9

‘Are we discounting terrorist involvement in this one now, sir? Only the tabloids are all harping on about ISIS cells and everywhere being on heightened alert.’

Morning briefing, and McLean was glad that they had moved operations out of his new office and along the corridor to the major-incident room. It looked like every constable in the city had been drafted in and most of the sergeants, although what they were supposed to all do he wasn’t sure. They’d barely started and already the inevitable questions were coming in.

‘You should know better than to believe anything you read in the papers these days. Especially the ones with more pictures than words.’

A low ripple of laughter greeted his answer, and McLean allowed himself to relax a little. Morning briefings were never much fun, but at least this investigation had the look of being relatively straightforward. Horrific, yes, but straightforward.

‘Forensics are still looking at the truck, but this doesn’t bear the hallmarks of a terrorist operation. The truck wasn’t stolen, and the driver doesn’t fit the profile. His post-mortem’s scheduled for later today, and that should shed a bit more light on the matter.’ He paused a moment, looking out over a sea of expectant faces. Word had no doubt got out that the chief constable himself had green-lit a full investigation. Nothing like the prospect of unlimited overtime to motivate the workers. That and something a bit out of the ordinary, a change from the day-to-day tasks and repetitive run-ins with the less savoury aspects of Edinburgh society.

‘Key tasks are to identify those victims we haven’t already been able to name and inform their families. DI Ritchie will be heading up that side of things as soon as she gets here. We’ve reason to believe the truck was carrying a dangerous cargo without licence, and may have been inadequately maintained. I’ll be looking into that myself. DS Laird will be co-ordinating interviews with all the members of the public we took details from at the scene. The hotline number’s already out there and generating a lot of calls, but we’ll have a team going over CCTV footage and combing social media, too. I want as much information about this crash as we can put together, as quickly as possible. I don’t need to tell any of you that we’re under public scrutiny with this one. People are worried and the press stirring things up doesn’t help much. If you’ve any more questions, see DC Gregg or DS Laird. Now let’s get on with the job, aye?’

McLean watched as the mass of uniforms began to dissolve away, individual officers seeking out the teams and tasks to which they’d been assigned. A few left swiftly, the chancers who’d thought they might get out of regular beat patrols. Or looking for an excuse to be late with their paperwork. Thinking about his own office and the innumerable extra forms this investigation would generate, he could only have sympathy for them. ‘Reckon that went well enough. I wouldn’t give you much more than a week before the high heidyins start moaning about the cost, though.’

McLean looked round to see DCI Jayne McIntyre approaching. She must have come in late, as he’d not seen her before the briefing began.

‘A week? I should be so lucky. Besides, I can’t see this taking that long. Unless you know something I don’t.’

‘Well, there is one thing. Ritchie won’t be back until late tomorrow. Someone else will have to get the ball rolling on those IDs.’

‘Tomorrow? Any reason why?’

‘If there was, nobody told me. Guess she’s not finished whatever it was she was doing up there.’

McLean scratched at his chin, feeling the rasp of stubble where he’d missed a bit in his hurry to shave that morning. Despite his nightmare, he’d fallen asleep again and missed the first alarm completely. ‘Doesn’t really matter. Kirsty’s never been much of a fan of the mortuary, so I’ll probably be the one liaising with Angus and the team anyway.’

McIntyre cocked her head to one side like a quizzical sheepdog. ‘Like you weren’t going to be running the whole thing yourself anyway. Come on, Tony. I know how you operate.’

‘Am I that predictable?’ It wasn’t a question McLean needed an answer to, but it reminded him that the PM on the driver was going to be taking place soon and he’d promised Angus he’d be there. He pulled out his phone, checked the time.

‘Somewhere you need to be?’ McIntyre asked with a mischievous smile. ‘The city mortuary?’

‘Aye, well. If Kirsty’s still stuck up in the Highlands.’ McLean glanced around the room, happy to see his team under control. ‘Guess I’d better go see what made our driver lose control of his truck.’

‘OK, but don’t be too long about it. You’ll need to be back here for eleven.’

‘Eleven? Why?’ McLean saw the expression on McIntyre’s face and had a suspicion he knew. Too much to hope they’d let him deal with the trauma of the truck crash on his own.

‘Boss’s orders, and by boss I mean the chief constable, not me, not Forrester, not even Teflon Steve. All officers at the scene yesterday have to report for an assessment with the station counsellor.’

McLean opened his mouth to complain, then closed it again. McIntyre was just the messenger for this particular piece of bad news. And a part of him had been expecting it anyway.

‘Cheer up, Tony. You’ll be fine.’ The detective chief inspector slapped him gently on the arm. ‘Not like you’re having nightmares or anything, right?’

‘You really know how to make an old man happy, don’t you Tony.’

He should really have been chasing up the investigation into the hauliers and how the truck had come to be carrying illegal waste, but the city mortuary held a curious fascination for McLean. He’d visited it uncountable times in the course of his professional career, true, but it had also been his grandmother’s workplace for years before that. Sometimes it felt like a second home, which didn’t say much for his choice of friends.

‘I mean, we’ve a busy schedule anyway, what with the staff cuts and everyone doubling up on shifts, but you just had to give us twenty fresh cadavers to examine. Just to keep us on our toes.’

Angus Cadwallader, city pathologist and perhaps the only one of those friends who wouldn’t think twice about the amount of time he spent here, struggled into a set of green scrubs in preparation for the post-mortem on the truck driver. Bernard Wilkins lay on his back on the stainless-steel slab in the middle of the examination theatre just a few paces away, covered in a white latex sheet to preserve what was left of his modesty. Unlike some of the other victims of the crash, he hadn’t been hard to identify, given that his fleece bore the same logo as that painted on the side of the truck. His wallet and driving licence had been inside the cab, too, even if he hadn’t.

‘Well, I guess we’d better get on with it. Sooner started, sooner finished.’ Cadwallader winked and strode out into the theatre like an actor in search of ham. McLean followed him, somewhat reluctantly. While he was more at ease in this place than most, he still didn’t like dwelling too much upon the frailty of the human form and the mortality of others. The mortality of Bernard Wilkins, truck driver, was all too obvious as Cadwallader’s assistant, Dr Tracy Sharp, folded back the cover to reveal the battered, naked body.

‘Subject is male, Caucasian …’ A pause while the pathologist read some details off from a clipboard. ‘165 centimetres. That’s, what? About five foot five in old money? Weight eighty-six kilograms, about thirteen and a half stone. Sixty-three years of age. Substantial subcutaneous fat deposits around the arms, legs and torso. I think it’s fair to say he was a tad overweight, don’t you?’ Cadwallader continued his exterior examination, dictating notes to the microphone that hung over the table. McLean didn’t need to listen, he could see well enough what had happened to the man. His face was a mess of cuts and abrasions where he had been thrown through the windscreen. As luck would have had it, away from the bus stop. He’d been found a few yards further up the street, the furthest dead body from the crash.

‘I’m mostly interested in what killed him, Angus. Was it the impact or something else?’

‘All in good time, Tony. All in good time.’ Cadwallader leaned close to the dead man’s head, peered first into one eye and then the next. McLean stood back, giving his old friend room and preparing himself for the bit when the scalpels and less subtle instruments of torture came out. It was hard to be dispassionate about this post-mortem – intentionally or accidentally, Bernard Wilkins had been responsible for the deaths of nineteen innocent people – but even so McLean had no great desire to see his innermost secrets. Viscera held far less fascination for him than they did the pathologist.

‘Ah. Yes. That would explain it,’ Cadwallader said after a few minutes of removing, inspecting and weighing organs. ‘Poor chap probably had no idea what hit him.’

‘Heart attack?’ McLean had witnessed enough examinations to know whereabouts the pathologist’s attention would be focused by this stage of the proceedings.

‘If you insist on such an unscientific description, then yes. Massive and sudden. Bloody bad timing, too, but given the state of him it could have happened anywhere.’ Cadwallader held up the dead man’s heart for McLean to see, then seemed to remember who he was showing it to and instead passed it to Dr Sharp for weighing.

‘So we can rule out terrorist activity, then. This really was nothing but a tragic accident.’

Cadwallader paused a while before answering. With his green scrubs spattered in Bernard Wilkins’s blood, arms caked in gore and thinning hair sticking out at odd, unkempt angles, he looked like nothing so much as a latter day Dr Frankenstein.

‘Tragic, yes. Accident? Well, I’ve another nineteen examinations to do, all of which are going to take a lot longer than this fellow. Some of them were brought to the mortuary in buckets, Tony. You tell me if that sounds like an accident.’