Стюарт Макбрайд - The Coffinmaker’s Garden

Still, it was enough to get a feel for the place, and where Gordon Smith’s basement had been empty — except for his killing apparatus — Helen MacNeil’s was littered with the debris of three lives. Kids’ bikes rusted away alongside collapsed boxes of plastic toys. The remains of a teddy bear going mouldy where it poked out the top of a box full of vinyl records.

No point sneaking around now — if they didn’t know we were in here, they never would.

Deep breath. ‘GORDON SMITH! ARMED POLICE! COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD!’

The only sound was my breath and the distant mourning gale.

Then Shifty’s voice hissed down from the living room. ‘Anything?’

Back to normal volume: ‘Don’t think they’re here.’

‘Bugger.’ His heavy feet thumped down the stairs. ‘We’re too late, then. It’s...’

When I turned, he was standing with one foot on the bottom step, chin up, nostrils flaring.

‘Can you smell that? Sort of... butcher’s shoppy.’

Which probably meant Gordon Smith and Leah MacNeil had got their hands on another victim. Shifty was right: we were too late.

‘BASTARD!’ Bellowing it out, eyes screwed shut, knees bent, walking stick and gun clenched in aching fists.

And now we had yet another crime scene to manage before the damn thing fell into the North Sea.

‘Great.’ Shifty scuffed a toe through the dust. ‘You want to call it in, or sod off out of it? Either way, they’re not here.’

The rubbish didn’t fill the entire basement, Helen had left a meandering path through the boxes. Tempting though it was to get the hell out of here, it meant we’d never know who they’d killed. More importantly, the family would never know what’d happened to their child / brother / sister / parent. So I hobbled along the path, taking my little ball of bright-white light with me. Past rows and rows of long-forgotten crap, the top surface of everything clarted in a thick layer of gritty brown dirt — probably drifted down from the floorboards upstairs.

The basement opened out at the final turn. Not into a wide-open space, but a hollow, not much bigger than a double bed.

I stopped where I was and stared.

The rear wall, the one closest to the devouring waves, the one that stuck about four feet out from the crumbling headland, had a body spread-eagled against it. Her arms were tied to the floor joists of the room above; legs more than shoulder-width apart, ankles tied to the barbell from Helen’s multigym. Head hanging forward, blood... everywhere .

‘Jesus...’

Strips of skin hung from long ragged wounds, showing off the dark glistening muscle beneath, the occasional flash of bone where they’d dug deeper. A wide pool of shining burgundy seeping across the concrete floor.

I stepped closer, and slow-motion ripples spread out from my boot.

David Quinn, back in Stirling, had been bad enough, but this was much, much worse.

A muffled rumbling shook the basement and fresh dust drifted down from the floor above, shining like dying stars in the torchlight.

Cut her down. Cut her down and get her out of here.

With what? They took Joseph’s cutthroat razor off you, remember?

‘Shifty, you got a knife?’

No answer.

‘Shifty!’

Still nothing.

I jammed the gun in my pocket, reached forward, took a handful of dyed-blonde hair and pulled her head up. Nothing but hollow sockets stared back at me, but there was no mistaking that heart-shaped face, the long sharp nose, or the broad forehead.

Just like her grandmother’s.

Leah MacNeil.

I huffed out a breath and stepped back, letting her chin fall against her chest again.

How could Smith...? She was like a granddaughter to him. OK, so Leah was a monster, but she didn’t deserve that .

‘Shifty?’

Another rumble, and this time the floor trembled beneath my feet, sending slow sticky ripples spreading across the bloody pool.

I turned, but there was no sign of him. Nothing but darkness where the torch’s beam couldn’t reach. ‘SHIFTY: STOP SODDING ABOUT!’

Maybe he’d done the sensible thing and buggered off out of here, before everything collapsed into the sea? Maybe that wasn’t a daft idea at—

Alice’s phone rang in my top pocket: David Bowie’s ‘Ashes to Ashes’. The ringtone she’d set so she’d know it was me calling.

Which could only mean one thing.

I pulled out her mobile and answered it. ‘Gordon Smith.’

‘Ah, Mr Henderson, I’m so glad to hear your voice again!’ It was little more than a whisper, barely audible over the creaks and groans of the storm-battered house. I turned the phone’s volume up full. ‘You’re not a man who likes to stay dead, I like that about you.’

‘You killed Leah.’

‘Yes, well...’ He cleared his throat. ‘Turns out you were right about that, so credit where it’s due. You tried to tell her, remember? But would she listen? Teenagers, eh?’ Putting on a singsong voice for, ‘What ya gonna do?’

Another rumble, and this time a sound like ice cracking on the surface of a very deep dark lake joined it. The torch hadn’t switched off as the call came through, so I held the phone in front of my face, swinging it around. That pool of blood had got a lot shallower around my trainers.

‘Where are you?’

‘You see, I know a lot of people look at someone my age and they think, “He can’t be any good with modern technology and stuff; dinosaurs were roaming the earth when he was a wee boy, for goodness’ sakes!” But you can’t be a Luddite and work in the theatre these days, it’s all electronics and software.’

That cracking noise sounded again.

I backed away from the end wall.

Actually, sod backing away, I turned and hurried through the maze of boxes and family crap. ‘She looked up to you like a grandfather, Gordon. She loved you!’

‘So I had a dig through your phone and discovered the tracker app. Did you know, if you agree to be traced, you automatically get to see where the phone tracing you is? It’s rather sweet, really. An exercise in trust and mutual surveillance.’ Still no louder than a whisper. ‘At first I thought you were this Alice woman, but then I saw you and your fat friend creeping into Helen’s house and I have to admit, it was quite the shocker. I could’ve sworn you were dead when we dropped you in that inspection pit. I clearly need to work on my garrotting skills.’

I turned the last corner, before the stairs, and stumbled to a halt.

‘Anyway, as you’ve come all this way, it would’ve been rude of me not to pop in and say hello.’

Shifty lay facedown on the concrete, one arm twisted beneath him, the other hand still clutching his collapsible baton. The back of his bald pink head was stained, wet scarlet.

‘And I’m sorry Leah couldn’t be with us — not in spirit anyway — but I simply couldn’t cope with her foul language any longer.’

I spun around, torch brushing the nearest boxes with its narrow beam of cold white light. ‘If you’ve killed Shifty, I’m going to tear you to pieces.’

‘So I gave Leah the starring role in her own production: A Delicate and Terrible Death. She was excellent, Mr Henderson, screamed like a professional. Her mother would’ve been so proud.’

I hunkered down beside Shifty, dropped my walking stick and felt for a pulse. Still there. As I stood, something glittered in the torchlight — halfway up the wooden steps to the trapdoor. Like a granite thermos flask with silver handles fixed to it.