60

McLean stood up too quickly, catching the side of his head on the roll top lip of the bath. Reeling at the impact, he staggered into the bedroom, unsure how it had suddenly become so dark in there. Sunlight speared through narrow slits in shutters he hadn’t noticed were closed before, casting more shadow than light. One ray splayed across the bed, the crumpled form of DC Harrison laid out on the mattress. He stumbled over, vision still starred from the blow to the head.

‘Harrison? Janie?’ He reached a hand out to shake her shoulder, but she didn’t respond. Face down, unmoving, he couldn’t see if she was even breathing. Nor could he see any reason why she should be this way.

‘Come on, Constable. No time for kipping.’ He rolled her over and almost screamed himself at the look on her face. It mirrored that of Alan Lewis in the bath, of James Barnton, propped up against a headstone in Dalry Cemetery. Hardly daring, he reached for the exposed skin of her neck, just below her jaw, trembling fingers feeling for a pulse that wasn’t there.

Something clicked in his brain, and the training kicked in. He loosened her collar, checked her airway was clear and started CPR. Backup was on its way, wasn’t it? Did he have time to stop and call Control? What the fuck happened to her?

It felt like hours, but was probably less than a minute before the detective constable started to respond. A gentle finger to her neck again revealed an erratic, weak pulse, and her eyes began to flicker beneath closed lids. Sitting upright on the bed, McLean breathed a sigh of relief, only then feeling a tinge of embarrassment burn the tips of his ears as the unusual intimacy of the situation dawned on him.

‘Don’t try to move. Help’s on its way.’ He wasn’t even sure if she heard him, but at least he could see she was breathing now. He slid off the bed, still a little disoriented himself, reached up to the side of his head and felt the start of a nice, sore lump forming there.

‘I didn’t mean to hurt her. Honest.’

Startled by the voice, McLean spun round in search of who had spoken. His head throbbed painfully, stars dimming his vision as something moved in the deep shadows. A figure shuffled towards him, vaguely man-shaped but oddly distorted, and as the light played across it, McLean saw a creature from his worst nightmares. Skin bubbled and burned from a face locked in a permanent scream, arms bent at impossible angles, broken white bone poking from gaping wounds. A stench of chemicals and ordure filled the room, choking him and forcing tears from his eyes. He took an involuntary step back as the creature emerged more fully into the light, something that might have been a hand reaching out for him.

‘All I did was touch her.’

McLean took another step back, almost overwhelmed by the horror, the stench and the sheer impossibility of what he was seeing. His leg hit the side of the bed, DC Harrison still sprawled out behind him, forcing him to stop as the apparition came ever closer. He could hear its breathing now, a choking, bubbling sound like a man drowning in a bath of acid effluent.

‘What are you?’ The words croaked out of McLean’s throat, but the act of speaking them cleared his head a little. It also made the apparition pause, cock its head to one side like an inquisitive dog. There were features in that broken, bloody mess, and by some strange trick of the light they began to emerge more clearly with each startled blink.

‘Edward?’

The grotesque shook its head, becoming less horrific with each passing moment, more like the face McLean had seen on the computer screen in the city mortuary. More like the young man clutching the red scarf at the crash scene, lost and bewildered.

‘Dan?’

The young man stopped completely now, just an arm’s reach away. McLean couldn’t see anything clearly, his head fuzzy. How hard had he hit it?

‘How do you know my name?’

‘You were there, at the crash. I saw you, remember?’ McLean reached out to touch the apparition, then remembered Harrison’s scream, Lewis’s face. ‘You went to meet Maddy.’

‘How could you possibly know that?’ The young man spoke with a soft, quiet voice, his accent hard to place beyond English. McLean’s head ached with the stench of chemicals and the dull thudding of the lump forming on his skull.

‘We’ve been to your flat, Dan. Seen your computer. You had Mike Finlay’s phone, so you must have been there when he died. James Barnton, too.’

‘I never meant to hurt them. Sure they deserved it, but I didn’t … I just …’ The young man pawed at his face as if trying to claw the skin from his cheeks, and as his agitation rose, so the room darkened and the chemical reek grew ever stronger. McLean could scarcely breathe, let alone think straight. How had he come to be here? How could any of this make sense? Maybe it didn’t. Maybe that was the whole point. This was where logic fell apart and Madame Rose’s world of waifs and spirits, unnamed ghosts and gathering darkness finally had its place.

‘You didn’t kill them, Dan. You couldn’t have killed them. You died in the crash, with Maddy at your side.’

Silence settled over the room like the haar rolling in off the North Sea. The young man stood as motionless and limp as a hanged corpse, head dropped and arms by his side. Then slowly, he raised his gaze to meet McLean’s, a dark fire in his eyes, and screamed like a banshee. A crushing weight fell upon McLean, as if the air had grown too heavy on his shoulders. It gripped him tight, squeezing the breath from his lungs, wrapping his head in a vice. His vision blurred as his eyes began to pop. Slowly, he sank to his knees under the pressure, feeling his ribs crack with the strain.

And then as soon as it came, the weight was gone. McLean looked up, gasping for air, to see the man who had been Daniel Penston fade away to nothing, his scream drifting off into a wail of despair, echoing to the depths of McLean’s soul.

The mournful wail in his ears drifted away, morphing into the sound of approaching sirens. McLean shook his head, wincing as a stab of pain lanced through his brain. Light oozed back into the room like brackish water, the shadows banished to the far corners. Beside him, DI Harrison let out a low moan as she began to stir, and through the door in the bathroom, Alan Lewis was still dead in his bath. Of Edward Gosford – Daniel Penston – there was no sign, but then why would there be? He’d died in the truck crash on the far side of the city over a week ago. There was no way he could have been here, in this room. No way he could have been anywhere near Extech Energy when James Barnton had died, or in the portable-cabin offices of Finlay McGregor, scaring Mike Finlay so badly he tripped over his own feet and speared himself on a lethal shard of broken glass. No way he could have hacked into the corporate network of Alan Lewis’s financial empire and revealed all its nasty secrets.

‘Inspector? Constable? Anyone?’ A voice drifted up from below, filtering through McLean’s thoughts and dragging him back to the present. The situation was almost hopeless. How could they explain Lewis’s death, let alone Harrison semi-conscious on the bed. Bad enough the gossip among the junior officers when that little story got out; worse still if someone thought she might be medically unfit for active duty. He’d seen one young detective constable go that way. There was no way he was going to let it happen to a second.

But how to persuade whoever was calling from the hallway downstairs that this wasn’t what it looked like? McLean scanned the room, searching for something, anything that might possibly explain what had happened here. Time to improvise.

Checking his latex gloves were still intact, he hurried around the bed, grabbing the bedside light off the stand. Its flex was just about long enough to reach. He tugged hard, easing the wire under the bathroom door. Lewis still lay there dead, head fixed in that rictus grin of horror. Suicide or murder, would anyone care? He lifted up the dead hand, still unpleasantly warm from the bathwater, wrapped it around the base of the lamp. So the prints would be distorted, if they took at all. There wasn’t much else he could do.

‘Sorry about this. But then again, you brought it on yourself.’

He dropped the lamp into the bathwater, pleased to hear a slight spark as it shorted out. Back in the bedroom, he hurried over to Harrison, who was struggling to sit upright, her head clutched in her hands.

‘What the fu—, … hell just happened?’ She looked up at him, squinting against a pain he could easily imagine.

‘You stumbled. Cracked your head on the bedpost, remember?’

‘No … I … There was a young man. I … He –’

‘You stumbled coming out of the bathroom, cracked your head on the bedpost. Remember.’ McLean said it more forcefully now, and something must have sunk in. Harrison nodded, just once, wincing as pain shot through her head again. He put a hand on her shoulder. ‘You’ll be fine. Just let me do the talking, OK?’

Harrison opened her mouth to say something, but then Detective Constable Stringer burst through the door, closely followed by DCI McIntyre. Her gaze flitted from the bed to McLean, to Harrison and then back to McLean.

‘Jesus Christ, Tony. What the fuck happened here?’