Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

‘True.’ She stood there, frowning at the burned bones of a long-dead house. Then turned, ‘Anyway, there’s no point hanging around here, is there? They’ll call us when they need us. In the meantime, I think you and I should go on a little field trip, don’t you? Spend some quality time together.’

Why did that sound ominous...?

The Fiat Panda roared and spluttered, coughing like an old man on sixty-a-day as they lurched around the City Stadium Roundabout and into the long queue of traffic heading west on the dual carriageway. Orange cones and brake lights stretched ahead of them, fading into the gloom as the first drops of rain splashed against the windscreen.

Fifteen minutes and they’d barely gone a mile and a half.

Callum sat in the passenger seat, with his hands in his lap. Because otherwise there was a risk of touching something in here. The dashboard had developed a new feature: someone had written ‘MUCK!’ in the dust. With every lurching gear change, bottles clinked in the back.

Something sticky glistened in the passenger footwell and Callum shifted his leg away from it. ‘I’m worried about DS McAdams.’

‘Welcome to my world.’ She cracked the window an inch, letting the drone of traffic in and a fat black fly out . ‘Rosalind seems to be integrating well, doesn’t she? Dotty speaks very highly of her. Very efficient.’

‘I’m serious. He’s holding his stomach and wheezing, sweating. I’ve seen bottles of milk with more colour in them.’

‘He’s dying, Callum. This round of chemo...’ Mother sighed. ‘I remember the good old days, before the old ticker started acting up.’ She tapped herself on the chest. ‘It was Andy and me that arrested Ian Zouroudi. We caught Dani McGiven. We nailed Joanne Frankland, even though everyone thought her brother Stephen did it.’

‘Maybe... I don’t know. He shouldn’t be at work, he should be home resting.’

‘Then there was that counterfeiting syndicate, operating out of a charity shop on Dresden Street.’

‘Tod Monaghan’s dead: McAdams got his last serial killer. We’ll find Ashlee Gossard and that’ll be that. Everything else is just tidying up. Send him home.’

A smile tugged at Mother’s cheeks. ‘I remember one time, we’d spent all day chasing down an armed-robbery witness, and Andy—’

Callum’s phone burst into song, buried deep in his pocket. ‘Sorry.’ He pulled it out. ‘Hello?’

Elaine’s ‘angry schoolteacher’ voice scraiched in his ear: ‘Did you pick up your stuff? Because I don’t want you turning up at the flat pretending you forgot something.’

‘Oh for God’s sake.’

‘If I get home from Mum’s and you’ve—’

‘Bye, Elaine.’ Callum hung up. Checked his call history and barred the number she’d dialled from.

The hairs prickled on the back of Callum’s neck, and when he turned his head Mother was staring at him. ‘What?’

‘Do you want to talk about it?’

He folded his arms. ‘No.’

‘You’re going to have to deal with this sooner or later, Callum. That’s how relationships work.’

The industrial estate ground past on the right.

Callum kept his arms folded. Scowling out at the traffic in its depressing slow-motion waltz. Brake, two-three. Inch forward, two-three. Brake, two-three. And repeat. On and on till the end of the world...

Up ahead, a big metal sign announced that all this traffic chaos was going to continue for at least the next six weeks. Because everyone wasn’t miserable enough already.

‘I’m serious, Callum.’ Mother indicated, then drifted right into a turning lane marked out with another stretch of orange cones. Sat there with her turn signal clicking. ‘Are you going to spend the rest of your life avoiding her?’

He kept his scowl pointed out of the passenger window. At the cars full of miserable people, stuck in their miserable lives, stuck in miserable traffic, in the miserable rain.

A sigh. ‘What’s going to happen at work, then? When Elaine comes back after the baby?’

Someone coming the other way flashed their lights, leaving a gap in the traffic and Mother put her foot down, sending the car kangarooing across the opposite lane and down a road lined with dark-green gorse.

‘And what about Reece? He’s still going to be a Detective Chief Inspector, no matter how much you hate him. He’ll still be able to give you orders. And if you’re fighting with Elaine, he’ll win that argument every time.’

‘I get it, OK? I’m screwed. You happy? I — am — screwed.’

‘That’s not what I meant, Callum. You’re going to have to make your peace sooner or later. And the longer it takes, the more it’ll hurt.’

‘Can you just leave it, please?’

A sigh. ‘Well, no one can say I didn’t try.’

She indicated and turned left, down another gorse-lined road, bordered by fields. A patch of woods. And just beyond them, the hulking grey lump of Her Majesty’s Prison, Oldcastle. The kind of building not even an architect could love: brutally minimalist, with featureless walls and a three-storey glass block built out front that had a wide concrete portico like a Seventies hotel.

Mother pulled into the car park, and the Panda did its roar-and-backfire trick again, before dying into silence.

He unclipped his seatbelt. ‘Going to tell me what we’re doing here?’

She just grinned at him.

Oh joy...

They’d made a bit of effort with the interview room: framed prints of landscapes screwed to the wall; a fake rubber plant in the corner; flattering mood lighting; one of those automatic wall-mounted air-freshener things they sometimes had in toilets, puffing out the occasional fruity whiff. But even that couldn’t disguise the fact that this was an eight-by-ten windowless box in the west wing of a prison.

It didn’t do much to shift the underlying sour whiffs of grease and BO either.

Mother sat at the interview table — chipped and scarred, with initials and swearwords scratched into the Formica. She poked away at her phone, playing Candy Crush by the look of things.

Callum stood by the radiator, drying off his damp, bramble-ruined trousers. ‘Still don’t know what we’re doing here.’

‘Good things come to those who wait. You just have to have faith and patience, and—’

The interview room door opened and a small balding man in thick-rimmed glasses and an ugly jumper sidled into the room. ‘Flora. It’s lovely to see you again. I was so shocked to hear about your... incident . I trust you’re fully recovered now, yes? Good. Excellent. Yes.’ A nod for Callum. ‘You must be the young man, Flora’s told me so much about. Nice to meet you.’ He stuck out his hand — surprisingly warm, strong, and dry when Callum shook it.

Mother put her phone away. ‘Is he ready, Duncan?’

‘Oh yes, yes. Yes indeed.’ Duncan clasped his hands together. ‘Now, I know you’ve been here before, but there are a few formalities to take care of. You’re not to give the inmate anything, and you’re not to take anything from him. That includes messages to, and from, the outside world. You’re not to let him use your mobile phones. We disapprove of physical contact. And a staff member will be present at all times. OK?’

She spread her hands wide. ‘How can I refuse?’

‘Good. Yes. Well, let’s get started, shall we?’ Duncan stuck his wee baldy head out into the corridor. ‘You can bring him in now, Rachael, thanks.’

Gareth Pike had to duck to get into the room, his rounded shoulders brushing the door frame. His pale scalp gleamed like a freshly polished cue ball. He paused and pulled on a slow sticky smile. ‘Constable MacGregor, how delicious to see you again. Are you here about my south-facing cell?’