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

like. What he couldn’t understand was why he needed to be involved. It was the kind of thing management did, and that meant uniformed officers of superintendent rank and above. Not some recently demoted detective inspector in the unglamorous world of Edinburgh CID. Elmwood’s excuse that he was, to put it bluntly, famous, held some water. And he was part of the city’s old guard, however much he disliked the idea. It was still a nuisance he could have done without.

Shaking his head at the stupidity of it all, he turned back to the conference table. As he slid his and the chief superintendent’s chairs back into line with all the others, he noticed the box that he and Harrison had found in Cecily Slater’s cupboard. He’d put it on the table, intending to go through it more carefully once he’d finished sorting out all the overtime sheets for the week. It would probably have been quicker simply to hand the whole thing over to one of the new DCs to leaf through, except that they were all busy, and the box didn’t seem to be particularly relevant to the investigation. McLean didn’t quite know why he was drawn to it. There wasn’t much chance they’d find a clue in among the ancient papers, but they called to him all the same.

He picked up the box, looking around almost guiltily as he saw the word written on the lid again. Burntwoods. A big old house somewhere near Carnoustie in Angus. He wanted to look it up, but there was too much work to do. Leaving the box on the table was no good; it would continue to sing its siren song and soon enough he’d give in. So he tucked it under one arm and strode out of the room.

A few uniformed officers offered greetings or nodded politely as he tramped down the stairs from the third floor to the basement. It always surprised McLean how much the atmosphere of the station changed as he descended from the ugly concrete building thrown up in the eighties and into the older, arched-stone levels of the Victorian station that had stood on this site before. Why they hadn’t dug everything up and started from scratch, he’d never been able to find out. Not that he’d tried all that hard. It remained one of life’s little mysteries.

The Cold Case Unit had its centre of operations in what had once either been an evidence locker or a drunk tank, depending on which grizzled old sergeant you asked. Quite probably it had been both, but now it was little more than a file store with a few desks shoehorned into whatever available space could be found. The only natural light in the room came from a lightwell at one end that opened up on to the car park at the rear of the building. At the other end, ex-Detective Superintendent Charles Duguid’s desk sat empty.

McLean glanced quickly at his watch, surprised to find that it was, indeed, late enough for Dagwood to have gone home. As far as he was aware, the CCU weren’t deep into any particular case at the moment, but were working their slow and methodical way through an altogether far too long list of unsolved murders.

‘You just missed him.’ A familiar voice piped up from the shadows, and moments later Grumpy Bob stepped into the light, clasping a thick archive file in both hands. He shuffled over to his desk and gave the file a theatrical blow across its surface, as if to remove dust, before dropping it down on to the desktop.

‘Afternoon, Bob. Didn’t realise you were back already.’

Grumpy Bob lowered himself into his seat with a gentle ‘oof’ noise, much like the one McLean found himself making whenever he bent down to pick something up off the floor these days.

‘I’ve been back the better part of two months, Tony. Not as if I had anything much better to do, and this . . .’ he held up the dusty folder ‘. . . beats sitting at home watching the telly until it’s time to go to the pub.’

‘Guess I’m the one who’s been out of the loop, then. You settling in here OK?’

‘My natural element. And I can pretty much keep my own hours. Dagwood’s not so bad a boss now he’s not having to balance budgets and deal with too many idiots. As retirements go, it’s worked out fine.’ Grumpy Bob dropped the folder, leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head and his feet up on the desk. Then he seemed to notice the box tucked under McLean’s arm. ‘Except when people bring me unexpected gifts.’

‘This? I don’t know what you mean.’ McLean placed the box on Grumpy Bob’s desk as the ex-detective sergeant removed his feet from the suspiciously clean surface and leaned forward for a better look.

‘Burntwoods. Why does that name ring a bell?’ He pulled the lid off and lifted out a handful of papers from inside.

‘Big old house outside Arbroath or Carnoustie or somewhere. Don’t think it’s there any more, but for some reason or other our murder victim, Cecily Slater, spent time there as a child. Found that in her house.’

‘The fire in the woods? Aye, heard about that. Not a nice way to go.’ Grumpy Bob pulled a grubby pair of reading spectacles out of his breast pocket and slid them on before leafing slowly through the papers. He stopped when he reached the first black and white photograph of the mansion, let out a low whistle.

‘It’s probably nothing to do with the case at all. Just something the old lady kept as a memento of childhood. I can’t really justify giving it to the team to research, but . . .’

‘You thought I might have some time on my hands?’ Grumpy Bob arched an eyebrow, then grinned. ‘Aye, I’ll have a look through it all. It’ll cost you, mind.’

‘How does a pint up front sound? More when I see the work.’

Grumpy Bob was on his feet