Стюарт Макбрайд - The Coffinmaker’s Garden

I pulled on my best reassuring-police-officer voice. ‘Look, it isn’t—’

‘YOU THINK I’M STUPID?’ Bellowing it, right in my face. ‘HE KILLED HER TOO, DIDN’T HE?’

Over by the outside broadcast vans, the hyenas were looking our way. Peering out through their windscreens. Scrambling for cameras.

‘DIDN’T HE? HE KILLED MY LEAH!’

Alice put a hand on her arm. ‘Please, this isn’t—’

‘DON’T YOU DARE TOUCH ME!’ Helen’s right hand flashed out, a backhanded slap that sent Alice spinning, stumbling to the ground.

The two silent seconds that followed were broken by Henry growling, hackles up, four little feet set on the wet pavement.

And that was it.

I grabbed a handful of Helen’s collar and slammed her backwards into a scabby Land Rover hard enough to set the car’s alarm shrieking. Hazard lights flashing their orange warning as I bared my teeth and forced my face into hers. Rain hissing down around us like the end of days. ‘You EVER lay a finger on her again and I will FUCKING KILL YOU!’

The growling turned into barking.

Helen grinned back at me, but there was no warmth or humour in it. It was cold and vicious, like her eyes. ‘You know what it’s like.’

I bounced her off the Land Rover again. Then let go. Squatted down beside Alice. Brushed the hair from her face. Helped her sit up. ‘Are you OK?’

Her bottom lip was already swelling up. A thin crack of red bisecting it, glistening. ‘I’m fine, I’m fine...’ Clothes and jacket stained with water where she’d hit the deck.

Helen loomed over us. ‘The Birthday Boy took your daughter, didn’t he? Tortured and killed her.’ A bitter laugh. ‘Oh, I know alllll about it. Even downloaded the e-book.’

‘Come on, let’s get you up.’

The car alarm was still screaming as I helped Alice to her feet.

‘You OK? Not feeling dizzy or anything?’

She brushed my hands away. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Good.’ I dropped my walking stick and Henry’s lead, turned, snatched a handful of Helen’s coat and hauled back a fist to—

‘Ash, no!’ Alice — hanging off my raised arm, pulling it back down again. ‘The TV people.’

They were hurrying across the road, getting their cameras up.

I let go and gave Helen another shove. ‘You don’t touch her again.’

‘You were never that squeaky clean, even when you were a copper. So I’ve got a deal for you: you help me find Gordon Smith before these wankers do, and I’ll make it worth your while.’

Deep breath. ‘Go home, Mrs MacNeil.’

‘I know where an armoured-car job’s hidden. Six million in jewellery, paintings, sculptures, antiques, and the like. You help me, you get a third of it.’

‘Ash, we have to go!’

The cameras were up on their shoulders now, reporters trotting alongside, microphones out, umbrellas up. Closing in for the kill.

I grabbed my walking stick, turned on my heel, and hobbled off down Peel Place, Henry trotting along beside me, Alice scrambling to catch up.

Her umbrella was all collapsed in on one side, where it had bounced off the pavement.

An idiot in a grey suit, stopped right in front of me, holding out his microphone. Eyes widening when he finally realised I wasn’t stopping. He jumped to one side, and the three of us marched past, Helen MacNeil’s voice ringing out behind us: ‘YOU KNOW WHAT IT’S LIKE!’

Alice shuffled up beside me. ‘She still there?’

‘Yup.’

Down on the street below, Helen MacNeil was standing in the rain, talking to the Sky News people, glaring at the camera as if it’d refused to pay protection money.

Not our case.

Not our problem.

Not our—

A sharp rapping noise came from the front of the room, followed by a pointed, ‘I’m not boring you, am I, Ash?’

When I turned, there was Detective Superintendent Jacobson, tapping the tip of his extendable pointer against one of the small room’s four whiteboards. He’d peeled off his trademark brown leather jacket, leaving it draped over the back of a chair to drip onto the scabby carpet tiles, exposing a dark red shirt that was about two sizes too big for a wee hairy bloke in tiny square glasses.

He wasn’t the only one staring at us.

Professor Bernard Huntly: in his immaculate pinstriped suit, starched white shirt, and pastel silk tie; battleship-grey short-back-and-sides; Sandringham moustache; and a pair of performance eyebrows — both of which were raised as he smirked in our direction.

Dr Sheila Constantine: buried somewhere within a big padded jacket with a furry collar, a tartan scarf wrapped around her neck and chin, two apple cheeks and button nose poking out over the top. Woolly hat covering most of her thick blonde hair, even though the radiators in here were pounding out heat.

Henry: tail going like a furry windscreen wiper, mouth hanging open, tongue lolling out, the smell of wet dog rising off him like a fusty chemical weapon.

And PC Thingy. No idea what her real name was, because I hadn’t been paying attention when Jacobson introduced her. Some no-hoper O Division had lumbered us with, in order to look as if they were cooperating. A stringy scarecrow with oversized hands and a buzzcut, whose nose and chin entered any crime scene about half a step before the rest of her.

Which only left one member of LIRU: Sabir. He wasn’t there in person, but his chubby face looked out from a monitor, placed on a wheelie trolley near the front of the room. Mouth a small twitching horror show as he shovelled in crisps, crumbs and stubble on his jowls, bald as a long-dead egg, skin the colour of slightly mouldy beetroot. Someone had stuck a strip across the top of the monitor with ‘DS AKHTAR’ printed on it. Sabir’s voice crackled out of the speaker, sounding about as Liverpool as you could get. ‘No offence, like, but can we get this thing wrapped up, or wha’? I’m meant to be hackin’ into a crime-syndicate an’ planting Trojan viruses on their Dark Web servers in twenny-five minutes, and I’d kina like to go for a crap first.’

‘Quite.’ Jacobson clicked his pointer against the board again, underlining a bullet-pointed list. ‘So, to recap, now everyone’s paying attention: eighteenth of June, victim one is strangled by hand. Twentieth of August, victim two is strangled with his own belt. And fourteenth October, victim three is strangled with a silk cord—’

‘Actually, Bear,’ Professor Huntly held up a manicured finger, ‘speaking as this delightful little team’s physical evidence guru, I think you’ll find the strangling ligature was probably a curtain tie.’

That got him a scowl. ‘Speaking as this delightful little team’s boss , you lost “call me ‘Bear’” privileges yesterday, when you pissed off the Procurator Fiscal.’

Huntly sniffed. ‘I merely pointed out that decomposition products were—’

‘Don’t make me tell you again!’

A shrug. ‘Sorry, Detective Superintendent.’

‘Better.’ Jacobson frowned at the whiteboard for a moment. ‘Now, where was I? Yes, right: silk ligature. No sign of it at the deposition site, so it was taken to and from the scene by our killer.’ The pointer came around to aim at Dr Constantine. ‘Sheila?’

She dug her hands into her armpits, smothering them in the padded fabric. ‘The transition to ligatures isn’t the only change: there’s a definite difference in how long he takes to kill his victims. With Andrew Brennan he crushes the hyoid bone and the windpipe, so death would be reasonably quick. Oscar Harris has a worse time — going by the bruising, our killer tightened and released the belt around his throat three times, before committing to it. Lewis Talbot...’ She puffed out a breath and dug her hands in deeper. ‘First off, the state of the body didn’t help any: four weeks half-buried in the woods. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve post-mortemed worse, but once the soft tissue starts to go, we lose a lot of structural detail. So while it’s impossible to say one hundred percent for sure, I think he was strangled and revived and strangled and revived at least eight times. And given the infusion of blood in the tissue around his neck, it could’ve taken anything up to an hour. Maybe an hour and a half.’