McNab stepped into the shower and turned it to the power setting. The impact on his skull felt like a pneumatic drill pounding his brain. He stood like that for all of five minutes, then moved the impact to his neck and shoulders.
After this he would eat, he promised himself, even if his stomach wasn’t asking for food.
He stepped out after fifteen minutes, finishing with a blast of cold water. If he’d been asleep on his feet before, he was awake now.
Dried and dressed, he went through to the kitchen and put on the coffee machine, doubling the required number of spoonfuls of fresh coffee for the amount of water he poured in.
He’d purchased enough ingredients for breakfast in the local corner shop on his way home. He could have stopped at a cafe en route but feared that he would fall asleep, his face in whatever they served him.
He fired up the gas and, adding oil to the pan, set about frying the big breakfast pack of sausage, bacon, black and white pudding. Once cooked, he slipped the slices into the oven to keep warm and fried himself two eggs to go with it.
Once he began the process of eating, hunger took over and he demolished the food in record time. Wiping the plate clean with bread, he poured himself another coffee. Feeling human again, he said a silent thank you that he was not facing a hangover. He’d survived last night probably because he hadn’t taken to whisky.
Opening the window wide, he stood in the draught of cool air and took a deep breath of Glasgow oxygen.
Now he would go and see Freya. She had to be told what had happened last night that had stopped him going round there, and it was better he did that in person. Trying her number, he heard it ring out unanswered. Well past nine o’clock now, he told himself she would be at the university library, and that’s where he should head first. He left a message on voicemail to that effect, apologizing for not coming over due to an emergency at work, which he would explain when he saw her.
McNab then put his dishes in the sink, ran some water on them, fetched his jacket and set off.
The food and the shower had brought a clarity to his thinking that had escaped him in the long hours of the night. His gut feeling told him that Mark had lied. Not about the night he spent with Leila, but about his contact with the person who’d sent him the video clip.
That someone had in some manner persuaded Mark to kill himself. ‘No one else will die.’ That phrase had jumped out at McNab. His own initial response to it had been positive, because he wanted to believe that now Freya would be safe. But who had said, ‘No one else will die’?
McNab didn’t think those words had come from Mark, but from someone who’d persuaded Mark that if he confessed, that would be the case.
Mark had sacrificed himself, but for whom and for what?
The image of the Nine reared again in his head. Power, money, influence. That’s what the men Leila had performed sexual magick with all had.
‘Fuck them,’ McNab said out loud. ‘I’m going to fuck them, if it’s the last thing I do.’
Rhona had risen to the drill of her mobile.
Sean, on the other hand, slept on. This time Rhona didn’t resent his peaceful sleep but merely acknowledged it. She thought about placing a kiss on his forehead, but decided against it. He might stir and envelop her in his arms and she would succumb. She must save dessert for a later date.
The caller was Chrissy, her voice high with excitement or shock.
‘Mark Howitt handed himself in and confessed to the three murders then suffocated himself in his cell.’
A stunned Rhona asked Chrissy to repeat this more slowly.
‘A mate called me. When she went on duty this morning, the station was alive with the news. Mark Howitt, the QC’s son, gave himself up last night. Confessed to McNab that he was the man who’d taken Leila Hardy home. Then wrote a further confession in his cell. He claimed that he also killed Shannon and Barry Fraser to cover his tracks.’
Rhona called a halt at this point.
‘We have no forensic tests to prove that the man with Leila that night was also present at the other crime scenes.’
‘Well, we’d better prove it or not, soon,’ Chrissy said in her usual forthright manner. ‘My bet’s on a false confession.’
Rhona was inclined on instinct to agree.
‘Why would he do that?’
‘He said that no more killings would happen,’ Chrissy told her.
‘Has this hit the news?’
‘Not so far. Want to take a bet how long it takes? Witch killer and son of QC confesses all, then commits suicide. He promises in his confession that no one else will die.’
‘You should be a reporter,’ Rhona said.
‘I’d write a damn good headline,’ Chrissy retorted. ‘But seriously, you need to get down to the mortuary.’
There are some places in life that are necessary. There are places necessary for the dead too. A room full of drawers of dead people sounded like something from a horror film, yet here they were. As necessary as air was, to those who lived.
The scent of death was masked in here by the presence of cold. Deep, penetrating cold that halted, or at least suspended, the organic disintegration of the human body that was both inevitable and essential.
Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, or rather decomposition, which didn’t sound so philosophical, but did sound less messy. In her time, Rhona had had her hands in gloop consisting of human remains, mud and blood, so looking on cold marbled bodies could be thought of as easy in comparison.
Except it wasn’t.
The young man before her was a perfect specimen of a male human body. Sculptured. Bone and sinew in complete harmony. Handsome even in death. The enormity of the loss of possibility was there to view.
Mark Howitt had gone out for a night of fun. The penis that lay there cold and flaccid had driven him to pastures new. Excitement heightened by cocaine and alcohol. But at the end of the day he was driven by a male’s need to have sex. Primeval, maybe, but nevertheless the reason why humans continued to exist. Without that drive, there would be no future. No future generation.
It seemed that Leila had responded to this need, matching it with her own desire. There had been no coercion, except perhaps on her part.
Neither of those two young people had wished evil, but nevertheless it had been visited on them.
An’ it harm none, do what thou wilt.
How did following such a creed end in such evil?
There would be a post-mortem, but the result was already known. Mark Howitt had died by his own hand. So determined had he been to end his life that he had stuffed his socks so far down his throat that it would have been impossible to stop his own suffocation.
He had died as he thought Leila had died. A fitting retribution.
Or was it?
Rhona indicated that she’d seen enough and the mortuary assistant shut the drawer.
Bill was seated in his usual place at the window, the mug of cold coffee or tea on the desk beside him. Rhona waited while he turned, the resultant girn sounding like an old friend reappearing in difficult circumstances.
‘You saw him?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘I broke the news to his father. We know one another from way back.’ He halted for a moment. ‘It was Mark Howitt QC who I consulted about the denied access.’
‘My God,’ Rhona said.
‘Strange how circular life is.’
‘And now his son is implicated.’
‘Do you believe his confession?’ Bill said.
‘The DNA sample I took from his body will indicate whether he was with Leila the night she died,’ Rhona told him.
‘What about the other crime scenes?’
‘We should know in forty-eight hours.’
‘How would you feel if your son was a murderer?’ Bill said to the air, but also to Rhona. ‘Would it be your fault?’
‘There must be a time when a child becomes an adult and makes their own choices.’
‘That sounds like Magnus talking,’ Bill said. ‘Do we not make the child that becomes the adult?’
‘You and I both know that no matter how good and loving a childhood might be, psychopaths still exist.’
‘Was Mark Howitt a psychopathic killer or a daft boy who found himself caught up in something terrible?’ Bill said.
‘That’s what we have to find out.’
Forensics were a way of mapping out what happened in intricate detail. There was no emotion involved, only science. The science of who, where and when.
There was a cleanness in that. A certainty. Yet nothing was certain. In the past, the present or the future. It was how you viewed it that mattered.
Imagine a fence post above a ravine where a body lies. Whose DNA was on it? Those who had placed their hand there as they climbed over the fence to take a closer look at what lay below? The man who had cut the post? The man who had hammered it into the ground? All had imprinted their person on it. Only one DNA sample belonged to the person who’d held on to that post as he’d tossed his victim into the ravine.
DNA wasn’t enough, but in Mark’s case, it might be sufficient to make the authorities believe the man who made the confession was in fact guilty of all three murders.
On the other hand, DNA could also be purposefully placed at a crime scene to implicate the innocent. In Rhona’s opinion, Mark Howitt’s confession hadn’t cleared up the mystery, but only added to it.
Rhona told Bill what she thought.
‘I’ll request Magnus watch McNab’s interview with Mark,’ Bill said, ‘and also examine his written confession. Maybe he can give us some insight into the thought processes that led to his suicide.’
As she made to leave, Bill added, ‘You and McNab sort out your differences over the Stonewarrior case?’
The sudden question had caught her unawares, but Rhona answered as honestly as she could. ‘McNab and I will always have differences of opinion. But we’re okay, I think.’
‘Good.’
The text came in as she pulled up in her parking space at the lab. Seeing it was from Danny, she said a silent thank you to Sean. The answer to her message about meeting with Ollie was short and sweet.
I’ll be there.
The second task McNab had allotted her, of helping identify a list of police officers currently on the DNA database, would take a lot longer. In that, she had DI Wilson’s help. Bill had surprised her by bringing up the subject himself just prior to her departure from his office. His message had been suitably oblique, but she knew Bill well enough to believe that he too was on the case.