach houses of the mews further obscured the view. McLean counted garage doors until he thought he had the right one for the chief superintendent’s address. Alongside the incongruously modern garage door, a wooden door was set into the garden wall. It should have been locked, and yet when he tried the handle, it clicked and the door swung open. Mist billowed through the opening like smoke, and brought with it that tantalising scent again.

He pulled out his phone, brought up Harrison’s number, and dialled as he walked through the back garden towards the house itself. The call went straight to voicemail, which probably meant the detective sergeant was talking to someone else. It should have logged his attempt, possibly even notified her he had called, so he rang off and put his phone away. She’d ring him back as soon as she was done.

Unlike the front door, the back door opened at ground level to a paved area. In the pitch black McLean stumbled on an uneven flagstone, almost falling arse over tit. He reached out to steady himself on the frame, and felt the door itself give slightly. Not just open, but ajar. Had the chief superintendent fled? Left even her phone behind so that she couldn’t be traced? Gone in such a hurry she’d not even remembered to close the back door?

Taking his phone out again, McLean tried Harrison’s number. Once more, straight to voicemail. Inside, he tried the light switch, but nothing happened. Not good. He knew he should go back, wait for the squad car that was surely on its way by now, but there was that faintest scent of smoke, and could he hear something? He trained the soft LED glow of his phone’s torch ahead of him so that he could step inside without fear of tripping over again.

The laundry room felt cold, the fog from outside having seeped in through the slightly open door. As he moved further into the house, so the temperature rose and the air began to feel dry. McLean stepped into the kitchen and played the torch around, revealing a large room with modern fittings that somehow looked bare. He almost dismissed it as being the minimalist work of some grossly overpaid interior designer, and then he noticed that there were no chairs around the table.

A noise from the doorway distracted him, something creaking in the narrow passage that led from the kitchen to the hall. McLean pointed the torch that way, but its beam cast too little light to see much. He crossed the room on light feet, tense as he listened for any more sounds, but there seemed to be only the general creaking expected of an old building.

The light switch by the door didn’t work, and now he thought about it, McLean couldn’t hear any telltale hum from the large American-style fridge across the room. Someone had cut the power. Was it Elmwood herself? Had she done a runner? But why leave the back door unlocked, then? Why switch off the power?

McLean shook the thoughts away. There was nothing to be gained from playing the hero; the events of the summer and all the idiotic blame-spreading fallout from them had taught him that. He tapped off the torch light, slid his phone in his pocket and started to retrace his steps.

A low moan echoed in through the other door. The one that led to the front hall. McLean froze, tensed, straining his ears to hear. The noise came again, human, suffering. What the hell was going on?

Moving slowly, fingers brushing the wall to help him navigate the almost total darkness, he stepped silently out of the kitchen and along the corridor. There should have been a couple of antique side tables, memory told him, but his hand passed through empty space. There should have been old paintings hanging on the walls, but they were not there. Someone had cleared everything out of the corridor, along with the chairs from the kitchen.

Another door stood ajar, blackness beyond it almost complete. McLean knew it led to the basement, but in the darkness he could sense nothing. Then that low moan came again, wounded and woozy. He edged past the open door, carried on until the corridor opened out into the hall. There was a little more light in here, the reflected glow of the city coming in through the glass cupola three stories up. Even so, the scene made no sense.

Furniture had been dragged from every room, pictures ripped from the walls, chairs heaped one atop another in a huge pile that reached almost to the edges of the hall. Even if it hadn’t been fast approaching Guy Fawkes night, McLean would have recognised the stack for the pyre that it was. And there, at the top of it, in the place of the infamous would-be regicide, gagged and bound to a sturdy bed frame, was the chief superintendent.

‘The actual fuck?’

McLean mouthed the curse, even as he was moving towards the stack, searching for a way to get to the chief superintendent and cut her down. She still wore her work clothes, but her face was a mess, black around her nose that was almost certainly blood, and dark bruising under her eyes. Judging by the size of the pyre, she must have been out cold for hours, but now she was slowly coming around.

Another low moan forced its way past the gag in her mouth. Her head swayed as she tried to take the weight of it, and as she raised her chin, McLean saw a thin strip of something tight around her neck. A recent conversation came back to him then, taking tea with Madame Rose and Mirriam Downham. The tradition in Scotland to throttle the accused so that they were unconscious before burning them to death for the crime of witchcraft. Whoever had seen to Elmwood was not practised in the art, then.

Skirting around the edges of the pyre, he pulled out his phone and hit the screen to call Harrison again. It went straight to voicemail. What the hell was she playing at? McLean killed the call and turned towards the front door. He could unlock it, let her in along with the back-up that must surely be here by now.

A man stood directly behind him, face sheened with sweat, hair matted with it. His wide eyes were mad and bloodshot, and he carried a bottle of what looked like white spirit in one hand. McLean barely had time to react before the punch came out of nowhere, a jab to the face boxer-style. It caught him on the turn, snapping his head back and spinning him around to sprawl on the ground among the broken picture frames and smashed chairs. His phone slipped out of his grasp, skittering away into the darkness. Before he could even begin to rise, before he could even shout for help, the air whooshed out of him as the man kicked him hard in the stomach. McLean rolled away as best he could, trying not to vomit as he gasped for air. He needed to shout, alert Harrison to what was happening, but it was all he could do to even breathe.

He sensed the next kick more than saw it, twisting away so that it grazed his shoulder. Had he been less dazed, he might have grabbed the foot in passing and sent the man tumbling. Instead, he pushed himself away, weak legs refusing to let him stand. The man was a shadow, almost invisible in the gloom, but instead of coming in for a killing blow he seemed to recede. There was a scraping noise that penetrated even the ringing in McLean’s punch-drunk ears, and then a powerful reek of paint thinners filled the air.

‘No.’ McLean pushed himself to his feet, fighting the urge to throw up, and the dizzying whirl that threatened to have him tumbling to the floor again. He could barely see anything over the spinning stars in his eyes, and the reek of white spirit only made things worse. He was still gasping for air, still not able to muster much more than a hoarse whisper.

Another noise, and with it a bright flare of light that wasn’t anything to do with the blow he’d taken to the head. McLean squinted against the glare as it illuminated the man’s face. He stood close to the pyre, almost in it, and stared up at the lolling form of the chief superintendent.

‘All the witches must burn.’ His voice wavered as the match in his fingers flickered in anticipation of greater things. McLean was already moving, the last of his strength carrying him across the hall in what he hoped was a straight line. Even though his lungs felt empty, he forced out an angry roar, reaching for the hand that held the match as he smashed into the man. But his fingers closed on empty space. The two of them fell together, rolling away from the pyre in a tangle of limbs as the room lit up bright with fire.

‘No!’ McLean lashed out with a weak fist, catching the man in the side of the head. Almost casually, his attacker swatted him away, pushing himself to his feet with an ease McLean envied. Gary Tomlinson. It had to be him. McLean was all too aware that his attacker was half his age, strong from a decade of working on building sites, stronger still from whatever mad rage was coursing through him. There was no way to win this fight fairly. Where the hell was Harrison and that back-up?

Pivoting on his elbow, McLean lashed out with a foot. His hip screamed in pain, but somehow he managed to connect with Gary’s leg as he brought it in for another heavy kick. The man fell backwards with an angry yell, but the move brought McLean’s head round to the fire that was greedily climbing up the pyre towards the chief superintendent. He heard the crackle of his own hair catching, and instinct pulled him back. He brushed away the flames with one hand as the other one found the floor, levered himself into a crouch just in time to see Gary coming for him again. He launched himself upwards with all his remaining strength, catching his attacker in the midriff. The two of them fell to the floor once more, tangled together, and McLean used his momentum to smack his forehead into Tomlinson’s face. He felt the crunch of nose breaking, and then his attacker fell still.

No time to rest, the air was choking bad, the flames leaping eagerly at the dry wood. McLean thought his ears were ringing with the blows he had taken in his brief fight, but as he focused he realised it was screaming. He scrambled to his feet, swaying from the exertion. Stumbling to the nearest window, he grabbed a long, heavy curtain and heaved. For an agonising few moments nothing happened, then the whole curtain rail pulled away from the wall and he fell backwards, momentarily smothered by the heavy velvet.

It took too long to fight his way out of the fabric’s embrace, his strength almost gone. The room was unpleasantly hot now, and somewhere over the roar of flames McLean could hear a rhythmic pulsing sound. Unimportant, he could deal with that later. He gathered up the curtain and flung it over the pyre. Flames licked at the edges, finding something new to feast upon. There was no time to spare.

Taking his life in his hands, he stepped on to the curtain, finding a balance in amongst the burning stack. The chief superintendent had fallen silent now, head bowed, hair almost all gone. Was she still alive? McLean put his arms around her and heaved. He’d expected resistance from the ropes that tied her to the bedpost, but the flames had already weakened them. She fell against him and, unbalanced, he tumbled backwards. He landed on his back, the fall and the weight of the chief superintendent both driving the air from his lungs. The back of his head clattered against tile and the flames seemed to dim around him. Elmwood’s face rested on his shoulder, her skin blackened and blistering. What a stupid way to go, burned to death in the embrace of a woman he wanted nothing to do with.

And then the weight lifted off him as someone carried the chief superintendent away. Another face loomed over his, upside down, as other figures swarmed in his peripheral vision. DS Harrison looked both worried and livid.

‘Thought you said you weren’t going in on your own, sir.’