59

The leafy back streets of the New Town were home to much of Edinburgh’s old money. Vast terraced town houses, suited more to Victorian living than the needs of modern life, many had in the past been converted into flats or offices. Now that process was being reversed, but some corners had never changed in the first place. Unexpected closes and squares centred on private gardens, the massive trees an indication of how long it had been since this modern city had been planned. Alan Lewis’s money wasn’t old. He had forged it out of the new financial regime that grew after the deregulation of the banks in the 1980s. Nevertheless, he had found himself an ancient lair in which to hide, taken on the trappings of the gentry despite his humbler roots.

‘That’s his car there, sir. Thought I recognized the number.’ DC Harrison pointed to a shiny black Bentley, its windows almost as dark as its muscled flanks. The number plate wasn’t personalized, no awkwardly misspelled version of his name or reference to his company. It merely showed that, like McLean’s new Alfa, it was only a few months old.

‘Not sure if that’s a good sign or bad.’ McLean peered in through the windscreen, past the resident’s permit, to the black-leather interior. Nothing lay on the passenger seat or in the footwell, but then he’d not really expected anything. Looking up from the car, he saw the four-storey bulk of Lewis’s town house looming over them both. If its windows were eyes, then they were sightless and old, the stonework around them blackened by soot from fires last lit half a century ago. Stone steps led up to a shiny black-painted door, and something about the way the light played on it struck McLean as wrong.

‘You tried his phone, aye?’ He crossed the pavement, climbed the steps, Harrison close behind him.

‘Three or four times, sir. Mobile and landline. They both just kept going to voicemail.’

McLean pressed lightly on the glossy wood, and the door swung slowly inwards. Not just unlocked, but unlatched as well. He knew that Edinburgh wasn’t a bad city for burglaries, but leaving your front door open wasn’t something most people did.

‘Get on to Control. I think we might need a squad car over. Maybe more than one. See if you can’t get a message to DCI Featherstonehaugh, too.’ He dug out a pair of latex gloves and snapped them on. Then pushed the door all the way while Harrison made the call.

It opened on to a small porch, glazed double doors leading to a larger hall beyond. For a moment he wondered whether Lewis was simply in the habit of leaving the front porch accessible for any delivery drivers, but then he noticed the double doors had been left just slightly ajar, too. It was an odd way to leave them, as if whoever had passed through was only paper thin. Or the wind had caught them after they hadn’t been closed properly.

‘They’re on their way, sir. ETA five minutes. We going to wait?’

McLean frowned at her. ‘What do you think?’ He didn’t wait for an answer, but pushed open one of the glass doors and stepped into the hallway. It hadn’t been all that noisy outside, just the hum of the city as background, the occasional distant wail of a siren. Now the silence was almost total, underlined by the slow tick tock tick tock of an old grandfather clock standing between two closed doorways. Wide stairs of dark wood climbed towards a halfway landing at the back of the house, light filtering through an impressive stained glass window.

‘Hello? Anyone home? Mr Lewis?’ McLean walked across the hall, opened the first of the doors on to a well-appointed drawing room. The air had a stale quality to it that suggested people didn’t go in there very often, and when he ran his gloved finger over the surface of a nearby occasional table, it came up in a fine smear of dust.

‘Phone’s over here.’ McLean looked back out to the hall and saw Harrison pointing at a modern handset on an antique sideboard. She had pulled on gloves, too, he noticed. ‘Looks like there’s just the one message. That’ll be me, most likely.’

‘Leave it for now. Let’s just check all the rooms. Touch as little as you can, aye?’

Harrison nodded her understanding, moving off towards the back of the house. McLean checked the opposite side of the hall, an empty dining room as unused as its twin on the other side. He found more signs of life in Lewis’s study, but still not the man himself. Bookshelves lining the walls were filled mostly with dry economics and finance texts, a few biographies and a sizeable collection of Mills and Boon romances, all well thumbed. Well, there was no accounting for taste. He was leafing through the third in a row, surprised to find that they had all been signed by the authors, when a distant voice reminded him of why he was there.

‘You’ll want to see this, sir.’

He replaced the book, went back to the hall, trying to work out where Harrison had gone.

‘Up here. The bathroom.’

McLean followed the voice and found the detective constable waiting for him on the first landing. More stairs led to higher floors, but she indicated for him to follow her through an open door. Lewis’s bedroom lay beyond, set to the front of the house and overlooking the private gardens shared by the other addresses in the close. Beyond the massive bed, another open door led to an en suite bathroom.

‘He’s in the bath.’

The flatness of Harrison’s tone was a warning, but it still couldn’t prepare McLean for what he saw. Alan Lewis lay in the bath, the clear water making his body look bloated and distorted. There was no mistaking the fact that he was dead. One arm covered his modesty, for all that it was worth. The other dangled over the side, pointing to the marble floor. A small puddle of drips had accumulated beneath his fingers. All of these things McLean noticed as he tried hard not to focus on Lewis’s face.

The dead man stared at nothing, a point in the middle distance that might have been where the ceiling met the corner of the far walls, or might have been head height to a short man standing over him as he lay in his bath. His lips were curled back to reveal yellowing teeth, a swollen tongue. But it was the terror in his eyes that McLean would find hard to forget. A look all the more horrifying for being almost identical to one he had seen just two days before.

The same sheer terror as that on James Barnton’s face.

‘I guess that’s why he wasn’t answering his phone,’ Harrison said, her voice a little squeaky. McLean dragged his gaze away from the dead man, looked over to where she was standing in the bathroom doorway. He couldn’t remember ever having seen her face so pale.

‘Go downstairs. Wait for the squad car to arrive and let them know what we’ve found.’ He reached out, touched her gently on the arm and steered her away from the horrific sight. Contact brought her back to herself, a little colour flushing her cheeks.

‘Sorry, sir. Bit of a shock, right enough.’

‘That’ll be the understatement of the year.’ McLean turned back to the corpse in the bath. ‘Better get on to Control again. We’ll need the duty doctor and the pathologist. All the usual stuff.’

‘You think this is suspicious? He didn’t just have a heart attack or something?’

‘Front door open? And we’ve been trying to get a hold of him all day?’ McLean shook his head. ‘No. I’m sure he was under a lot of pressure, but I don’t think Mr Lewis died of natural causes. Angus can be the judge of that though, but only once you’ve spoken to Control.’

Harrison took the hint and hurried away. McLean was tempted to go after her, not wanting to spend any more time with the dead man than was strictly necessary. He’d seen death plenty of times before. Too many times, some would say. After a while, it became easier to deal with the aftermath. A dead body was just an empty vessel, a series of clues that might help determine how the end had come. The sudden, senseless violence visited upon the crash victims had been horrific, but only in a slasher movie, slaughterhouse manner. It was terrible, but all too easy to explain what had happened to them and so he had been able to compartmentalize their deaths, let his subconscious deal with them over the course of a few bad dreams, and move on.

This was different in the same way that James Barnton’s death had been different. Both had left bodies largely undamaged, the only clues their expressions of utter, abject terror. To look at Alan Lewis’s face was to see raw, primal fear.

‘What the hell spooked you?’

McLean spoke the words aloud as much to centre himself as anything. He needed a clear head here, a detective’s head. He crouched down, looking around the bathroom for clues that there might have been someone else in here when Lewis had died. The bath was cast iron, with a roll top and one of those wonderful column plugs he remembered from his childhood. Dust bunnies had collected underneath, away from the cleaner’s reach, but apart from the puddle of water beneath Lewis’s fingers there was nothing untoward in the room. Except there was something that was bothering him. Something he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

McLean reached out, turned the back of his hand to the side of the bath, and that was when it clicked. The water was still warm. Hot, even. Knowing he’d get a ticking off from Angus, McLean reached out and gently turned the dead man’s hand. The flesh on the tips of his fingers had barely begun to pucker. He hadn’t been in the bath long at all. Had only died very recently.

McLean thought he saw a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye. Turning a little too swiftly, his head reeled as the blood drained out of it. For a moment he saw a shadow on the wall, the silhouette of a person running from the room.

And then DC Harrison screamed.