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

to catch up on the day’s lack of progress in the Cecily Slater case. He closed his office door behind him as he left, confident there’d be more work waiting for him the next day.

DS Harrison and DC Stringer were busy at one of the workstations when McLean entered the incident room. Harrison’s sixth sense must have kicked in, as she looked up almost immediately. He crossed the room to join the two of them, not failing to notice how quiet everything was. Little point in having a briefing when there was no measurable progress.

‘I’m guessing we’ve nothing more on Cecily Slater,’ McLean said. ‘You dig up anything useful on our two dead men yet?’

Harrison glanced back at the screen. ‘Not a lot, sir. Plenty of calls made and messages left, but it’s not easy finding the right people to speak to. Whitaker’s wife confirmed Fielding was his lawyer for the divorce. She reckoned they were maybe planning an appeal or something, too.’

‘Remind me what the grounds were for that one?’

‘She found child abuse photos on his computer, caught him doing something to his own daughter. Never got the full story of what, and I don’t really want to know. The only reason he wasn’t locked up was because Fielding managed to argue she could have planted the images herself. And the accusation of abuse was his word against hers. Still enough to deny him access, though.’

McLean compared Harrison’s words with what they’d learned about Galloway earlier. The parallels were striking. ‘What about the estate agent, Purefoy?’

‘Still trying to track down the full details, sir.’ Harrison shook her head slowly. ‘Divorced two years ago. Lost access to his kids. Ex-wife claimed he’d been mentally abusing her for years. Jay spoke to his current girlfriend who wasn’t exactly sad he’d died. Said, and I quote, “He could be lovely at times, but he also scared the crap out of me.” She also said she sometimes worried he’d hunt her down and kill her if she ever left him.’

McLean recalled the post-mortem report, Cadwallader’s veiled suspicions. ‘Could she have killed him?’ he asked.

‘She wasn’t in town when it happened,’ Stringer said. ‘Not sure she could have done something like that anyway. She’s a tiny thing.’

‘What about Fielding? He have any connection to Purefoy?’

‘Nothing we’ve managed to establish so far.’ Harrison finally noticed she was fiddling with her phone, held it up and stared at the blank screen. ‘I’m still waiting on a couple of calls, but Fielding wasn’t involved in Purefoy’s divorce. There was one thing, though.’

‘Aye?’

‘It was about Izzy DeVilliers, see? I was at the hotel not long after she and her fellow protesters were arrested. We had a complaint from Fielding. Me and Lofty landed the short straw of going to placate him.’ Harrison looked down at her phone again, but only to avoid McLean’s gaze this time. ‘That might have had something to do with why I did my best to get Izzy off. I’d have done the same for the rest of them if I could, but I heard the charges were dropped anyway.’

‘Is this going somewhere?’ McLean asked.

Harrison’s head jerked up as if she’d been poked. ‘Sorry, sir. Aye. It was when we were at the hotel being lectured by Fielding. Fair made my skin crawl to be in the same room as him. Breathing the same air. Euch.’ She shuddered. ‘But he was with a bunch of blokes who’d been at his conference or whatever the hell it was he was doing. A seminar? I don’t know. Anyway, I didn’t really pay that much attention to them at the time. But when I saw Purefoy at the building site? See, I was sure I’d seen him somewhere before, and recently. It’d been bugging me for days and then going over his file just now it suddenly clicked. He was there, at the hotel, with Fielding and a bunch of others.’

McLean was about to ask whether or not Harrison was sure, but he stopped himself. She was a trained detective, and good at it. She noticed things, remembered people. ‘We’ll need some kind of corroboration,’ he said.

‘I’ve asked the hotel if they’ve still got CCTV from the event. You never know, might get lucky.’

‘What are you thinking then? With these connections to Fielding.’

‘That’s what I can’t work out, sir. These three deaths are weird but not obviously murder. Galloway’s probably overdosed on his painkillers, Whitaker dropped a fag in his lap when he was pished, and Purefoy just got unlucky.’

‘You don’t believe that any more than I do.’

‘No, you’re right. It stinks something rotten. We going to do something about it?’

‘Not sure what we can, right now. Keep on the hotel for that footage. Maybe see if you can get hold of a guest list for the conference. If Galloway and Whitaker were there too, then I’ll take it up higher, see if McIntyre reckons it’s worth looking into. Meantime we need to concentrate on Cecily Slater, right?’ McLean waved a hand at the general lack of busyness in the room. He was only half joking when he added, ‘And if you can find a link between her and Fielding, then we’re all set.’

40

It had been a while since McLean had visited Madame Rose at her house on Leith Walk. It wasn’t as if he had been consciously avoiding her, or at least that was what he told himself. He didn’t mind her company, if in small doses. But more often than not he preferred solitude to being swept into her powerful orbit.

The house seemed unchanged, much as it had probably been unchanged in over a century. A parking space became available opposite her front gate as he pulled into the street and approached it. No charging stations here, but Emma’s little Renault still had enough electricity in it to take him to Fife, should madness possess him. Plenty to get home later.

As he crossed the small courtyard and climbed the stone steps to the door, he