The delicious smell of cooking met Rhona as she approached her front door. Her plan had been to order in food, for despite being in the presence of death most of the day, she was starving. But the aroma suggested that Sean, rather than leave, had stayed to cook for her.
She paused before putting the key in the lock, trying to decide how to deal with this. If she appeared welcoming, that might suggest she was glad Sean had stayed on. If she was annoyed, that might give the impression she didn’t want him there at all.
Neither way was how she felt.
On entry, the cat came bounding towards her. Tom was no longer the small furry ball Sean had bought after her first cat, Chance, had been killed, murdered by a psychopath as a warning to her. She’d been annoyed with Sean for making the decision about a new cat without consulting her, but had gradually warmed to Tom’s presence. Yet the cat, appearing now, simply reminded her of the psychological games her former live-in lover was wont to play.
Rather than seeking Sean out, Rhona dropped her forensic bag, removed her jacket and headed straight for the shower. Fifteen minutes later, smelling a good deal better, she entered the kitchen to find it empty.
The table was set for one, with a note on the waiting plate.
Food in the slow cooker. Should be ready by six, but won’t spoil. White wine in the fridge. Enjoy. Sean x
The wrath Rhona had nursed under the heat of the shower dissipated and she felt foolish, and then a little annoyed.
Why? Because he’d done what she’d wanted and left?
Rhona retrieved the wine and poured herself a glass. The slow cooker, bought by Sean when they’d lived together and which she’d buried in a cupboard when she’d told him to leave, was back in pride of place on the work surface and emitting the delicious aroma she’d encountered on the stairs.
Rhona decided not to ponder Sean’s motives or how she should interpret them, but rather just eat the food he’d prepared for her. The contents of the cooker turned out to be chicken casserole. That and the wine were definitely up to Sean’s usual standards and, she had to admit, better than the meals she generally phoned out for.
Hunger assuaged, she took her wine through to the sitting room and settled on the couch with her laptop. There was a message from Chrissy to say she’d logged the samples taken from the flat, including the creepy dolls, then gone home. As Rhona read this, another email pinged in, this time from McNab.
Rhona regarded it for a moment. The title ‘Monday morning’ immediately made her think he’d decided to confess to Bill Wilson. She hesitated, then opened it, and found it was simply alerting her to the post-mortem on the possible suicide.
Her relief at this irritated her. She wasn’t usually prone to indecision, but this case wasn’t usual. If McNab would just lay off the subject, she would make up her own mind what to do. Even as she thought this, she was aware that this line of reasoning was just a way of blaming McNab for her indecision.
Well, he’d put her in this position.
To take her mind off McNab, she fired up the photographs from the crime scene. Scrolling through them, she decided the images of the dolls were almost as disturbing as those of the victim.
Now, observing the dolls en masse, Rhona realized they were arranged in three rows of nine, and that each row was divided into three, by hair colour, making nine blondes, nine brunettes and nine redheads in total. Since the cord used in the hanging was also knotted nine times, it did seem that the number nine was significant in some way or other to the victim.
She decided to do a little online numerology research.
When she entered ‘the significance of nine’ into the search box, Wikipedia popped up first. The detailed and substantial entry provided a great deal of information on the place of nine in mathematics, including the simple fact that when you multiply any number by nine, then add the resulting digits and reduce them to a single digit, it always becomes a nine. Intrigued by this, Rhona tried a few herself just to make sure. It seemed, said the entry, ‘that from a numerological perspective, the 9 simply takes over, like the infamous body snatchers’.
There was also a mention of nine in Chinese lore and in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, with the nine companions of the ring and the nine Ringwraiths, matching good and evil. She learned quite a bit from her study of the number nine, but none of it offered an insight into the pattern of nine in the hanging dolls or the use of nine knots in the plaited cord.
Of course, should the post-mortem conclusion be that it wasn’t suicide, then the cord might have been the property of the perpetrator, rather than the victim. Which led Rhona to wonder if the presence of the dolls could also be the work of the perpetrator.
Her first thought when she heard the door buzzer was that it might be Sean returning, but she dismissed that as unlikely. At ten o’clock he would just be starting his set at the jazz club.
When she answered the intercom, there was a moment’s silence as though her visitor might have rung the wrong flat. Rhona was about to put the receiver down when McNab finally spoke.
‘Can I come up?’
‘No.’
‘Please? We need to talk.’
Rhona wanted to tell him to go away, but found herself unable to. Maybe he was right. Maybe they did need to clear the air.
Rhona released the door and let him in.
Michael Joseph McNab looked better than he had done for some time. Gone were the shadowed eyes. He’d shaved, and he definitely hadn’t been drinking. When she’d offered him a whisky, he’d turned it down and asked for coffee instead.
‘Make it strong,’ he requested.
Rhona did as asked then poured herself another glass of wine.
McNab sniffed the air. ‘Been cooking?’
‘I don’t cook. You know that.’
He smiled. ‘Smells good whoever made it.’
Rhona sipped her wine in silence. McNab swallowed the coffee and held the cup out to be replenished.
Eventually he spoke. ‘I’m in a better place now. Off the booze, for a start.’ When Rhona didn’t respond, he went on. ‘That night at the stone circle, I’d had God knows how many drugs pumped into me. I was high and mad and when I saw that bastard on top of you, I . . .’ He halted.
His words had conjured for Rhona a memory as vivid as when it had happened. Suddenly she could smell him again, feel his weight bearing down on her. She stood up and walked to the window and looked down on the tranquil scene below, trying to dispel that other image.
‘I’ve written it all down,’ McNab said. ‘Everything I can remember. You can read it if you want, before I hand it to the boss.’
Rhona didn’t turn from the window.
‘We were both debriefed. Neither of us told the full truth then,’ she said.
‘I’m going to tell it now,’ McNab said.
‘If you do, then I’ll be the liar. By omission.’
‘Not the way I’ve told it.’
‘Then it’s not the truth,’ Rhona said.
She turned and their eyes met and held for the first time since that fateful night in the dark, in the middle of the stone circle.
‘I have to fix this,’ he pleaded.
Rhona slowly shook her head. ‘It’s unfixable.’
McNab was trying to read her expression. ‘You want to let it go?’ he said, surprised.
In that moment, Rhona made her decision. ‘Yes.’
A flurry of emotions crossed his face, relief and hope among them. Rhona felt a little of both herself. McNab had offered on numerous occasions to reveal the last moments of the serial killer they had come to know as Stonewarrior, yet she had refused to discuss it with him.
Now that she had made a decision, it was as though the weight of the killer’s body had been lifted from her.
‘Can we change the subject now?’ she said.
‘Gladly.’
‘I’ve been studying the photographs from the suspicious death,’ Rhona said.
‘And?’
‘Did you notice the presence of the number nine?’
‘Not particularly,’ he said cautiously. ‘Unless you mean that twenty-seven dolls constitutes three times nine.’
Rhona beckoned him to follow her through to the sitting room and fired up the laptop again. She showed him the photographs she’d taken of the dolls. McNab’s recoil at that image reflected her own.
‘There are nine of each hair colour,’ she said. ‘Each row is made up of nine dolls, divided into threes.’ Rhona pulled up an image of the red cord still encircling the victim’s neck. ‘You’ll have to take my word for it until the PM, but there are nine evenly spaced knots in the ligature used to hang her.’
‘So what’s special about nine?’
‘Lots of things.’
She brought up the Wikipedia page and watched as McNab’s eyes glazed over.
‘For fuck’s sake. Don’t make it maths or we’ll have to bring in the nutty professor again,’ he said, alluding to Professor Magnus Pirie, criminal psychologist and McNab’s very own bête noire.
Rhona ignored the dig at Magnus. ‘I don’t think it’s anything to do with the maths properties, but it’s significant in some way.’
‘Her pal said Leila was a New Age believer, if that helps,’ McNab offered.
‘It might.’
Rhona tried a search on ‘nine’ and ‘New Age’. What appeared was anything but enlightening, unless you believed that the Masonic Lodge was behind the Twin Towers attack and that both the Bible and the devil used the number nine in their scriptures.
Rhona closed the laptop.
‘I didn’t think you would give up so easily,’ McNab said.
‘I haven’t.’ She looked pointedly at her watch.
McNab took the hint. ‘Okay. I’d better head for the pub, before it’s closing time.’
‘What?’ Rhona said.
He smiled at her reaction. ‘To talk to the barman on duty last night when Leila met her man.’
She didn’t return the smile, irritated at him for setting her up, but then again, that was the real McNab. She walked him to the door.
Rhona didn’t want him to bring up their earlier discussion and was keen for him to leave. Sensing this perhaps, he exited, but as she made to close the door behind him, he stopped her.
‘We are okay, Dr MacLeod?’ he said.
Rhona wasn’t willing to go quite that far.
‘Let’s wait and see,’ was all she could manage.
He appeared to accept this, because he nodded, then headed downstairs.
Rhona stood for a moment, listening to his echoing footsteps, hearing the main door slam shut behind him.
What the hell had she done? Whatever way you looked at it, she had bound herself to McNab by keeping the secret.
And secrets, she knew, had a habit of coming back to bite you.