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

designs. Then the officers kicked close to the lock, only using front kicks. We were trained to use the heel of our foot for the motion. An embedded crunch and movement of the door signified our cues.

“For crying out loud,” I complained to the officers disappearing from view, without checking for danger inside first. House calls were the most threat to everyday officers. The residents know the street, know the exits and set up exotic plans to fight back.

A billowing, familiar scent whacked me in the face. Alcohol and a lot of it. From Paul’s entrance hall, McCall spoke hurriedly on the phone to the ambulance service.

Skewwiff frames adorned his dirty walls, Paul present in nearly all of them. A beautiful woman hugged him tightly in some, and in others, they shared romantic kisses. Sunsets and parks surrounded the backdrops, and in a few, the church. Presumably, this was Paul’s late wife, Linda.

A figure lay in the corner of the living room, the one which McCall spotted from outside. I immediately recognised the shoes as Paul’s. They were stomping boots coated in a thick layer of mud. His body stayed dead still, and that’s exactly what I feared he was. The officers surrounded him like bees to honey, doing some form of emergency procedures on Paul Roberts. They had far more experience than me, in that regard, so I let them go at it.

Thousands more pictures littered his living room walls, though these kinds were not beautifully framed. Instead, these stuck to the wall with sellotape. Messy and downright hideous. Hand-drawn triangles were scribbled into the plastered ceilings, and notepads laid opened at random, filled to the brim with ink drawings. From a glance, they were occult scribbles and momentos, drawings of creatures, and lists of nonsense which nobody but the writer could decipher.

Not a typical priest in the slightest. His entire house suggested rebirth in some form. The man who married Linda in those photographs was entirely different, worlds apart. Sensible and average. Now we were left to deal with an erratic, converted Satanist who transferred to the dark side instead of peace and tranquillity.

“Paul, can you hear us?” one of the officers urged. “Paul Roberts? Stay with us, Paul, keep breathing.”

Packets of emptied tablets resided close nearby to explain the cause of Paul’s state. I stooped low to pick up a package and read their labels. Paroxetine. Although he showed no sign of consciousness, the man’s face seemed unusually alive. Strands of broken, dead hair flicked unevenly to frame his uneven face shape. His regular frown lines were magnified by the dozen, leaving lines covering the bridge of Paul's nose, around his eyelashes and even the very corner of the mouth area. Even the colouration stayed similar, extremely pink and translucent. He can’t have been unconscious long.

“What do these do?” I questioned nobody in particular.

“No idea,” McCall replied. She huffed at the sight of Paul Roberts, praying he’s not gone too far to recover. We had burning questions. “Ambulance is on their way.”

There was not much McCall or me could do to help the officers out without getting in the way. We only hoped Paul would survive long enough to open up to us, as dehumanising as it sounds.

“Geez.” McCall slowly paced around the dirty, uncleaned room, overfilled from junk and pieces of paper. As well as pentagrams scrawled and scratched into his wall, there was also scribbles of sentences that spoke no sense. She rifled through his notebooks noisily and even touched a few piles of wooden junk scraps, getting a sense of how Paul Roberts lived his sinister life.

“Finlay?” McCall’s lower register caught my attention, and she didn’t even glance away from the sight she stared at. I walked over, avoiding a lot of rubbish on the floor and managed to miss an especially grim chunk of mould. The house, though picture perfect on the outside, held a lot of secrets inside.

In the gloomy mist, my own eyes took a while longer to adjust. When they did, my body tingled from a mixture of fear and strange relief. Underneath the half-ruined sofa and situated in the gap between floor and furniture, the tip of a sharp knife pointed out. Quickly hidden by a careless man, stashed not too dissimilar from Jack Harper’s efforts. It didn’t take a brilliant detective to notice the dried blood pattern staining the sharp point.

“If that’s our murder weapon, we need to get this to forensics. I’ll tell DCI Campbell to send them our way,” I noted duly, touching nothing else in fear of staining the scene.

“He didn’t wash it away then.” McCall’s voice held a mixture of concern and excitement. If the knife held blood from our victims and prints, we might have solved the case.

“Bloody hell,” I said in disbelief under my breath, still staying with Paul for the time being. Our relief was shared in peace before the rush, and streams of medical professionals began. Moments of extreme euphoria, of adrenaline made all the strife’s of our occupation worthwhile.

“Looks like you got him, Finlay,” McCall’s face tilted to meet mine, euphoric from relief but also undertones of excitement. We were exhausted, that much was true.

“I’m not counting my lucky stars just yet, McCall. I learnt that from last time. Anything could happen.” I swallowed thickly, a red band of pain rising in my lungs. This case felt within reach but also threatened to be another letdown. “And I didn’t do it alone.”

I thrust my bruised hands into my pockets, awkwardly. McCall stared at the weapon, unable to stop staring at it.

“There was Mandy and the team.” I overheard the officers giving Paul Roberts CPR in vain. “And you.”

Paul put into perspective how fragile and easy life could be taken away. From something as simple as an accident, or deliberate attempts to take someone’s life.

“You’re tired. There’s no way Finlay would be saying this on a normal day.” McCall nudged me exhaustedly, leaving me to offer the officers help until