62

His head still hurt, a small lump towards the back of his skull that throbbed in time to his heartbeat. McLean wanted nothing more than to go home, collapse on the sofa and treat his injuries with fine malt whisky. That didn’t look like it was going to happen any time soon.

‘You say you just found him there, in the bath, dead?’ DCI McIntyre stood in the main hall of Alan Lewis’s house as an army of forensic technicians trooped through and up the stairs. They wouldn’t find anything, but the financier was rich enough and important enough for them to have to look.

‘Door was open when we got here. Looks like he killed himself.’ McLean winced slightly as he nodded his head in its direction. He was sitting on an elegant antique chaise longue, waiting to be dismissed from the scene.

‘Why did you even come here? I thought we’d handed all of this over to the Organised Crime team.’

‘So did I, but I don’t see them anywhere yet.’ McLean tried to stretch the knots out of his neck, but movement just made the ache in his head worse. Keeping still was hard, though. He wanted to get up, get out of this place. Soon enough the paramedics would bring the body down and he’d rather not be here when that happened. Sitting beside him, DC Harrison stared blankly across the room. She should probably have gone to hospital, but McIntyre wasn’t letting her go anywhere just yet. At least she was still alive.

‘What did you expect? You only raided Extech, what …’ McIntyre checked her watch, ‘… just over twelve hours ago. They’ve hardly had time to read the background reports.’

‘Lewis was behind it all, Jayne. He financed Finlay McGregor, put up all the money for Extech’s biodigester site. He even owns a majority share of LindSea Farm Estates. He’s been cleaning money for everyone from Colombian drug cartels to the Russian mafia. Probably a few Tory politicians, too.’

‘So what the hell’s he doing dead in his bath, then?’

McLean shrugged. ‘Everything was about to blow up in his face. He might be rich, but there’s no way he was going to buy his way out of jail on this one. Probably thought ending it all was preferable.’

McIntyre looked unconvinced. ‘How is it you know all this? And don’t try to tell me Lofty Blane uncovered it. He’s good, but not that good.’

McLean leaned back until his head rested against the wood panelling of the wall, ignoring the stab of pain from the bruised lump. Daniel Penston’s computer, with all its hacked information, was still in his flat in Gorgie, along with Mike Finlay’s mobile phone. Hopefully by now DCI Featherstonehaugh was there, too, making sure neither item mysteriously disappeared. But how could anyone explain either of them when the young man who lived there had died in the truck crash?

‘It’s … complicated. Do we have to go into it now?’

A commotion at the top of the stairs interrupted McIntyre’s response, a stumbling and gentle swearing as two paramedics manoeuvred a stretcher with a bodybag strapped to it down the slippery polished wood steps. For a moment, he thought they were going to drop it, and he had visions of the bodybag bursting open, Lewis’s wet, naked form sliding out like a newborn infant. The paramedics recovered their balance, though, and soon enough they had placed the stretcher onto a trolley and were wheeling it out the front door.

By the time it had gone, a slower, more measured tread creaked the stairs on its way down. McLean looked around to see his old friend Angus Cadwallader approaching, his assistant, Doctor Sharp, just a couple of paces behind as she struggled with his heavy bag.

‘I can think of worse places to die than in a warm bath in my own home.’ Cadwallader tried a smile. ‘Evening, Jayne.’

‘Angus.’ McIntyre nodded her hello. Beside him on the couch, McLean could see Harrison fidgeting nervously. It was fair enough; he didn’t really want to be here either.

‘So you reckon it really was suicide, then?’

Cadwallader inclined his head slightly. ‘You never miss a thing, do you, Tony. Aye, suicide looks most likely. We’ll know once I’ve had a closer look at him back at the mortuary, but that won’t be until the morning.’

McLean hadn’t realized how tense he was, but at the pathologist’s words the pent-up tension dropped away. There would still be questions to answer, forms to fill in, decisions to justify. Lewis’s financial empire would surely unravel, and there would be revelations to come, but none of that mattered to him. Let the Organised Crime experts deal with that; his job here was done.

A movement in the shadows, right in the corner of his eye, dragged McLean’s attention to the dark corner where the stairs turned and crossed the passageway that led to the back of the house. For a single eye-blink he thought he saw Daniel Penston standing there, watching.

Another blink, and he was gone.

The light was fading by the time McLean dropped DC Harrison off at the front door to the tenement flat she shared with Amanda Parsons. They had said very little on the journey across town, each occupied with their thoughts about the events that had unfolded in Lewis’s house. Either that or she was just as dog-tired as he was and had no energy left for conversation.

‘No need for an early start tomorrow. Sandy Gregg will be co-ordinating the handover to Organised Crime, so you’ll not be needed for anything. Get some rest. You’ve earned it.’

Harrison smiled, nodded her understanding. ‘Might want to think about taking your own advice, sir.’ She closed the car door on him before he could answer. Cheeky, perhaps, but the truth in her words stung. He checked his mirror, indicated and pulled out into the traffic. Time to go home and face Emma’s justified wrath.

It wasn’t that he had been consciously avoiding her, but the analytical part of his brain could see the patterns all too well. The conversations that never happened, the bad dreams that left him weary all day, the way he convinced himself that letting her sleep late in the mornings was a good thing, these were all signs. How must she feel, all alone in that great old mansion? What must it be like to go to bed before him, wake to find him already up and gone? He had to try harder, be a better person. It wasn’t just him on his own any more. They were a couple, and soon they would be a family.

The kitchen light blazed out on to the gravel driveway as he pressed the annoying little button that operated the handbrake, killed the engine and stepped out into the warm summer evening. The first thing he noticed was the quiet, as if someone had placed a bubble over the house and garden. The second thing he noticed was the eyes, staring out at him from the bushes. The cats were back, and whereas before that had given him a feeling of security, now it hurried him inside in unaccountable fear.

Stepping into the kitchen only made the fear worse. A chair lay on its back on the floor, a spilled mug of tea splayed across the rough wooden surface of the table.

‘Emma?’

McLean moved swiftly to the far door, then stopped in horror. A single handprint marked the painted surface in something dark and red. What he had taken to be tea spilled from the mug on the table took on a more sinister tone as he saw drops spreading on the floor, their spatters marking a path from table to doorway and on up the corridor.

‘Emma!’

More forceful now, his voice sounded strange in the silence, the pounding blood in his ears the only response. McLean fought the urge to rush forward, years of training overriding the protective instinct. Instead he pulled out his phone, thumbed at the screen as he followed the blood trail towards the hall.

Mrs McCutcheon’s cat lay on her side at the bottom of the stairs, and for a moment McLean thought she might have been attacked, that the blood might have been hers. But she stirred at his movement, sprang to her feet in a surprisingly lithe motion. Then she arched her back, tail straight up and twice as thick as it normally appeared. The hiss wasn’t directed at him, he could tell that much, but it was terrifying all the same.

‘Detective Inspector McLean. I need a squad car and an ambulance to my location. Now.’ McLean gave his address to the surprised man in the control centre as he climbed up the steps. More blood slicked the dark wood, what looked like lumps of flesh speckling the surface here and there. He shoved the phone back in his pocket and took the last few steps two at a time.

‘Emma!’ It was a shout now, the trail leading him not to their shared bedroom but the nursery. Another bloody handprint smeared the freshly painted door, more blood and gore leading across the room to the bathroom beyond. A mobile phone lay on the carpet beside the cot that had only just recently arrived, smears across its screen and dulling the chrome surround. McLean rushed to the bathroom, pushed the door fully open, his mind whirling with fear and horrible certainty.

Emma sat in the bath, knees up, arms clutching them to her chest. There was blood everywhere, and for a moment he thought she was dead, hacked to pieces by some crazed axeman. But she stirred as he rushed towards her, looked up at him with tear-filled eyes.

‘You didn’t come home.’ Her voice was like a little child’s, weak and faint. ‘I tried to call, but the pain … And then …’

McLean knelt down beside the bath, ignoring the wetness that soaked through the knees of his trousers. He reached out and put an arm around her, felt her cold and shivering body. A trail of blood and bits tracked down to the plughole, stained her legs and bare feet.

‘It’s OK,’ he said as she sobbed into his shoulder. ‘It’s all going to be fine.’

But he knew deep down that it wasn’t. It would never be fine again.