A Song for the Dying. Stuart MacBride

Hutcheson? Bloody hell… What happened?’

      ‘Henderson. Not Hutcheson.’

      ‘Of course, yes, sorry.’ She knelt on the ground beside me. Took my head in her hands and stared into my eyes. ‘Are you experiencing any nausea? Dizziness? Ringing in the ears? Headache? Confusion?’

      I grabbed her hand. ‘Who are you?’

      ‘OK, that’s a yes on the confusion. It’s Ruth. Ruth Laughlin? Laura Strachan’s friend? You came to the flat after they found her, remember? Talked to all the nurses?’

      ‘She’s still alive.’

      ‘Of course she is. They let her out of hospital two weeks ago.’ Ruth shifted herself around, placed one hand on the back of my neck, pressed her other against my chest. ‘Come on, let’s get you lying down… There we go. You know, you’re lucky I was here. Concussion can be very serious.’

      A distorted voice burbled from the station’s loudspeakers. The words echoing back and forth until they were little more than a smear of syllables fighting against the song. ‘… the train now departing from platform six is the one seventeen to Edinburgh Waverley…’

      For God’s sake – why didn’t Rhona tell them to cancel the trains? Fifteen minutes from now he could be in Arbroath. Dundee in twenty-five.

      Not too late – call Control and get patrol cars to the nearest station. Have the bastard picked up right off the train…

      ‘Inspector Henderson?’

      Bloody fingers wouldn’t work, Airwave handset was all slippery…

      The wail of sirens cut through the end of the announcement. That would be the backup I called for. Late as always.

      ‘Hello?’

      Yellow and black dots bloomed in the siren’s wake, growing, spreading, blanking out the glass ceiling behind Ruth Laughlin’s head as she frowned down at me. A halo of darkness.

      ‘Inspector Henderson? Can you hear me? I want you to squeeze my hand as hard as you can … Inspector Henderson? Hello?’

Monday

       9

      I eased Alice’s door closed and crossed the corridor to my own room. It was small, but functional, just big enough for the double bed against one wall, the chest of drawers, and wardrobe. A pair of dark-blue curtains that still had the same creases as the ones in the lounge. A cheap-looking alarm-clock radio on the floor beside the bed, glowing 00:15 at me.

      My cell was bigger than this.

      An old-fashioned brass key sat on top of the duvet, with a cardboard tag attached to it by a red ribbon. Spidery handwriting: ‘THOUGHT THIS MIGHT COME IN HANDY’.

      Ah…

      I turned. There was a lock fitted to the bedroom door, specks of sawdust dandruffing the floorboards underneath it along with a few quavers of shaved wood. The key slipped right in, and when I turned it, the bolt slid home with a clack.

      After two years inside, it was strange how comforting that sound was. Especially combined with the muffled rattle of Shifty’s snores coming through the wall.

      The laptop went on the bed, while I stripped, folded all my clothes, and placed them in the chest of drawers. Old habits.

      I took out my shiny new mobile phone and thumbed in the number on Shifty’s Post-it note. It rang, and rang, and rang…

      Crossed to the window, eased one side of the curtains open a couple of inches. Just concrete, gloom, and streetlights. Someone crept their way across the garden opposite with a torch. Good luck finding anything worth stealing around here.

      Then a click, and a muzzy voice crackled from the earpiece. ‘Hello? Hello, who’s this?’

      ‘You Alec?’

      Some rustling, a hissing noise, then a clunk. ‘Do you have any idea what time it is?’

      ‘I need a piece. Tomorrow. Semiauto—’

      ‘There must be some mistake. I offer spiritual guidance to wayward souls. Are you a wayward soul in need of guidance?’

      Ah. Right. Cautious. Probably a good trait in a gun dealer. ‘What do you think?’

      ‘I think… I think that you’re on a dangerous path. That your life hasn’t turned out the way you hoped. That darkness surrounds you.’

      Why the hell else would I need a gun? ‘So, what now?’

      ‘I think you should come see me. We can meditate on your predicament. Drink some herbal tea. Find a core of peace within you.’ A muffled yawn. ‘Now, do you have a pen and paper?’

      I stuck Shifty’s Post-it to the windowpane. Went back to the wardrobe and pulled a pen from my jacket pocket. ‘Go.’

      ‘Thirteen Slater Crescent, Blackwall Hill, OC12 3PX.’

      ‘When?’

      ‘I shall be available for spiritual guidance between the hours of nine and five tomorrow. Well, I might head out to the shops around lunchtime, but other than that…’

      ‘OK: tomorrow.’

      ‘Peace be on you.’ And he was gone.

      A rogue firework screamed up into the sky from a couple of streets over, booming and crackling in a baleful eye of scarlet.

      Peace wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.

      I let the curtains fall closed, slipped in beneath the duvet and powered up the laptop. Propped it up on my chest and settled back to watch the rest of Wrapped in Darkness.

      Laura Strachan picks her way along the High Street, ignoring the olde worlde charms of the surrounding buildings – now converted into charity shops, bookies, and places you could get a payday loan or pawn your jewellery. ‘What happened to me that night, and over the next couple of days … it’s slippery – difficult to hold onto. Like… Like it never really happened to me. Like it was happening to someone else, in a movie. All larger than life and shiny and fake. Does that make sense?’

      Which might explain Baywatch Steve and the cheesy dialogue.

      ‘I wake up some mornings and I can almost taste the operating room. The disinfectant, the metal… And then it fades, and I’m left with this feeling like something’s crushing my chest.’

      Then the scene shifts to the briefing room at Oldcastle Force Headquarters – the old one with the sagging ceiling tiles and sticky carpet. Before the refit. Journalists pack the seats, cameras, microphones and Dictaphones bristling towards the four men sitting behind the table at the front. Len’s at one end – bald even then – in his ancient double-breasted black suit. Next to him is the Media Liaison officer, ramrod-straight and sweating. And next to him…

      Something popped deep inside my ribcage, letting out a little grunt of pain.

      Dr Henry Forrester stares out of the laptop screen at me. He’s got more hair than he did at the end. More life about him. Before his cheeks sunk and the wrinkles stopped looking distinguished and started looking haggard. Before the guilt and the grief and the whisky hollowed him out.

      ‘Henry. You silly, silly bastard…’

      The man sitting next to Henry – the last person on the table – can’t be much older than twenty-four. Slope-shouldered, a fringe of curly brown hair hanging over his eyes, a nimbus of it fluffing out around his head, coiling over the shoulders of a grey suit, shirt, and tie. Get a sensible