Book of Souls Read Free Page B

doesn’t it lad.’ Detective Inspector Malcolm ‘Mac’ Duff is shrugging off his coat. Detective Sergeant Needham has already thrown his down onto an old chair sitting by the door.
    ‘Welcome to my not-so-humble home,’ Needham says. ‘Or should I say my father’s home.’
    ‘I didn’t think they paid duty sergeants that much.’
    Needham laughs. ‘Don’t go getting any ideas, constable. They don’t. This place has been in the family for generations. Here, let me give you the two-cents tour.’
    It reminds him of his grandmother’s house, up in Braid Hills, though in truth it makes that place look small by comparison. Still, there’s that air of a home waiting to be filled. Most of the rooms are cold, damp, unused. Only the kitchen, with its vast range oven and long wooden table, has any real warmth to it. The tour ends there with the inevitable mugs of tea.
    ‘You’ll be wondering why we’ve all come out here, lad.’Duff has taken the head of the table, even though it’s not his house. ‘Needy’s got the space, and no wife or children to go upsetting. You know how the station can get; so busy you can’t hardly hear yourself think sometimes. So we use this place as a sort of unofficial incident room.’
    ‘For what?’ He asks the question even though he suspects he knows the answer.
    ‘The Christmas Killer’s what, lad.’ Needham stares at him with an unusual intensity. ‘Eight years we’ve been trying to catch the bastard. You impressed everyone with the way you solved the Probert case. Now’s your chance to have a crack at something really difficult.’

6
    The sound of laughter echoed out of the propped-open door to the CIB room. McLean paused outside, his ears still ringing from the bollocking he’d got from Duguid. It was always worse when you knew you’d fucked up and deserved the rant. Hard to ever accept that the DCI was right. Jovial company wasn’t what he needed right now, but neither was the prospect of folding himself into his tiny office and getting to work on the overtime rosters or whatever else the duty sergeant had chosen to heap on the most junior DI in the station. He glanced at his watch; too early to call it a day? Probably, even if it had started long before dawn. Well, there were plenty of other cases demanding his attention, that at least had been the truth. And what better place to start than down in the archives, far away from anyone who might remind him of his failings.
    The station was an architectural monstrosity, designed by a committee and thrown up in the seventies when the fashion for unadorned concrete was all the rage. Like much of Edinburgh, it had been built on top of something else, in this case an earlier, Victorian police station, and the basement levels were a different place altogether. Descending the old stone steps, worn in the middle by countless criminal feet, was like passing into another world. The walls were brick, painted with countless layersof thick white and laid in perfect vaulted arches by master craftsmen who had obviously taken pride in their work. The rooms down here were small, windowless. Cells from an earlier age. No longer deemed safe for housing prisoners, they had been co-opted into storage space for evidence and old files. One had been converted into an office, and it was from here that Sergeant John Needham ruled his underground realm.
    McLean approached the doorway quietly, not out of any desire for stealth so much as because the place demanded silence, a bit like a cathedral, or a crypt. As he came closer, he saw that the office door was open, the light on, and from inside came the unmistakable noise of a man trying very hard not to cry. McLean peered around the doorway to see the sergeant hunched over his desk, back to the door, shaking gently.
    ‘Needy?’
    The sobbing stopped as if a switch had been flipped. Sergeant Needham looked up, rubbing at his cheeks as he tried to focus through raw-red eyes.
    ‘Who –? Oh,