Stuart MacBride - A Song for the Dying

Alice turned the engine over. ‘I can be quite persuasive when I need to be.’

On the other end of the phone, Sabir coughed. ‘ Now, if you don’t mind, I’m not done banging your mam yet. ’

The sign outside Force Headquarters didn’t say ‘OLDCASTLE POLICE’ any more, now it was ‘POLICE SCOTLAND ~ OLDCASTLE DIVISION’. They’d even ditched the crest for some bland corporate saltire thing.

Shame they hadn’t ditched the building. The large Victorian red-brick wart blemished the street’s sandstone skin — its narrow windows dark and barred, as if it was expecting a siege. Just as well, because one had arrived.

A clan of reporters and camera crews hung around the front doors, smoking and joking, waiting to pounce and tear someone to shreds. Feast on their bones.

One of them looked up as we climbed the stairs, a heavy Nikon hanging around his neck, little brown cigarillo clamped between two fingers. ‘Oy! You two got anything to do with the Inside Man?’

I gave him a big theatrical shrug. ‘Someone broke into our shed and nicked the lawnmower.’

‘Pity…’ He took a couple of photos anyway, then went back to waiting.

I held the door open and Alice slipped past me into reception, carrier-bag clinking against her thigh.

Black-and-white tiles made the room look more like a train-station toilet than somewhere to report a crime. At least it was easy to hose the vomit and blood off the floor…

A raptor-thin man sat behind the desk and a slab of bullet-proof glass. The hair on his head was a close-cropped grey, about half as short as his bushy black eyebrows. Sergeant Peters puckered his mouth, narrowed his eyes. ‘How come you didn’t come in round the back?’

‘Wouldn’t give me the new access code.’

‘Hmph. Tossers.’ He nodded at Alice. ‘Pardon my French, like.’ Back to me. ‘You want us to call someone?’

‘Actually,’ Alice stepped forward, ‘I’m here to see Dr Frederic Docherty, it’s Dr McDonald, well, I’m Dr McDonald, not him, I realized that would sound a bit confusing as I was saying it, but you can call me Alice.’

Peters raised a thick eyebrow. ‘Right… I’ll just do that. What about you, Guv?’

‘Archives.’

He slammed the visitors’ book down on the counter. ‘Right, sign in, I’ll knock you up a pass, keycode is three-seven-nine-nine-one. And you can tell the tossers upstairs they can stick their bloody job if they don’t like it.’ He grumbled over to the computer and battered the keyboard into submission with two-fingered hate. ‘Like it’s my fault I can’t work nights. Don’t see them looking after a sixty-year-old bedridden woman with cancer…’

‘Ah, Dr … McDonald, isn’t it?’ Frederic Docherty half rose from his seat and gestured towards the other side of the conference table. Another sharp suit, this time with a bright blue shirt and white tie. ‘Please, do sit. And will your friend be joining us?’ He looked at me.

I didn’t move. ‘Better things to do.’

‘I see.’

Alice put her carrier bag down on the tabletop, then sat. Pulled out a half-bottle of Grouse and cracked open the top. ‘Would you like one?’

‘Ah…’ He lowered himself back into his seat. ‘Let me guess: you’ve worked with Henry Forrester, haven’t you? He was a big believer in the empathic-slash-cognitive-enhancing power of caffeine and whisky.’

She poured a glug into her mug. ‘Two years ago, we were hunting a serial killer. I … was the one who found Henry’s body in the hotel.’

Docherty’s face pinched, as if something sharp had just burrowed its way beneath his skin. ‘He was a good man. A good mentor. When I heard he’d died…’ A sigh. ‘That must have been horrible for you.’

Alice knocked back a mouthful of laced coffee, then dipped into her satchel and came out with the Inside Man letters, all six of them covered in highlighter strokes and red biro squiggles. She laid them out on the table top. ‘I’ve been analysing the form and content and I think we need to revisit the profile. The Inside Man-’

‘If you want to talk about it, I’ve done a considerable amount of work with bereaved families.’

She added another slug of Grouse to her mug. ‘The language used, the imagery, it’s all heightened, salacious, like he wants us to be there with him. That doesn’t match someone-’

‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of. When Henry died, it took me months to work through my feelings with my therapist. We’d been very close. It’s-’

‘-kind of background in the profile, so we need to go back and-’

‘-be highly beneficial to your on-going emotional health.’

I left them to it.

Another box. This one was scribbled with black marker pen, the case number crossed out three times and written in again. No wonder it was nearly impossible to find anything.

I dumped it on the floor with the others and reached into the row behind it. The shelves were scarred, the paint flaking away, rust spreading out from the joins. Dust covered everything with a blanket of fur, little puffs of the stuff drifting out every time something was moved. It glowed in the gloom, caught by the miserable gritty light of a fluorescent bulb.

PC Simpson had a scratch, setting the fat on his belly wobbling. Dumpy, balding, and coasting towards retirement in slow-motion. ‘Of course, the real problem’s the voting system, isn’t it?’

Next row wasn’t much better. All illegible numbers and corrections and why could no one ever file things properly? ‘Are you sure this is the right section?’

‘Take that Marilyn woman: can’t sing for cheese, but there she is week after week, because people think it’s funny. Thought Britain was meant to have talent?’

‘Simpson, I’m going to count to five, and then I’m going to take this walking stick and ram it so far up you everyone’ll think you’re a bloody unicorn!’

He stopped scratching and hauled out another box. ‘Should be in here somewhere . Tosspots from SCD and CID ransacked everything they could find when they started the investigation. But they lack the systematic approach, don’t they? Charging about like idiots.’

I dumped another box on the floor — two completely separate crime numbers scrawled on the greying cardboard. ‘How could you let the place get into this mess?’

‘Oh no you don’t; my system was working perfectly, thank you very much. I go off on the sick for a couple of months and some idiot puts that wee tosser Williamson in charge. When I get back everything’s all over the shop.’ He popped the top off a case file and rummaged in the contents. ‘You let people run amok in your archives and they get used to it. Take advantage. Number of times I’ve come down here to find that prat Brigstock hauling stuff out of boxes, or Rutledge, or that psychologist git, or bloody Detective Superintendent “Why can’t you get this place tidied up?” Knight. No one ever wants to sign for anything.’ His voice jumped half an octave, put on a posh Glaswegian accent. ‘“Oh, I just need to check something, I’ll put it right back.” Does this look like a sodding library?’

The next box had a knife and an axe in it, both in their clear plastic bags with dried flakes of blood in the bottom.

‘And how come it’s always cover versions? You want to be famous: write your own songs. Otherwise it’s just glorified karaoke.’

Another box, this time with no crime numbers on it at all.

‘But no one cares, do they? Ah, here we go.’ He thumped a box down in front of me. ‘Inside Man, “K” to “N”.’ He took a deep breath and wheezed it out across the lid, sending up a little storm of dust. ‘Told you it’d be back here, somewhere.’