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‘It wasn’t even money he took. It was stupid things: a standard lamp from next door, a bust of Daley Thompson from the sports centre, all the cutlery from Terry’s Bistro on Minerva Road. It wouldn’t even have been a thing if the bloody sports centre hadn’t insisted on pressing charges.’
Callum fished the steaming teabags out and dumped them in the bin. ‘What happened with the girlfriend?’
‘Gah …’ Ms Carmichael stared at the ceiling for a moment. ‘Angela. He wouldn’t leave her alone. Always buying her little presents and writing her little notes. Following her home from school.’ She looked down when Callum put a mug of tea in front of her. ‘I tried to talk some sense into him, but you know what teenage boys are like – all hormones, spots, and erections. Her parents called the police, and he was in trouble again.’
The fridge was mostly full of yoghurt and chardonnay, but there was half a pint of semi-skimmed that looked reasonably fresh, so Callum stuck it in the middle of the table. ‘Nothing since?’
She wrapped her hands around her mug. ‘It took a while, but he grew up a bit. Got over his dad abandoning us for some leggy tart in the roads department. Started doing well in school again. Went to university and got an MA in business management.’
‘Sounds like a bright kid.’ Callum passed Franklin a slightly wonky green mug, but kept his eyes on Ms Carmichael. ‘Is it OK if we take a look at Glen’s room?’
‘What?’ She blinked at him. ‘Oh, yes. Right.’ She scraped her chair back and stood. Led them out of the kitchen and down a small corridor to a room at the end with ‘SECRET EVIL VILLAIN LAIR’ printed on a sign hung on the door beneath a radiation symbol. She opened it and stepped to one side, mug of tea clutched to her chest. ‘Of course, by the time he graduated no one was hiring. That’s the recession, isn’t it?’
The floor was barely visible through the patina of discarded socks, T-shirts, jeans, and pants. Walls covered in bookshelves – science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, mostly. A TV hooked up to a PlayStation. A poster of a young woman in a bikini, riding a motorbike. Never mind leathers, she wasn’t even wearing a crash helmet. Some people just didn’t take basic safety precautions. A collection of photographs pinned to the wallpaper, above a small computer desk that was heaped with envelopes and bits of paper. And a double bed covered in more clothes.
Every breath in here tasted of stale digestive biscuits and mouldering cheese.
Ms Carmichael shrugged. ‘Don’t look at me, I told him when he turned sixteen: you’re a grown-up now. You tidy your own room, or you live in a pigsty. Your choice.’
Franklin picked her way into the middle of the room. ‘Was Glen interested in museums?’
‘When he was little we’d go to the art gallery, and we’d laugh at all the statues and their naked willies, but other than that …’ A shrug.
‘Hmm …’ She leaned over the desk and pulled a photo from the wall. Held it out. ‘Is this him?’ Her finger hovered over the central figure in a group of three. It looked like a selfie: three young men, all with grins and tins of lager. Checked shirts and tan braces.
The one on the left had a full-sized Grizzly Adams beard, two squint teeth dominating his smile, all crowned by brown hair cropped close at the sides and floppy on top. He’d got one of those piercings, where they stuck a big round plug in the lobe to stretch it wide – making a dirty big hole. As if he was a Masai tribesman, instead of a peely-wally wee bloke from Oldcastle with a lumberjack fixation.
The one on the right’s arm snaked out of the picture – so he’d be the photographer – a shoulder-to-wrist tattoo of Clangers, Soup Dragon, and the Iron Chicken blurring into a colourful mush where the lens couldn’t focus. Long hair pulled back in a ponytail. A variety of studs spread about his nose, eyebrow, lip and ears.
And the one in the middle looked as if he’d inherited his great grandad’s haircut and glasses. Though where he’d got the massive soup-strainer moustache from was anyone’s guess. He was straightening his bow tie, showing off an oversized steel wristwatch on an oversized leather strap. More piercings.
Ms Carmichael squinted at the photo. ‘No, that’s his friend Ben. Glen’s the one on the left with the ridiculous beard.’ She grimaced. ‘Why these hipsters all want to look like old men from the thirties is beyond me. But there you go.’
‘I see.’ Franklin produced her notebook. ‘Can you tell me what your son was wearing when he left the house this morning?’
A snort. ‘This morning? He’s not been back here for six weeks. Him and his friends have been staying at the flat they’re doing up.’ She sighed, looking around the room with its explosion-in-a-laundry-basket décor. ‘Brett’s got a degree in environmental science, Ben’s got a BA in aquaculture, and none of them can find jobs. Recession.’
Franklin scribbled something in her notebook. ‘And where is this flat?’
‘They bought it at auction. The man who lived there killed himself in the living room – bank was foreclosing on his mortgage.’
‘Yes, but where is it?’
‘Hold on, it’ll be in here somewhere …’ Ms Carmichael rummaged through the piles of paper on the computer desk, before emerging triumphant with what looked like a council tax bill. ‘Flat twelve, one thirty-five Customs Street, Castleview, OC twenty-one, six QT.’ Then she turned and put a hand on Callum’s arm. ‘You’re sure Glen’s … not hurt?’
He gave her his best reassuring smile. ‘We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.’
‘Why did you have to lie to her?’
Callum shrugged, slowing the car at the junction. ‘What did you want me to tell her: we’ve no idea if your wee boy’s dead or not? Think that would’ve helped?’ The bridge over the River Wynd made a graceful cobbled arc above the water, marking the border between Blackwall Hill’s twisted knot of housing estates, the Wynd’s well-ordered Georgian streets, and Castleview’s functional industrialisation. All of it grey and miserable in the drizzle.
He took a left at the next roundabout, down a long drab street – blocks of terraced flats, punctuated by shopping centres with more boarded-up windows than new shops.
‘What if Glen Carmichael turns up dead from a punctured lung, or a ruptured spleen?’
‘Then he’ll still be dead whether she’s panicking about him or not. Let her have … Oh, hold on.’ He slammed on the brakes and pulled their manky Vauxhall into a space between a delivery truck and a skip.
‘What the hell do you think you’re—’
‘I’ll only be a minute.’ He scrambled out of the car. ‘Honestly, five tops.’ Callum clunked the door shut, waited for a bus to grumble past, then hurried across the street and into one of the few shops still open.
The Royal Caledonian Building Society’s carpet was going threadbare in the middle, drawing a straight line from the door to the counter. A large middle-aged lady sat behind the bulletproof glass, reading a copy of the Castle News and Post. She looked up as he reached the counter and pulled on a smile about as natural as a porn-star’s breasts.
‘How can I help you?’
Callum thumped his warrant card on the countertop. ‘Someone stole my wallet and I need you to give me some money from my account.’
She made a face, as if he’d just slapped a used nappy down in front of her. ‘I’ll have to speak to the manager …’
The sharp-faced woman pulled on her glasses and peered at her computer screen. ‘Well, Mr MacGregor, you’ll be glad to hear that we appear to have recovered your cards. Someone tried to use them to redeem a number of items at … let me get this right … at a “Little Mike’s Pawnshop”? In Kingsmeath?’
Little sods were probably trying to get hold of samurai swords, crossbows, and ninja throwing stars.
Callum crossed his fingers. ‘Did they find my wallet?’
Please, please, please, please.
She poked at the keyboard. Frowned. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t actually have that information. But the proprietor has destroyed the cards, and as there’s been no successful purchase made on the account, there won’t be any excess to pay.’ The frown turned into an expectant smile, as if she was waiting for congratulations and a round of applause. ‘We’ll get new cards issued to you in the next couple of days.’
‘A couple of days? But I need to buy—’
‘I’m sorry, but the cards have to be reissued from head office. I’ll flag it as urgent, but it’ll still take a couple of days. Now is there anything else I can assist you with, Mr MacGregor?’
‘Yes: I need to take some money out of my savings account.’
‘Ah. I see …’ She made the same face as the woman behind the counter.
Franklin glowered at him as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat. ‘What happened to “five minutes, tops”?’
‘Don’t start.’ He hauled on his seatbelt and started the car. Pulled away from the kerb. ‘Just been bent over a bank manager’s desk for the last quarter of an hour, being shafted without lubricant. And do you know what for? Fifty-three pounds and seventy-two sodding pence.’ He held up the tiny handful of notes and coins. ‘Because that’s all the money we’ve got.’
Down to the end of the road, and right onto the main road.
‘It’s my sodding money! Why do I have to beg for my own fifty-three quid? How is that fair?’
Franklin shook her head. ‘Do you do anything other than moan?’
‘I’m not moaning, I’m ranting. It’s different.’ He took a right, into another street full of tenements, heading towards MacKinnon Quay. ‘How much did we pay to bail those thieving gits out? Billions. Whole sodding country up to its earholes in debt, people losing their jobs and their houses, all so they can enjoy their bloody yachts and champagne!’
A smile. ‘Do you honestly think the manager of a wee building society sub-branch, in a nasty little shopping centre, in a crappy corner of the mediocre cesspit that is Oldcastle, has a yacht?’
‘That’s not the point.’
Straight through at the roundabout and onto Customs Street. It skirted the edge of the docks, with their large blue cranes and towering tanks of offshore mud, all secured behind a twelve-foot-high fence topped with razor wire.
Just past the harbour, a row of small cottages – jammed in tight as teeth – lined the left side of the road, but the houses opposite were a lot less quaint. They were built into the side of the hill, about six feet above road level: the kind of buildings councils put up to punish people for being too poor to afford somewhere better to live. Long, brutalist rows of grey flats, four storeys tall.
Oh, they’d made an attempt to tart them up, put brightly coloured cladding on the top floor, arranged big concrete planters out front on the four-foot-wide strip of grass that separated the flats from the vertical drop to the road below. But the cladding was chipped and faded, the planters cracked and full of weeds, the grass a patchwork of yellow and brown – landmined by generations of terriers and Alsatians.
Callum slowed the car. ‘Which one is it?’
She checked her notebook. ‘Number one thirty-five.’ Then tapped a finger against the glass, as if she was counting time for a very small orchestra. ‘One fifteen. One sixteen. One seventeen …’
‘Glen and his mates had three university degrees between them, and they bought a flat down here? So much for modern education.’
‘One twenty-two. One twenty-three …’
‘Suppose they spend six months doing it up, who’d be daft enough to buy it when they’ve finished?’
‘One twenty-eight. One twenty-nine …’
‘Bunch of idiots.’
‘One thirty-two. Thirty-three …’ She pointed. ‘That’ll be it there. Top floor.’
Callum parked outside, next to a dilapidated Transit van with, ‘DANNY & MIKE ~ CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINERS’ on the side. Someone had daubed the words, ‘THEYZ PEEDOFILES!!!’ underneath, in what looked like blue Hammerite.
He climbed out into the rain. Locked the car soon as Franklin joined him on the pavement. ‘You ready?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘It’s a wee boy with a degree in business management, Constable MacGregor, not Osiel Cárdenas Guillén.’ Franklin climbed the steps up to ground level, disappearing from view.
A sigh, then Callum followed her.
Down at road-level, the cottages opposite acted as a windbreak, but up here the drizzle came down sideways, driven in on frigid gusts. MacKinnon Quay sat off to the left, then the grey water of Kings River, then the green line of Dalrymple Park with its big granite monument on the other side. Castle Hill lost in the low grey mist.
On a good day it was probably quite some view, but this wasn’t one of them.
Franklin jabbed a finger at the intercom. Then grimaced and pulled it clear. She sniffed the end of her finger and grimaced again. Wiped it on the rough grey wall.
Callum took out a biro and used it to press the button marked ‘SERVICES’. Holding it down until someone inside finally got tired of the noise and let them in. He smiled at her. ‘Trick of the trade.’
Inside, the corridor was lit by a single flickering bulb in a flyblown fitting. Concrete floor, walls painted magnolia above waist-height and a grubby green below it. The smell of frying onions mingled with the hospital stink of disinfectant. An open stairwell led up into the gloom.
Yeah, Glen and his mates were definitely kidding themselves if they thought anyone was going to buy their flat.
Franklin led the way upstairs.
And Callum tried not to stare at her backside, he really did, but …
Heat rose up his face, making his ears tingle. Yeah, probably better not to ogle his new teammate’s rear end. But it was magnificent.
Across the first-floor landing and up another flight of stairs. And there it was, right in front of him again.
Stop it!
Pregnant girlfriend, remember? Even if she had been off sex for the last five months.
Yeah, but …
No. No staring.
He cleared his throat. Stared at the wall instead.
The second floor was almost identical to the first – two pairs of red doors, some with welcome mats, some with browning spider-plants and dying ferns in pots. Numbers on the doors. Plastic or brass nameplates.
A little old man cracked his door and glowered out at them. ‘You from the Council? About time. Tell those bloody hooligans to turn their music down! Can’t hear myself think in here.’ He slammed the door shut again.
OK.
Callum hurried past, trying very hard not to ogle Franklin’s bum as she climbed the last two flights and stepped out onto the third floor.
She reached into her jacket, came out with a pair of purple nitrile gloves. Snapped them on. Frowned. ‘Are you all right, Constable? Your face is all red.’
‘It … I … Just, you know, the stairs and that.’ He cleared his throat and snapped on his own gloves: blue. ‘You want to kick the door in, or shall we do it the old-fashioned way?’
‘Hmm.’ She knocked.
A skylight sat in the middle of the ceiling, right above the void in the stairwell. A scuffling scratchy noise followed two blurred outlines across the cloudy glass. Seagulls?
He shifted his feet, locked his eyes on a spot six inches above her head. ‘So who’s O’Neil Gillen, when he’s at home?’
‘Osiel Guillén, not O’Neil Gillen. AKA: El Mata Amigos, the Friend Killer. Mexican drug lord.’ Franklin knocked again. ‘Hello?’
She squatted down and lifted the letterbox.
Music pulsed out onto the landing, Led Zeppelin hammering on and on about giving someone a whole lotta love.
‘Hello?’ Another knock.
Callum wrinkled his nose. ‘Can you smell that?’
Sort of a cross between rancid sausages and pine air freshener.
‘Mr Carmichael? Police. I need you to open this door. Mr Carmichael?’ She glanced up at Callum. ‘Is it just me, or does this scream “dead body” to you?’
He took a step back. ‘Two choices: we dunt it in, or we go get a warrant.’
‘Hmmm.’ Franklin let go of the flap, cutting off the music. ‘Dunt it.’
‘My thoughts exactly.’ He raised a foot and slammed it into the wood, just below the handle. The whole thing rattled in its frame. One more. Then a third and the door sprang open, battering into the wall. It didn’t bounce back.
The smell got a hundred times worse.
The music got a lot louder too – thumping away from somewhere deeper inside the flat.
Oh yeah, there was certainly something rotten in there.
Percussion solo.
Franklin gritted her teeth and stepped into the hallway. ‘THIS IS THE POLICE! I WANT EVERYONE IN THE FLAT TO STAY WHERE THEY ARE!’
Gloom filled the hallway.
A sheet of plasterboard slouched against the wall, the bottom edge bowing under its own weight, anchored there by two big ten-litre tubs of magnolia paint.
She crept through the door at the end of the hall.
Callum followed her into a reasonably sized living room. Two windows should have given a view out across the harbour and the river, instead they were completely covered with … Yup, that was hardcore pornography. What little light filtered through it picked out the shape of a platform ladder, a collection of hand tools, and a stack of paint pots. A wallpaper table in the corner bent slightly under the weight of a tool belt, three electric drills, and a small, portable CD player – not quite turned up full volume, but close to it.
Franklin switched the thing off.
Now the only noise was the droning buzz of fat lazy bluebottles making drunken circles in the rancid air. The little dead bodies of their fallen comrades crunched beneath Callum’s feet.
‘GLEN CARMICHAEL?’ She reached into her jacket and came out with an extendable baton. Christ knew where she’d been hiding that. A flick of her wrist clacked it out to full length. ‘HELLO?’
Callum pulled out his pepper spray. ‘COME ON, GUYS, LET’S NOT PLAY SILLY BUGGERS!’
Two bedrooms led off from the living room, their windows similarly coated in bits of porn mag. One of them looked almost finished – the walls smoothly plastered and painted a neutral beige. The other was stripped back to the bare breezeblocks.
The kitchen was awash with pizza boxes and takeaway containers. A bong, half-full of dirty water, sat on the unit by a sink mounded with dirty dishes. A stack of empty lager tins that was taller than Callum.
Three university graduates and they still lived like teenaged boys.
The smell had been much stronger in the corridor than it was in the rest of the flat.
He stopped in the middle of the living room. ‘Where’s the bathroom?’
She frowned at him.
‘These flats didn’t go up in Queen Victoria’s time, did they? So where’s the bathroom?’
Back into the hall, where that big sheet of plasterboard leaned up against the wall.
He hefted the paint pots out of the way, then grabbed the plasterboard and pulled, dragging it over to the other side.
A flat panel door. That would be the bathroom.
Callum turned the handle and it swung open inwards. He—
Oh dear God, the smell …
It crashed out into the hall like an avalanche, the dark-sweet taint of rotting meat riding on a wave of cloying pine.
Behind him, Franklin made little retching noises.
He reached for the light switch and clicked it on.
About a million bluebottles leapt into the air, buzzing and swarming, battering at the bare lightbulb. Setting it swinging.
The room was just big enough for a white bathroom suite, which looked brand new, with a shower above the bath. Dark water filled the tub, the surface flecked with floating mats of white and orange mould. A crust of brown made a tidemark around the rim, tiny crystals that glittered in the swaying light.
There was someone in the bath, lying facedown, skin all blackened and swollen. Crawling with little white things where the body’s shoulders protruded from the water.
Franklin stepped up beside him. ‘Christ …’
Yeah.
And then some.
9
Callum stuck his notebook back in his pocket, stepping out of the stairwell and into the drizzle. The view hadn’t improved, if anything it was worse. Low cloud and mist hid everything on the other side of the river, reduced the MacKinnon Quay to little more than a collection of random shapes.
The whole world rendered in shades of grey.
Getting dark too.
Oh no … He checked his watch: just gone half six. The Polish deli would be closed. No pickled cucumbers, onion rolls, or anything else.
So much for Elaine’s cravings.
Yeah, he was going to be popular when he finally got home.
He scuffed along the path then down the stairs to road level, made his way past patrol cars and manky Transit vans. Someone had finger-painted a big willy in the dirt across the back doors of one, complete with hairs.
McAdams’ shiny red Shogun took pride of place in front of the Willymobile, engine running, inside lights on. Callum limped over to the thing and slid onto the back seat. Closed the door on the cold dreich evening. ‘God, it’s perishing out there.’
Sitting in the passenger seat, Mother took a sip of something in a large wax-paper cup. ‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Detective Constable MacGregor.’
He sighed. ‘What am I supposed to have done now?’
Her sidekick turned the blowers down and turned in his seat. ‘You kicked in the door. Didn’t call for permission. You should know better.’
‘You’re very welcome, Sarge.’ Callum cupped his hands over the heater mounted between the seats, trying to get some feeling back in his fingertips. ‘If it wasn’t for me you’d still be investigating odds and sods – I brought in a murder, OK?’
Mother still hadn’t turned around. ‘What makes you think it’s a murder, Callum? Man falls over in the bath, drowns, happens all the time.’
‘And did he accidentally drown in the bath, before or after dragging a big sheet of plasterboard and two tubs of paint in front of the bathroom door?’ Callum poked at the heater. ‘Can you turn this thing up?’
McAdams fiddled with the dashboard and warmth flowed. ‘What about the door-to-doors?’
He produced his notebook. ‘Sixty-three flats in the immediate vicinity. Twenty-four of them did nothing but complain about their neighbours, thirty-one wouldn’t answer the door or weren’t in, and nine want their hats re-tinfoiled. Not one of them had a single thing to say about Glen Carmichael or his mates.’ Shrug. ‘Well, other than the downstairs neighbour complaining about Led Zeppelin playing on a loop, full blast, for the last two days.’
‘Interesting …’ Mother tapped her fingers along the wax-paper cup. ‘Officially, I should reprimand you for breaking into a crime scene without authorisation, Callum, but our new girl put her hand up to it. Said you were dragged along against your better judgement.’
McAdams snorted. ‘I didn’t even know you had one.’
‘So you, my little man, may have a sweetie.’ Mother dug into her pocket and produced a bag of jelly babies. Held them out.
Callum helped himself to a green one. ‘Thanks.’
She put the bag away. ‘I always love this bit. Forensics are going through the scene, we don’t know who the victim is, there’s a killer on the loose. Excitement. Adventure. And …’ She frowned. ‘Can’t remember the end of the quote, but you know what I mean.’
McAdams nodded. ‘The main plot is unfolding. What we need now is a flashback from the killer’s perspective then some sort of investigative montage to show how much research the writer’s done.’ He clicked his fingers again. ‘Constable MacGregor, get yourself and your new best friend DC Franklin back to the lair. I want a murder board ready to go by … I’m in the mood for pizza, so call it an hour and a half. And get a lookout request on the go for Glen Carmichael and his two mates while you’re at it. Most people stick to rubber duckies in their bathtub, a dead body requires a bit more explaining.’