Ken McClure - Fenton's winter

"Bent is not the word," said Kelly, looking through the pages of the album.

"Takes all sorts as my grandmother used to say," said Fenton.

"So what happened here?" said Kelly, putting down the book and looking at Saxon's body. "Some trick go wrong?"

“ No," said Fenton. "His hands are still bound. He couldn't have set light to himself." He looked at the blackened corpse for a moment before starting to search round the room. He found a green jerry can and sniffed the contents. "Paraffin," he said to Kelly. "Some bastard shackled him, doused him in paraffin and started throwing matches."

"Where does that leave us?" asked Kelly quietly.

"Up to our necks in something I'd rather you didn't make waves in," said Fenton ruefully.

Fenton could see that he was in trouble no matter which way he turned. If he phoned the police it would be tantamount to admitting that he had known the whereabouts of Nigel Saxon and had failed to inform them. If he kept quiet and Jamieson found out later then that might even be worse. Jamieson might even suspect that he had been Saxon's killer with revenge for Neil Munro as the motive.

"You are sure it's Saxon aren't you?" Kelly asked.

Fenton nodded. "I'M sure," he said. "Even like that, I knew him well enough to recognise him."

"So what do we do?"

"Get out of here and pray that no one saw us come in," said Fenton.

Fenton and Kelly stood still for a moment in the quiet of the basement area and courted the shadow of the wall while they listened for sounds coming from above. When they were sure that all was quiet they climbed the steps quickly to the pavement and started walking.

Like Christians cast into some Georgian Coliseum they looked furtively out of the corners of their eyes for signs of lions. They saw nothing but Fenton was far from convinced. He imagined hidden faces behind every tall rectangular window. Their description was already being noted and telephones were being lifted. They suppressed the urge to run but doing so filled them with the nervous tension of thorough-bred horses held under rein.

"Up here," said Fenton, seeking the earliest opportunity of returning to noise and bustle. The lights of a white painted pub attracted them like harbour buoys and the crowd inside absorbed them into welcome anonymity.

"God, I needed that," said Kelly after downing his whisky in one gulp. Fenton ordered two more and they began to take stock of their surroundings. The clientele were mainly young, fashion conscious and noisy. The bar list boasted sixteen different cocktails. It said a lot about the customers.

"Why! Steven Kelly!" said a loud female voice behind them. Fenton froze but he felt Kelly's eyes on him before he turned round.

"Fiona Duncan, how nice," said Kelly, failing his audition for RADA, thought Fenton.

"Whatever brings you here?" continued Fiona at the top of her voice. Kelly was struggling but Fenton realised that it did not matter for Fiona was not listening to the answers. She was only interested in her own performance. Fenton knew the type. Conversations were opportunities for self projection, chances to display an ever changing slide show of facial expression to whoever might be watching. The loudness of the voice was designed to swell that number.

"Tom, meet Fiona Duncan," said Kelly looking like a wet spaniel. "She used to be a nurse at the Princess Mary."

Fenton nailed Kelly with a glance before shaking hands with the loud girl. "And where are you now Fiona?" he asked politely.

"The Western General!" said Fiona. She announced it like the winning number in a raffle and her right hand gave a little cheer.

Fenton smiled, passing her back to Kelly.

"So what are you doing with yourself these days Steve? Behaving?” asked Fiona.

Fenton saw the look that passed between Kelly and the girl and knew what had gone on in the past. He marked time with a fixed smile on his face until Fiona decided that she had to 'dash'. Her friends were waiting for their drinks. He almost felt the spotlight go out as she moved her cabaret to the bar.

"Sorry about that," whispered Kelly, looking sheepish.

"They should have cut them off at birth," muttered Fenton.

Jenny welcomed them with a sigh of relief and a barrage of questions that made Fenton hold up his hands. "You had better sit down," he said. He told her what they had found, trying to leave out as many of the gory bits as possible. Jenny kept probing. He added the gory bits.

"But supposing he lies there for weeks before anyone finds him?" Jenny pointed out. "Could our nerves stand it?"

The consensus was no. "How should we do it?"

"Anonymous call," said Kelly. "I'll do it on my way home. Go to 24a Lymon Place. There's a dead man there."

The story was too late for the morning papers but local radio carried it in their morning bulletins. Nigel Saxon, son of the owner of Saxon Medical, the company at the centre of the lethal plastic affair, had been found dead in a city flat and the police were treating the death as murder. There was no more. Fenton thought that it seemed so clinically clean and tidy, nothing at all like the hellish reality of what had lain in that basement. Nothing to convey the sight, the smell. Only the police would know that. It made him wonder how many other stories were deodorized every day, cellophane wrapped, sanitised for public protection. Did it matter?

The evening paper seemed to think that it did.' New Town Funeral Pyre for Plastics Boss' concentrated on the charring and disfigurement of Saxon's body, managing to use the phrase 'barely recognizable' three times in the story. For the first time the police admitted publicly that they had been looking for Saxon in connection with their enquiries into the death of Neil Munro. The simple statement invited the public to draw their own conclusions, the very reason they made it, thought Fenton. No mention was made of the sex angle however, something that made Jenny suggest cynically that the police were going to sell it to the Sundays. She was wrong. The tabloids got it on the following morning and made a meal of it with, 'Sex Secrets of New Town Basement.'

No 'secrets' were actually revealed but the suggestion of homosexuality and the persistent use of the word 'apparatus' was enough to alter the nature of the crime for the law abiding citizens of Edinburgh. Outrage at the murder became muted. The unspoken view that this was an affair that God-fearing folk were better off not knowing about became the prevalent one. Some perverted creature from a strange twilight world had got his just deserts. I'll make the cocoa Agnes, you put out the cat.

Fenton could not help but feel that the police had orchestrated the whole thing and it had worked. The pressure was off them for, to all public intents and purposes, they had tracked down Neil Munro's killer and he was dead, better than a conviction for the rate payers. As for Saxon's killer? They would go through the motions, follow routine but there was very little pressure on them this time. No one cared about Saxon or his seedy society. At least this was what Fenton had concluded but he had to change his mind when the police issued a description of two men that they wanted to interview in connection with the New Town murder.

Fenton held his breath as he listened to the descriptions. Two men aged between twenty and thirty, one six feet tall and dark, the other slightly shorter with fair hair and broad shoulders. Both had been seen leaving the area of the basement flat on the night in question

Fenton's first instinct was to phone Steve Kelly but he talked himself out of it, deciding that it was a panic reaction. Kelly phoned him. There was nothing really to say.

Kelly phoned again in the evening just after eight when Jenny was leaving for the hospital. "We've got trouble," he said and Fenton's heart sank. Jenny, who had been in the act of leaving, paused in the doorway and said, "Should I wait?"