Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

The floor was littered with bits of wood from the floor above. Callum looked up, through the holes in the cellar ceiling and out to the heavy grey clouds. A faint wash of sunlight broke free, infiltrating the dark room, casting a warm golden glow onto the wall opposite.

‘Ah.’ McAdams sucked in a breath. ‘Do you see what I see, Constable MacGregor?’

Three sets of chains were fixed to the stonework, each one with a rusty padlock making a noose on the free end. What looked like a melted plastic water bowl beside one of them. The burned frame of a metal bed, mattress gone, springs mottled by the heat, beneath another. An upended bucket by the third.

A fourth chain lay in the corner, still attached to the ring-and-plate that must have fixed it to the wall at one point.

McAdams pointed. ‘Do you want to say it, or will I?’

Monaghan hadn’t been keeping Rottweilers down here, these were for people. So Dr McDonald was right: women are dirty, subhuman things that have to be trained like dogs. Chained up and beaten...

The Peugeot Bipper was Monaghan’s van and this was his lair.

Callum pulled out his phone and made the call.

‘Rather them than me.’ The Dog Officer sooked his teeth as a handful of Smurfs picked their way through The Cloisters’ burned-out remains. He was a big man with a list to the left and hair poking out the neck of his black Police Scotland T-shirt. ‘Had a friend got trapped beneath somewhere like this for two days till they could dig him out. Lost his arm in that one, retired to Portugal.’

McAdams sniffed. ‘All right for some.’

‘Nah: plagued with haemorrhoids. Big as a grapefruit.’ He swept a hairy hand up and out, indicating another bit of the huge, overgrown expanse of back garden. ‘Come on, Penguin, off you go, you lazy sod.’

A black lab in a wee high-viz waistcoat snuffled away into the damp undergrowth, nose down, tail wagging.

Callum turned, one hand held above his eyes like the bill of a baseball cap. A horrible little Fiat Panda was lurching its way down the track towards them, bringing a swirling cloud of grey-blue smoke with it. ‘Mother’s here.’

That got a grunt from McAdams. ‘A pound will get you five, / That she’ll skin us both alive, / For delving in the cellar, / Of this terrible Jeffries fellar, / And risking both our instant deaths, / “Reproach” shall be her shibboleth.’

The dog officer raised an eyebrow. ‘Just make that up, did you? Cause rhyming “cellar” with “fellar” isn’t exactly Wordsworth, is it?’

‘Everyone’s a critic.’

Mother’s Panda came to a juddering halt behind the small collection of SEB Transit vans, gave one last vrooooom , then the gunshot retort of a backfire, and silence.

‘I’m just saying: resorting to doggerel in the middle stanza undermines the poetic integrity of the piece. That’s all.’ Dog Man stuck a hand against his chest. ‘For delving in the depths below, / Of this, our dark and deadly foe.’ A nod. ‘See? Much better.’ Then he cupped his hands around his mouth. ‘PENGUIN! WHERE THE SODDING HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE GOING?’

The black lab disappeared into a massive knot of brambles — five-foot high and covering at least a third of the garden.

‘Sodding dog’s a pain in my parliament, if you’ll pardon the French.’

Mother climbed out, sleeves rolled up on her fleece, bare white arms semaphoring in the sunlight as she marched over to the nearest Smurf.

McAdams stuck his hands in his pockets. ‘Save yourself, young Callum. Run away before she gets here. This will not be pretty.’

The Dog Officer nodded. ‘A six-eight-six haiku. Very avant-garde. PENGUIN, I’M NOT TELLING YOU AGAIN! Stupid animal.’

Rustling and crackling came from deep within the brambles, but that was it — no Labrador to be seen.

The Smurf turned and pointed in their direction. And Mother was on her way.

‘PENGUIN!’ A shake of the head. ‘Tell you, we get all the rubbish dogs in O Division. Anything that can’t find its own tail: they send it here.’ Deep breath. ‘PENGUIN! OUT HERE NOW, YOU USELESS WEE SOD!’

Mother rounded the corner of the blackened house, shoulders forward, hands curled into fists.

McAdams stood up straight. ‘We who are about to die, salute you.’

‘PENGUIN!’

‘Andrew Thomas McAdams, what in God’s holy name do you think you were doing going down there? Are you insane ?’

He just shrugged.

‘PENGUIN, IF YOU’RE NOT OUT HERE BY THE TIME I COUNT TO FIVE, I’LL SKIN YOU AND WEAR YOU AS A POSING POUCH!’

Callum stepped in. ‘If DS McAdams hadn’t put his neck on the line, we wouldn’t have found Monaghan and Jeffries’ dungeon.’

‘FOUR!’

She turned her scowl on Callum instead. ‘And you ! You should’ve kept him out of there, you know he’s not well!’

‘THREE!’

‘At least now we know Monaghan wasn’t working alone. There was no way he could prepare his victims at that tiny flat on Bellfield Road — he needed room to starve them before he gutted them and stuck them in the smoker. This is where he did it.’

‘TWO!’

Mother thumped the Dog Officer on the arm. ‘Would you please stop doing that while I’m giving these idiots a bollocking?’

‘Cadaver dog, my fuzzy backside.’ He zipped up his Police Scotland fleece, hauled on a pair of leather gloves, then stomped towards the brambles. ‘PENGUIN!’ He dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the barbed-wire mass. ‘AAARGH! SODDING SPIKY SONS-OF-A-BITCHING BRAMBLE... GAAAAAARGH!’

Callum tried his best reasonable voice. ‘Dr McDonald thinks there’s still a chance to save Ashlee Gossard. Come on, it can’t be a coincidence, can it? Someone spots the fire here and calls nine-nine-nine at six twenty — an hour and a half later, Ashlee and her mum are being attacked and abducted from their home. And a van registered to this address is right there in the vicinity.’

‘I’M GOING TO KILL YOU, PENGUIN! YOU HEAR ME?’

Mother stared up at the heavy lid of looming clouds for a moment, then sighed. ‘Andy, you know it was stupid going down there. What if the floor collapsed?’

McAdams smiled. ‘There are worse things in life than death.’

‘PENGUIN! WHERE ARE YOU, YOU STUPID...’

Callum pointed at the burned-out house. ‘Look at the timing: Brett Millar turns up at his parents’ house in Blackwall Hill, this place is set on fire, Ashlee and Abby Gossard get abducted.’ He held his hands out, like he was finishing a magic trick. ‘Millar got free and escaped — that’s why there’s a loose chain in the basement, pulled from the wall. Monaghan and Jeffries can’t risk him leading us back here, so they torch the house. Only now they don’t have anyone to mummify, so they go out and abduct themselves a pre-starved teenaged girl instead. Jeffries is still out there, and he’s going to kill her soon as he thinks she’s ready to become a god.’

Mother shook her head. ‘Yes, well done. All very logical and exact. Only your Paul Terence Jeffries isn’t “out there” or anywhere else: he’s dead.’

Oh...

‘HELLO?’

‘I got John and Dotty to go a-rummaging. The Cloisters belongs to an ecclesiastical trust. Jeffries was some sort of lay preacher, so not only did he live here rent-free — they paid him a wee stipend too. He stopped cashing the cheques, wouldn’t answer any letters, they couldn’t track him down anywhere, so they went to court and eventually had him declared dead. That was twenty years ago.’

McAdams sniffed. ‘So who’s been staying here?’

‘That’s the trouble — they didn’t know they still owned it, till Dotty phoned and made them go through the files. Turns out they’ve been paying council tax on a derelict property for over two decades. Not the most efficient biscuits in the tin.’