Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

Silence from the other end of the phone.

‘Boss?’

The shopping centre car park was nearly empty, just a handful of old cars and a Shopper-Hopper bus picking up a load of OAPs with their wheelie trollies and battered umbrellas. Franklin was down there too, marching about in the rain, one hand making violent stabby motions in the air as she dumped a shedload of angry into her mobile.

Mother’s voice sounded far away, muffled, as if she was talking to someone else. ‘You can shift Harrington from the suspect column to the victim one. No, he’s definitely dead.’ Then she was back. ‘He was a Blackwall Hill boy, and seeing as you’re in the neighbourhood...?’

Oh joy. ‘Death message?’

‘Good lad.’

‘Dr McDonald wants access to the crime scene.’

‘Meh. The Smurf Patrol have finished with it, so why not? Make sure she comes up with something useful though.’

‘Do my best.’ He hung up.

The Shopper-Hopper gave its diesel roar and pulled into the traffic.

Franklin did another lap, jabbing away like she was trying to stab and bludgeon someone all at the same time.

With any luck she’d get it out of her system and there’d be none left to batter him with.

But just in case...

Callum nipped back into the centre and grabbed a couple of fancy pieces and two takeaway teas from the Costa by the lifts. Hunched his shoulders and hurried through the doors, into the rain.

By the time he reached the pool car, she was behind the wheel again, dripping and glowering.

So much for getting it out of her system.

He slipped into the passenger seat and held out his peace offering. ‘Here. Tea, milk no sugar, and... Tada!’ One paper bag. ‘Got a billionaire’s shortbread and a rocky-road brownie. You choose.’

The frown didn’t shift. ‘What’s billionaire’s shortbread?’

‘Like a millionaire’s, but there’s bits of broken-up Crunchie in there too.’

She went for the shortbread, chewing with her shoulders dipped as the rain thumped down on the car roof. ‘Not that it’s any of your business, but Mark is my partner.’

Poor sod. Living with Franklin must be like trying to cross a minefield on a pogo stick every day. Blindfold. While sadists threw burning squirrels at you.

Mark was probably up for a medal. Or beatification.

Callum had a bite of brownie, sickeningly sweet, and washed it down with hot tea.

Franklin cracked a chunk off her shortbread. ‘His work’s hosting a dinner dance for charity Friday night, and apparently I’m being unreasonable because I can’t tell him if I’ll be there or not. Doesn’t matter that I’m working a mass murder, no, the important thing is making him look good in front of his bosses.’

‘Actually, a mass murder is when you kill four or more people in the same location without much of a gap between...’ He cleared his throat. ‘Sorry.’

‘You’re all the bloody same, aren’t you?’

‘Sadly.’ A slurp of tea. ‘What’s he do, this Mark of yours?’

‘Investment banking.’

And all sympathy for the guy died right there.

She finished her shortbread. ‘It’s not my fault I got transferred to Oldcastle, is it? I mean, it’s not like I can commute here from Edinburgh. I’d have to get the five-thirty train every morning and I still wouldn’t be here in time for a seven o’clock start.’

Callum balanced his tea on the dashboard and pulled out his notebook. Flicked through it. ‘Mother wants us to drop in on Ben Harrington’s parents and give them the bad news. Here we go: sixteen Brookmyre Crescent, Blackwall Hill. About five minutes away.’

‘And I am not giving up my career, just to play house in a flat in Portobello.’ She bared her teeth, nearly as white as the dental receptionist’s only with bits of chocolate stuck between them.

‘I can drive, if you like?’

‘Why do men have to be such selfish scumbags?’

A young mother slouched past the car, face slumped in permanent disappointment, pushing a buggy with a screaming toddler in it. Rain trickled from the straggly ends of her lank hair.

Callum had another bite of brownie. Kept his mouth shut.

Franklin sighed. Threw back the last of her tea. Then started the car. ‘All I ever wanted to be was a police officer. I’m not resigning. Wouldn’t give Superintendent Neil Sodding Sexual-Harassment Lambert the satisfaction.’

OK, at least this was safer ground than interfering in her relationship. ‘So go to Professional Standards, make a formal complaint.’

‘I did. Why do you think they transferred me?’ She took them out of the car park. ‘Which way?’

‘Left, then right onto McAskill Road.’

‘And yes, I shouldn’t have hit him. I know.’ The scowl deepened. ‘Dirty, slimy, sleazy little prick got his complaint in first. Who are they going to believe, a black woman PC, or a white middle-aged male superintendent? Because you can bet it’s not the woman.’

A lot of the shops around the centre had ‘To Let’ signs in the window, one advertising a closing down sale. One had its frontage all boarded up and a notice thanking customers for sodding off to Amazon instead of buying their books in a real bookshop.

‘That’s McAskill Road: take a right.’

She did. ‘It’s never the woman.’

The road dipped below a railway bridge, the inside scrawled with graffiti tags. A couple of older men huddled in a recess between the supports, sharing a cigarette and a litre bottle of supermarket blended whisky.

North of the line, Blackwall Hill broke out in coiled housing developments, little cul-de-sacs, and sweeping curved streets.

‘Take Caldwell.’ Callum pointed at the junction up ahead, past the pedestrian crossing. ‘You want to deliver the death message?’

‘Why, because I’m a woman ?’

‘On second thoughts, maybe a bit of compassion is in order. I’ll do it. You can make the tea.’ He held up a hand. ‘And before you start, it’s got nothing to do with “being a woman”. You either deliver the death message and sit with them while they grieve, or you make the tea. One or the other. Turn right here.’

That took them onto a wide road with bungalows on either side, that bowed away to the left following the contours of the hill.

Franklin pursed her lips. ‘Fine. You make the tea.’

‘You sure?’

‘Positive.’

It was a weird world when someone thought making four cups of tea was worse than telling a parent that their only child had been murdered. ‘Brookmyre Crescent. That’s us right there.’

She slowed for the junction, taking them into a dead-end road that cupped twenty or thirty houses in its coiled embrace. Some semidetached, some standing on their own. Most had been extended up into their attics, a few with converted garages, lots of lock-block driveways, wheelie bins arrayed on the pavements like guardsmen ready for inspection.

‘Number sixteen: the one with the dark-blue door and hideous garden ornaments.’

Franklin parked outside it as the rain faded to a misty drizzle.

‘Right, the mother’s name is Christine, father is Tony. No brothers or sisters.’

She nodded. ‘Christine. Tony.’ Then undid her seatbelt. ‘Let’s do this.’

Callum followed her out into the damp afternoon gloom.

Number 16 was on the downhill side: a detached bungalow conversion with a room above the garage and dormer windows on the upper floor. Ivy growing up the wall around the door. A wooden wishing well sat in the middle of a gravel lawn, surrounded by gnomes in various rustic poses, and angry tufts of pampas grass.

Classy.

The gap between the house and next door’s leylandii hedge was like a little picture postcard, looking down Blackwall Hill, across the river, and up to Castle Hill on the other side. A shaft of sunlight had made it through the heavy lid of slate-coloured cloud, turning the castle and its granite perch a warm shade of honeyed gold, all rendered in soft-focus by the drizzle.