Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

Probably worth a fortune with a view like that.

Franklin leaned on the bell. ‘Bet they’re not even in.’

‘Look, if you’d rather do the teas than deliver the death message, that’s OK.’

‘No, you idiot. There’s no car in the driveway. Family living somewhere like this? They’ve got more than one car.’

‘Maybe it’s in the garage?’

She tried the bell again. ‘You’ve never had a garage, have you? It’s not for keeping your car in, it’s for storing all the crap you moved out of the last house and haven’t taken out of the boxes six years later.’

No answer from inside.

‘You might be right.’ He checked his watch — 15:40. ‘Better give it another ten minutes, though. Just to be safe.’

Franklin hunched her shoulders and turned her back on the drizzle. ‘I’m not standing here, in the rain, for ten minutes.’

‘So we wait in the car. At least it’ll be—’ His phone burst into life, belting out its anonymous ringtone. ‘Hello?’

‘Is that DC MacGregor, I hope so, this is the number he wrote on his business card and I mean he should know what his own mobile number is shouldn’t he, mind you I suppose most people don’t do they, after all, they don’t phone themselves, so why would they remember it?’ All done in a single breath.

‘Dr McDonald. What can I do for you?’ He followed Franklin back down the driveway.

‘Psilocybe semilanceata.’

OK...

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

‘Liberty Cap mushrooms, AKA: magic mushrooms, AKA: shroooooms. We’re halfway through Benjamin Harrington’s post mortem and his stomach’s full of them, well, not full-full, but there’s quite a lot of them and they’ve not dissolved all that much because he must’ve died not long after taking them, which isn’t surprising because it’s still a lot of mushrooms to take in one go, but there’s heaps of herbs and things in there as well, only they’re going to take a lot longer to identify than the mushrooms, because magic mushrooms always look like magic mushrooms, don’t they?’

Callum settled into the passenger seat. Clunked the door shut. ‘Did he eat enough to kill him?’

‘I don’t think you can overdose on magic mushrooms, they’ve got an emetic effect, so you’re more likely to vomit them up if you take too many, well, I suppose you could choke on your own sick, but that’s not actually overdosing, is it? Anyway, they’re running toxicology on the tissue samples from the two mummies to see if they’ve got any psilocybin in them, did you know they’ve got their own mass spectrometer here, it’s amazing, I’ve never seen a mortuary with these kinds of facilities before, but Dr Jenkins says they were spending so much money sending samples away for testing that it made a lot more sense getting—’

‘Doctor!’ A bit rude, but at least it stopped her. ‘There’s a bong in the flat where the body was found — the shrooms might be Ben’s. He takes too many, dies, Glen and Brett are too stoned to help so they panic and board him up in the bathroom then do a runner.’

Franklin frowned across the car at him, mouthing the word, ‘What?’

‘That’s why they’re rushing through the tox screen on the mummies, if there’s psilocybin in the tissue samples, then we’ve got a link, and that’s exciting, but I’d still like to see the flat if I can, can I? ’

‘Yeah. It’s fine, SOCOs have finished with it anyway.’

‘OK, I’ll see you there, when’s good, is now good?’

‘Erm... No. We’ve got to tell Ben Harrington’s parents that he’s dead. And you’re in the middle of a post mortem, remember?’

Franklin’s phone launched into what sounded like Gilbert and Sullivan’s ode about policemen being a poor put-upon bunch of sods. ‘Yes?... What, now ?’

‘Oh... Right, well, if you can give me a call when you’ve done that, that’ll be great and we can get on with the geographical side of things and I suppose it won’t hurt to spend a little time dealing with the severed feet case, and did I tell you we post mortemed the other mummy?’

‘Is that the one from the tip, or the car?’

‘The tip, and I think I know why it was thrown away.’

Franklin started the car again. ‘Yeah, we’ll be there soon as we can.’

Silence from the phone.

‘Dr McDonald?’

‘Sorry, dropped my chocolate biscuit. The mummy from the car was eviscerated and the internal organs preserved separately then stitched back inside. The body in the tip wasn’t so lucky. He tried to preserve it whole, and mummification only works if you can dry out the remains faster than the microbes inside can decompose it.’

The gears made complaining grinding noises as Franklin performed a hurried three-point turn. She stuffed her mobile into a pocket. ‘Put your seatbelt on.’

He covered the mouthpiece. ‘Where are we going?’

‘Someone’s just broken into Brett Millar’s house.’

‘When was this?’

‘Now. Right now. Neighbour just called it in.’

‘—abdominal cavity is full of slippery moist organs and they go off incredibly quickly if you don’t preserve them, that’s why undertakers inject everything with preserving fluid when you die, because otherwise you’d probably burst during the eulogies, and that wouldn’t be very nice for the mourners, would it?’

‘Any idea who broke in? Did the neighbour recognise them?’

‘How should I know?’

‘So my educated guess is that Paddington is one hundred percent committed to the end result. He’s venerating these bodies by mummifying them, but they have to be perfect. This one wasn’t, so he disposed of it and started again. That also means he’s learning.’

Franklin put her foot down, sending pantile boxes whizzing past the car windows. ‘Where am I going, and how do we put on the blues-and-twos in this thing?’

Callum pulled out his notebook and flipped it open, bracing his knees against the door and the dashboard. ‘Walderswell Court. Right at the end, then left.’ He reached out and poked a switch, setting the sirens wailing and the lights flashing.

‘DC MacGregor?’

‘Still here, Doc.’

‘Please don’t call me “Doc” it always makes me feel like I’m meant to be one of the seven dwarfs and I know I’m not the tallest person in the world, but I like to think I’m a bit bigger than that, and if you think about it—’

‘OK, OK, sorry. Not Doc. You’re definitely not one of the seven dwarfs.’ After all, Snow White’s roll call didn’t go: Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Doc, Sneezy, Happy, Bashful, and Bug-Eyed Crazy Weirdo Person.

‘You can call me Alice, if you like, or do you prefer to keep things on a formal footing, sometimes that’s better in a work evironment, isn’t it, or does it just make me seem all distant and aloof, which would be bad, because I think we should operate as a team and—’

‘No, that would be great. Alice it is.’ He grabbed the handle above the door as Franklin threw them around the corner past another long sweeping row of houses. ‘Go right at the end and it’s second on the left.’ Back to the phone. ‘Was there anything else, Alice? Only we’re wheeching across town trying to get to a break-in before the thieving scumbag legs it.’

‘Oh, right. Sorry. That explains the sirens and things in the background, doesn’t it? I’ll let you go.’ She hung up.

‘Yup. Three hundred and sixty degrees of weird.’ He put his phone away as the pool car screeched around the corner and into an older, less gentrified bit of Blackwall Hill. No more lock-block driveways and formation gnomes. No more attic conversions. Just street after street of identical semidetached bungalows, bristling with satellite dishes.