Stuart MacBride - Halfhead

Dr Westfield pulls the intravenous sedative from the woman’s neck and throws the bag in the bin. It will take three or four hours for the drugs to wear off, enough time to have a nice hot bath. Then, when Mrs Bexley is all awake and terrified, they can have a little chat about how Stephen was naughty and how much pain that’s going to mean before his wife finally gets to die.

With a happy smile Dr Westfield pats the woman on the cheek. It’s not her fault she married a weak man, but it’s too late to worry about that now.

‘Sir! Over here, we’ve found one of them!’

Will struggled up the pile of trash to join the knot of jump-suited figures. They stood around a shallow hole in the rubbish, looking down at what used to be a man. The body was tied up in a bundle with orange packing tape: knees against chest, arms against knees, hands curled into stiff claws. The Bluecoat’s head was tilted back onto his left shoulder, sightless eyes staring up at the expressway, mouth hanging open, the skin waxy and yellow like rancid butter.

Brian hunkered down at the edge of the makeshift grave and ran a reader over one of the constable’s fingertips. He waited for the print to come back from Central Records, then read out the results. ‘Stephen Mackay: twenty-five, male. Bluecoat. Rank-’

‘Police Constable.’ It was Jo, standing on the edge of the group, dressed in a yellow suit and scarlet cropped cloat: the kind the horsy set always wore. The hood was up, hiding her eyes and she sounded as if she hadn’t slept in a month. ‘Married. Wife: Louise Mackay. One child: Cheryl, three years old.’

She pulled a palm-sized transmitter out of her pocket, punched the dead PC’s code into it and handed it to Agent Alexander. With a gentleness that would have surprised anyone who didn’t know him, Brian cleared some rubbish away from the back of Constable Mackay’s head, pressed the transmitter against the base of his skull and pressed the ‘send’ button.

‘Better?’ He asked one of the troopers.

‘I don’t…There! Got a positive lock on the other one.’

The team headed down the other side of the rubbish heap, leaving Brian, Will and DS Cameron alone with the dead body.

‘Jo,’ said Will.

‘Sir,’ said Jo.

Not exactly friendly.

‘Oh fer God’s sake…’ Brian picked himself up, slipped the transmitter into his pocket and tried to brush some of the muck off his coat. It didn’t help, just smeared it further. ‘You’re like a pair of wee kiddies.’ He watched them standing there in silence, then sighed. ‘Fine, we’ll keep it professional: the two coffin dodgers was interferin’ with each other. We couldn’t get a good signal lock on either of them.’

Will stared down at the packaged-up body. ‘Any idea why they were killed?’

‘Who knows these days?’ said Jo. ‘Wrong place at the wrong time? Asked the right people the wrong questions? Looked at someone funny?’ She straightened her shoulders. ‘Anyway, if you’ll excuse me, sir, I’ll go supervise excavating the other body.’

‘Of course.’ He watched her picking her way carefully down the slippery mound to where the team were already digging.

‘All right,’ said Brian when she was out of earshot. ‘Let’s hear it: what did you do?’

Will closed his eyes. Might have known this was coming. ‘Nothing. I didn’t do anything.’

‘Bollocks. I wondered why she was so quiet this mornin’. Yev done somethin’ stupid haven’t you?’

‘Brian-’

‘Don’t Brian me! If you think I’m gonnae stand around while you piss away the best thing that’s happened to you in years you’ve got another think comin’.’

‘It’s not-’

‘You listen to me, William Hunter. For years I’ve watched you buggerin’ about, never gettin’ close to anyone cos you’re still hung up on Janet. It’s been six fuckin’ years! You think she’d want you to be a miserable, lonely old bastard? Do you? Cos that’s what you’re turnin’ into!’

Will took a step back. ‘Where the hell did that come from?’

‘That woman down there cares about you! Or at least she did before you fucked it up.’

‘I know! OK, I know.’ Will sighed, looking down at the dead constable at his feet. ‘She asked about Janet and I freaked. I…I still miss her, Brian.’

Brian’s voice was softer, his big hand falling on Will’s shoulder. ‘I know you do, but you’re no’ the one who died.’

Jo was standing back from the excavations, watching as the Network troopers dug the second corpse out of the rubbish. With her bright yellow suit and short red cloat she looked like a fruit cocktail.

‘She has the most appalling dress sense I think I’ve ever seen,’ said Will with a small smile. ‘I like her a lot, but I don’t think she’s too keen anymore.’

‘Aye well,’ Brian gave him a wink. ‘You just leave that to me-they don’t call us the Clydeside Cupid for nothin’.’

‘Talk to me.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Ken’s voice was calm, even though it felt as if a weasel was playing the bongos on his heart with a pair of ice axes. ‘After speaking to Mr Hunter yesterday I got the guys to put a monitor on any data searches using your name or mine. Yesterday evening they got one: Glasgow Royal Infirmary.’

‘And?’

Ken shifted from one neatly polished Cuban heel to the other, trying to make the gesture look casual. ‘The search turned up some files from the hospital database.’

‘You told me you had deleted all reference to our involvement there, Ken.’

‘We…We didn’t know the files were being held in a backup, sir. We didn’t have access to them. When the hospital records crashed five years ago they must have been restored with historical data. The files we got rid of sort of…reappeared.’

Quiet settled in as the old man steepled his delicate, long-boned fingers, tapping the tips against his narrow lips, face closed and eyes on the middle distance. ‘Who was doing the searching?’ he said at last.

This was the part that Ken had been dreading.

‘Access was hacked so we have no positive ID, but Assist ant Section Director William Hunter and Detective Sergeant Jo Cameron were involved in an incident at that location two minutes after the last file was copied.’

‘I see.’ The old man sat back in his chair and pulled the test tube from his pocket, twisting it in and out of his fingers as if it was alive.

‘I got the guys monitoring Mr Hunter’s DataLink to take a real close look at what he’s been accessing. He downloaded the whole PsychTech database yesterday morning.’

Ken watched the test tube dance between his employer’s knuckles, feeling himself drawn into the old man’s silence. Unable to stop himself.

‘The…em…Harbinger files weren’t encrypted.’

The older man’s eyebrows shot up, and small beads of sweat began to dampen the nape of Ken’s neck.

‘I pulled Moncur and Stephenson in; seems the guys were using their ‘initiative’ and trolling though Westfield’s original notes looking for more data. Unfortunately they neglected to re-encrypt the files afterwards. Hunter’s got access to everything Doctor Westfield did before she was caught.’

‘I see…’ The old man’s gaze was a solid object, sharp and cold, like the pin in a lepidopterist’s display case. The younger man swallowed and tried not to fidget with his tie as those cold, grey eyes bored into him.

‘Kenneth, when the Network discovered Doctor Westfield’s unsavoury activities you asked me to let you go through her notes, to see if there was anything we could use. I agreed. When you discovered her programme to breed serial killers and suggested we take it over, I let you run with it. When you asked me to make sure she wasn’t properly halfheaded so we could tap into her knowledge, I even went so far as to perform the operation myself.’ He sat forward in his seat, teeth clenched. ‘We’ve spent six years questioning her and monitoring her damn children. Six years! And what do we have to show for it?’