Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

Open the Coffins belted out of the festival’s PA system — Leo McVey growling out the opening song about how boring life was in the village, and how sweet the apples growing over the well looked.

‘I can’t believe you said that.’ Franklin thumped the car door closed and curled her lip across the roof at Callum. ‘“Sick Dawg has to go take his medicine.” Genuinely?’

‘Arya, it’s just not fair; We’re starving and nobody cares...’

‘Oh come on, that was a classic action-film one-liner.’

‘It was cheesy rubbish.’

‘The bones protrude beneath our skin, / Oh, Arya, it’s sickening...’

‘Exactly.’ He slipped into the passenger seat, turned and smiled. ‘So, Donald. Any other offences you’d like us to take into consideration?’ He held up the evidence bag with Mr Lumpylump in it. The threadbare bear looked a lot fatter than it had back at Irene Brown’s house. Clearly the amphetamines-and-cocaine diet wasn’t working. ‘Or do you expect us to believe that this is it?’

‘Above the well, so plump and sweet, the apples grow, / And it’s not fair that we’re both starving, here below...’

A scowl from the backseat. Newman was hunched forward against his seatbelt, both hands cuffed behind him.

‘Nothing to say for yourself?’

‘You recognise me, Piggy? You know who I am?’

‘Ooh, and there it is: “Don’t you know who I am.”’ Callum grinned. ‘Trust me, Donald, if you have to ask that question, you’re not going to like the answer.’

‘Kiss my ass, Piggy.’ He sat back. ‘And I ain’t sayin’ another goddamn word till I get me my lawyer.’

‘Probably just as well. You’d only say something stupid and make it worse for yourself.’

‘The witch awakes inside the well, she’s getting thinner, / She hears the children up above and dreams of dinner...’

Franklin started the car, easing them out of the ‘FESTIVAL STAFF AND PERFORMERS ONLY!’ car park.

‘You don’t know me, Piggy . You don’t get to judge me.’

‘No, but we do get to arrest you, and that’s almost as much fun.’ He tapped Franklin on the shoulder. ‘Take a left here: cut through Blackwall Hill, miss out most of the roadworks.’

‘Hey, you think it’s easy? All them people worshippin’ you, and kissin’ yo ass, and you gotta get up there and, like, perform , man. Don’t matter how crap you feel, you gotta make that goddamn stage come alive.’

‘You broke a little girl’s arm.’

‘I grew up in a care home, Piggy. I got pain you ain’t even heard of.’

The junction took them out on a road lined with shops.

‘She was four years old.’

‘I got beat every day I was growin’ up, that leaves scars on yo soul , yeah? You wanna see some emotional scars?’ He shoogled in his seat, struggling against the seatbelt. Then used his cuffed hands to raise the hem of his leather jacket. A patch of buckled skin, veined through with pale shiny bits, sat in the small of his back, about the size of a dinner plate. ‘Bitch ran the place didn’t like the way I washed the dishes, so she throws a pot of boiling tatties at me. I was seven.’

‘Oh you grew up in care. Boo-hoo. We all grew up in care.’

Franklin shook her head. ‘I didn’t. My mum was a doctor and my dad worked for BBC Scotland.’

‘All right for some.’

‘Yo: bitch.’ Newman was round the right way again. ‘You dislocated my shoulder. Like it rough, do you? Like a bit of angry between your legs? That make you nice and moist?’

She glanced at him in the rear-view mirror, voice like a razorblade. ‘Do you want me to stop the car? Because I will.’

Donald Newman licked his lips. Then shrank back in his seat. ‘Nah, I’m good.’

‘Yeah, I thought not.’

‘Officer Franklin!’ A grin spread across Callum’s face. ‘Stop flirting with the prisoner. You’re—’ His phone burst into song in his pocket and he pulled it out. ‘Hello?’

‘Callum.’ Mother. Silence.

OK...

At the end of the street, Franklin took the main road West. Montgomery Park shrank and disappeared behind them, until only the huge inflatable spider crawled above the rooftops.

‘Boss? Are you still there?’

‘I need to ask where you were Friday night between nine p.m. and three a.m.’

‘What? Why?’

‘Callum, please. Just answer the question.’

‘Hold on.’ He dug out his notebook and flicked through it to the right day. ‘Nine-ish we were doing door-to-doors on Bellfield Road — we’d just searched Tod Monaghan’s flat and found the mummified body? Then we went back to the station and did paperwork. Then we went to the Bart for a celebratory drink. Then I got a call from an informant and arrested Gareth Pike in Kingsmeath.’

‘What time?’

‘Stopped interviewing him about half eleven? Then I went round to the flat and collected my stuff. Then quarter past midnight I got a call and went to a domestic on Manson Avenue. Franklin and I have just made an arrest on that one, it—’

‘And was DCI Reece Powel at your flat when you collected your belongings?’

Callum frowned out of the window. Blackwall Hill sloped down towards the river in a patchwork of houses and small parks. All of it grey and miserable in the rain. ‘What’s all this about?’

‘Was Reece there?’

‘Well, yes, of course he was. Don’t think they’d trust me there on my own, do you? I might have taken a crap on the carpet and spray-painted a few home truths on the walls. Now, what the hell is going on?’

‘Callum, DCI Powel was found in Camburn Woods an hour ago. Someone tried to kill him; he’s in surgery now.’

Oh.

The breath curdled in Callum’s lungs. ‘And you think, what, that I did it?’

‘I need you to come back to headquarters, Constable MacGregor. I need you to come back right now.’

Chief Inspector Gilmore sat back in his seat and peered over the top of his evil-scientist glasses. ‘I see. Yes.’

Sitting in the other chair, Mother just shook her head.

Some idiot had turned the interview room radiators up full, making sweat prickle between Callum’s shoulder blades. He glanced up at the camera’s dead black eye. Then down again. ‘Of course it wasn’t me! Why would I do something like...’ he pointed at the photograph sitting on the scarred Formica tabletop, ‘ that .’

DCI Powel lay sprawled on his back, in some undergrowth. Bushes behind him, the roots of a large tree to his left. His face was a mess of scarlet and purple: lumpen, swollen, and misshapen. More bruises on his arms, hands, and wrists where they poked out of his T-shirt. The same Rolling Stones one he’d been wearing that night in the flat, only now the graphic was smeared with blood. His never-been-worn-white trainers, filthy and scuffed.

Gilmore took off his glasses, huffed on them, then polished them with a hanky. ‘Do you need me to list the reasons, Callum?’

Mother put another photo on the table, next to the first. A head-and-shoulders portrait of Powel, lying on a hospital trolley. Up close, the damage was even worse. It looked as if someone had driven over his head. Repeatedly.

‘It wasn’t me!’

‘Your girlfriend was cheating on you with Reece Powel, he got her pregnant, you were paying for everything because you thought the child was yours. He told you about the affair the same day you learned that your mother had been murdered. You assaulted him that night and broke your hand...’ Gilmore’s eyes drifted down to the filthy fibreglass cast on Callum’s right hand. ‘Your DNA was found on his T-shirt.’