Stuart MacBride - A Song for the Dying

I levered myself out of the chair. ‘Nobody gets to celebrate till we’ve got Ruth, Laura, and Jessica back.’

He lowered his voice. ‘I understand, but-’

‘They’ve got what, thirty-six hours? Maybe forty-eight? We don’t have time to sod about with-’

‘First off, it takes between three and ten days to die of dehydration. Secondly, look at the pair of you.’ He pointed. ‘Elizabeth, how long were you on for yesterday? Fourteen hours? Sixteen? And the day before? And the day before that?’

She waved a hand in his direction. ‘That’s not the point. We have to-’

‘It’s exactly the point. You’re dead on your feet, and Limpy the Boy Wonder here has bags under his eyes only a panda could love. The rest of the team’s the same. Won’t be long before they start making mistakes.’

I banged my cane against the filing cabinet, setting it ringing. ‘We need to find them.’

Ness looked from the pile in her in-tray to the one in pending, to the stacks of forms littering her desk. ‘It’s a lovely idea, Bear, but we can’t.’

‘I’m not saying we should all troop off to the pub for beer and karaoke, I’m saying give the team a little space. Send half of them home on time for a change. We’ll draw up a big list of actions and make the nightshift chase them down. Then you can head off.’

‘But-’

‘Jessica, Ruth, and Laura aren’t going to die just because you went home to get some sleep. If nightshift get something, they’ll call. Tomorrow morning everyone’s going to be recharged and ready to nail the son of a bitch.’

And Wee Free would start carving bits off Shifty.

Nenova squeaked her chair closer, squinted at the TV in the downstream monitoring suite. Her partner, McKevitt, tore open another packet of cheese-and-onion, ferrying them from bag to mouth like a factory robot, crunching as the screen filled with Virginia Cunningham.

She settled into her seat, then her solicitor shuffled into view and sat next to her. He was a rumpled man in a corduroy jacket with leather patches on the elbows. A single horn of hair stuck out above his left ear. He took a sheaf of papers from his briefcase and ruffled through them. Didn’t look at his client once.

Alice leaned her head against my shoulder, let out a low shivery breath.

I rubbed her back. ‘You OK?’

She didn’t look up. ‘Long day.’

On screen, Detective Superintendent Ness got a PC to do the date and time thing, then nodded. ‘ I believe you want to make a statement. ’

Cunningham smeared her fingers across the tabletop. Her maternity frock was rumpled, the white cardigan missing a button. ‘ I… ’ She licked her lips. ‘ I want to plead guilty to the abduction and murder of Charlie Pearce. I’ve been thinking about it, and I want to… ’ A frown, as if she was trying to remember something. When she started again, the words sounded dead and flat. Rehearsed. ‘ I want to spare his parents the grief of a trial. They have suffered enough. ’

‘ I see. ’ Ness looked at the solicitor. ‘ And…? ’

He slid the top sheet from his stack across the table top. ‘ Full confession and admission of guilt, signed, witnessed, and dated. We want this taken into account during sentencing. ’

Cunningham kept her eyes down. ‘ I just… I kinda want to apologize for what I did and, you know, so they can put me somewhere I can get the help I need. So I can get better .’ One hand reached down to stroke the pregnant bulge. ‘ For my baby. ’

Nenova folded forward, until her head rested on the worktop. ‘Thank Christ for that…’

McKevitt blew out a crispy breath. ‘Yup. Knows she can’t win, wants a plea bargain.’ A shrug. ‘Still, at least it saves the parents having to watch her strangling the poor wee sod. Christ knows I’ll be seeing that in the dark for weeks…’

I put a hand around Alice’s shoulders and gave her a squeeze. Kept my voice low. ‘Proud of you.’

She squeezed back. ‘I wish I was…’

Alice dumped her satchel on the bar of the Postman’s Head. A photo of TV’s Dr Frederic Docherty now graced the dartboard — a single arrow stuck between his eyes.

Huntly sat at a table in the corner, slumped in front of a laptop connected to an external hard drive the size of a hotel bible. Chin resting in his hand, head nodding up and down as he popped in a handful of dry-roasted and chewed.

He looked up from the screen, voice deadpan: ‘Well, well, the conquering heroes return. I suppose you’re expecting cakes and balloons?’

Cooper had taken up position on the other side of the pub, frowning at a laptop of his own, scribbling things down in a notebook. Put his pen down. A smile ripped across his face. ‘Guv, Dr McDonald — great result!’

Alice blushed, shrugged one shoulder. ‘It was really all Ash, I just-’

‘Gah…’ Huntly rolled his eyes. ‘Yes, yes, false modesty, blah, blah, blah.’ He sagged till his forehead rested against the laptop. ‘It’s all very well for you, but I’m the one stuck in here with hours and hours and hours of CCTV footage. And I wouldn’t have to wade through the bloody stuff if you’d done a decent job and got a confession out of the odious creature in the first place.’ A pout. ‘I’ve been sitting here, watching grainy little people whizzing about on a computer screen, for so long I’m at risk of developing haemorrhoidae . And there’s still twenty hours’ worth to go.’

Cooper folded his arms and scowled across the room. ‘Don’t hear me moaning about having to go through the TV footage from that demo, do you?’

‘Television footage? I should be so lucky.’ Huntly slapped a hand to his chest. ‘I’ve done all the CCTV from Claire Young, and all the cameras where Jessica McFee went missing, and the surrounding streets.’ He slumped forwards again. ‘And that’s just the modern coverage; Bear wants me to go over the historic stuff too.’

Alice opened her satchel and produced the deposition-site photographs for each of the Inside Man victims. Spread them out in front of the beer taps.

‘And you would not believe the state of the old CCTV tapes. Some of it’s rotted, some’s been eaten by mice, a big pile looks as if it’s been underwater for the last eight years…’

I limped over. ‘Any sign of Docherty?’

The laptop’s screen was broken into three windows, each showing alternative views of the same scene. The timestamps clicked over to midnight. Tiny people moved in stop-motion lurches through the darkened streets, heading home after being turfed out of pubs and lovers’ embraces, preserved for a moment in the lonely glow of a streetlight.

Huntly pursed his lips and stroked his chin. ‘You know what? Now I think of it, I believe I did just see him on the clip I was watching a minute ago. He was outside a betting shop on Donovan Lane, with a dead woman thrown over one shoulder and Jessica McFee tucked under the other arm. I wasn’t going to mention it — seemed rather trivial at the time — but as you’ve asked-’

‘Don’t be a dick.’

Huntly raised an eyebrow. ‘I am not, as you so crudely put it, “a dick”. I’m refreshingly challenging.’

‘You keep telling yourself that.’

Alice unfolded a map of Oldcastle and started marking the dump sites in red pen.

I took the barstool next to her. ‘So, how did you get Cunningham to confess?’

She frowned at the map, forehead furrowed. ‘There has to be something significant about the distribution of deposition sites. Not just that they’re within quick emergency response time of the hospital and a working phone box, I mean they have to be close to the operating site as well, don’t they? There’s no point going to all that effort, making sure an ambulance can attend in under fifteen minutes, if it takes you an hour to get your victim there in the first place.’