What Will Burn by James Oswald (ebook reader web .txt) 📕

called Elmwood’s phone. Now that Harrison had pointed it out, he too could hear it ringing, the tinny noise echoing in the large hall. He let it carry on until it kicked into voicemail, then hung up. A few metres along the pavement, a gate in the iron railings opened on to steps leading down to the basement. It reminded him curiously of the tiny flat where Steve Whitaker had met his grisly end, only the light well here was considerably larger. There was no entrance to the house, only three windows all with shutters closed. Dead leaves littered the flagstones as he walked from one end to the other, and as he trod through them the rustling noise brought to mind winters past, heavy coats, woolly hats and bonfires.

Bonfires. McLean sniffed the air, catching the faintest whiff of smoke. Or was he imagining it? He kicked up a few of the leaves, in case it was their decay that he could smell. But that was a different scent. He walked to the nearest window, felt the glass for warmth. An old wooden sash, it wobbled slightly as he pressed against it, but it was firmly locked against intruders. As he turned away, he thought he heard a noise, faint as a whisper, like the cracking of dry branches underfoot. He stopped, straining to hear anything over the omnipresent dull roar of the city. Even muffled by the haar, it still made focusing on any particular sound all but impossible. Had he imagined it? The night was certainly one for playing on his fears.

‘Twenty minutes is the best they can do,’ Harrison said as McLean emerged from the steps back out on to pavement level. ‘Lucky one of the secretaries was working late.’

‘Call in a squad car with a big red key anyway.’ McLean climbed the steps to the front door again, bent to the letter box and pushed it open. Beyond, he could see only the dark shapes in the unlit front porch. The inner door was closed, only blackness beyond. Once more he thought he heard something, turned his head to listen through the opening. His fingers slipped and with a clatter, the flap sprung shut. The noise rang loud, blotting out anything else.

‘Can you hear movement inside?’

Harrison pressed her head to the door, paused for a few seconds as McLean’s hearing slowly came back. When she stood up again, she shook her head.

‘Quiet as the grave. But this place gives me the creeps anyway. Of all the houses in the city she could have chosen to live in, why pick this one?’

McLean knew what the detective sergeant meant. Harrison had almost died in this house, touched by something neither of them were quite prepared to accept could exist. What other trouble awaited them within its forbidding stone walls?

‘Here.’ He pulled out his car keys and handed them over. ‘You go wait for back-up or this late working secretary to turn up.’

Harrison looked at him suspiciously, but took the keys anyway. ‘What are you going to do, sir?’

‘There’s a mews entrance up the way.’ McLean pointed to a gap in the terrace further along the street. ‘I’m going to have a quick look around the back.’

‘Shouldn’t we both wait?’ Harrison’s tone wasn’t exactly hectoring, but for some reason it put McLean in mind of his grandmother when she’d been less than impressed with something he’d done. He knew he should heed her advice.

‘Just going to have a quick look,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

The haar that had drifted in off the Firth of Forth thickened as McLean made his way along the street and down the narrow entrance to the mews. There were no street lamps here, and the few lit windows at the backs of the houses added an ethereal glow that only served to deepen the shadows. The air hung heavy with the scent of damp stone, oily cobbles and leaf mould, and somewhere on the edge of it all, he caught the smell of wood smoke. Most likely someone nearby had a wood burning stove in their house. This part of the city was meant to be a smoke free zone, but that didn’t necessarily mean the local residents all followed the rules. These were wealthy people, and experience had taught him they were the ones most likely to ignore petty things like not burning logs brought down from their second home in the countryside. Unless it was someone else doing it, in which case they would complain loudly to the authorities.

It was hard to tell from the back lane which of the houses was which. The upper storeys were lost in the swirling fog, and the squat coach houses of the mews further obscured the view. McLean counted garage doors until he thought he had the right one for the chief superintendent’s address. Alongside the incongruously modern garage door, a wooden door was set into the garden wall. It should have been locked, and yet when he tried the handle, it clicked and the door swung open. Mist billowed through the opening like smoke, and brought with it that tantalising scent again.

He pulled out his phone, brought up Harrison’s number, and dialled as he walked through the back garden towards the house itself. The call went straight to voicemail, which probably meant the detective sergeant was talking to someone else. It should have logged his attempt, possibly even notified her he had called, so he rang off and put his phone away. She’d ring him back as soon as she was done.

Unlike the front door, the back door opened at ground level to a paved area. In the pitch black McLean stumbled on an uneven flagstone, almost falling arse over tit. He reached out to steady himself on the frame, and felt the door itself give slightly. Not just open, but ajar. Had the chief superintendent fled? Left even her phone behind so that she couldn’t be traced? Gone in