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

‘Just something peripheral to the old lady we found dead out in the woods on the Bairnfather Estate. He might not have had time to look at it yet if you’ve got him working something else.’

Duguid polished his spectacles with a red spotted handkerchief for a moment, his expression impossible to read as ever. ‘Heard about them knocking you back to DI. I’m guessing you’re not too upset about that.’

‘Means I can pass the paperwork further up the line. Spend more time actually trying to solve cases rather than telling other folk what to do, then telling them again when they do it wrong.’

‘Ha. As if you’d ever delegate anything important, McLean.’ Duguid leaned to one side and retrieved something from the floor. When he placed it on his desk, McLean recognised the box he’d found under the stairs in Cecily Slater’s cottage.

‘Grumpy Bob, on the other hand, has no such qualms.’ The ex-detective superintendent lifted the lid off and took out the top few items. McLean stepped forward for a better look as Duguid laid them out on the desktop. There were a couple of photographs of the house, one black and white, one colour; a series of letters written in neat but tiny handwriting; some newspaper cuttings, their paper yellow and brittle with age; and a small leather-bound diary with the date 1943 tooled in gold on the cover.

‘It tells an intriguing tale.’ Duguid picked up the black and white photograph. It wasn’t one McLean had seen in his cursory look through the box, but now he studied it he could see that the house was only a background feature. The foreground consisted of a group photograph, slightly blurred, of perhaps fifty girls lined up in rows. They varied in age considerably, the youngest sitting cross-legged at the front, the oldest on chairs directly behind them and a third row of teenagers standing at the back.

‘Burntwoods was a boarding school?’ McLean took the photograph and held it close, peering at the faces as if he might somehow recognise a young Cecily Slater even if the focus meant most of the features were blurred.

‘Not exactly, no. It belonged to a lady called Mirriam Downham. You’ll remember the Downham Trust?’

It took him a moment to make the connection, coming as it did rather out of context. ‘The shelter for abused women?’ McLean thought back to the last time he’d worked with Vice, or the Sexual Crimes Unit if he was being formal. The Downham Trust had been occasionally helpful in getting sex workers away from violent and manipulative pimps, battered women away from their abusive husbands and boyfriends. They ran a women’s refuge south of the city, one of many dotted around the whole of the UK.

‘That’s part of what they do, and apparently it all began at Burntwoods. From this photograph it’s clear that they took in children as well, gave them some kind of formal education. According to this, though . . .’ Duguid fished out one of the newspaper cuttings ‘. . . the house burned down in 1930 and was never rebuilt.’

‘Really – 1930? But this photograph.’ McLean looked at it again, trying to find any clue that it had been taken in the forties, when Cecily Slater was supposed to have been there. Turning it over, he saw the neatly inked words ‘Burntwoods – Summer 1943’ in a stamped box that included the name of the firm of photographers, Carnegie and Sons, Dundee.

‘That’s a mystery in itself, although there’s no date on that newspaper clipping so it’s possible they rebuilt after all. Certain, I’d say, given the other photograph.’ Duguid passed it over, and McLean saw the house in colour this time, albeit faded like the few pictures he had of his parents. Like those, this one seemed to have been taken by an amateur, and it showed a young woman posing in the foreground. It was difficult to be certain, but he’d have put her age in the mid-twenties. He flipped the picture over to see the words ‘Cecily – August 1956’ written in heavy pencil.

‘Cecily Slater would have been what . . . twenty-five then, so that makes sense. I expect she went back to see someone, maybe? What about that?’ McLean pointed at the diary.

‘That?’ Duguid picked up the slim notebook and flipped through the pages, then handed it to McLean. ‘I’ve neither the time nor the inclination to read the daily outpourings of a twelve-year-old girl. Bob’s had a wee look, but the writing’s tiny and it’s hard to make much sense of any of it. Some’s written in a kind of code, too. There’s more in the box here. Every year from ’thirty-eight to ’forty-six. They’re all Cecily Slater’s, and they all have Burntwoods written in the front cover as the address.’

‘Eight years. And she was still going back ten years later. She must have had some attachment to the place. Might explain why she preferred to live alone, out in the woods. Never married or had kids. All the locals thought she was a witch.’

‘You think she was abused? As a child?’

McLean shrugged. ‘It’s possible. Maybe I’ll ask Lord Bairnfather when I interview him.’

Duguid grinned, not something McLean could ever recall having seen before.

‘Now that’s one interview I’d like to sit in on.’

24

‘Where the hell have you been, Tony? We’ve been looking for you everywhere.’

Detective Superintendent Jayne McIntyre stood outside the door to McLean’s office as he approached along the corridor, somewhat giving the lie to her claim. Hands on hips like a fishwife, the glare she cast in his direction was more than enough warning for him not to point that out.

‘Down in the basement talking to Dagwood. CCU’s still my responsibility, as far as I’m aware. I asked Grumpy Bob to do some digging in the archives for me. Stuff we found out at Cecily Slater’s cottage.’

McIntyre narrowed her eyes. ‘Trying to shift the investigation costs on to another budget? If I didn’t know better,