The Devil's Due: A Cooper and McCall Scottish Crime Thriller by Ramsay Sinclair (nonfiction book recommendations TXT) 📕

We ignored any last-minute requests for us to take on a load more paperwork when we got back. Sometimes, if we didn’t stand up for ourselves at the station, everyone would lumber us with their dirty work.

We were two determined souls on a mission, locking ourselves away into my personal office. I found a spare chair from the night staff and carried it through for McCall to relax on. She’d located a bunch of randomly baked cookies from a night watch officer that they’d baked their day off.

“Well, it’s all here. Everything I found.” I rifled through the bible again as she crunched cookie crumbs everywhere. A few spare pieces decorated her lips, but her pink tongue darted out to lick them away. I sighed and pointedly brushed the crumbs off my desk. “One bible and post-it note plus one large ring.” It clunked in its bag against the tabletop.

“Fake. Look at the rust.” McCall frowned in disgust. “Tacky if you ask me.”

“I wasn’t asking for your fashion opinion,” I snapped. “It was at the bottom of Laura’s bin.”

She stopped eating, dug out a pair of gloves, and slipped them on. Properly prepared, she took the bag from me and pulled the ring out to inspect it.

“Heavy,” she observed. “And huge.” Her eyes widened. She slid it on, and it hung loose on her first finger, the second, and the third. Finally, she tried it on her thumb, and even then, it still didn’t fit. I imagined it would even be loose on my larger fingers. “Either the person who this ring belongs to had huge hands, or their ring didn’t fit.”

McCall placed the ring carefully upon the desk again, sitting atop the evidence bag that had contained it. It was so dull that it wouldn’t even shine directly below a light source.

“What’s that symbol mean?” She pointed to where the front of the ring flattened with a risen circle atop the surface. The inside of the circle showed an upside-down triangle which formed into two squiggly lines of sorts, an unusual pattern.

“No clue. Never seen one before. Perhaps we could get forensics to take a look or… a ring expert,” I spoke slowly, not even sure where we’d find one of those.

“Alright.” McCall drooped down in her seat and lay her elbows down on my desk. From my angle, she may as well have been asleep. “What else did we get?” she mumbled, eye to eye with the ring.

“Let’s see. We know the boot print is a size nine, and our killer escaped through the window. He forced Laura down, tied her hands, and cut her wrists. Why, I still don’t know.” I rifled through my memories of the scene for my own sake too. “The post-it note in the bible has the same number written on it that was carved into Gavin’s arm.”

“Nine or a six?” McCall asked sleepily. “You could always check the sticky strip on the post-it note. Nobody writes upside down on one, that’s just wrong.” She had a point, not that it was a one hundred per cent sure thing.

“Well, it’s likely a six then, though we can’t be sure, even with that.” My hand trembled slightly, locating page six in the bible. “Maybe it’s correlating to a passage. Or page… or a chapter,” I spoke, changing pace with my eye movements. “That’s whittled down our searches by a--”

McCall hunched over my desk, entirely exhausted. Her head lay in the crook of her arm, nested comfortably, fast asleep and snoring gently. A streak of makeup splattered her cheek, a result of wiping her face on her shirt accidentally. She’d be drooling soon.

A daft grin decorated my lips, finding the situation extremely amusing. We weren’t as young as we used to be and staying up late didn’t seem to be a viable option as of late.

Conscious of the lamplight shining directly onto McCall’s face, I flicked the switch off, and the dreary office plunged into darkness. My original intention was to use my phone torch instead, but I soon relaxed far too much. Before I realised what had happened, my own body sunk down as I allowed both eyelids to close.

We tossed and turned uncomfortably throughout the night, sighing dreamily in unison, the two sleeping detectives.

24

“DI Cooper. DS McCall. Get your sorry arses up. We’ve got work to do,” I jumped awake at DCI Campbell’s harsh tone and ended up banging my head on the same lamp I switched off late last night. The metal bar clanged loudly on my skull, and I grabbed my head in a sorry state.

“Ouch,” I groaned loudly, not realising I’d mimicked McCall’s sleeping pattern during the night. I had only intended to take a quick nap, not fall into a coma induced state all night long.

“Hm?” McCall groggily said, not entirely with the program yet. I brought my arm off the desk at the same time and accidentally knocked McCall’s cold tea over. It spilt across the desk Laura’s retrieved bible. Sods Law. Exhibiting an incredible range of reflexes, I swiped the liquid away before too much damage could be caused. I couldn’t help the tea soaking a few filled out document forms though, but nothing which couldn’t be rewritten.

McCall’s eyes bore into my body, then lifted her arm for me to see. Her entire shirt arm had been covered in my brown tea liquid.

“Did you not hear what I said?” DCI Campbell shook his head at the sorry sight of his team leaders, unprepared and unorganised. In the early morning light, which barely escaped through the general office windows, a bunch of wispy hair placed themselves upright on DCI Campbell’s scalp. “I’d expect this from those bunch of poofters out there, not you two.”

Both me and McCall winced at his choice of language. At times, DCI Campbell forgot we had moved into the twenty-first century, where terms like those weren’t appreciated anymore. Our haze of sleep vexed us from