Jackie Baldwin - Dead Man’s Prayer - A gripping detective thriller with a killer twist

DC Mhairi McLeod shuddered as she turned the key in the ignition and quit the hospital car park with squealing tyres. Note to self. Never ever attend a post-mortem again. It was one thing reading the eventual report couched in dry medical terms, most of which she had to look up in the medical dictionary she kept in her drawer. It was another thing entirely actually being present. She wondered how the pathologist could stand to do his job; day after day, hacking into people like they were just pieces of meat. Desperately she tried to delete the images of the dead priest from her memory, but they were there to stay. Dammit. It had been a helluva couple of days. She felt her nerves were stretched as taut as a violin; one good twang and they would ping apart.

Before Farrell came along she had been aware that the other detectives had stopped taking her seriously and felt that she had failed to live up to her earlier promise. Ever since Ewan had run out on her on the eve of their wedding six months ago, she had been all over the place, more interested in having a good time than in forging ahead in her career. The career that had meant everything to her until it lost her the man that she loved. Ewan had struggled with her crazy hours, not to mention the fact that from time to time she might be placed in harm’s way. What had given him the final push to end things was when she had failed to turn up for their rehearsal dinner because she had to talk a young drug addict down from the roof of the local hospital. Farrell had been loading responsibility on her from the day he arrived. Maybe he hadn’t heard yet that she was a flake?

Parking outside St Aidan’s, Mhairi quickly walked up the lane to the priests’ house. She banged the heavy brass door-knocker. The curtains were still shut in a few of the rooms and there were smudges on the brass plate. There were no signs of life. Growing impatient she knocked again. This time, after a few seconds, she heard a door opening deep in the interior of the house accompanied by the sound of urgent footsteps. The door was flung open and a slightly dishevelled Father Malone stood there, blinking almost comically in the sunlight.

‘DC McLeod … er, sorry to keep you waiting. No housekeeper, sometimes I forget …’

‘No worries,’ Mhairi said, smiling at the young man, who resembled a badger woken up from hibernation too soon.

‘Come in,’ he said, throwing wide the heavy wooden door and causing it to creak alarmingly on its hinges.

Father Malone rushed ahead of her into the same room they had been shown a few nights ago. He threw open the curtains and whisked away a pile of newspapers from an upright chair, gesturing for her to sit down. The carpet looked like it could do with a good hoover.

‘Aren’t there any ladies of the parish who could come in to give you a helping hand until Mary is able to return?’ she asked.

‘Too many, that’s the trouble. If I let one in to help they’ll all want to do it and then it’ll be …’

‘Needlepoint at dawn,’ Mhairi finished with a grin.

‘Something like that,’ he said.

Mhairi fished in her handbag and brought out the two evidence bags that Farrell had given her. Father Malone saw what she was doing and started to look anxious.

‘Do you recognize this rosary?’ Mhairi asked, passing the sealed bag to him.

The priest looked at it carefully then handed it back.

‘No, it’s not one I’ve seen him use.’

‘How about this little ornament?’

She handed him the other bag, feeling nauseous again as she remembered where it had been found.

Again, Father Malone stared at the item intently through the plastic.

‘It looks like it might have been removed from a nativity scene but I can’t say it’s ringing any bells with me, I’m afraid,’ he said.

‘If you need any religious items, like rosaries or statues, can you tell me where you would get them?’ asked Mhairi.

‘Well, there’s a place in Edinburgh I know we have used. Let me just look up the address.’

He retrieved a battered address book from the old-fashioned sideboard and flicked through the pages. He then wrote an address down and handed it to her.

Suddenly, the door-knocker sounded with a thump causing them both to jump. Father Malone went to answer it, and Mhairi put the items carefully back in the zip compartment of her bag before standing up and following him out.

Father Malone was having a whispered conversation with a craggily handsome man in jeans and a fisherman’s sweater. As she approached silently there was something in their body language that made her feel uncomfortable, as though she was intruding.

‘Look, it’s not a good time. The police are here. You have to leave …’

‘Don’t mind me,’ Mhairi said behind them.

Father Malone sprang back from the door as though he’d been stung, his face flushing deep red. An expression of annoyance flitted across the other man’s face but Mhairi couldn’t tell if he was annoyed with the priest or annoyed with her for interrupting them.

Mhairi thanked Father Malone and walked down the steps, resisting the impulse to look back and see if the man had been ushered inside. What was that all about, she wondered?

Back at the station, Mhairi checked in the evidence bags. As she went past DCI Lind’s office he glanced up and beckoned to her to come in. Although she’d been pulled up by him a few times, she had a lot of respect for the DCI. He always strived to be fair and, unlike a lot of the blokes in the station, he had never tried to come on to her.

‘Come in, Mhairi,’ he said. ‘How was the post-mortem?’

‘Absolutely gross, Sir.’

‘It’s something you never quite get used to, which is probably a good thing. Anything useful come out of it?’

‘It looks like he was strangled with some rosary beads. He also had his head bashed in, er, I mean a depressed fracture of the skull, but that wasn’t the cause of death, Sir.’

‘What else?’

Mhairi’s face screwed up in remembered disgust.

‘They pulled out an ornament of a baby from his digestive tract, Sir.’

Lind raised his eyebrows.

‘And I thought this case couldn’t get any weirder,’ he sighed.

Mhairi returned to her desk, called up the digital images of the rosary and religious icon she had taken earlier, and emailed a query to the address Father Malone had given her. This case was really freaking her out. She’d never known anything like it.

Farrell sat behind his desk and pulled an overflowing basket towards him. So much for the concept of a paperless office. The reports on his desk were multiplying like bacteria. He pulled a sheaf of brightly coloured charts that had been sent up by the civilian intelligence analyst towards him. Quickly scanning them, he soon realized that they told him nothing new. There simply wasn’t enough data available yet to pinpoint any specific patterns forming. He took a sip of the mud-coloured coffee he had grabbed on the way up and pulled a face. Pure gut rot. He glugged it down anyway. Needs must. If they could uncover a motive in this case it might lead to the killer. What had the dead priest done that had been so heinous it had led to his murder? Could he have interfered with somebody’s kid? Farrell thought back to his own years as an altar boy and couldn’t recall a single instance when Boyd’s conduct had made him uneasy. It didn’t fit the mode of killing either. An outraged father would have charged at Boyd like a bull at a gate. There would have been no finessing at the crime scene. Unless, of course, the killer had dressed it up to look like a nut job to throw them off the scent. It was no good. He was going round in circles. Glancing at his watch, Farrell realized it was nearly time for the final briefing of the day.