Cold as the Grave Read online

  Copyright © 2019 James Oswald

  The right of James Oswald to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law, this publication may only be reproduced, stored, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, with prior permission in writing of the publishers or, in the case of reprographic production, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

  First published as an Ebook in Great Britain by WILDFIRE

  an imprint of HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP in 2019

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cataloguing in Publication Data is available from the British Library

  Ebook conversion by Avon DataSet Ltd, Bidford-on-Avon, Warwickshire

  Cover design by Patrick Insole. Cover image © lodgephoto.com/Mathew Lodge/Alamy Stock Photo (abbey), STILLFX/Shutterstock (sky) and Orkhan Aslanov/Shutterstock (birds).

  Back cover © pashamba/Shutterstock.

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 4991 3

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

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  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Also by James Oswald

  About the Book

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  About the Author

  James Oswald is the author of the Sunday Times bestselling Inspector McLean series of detective mysteries, as well as the new DC Constance Fairchild series. James’s first two books, NATURAL CAUSES and THE BOOK OF SOULS, were both short-listed for the prestigious CWA Debut Dagger Award. AS COLD AS THE GRAVE is the ninth book in the Inspector McLean Series.

  James farms Highland cows and Romney sheep by day, writes disturbing fiction by night.

  By James Oswald and available from Headline

  No Time to Cry

  Cold as the Grave

  About the Book

  COLD AS THE GRAVE

  The ninth book in the Sunday Times bestselling phenomenon that is the Inspector McLean series, from one of Scotland’s most celebrated crime writers.

  Her mummified body is hidden in the dark corner of a basement room, a room which seems to have been left untouched for decades. A room which feels as cold as the grave.

  As a rowdy demonstration makes its slow and vocal way along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, Detective Chief Inspector Tony McLean’s team are on stand-by for any trouble. The newly promoted McLean is distracted, inexplicably drawn to a dead-end mews street . . . and a door, slightly ajar, which leads to this poor girl’s final resting place.

  But how long has she been there, in her sleep of death? The answers are far from what McLean or anyone else could expect. The truth far more chilling than a simple cold case . . .

  For all those fleeing violence, oppression and war

  Acknowledgements

  There is always a danger in writing acknowledgements that I will leave out someone important. Not because I don’t value the input of each and every one of the people who have helped make this book a thing, but because by the time I get to the point where I’m trying to remember you all, my brain is utterly shot.

  Thus I managed to fail entirely in recognising Alan Lewis in the acknowledgments for the last Inspector McLean book, despite him being the villain. Alan, I hope you can forgive me – for this if not for forgetting to wear a tie to work so many times.

  This is my story, but an army of helpful people have worked very hard to make it as good as it can be before it reaches your hands. I’m hugely indebted to my editor, Alex Clark, and to Ella, Jo, Jenni and the rest of the team at Wildfire and Headline. My thanks to Mark Handsley for his sharp eyes on the copyediting too.

  Thanks as ever to my agent, the irrepressible Juliet Mushens, and to Gemma Osei for being so organised when I am anything but. Thank you also to all my internet friends, the legion of book bloggers and reviewers, and especially the Order of the Crusty Blanket. You may be a time sink, but you also keep me from becoming a complete hermit.

  My biggest debt, as ever, is to Barbara, who keeps an eye on the real world when I’m away in my made up ones. I couldn’t do it without you.

  And finally I would like to thank The Beast from the East, without whom this book would have been finished much earlier. Nothing quite kills the creativity faster than having to dig sheep out of a snowdrift.

  1

  If only it wasn’t so cold.

  She remembers a land of sun and heat, desert sand spreading away from the city in all directions. Night could be freezing, out beyond the ancient walls, but home was always warm. Narrow cobbled alleys, the smell of spices and street food. Dawn prayers called from a thousand minarets, bringing life to another new day. These and countless other happy memories taunt her as she huddles in the dark corner, shivering, alone and afraid.

  It’s coming for her, she knows. The bogeyman, the afrit, the djinn. A hundred different names for a hundred different nightmares. Her life since the anger came to her world, since the explosions began, since the bombs started to fall and they all had to flee.

  She hugs her knees to her chest, wraps herself tight against the wind that whistles through this old building. So unlike the places she knew growing up. What’s left of them now? No more than rubble soaked in the blood of her friends and family.

  Around her neck, the amulet hangs like a dead weight. She remembers her grandmother’s solemn face
as she gave it to her, remembers the words she spoke: ‘Keep this with you at all times, littlest one. It will summon protection when you need it most.’ There have been many times since then when she has needed its protection, and yet none has ever come. Still, it is a reminder of home. The only one she has left.

  A noise like thunder, and lightning chases away the darkness as a door on the other side of the room is kicked open. She clamps her mouth shut against the chattering of her teeth, longs for the sun and the warm breeze blowing in across the desert. Longs for a place where the air doesn’t freeze your breath, and the rain doesn’t turn to ice as it falls from a sky painted purple like a bruise. She is so cold she thinks she will die here, long before the demon claims her soul. Knowing that those are her two options forces a tiny sob from her throat.

  ‘I know you are here, my sweet little thing.’

  It speaks in the language of her dead father, the words of the Imam, the voices of the hard-faced men who jostled her and her mother onto a tiny boat and set it sailing into the wide sea. It is all the people who have promised her freedom while taking it away. She shoves one hand into her mouth, bites down on her knuckles and tries not to breathe. The other reaches for the amulet, its ruby crystal warm to her touch as if a fire burns within it.

  ‘Come out now, child. There is no point in hiding.’

  It is closer now, she can hear. Its tone is beguiling, but she knows better than to believe its lies. She has heard too many now to fall for them again. All she can do is sit motionless, hoping against hope that it won’t see her in the gloom. And now she can smell it, too. The sickly-sweet musk of rotting bodies, the sharp tang of freshly spilled blood, the sting of gun smoke. She hardly dares breathe lest its stench make her sneeze. She must not be found. She cannot be found.

  ‘You are close, my pretty. I can taste you on the air. So much fear.’ A pause, and she hears the animal grunts as it sniffs out her scent. ‘Why do you fear me so?’

  She almost answers, such is the power behind its questioning. Tears run through the dirt on her cheeks, snot dribbles from her nose but she dares not wipe it away. She is petrified like the ancient statues her father took her to see in the desert. The old city ruined, reclaimed by the sand. Is that how they came to be stone? Did this demon exist even then? Steal their souls like it will surely steal hers? She grips the amulet tighter still, feels the thin cord around her neck snap.

  A floorboard creaks, shifting under weight. It’s close, she understands. Too close. She sees the door through which she came, a thin strip of light making the shadows even deeper. She ran here across an unfamiliar city, following her instincts, trusting them to take her to safety. How foolish to think it would be that easy, after all this time. The demon knows her intimately, has her scent. She can’t hope to escape it. Not now, not ever.

  She sees motion in the darkness, and it turns its head towards her, a black shape even darker than the shadows. Twin circles of dullest red hover in the air. Like iron heated in the forge until it begins to glow, they smoulder and smoke. They move slowly, passing over her once, twice. She almost believes she has escaped, but then they pass a third time, stop. The iron glows bright and all she can see is flames.

  ‘Ah, my sweet little girl. There you are.’

  She cannot move, cannot scream. There is no hope for her, and no protection comes. There is only the amulet falling from her grasp, tumbling to the stone floor and smashing into a million pieces. And if they billow into a tiny flame before vanishing altogether, she does not see.

  She is already dead.

  2

  Tiny flakes of snow fluttered down past the glass window that made up one entire wall of the third-floor conference room. Detective Chief Inspector Tony McLean knew that he was meant to be concentrating on the meeting, the profile reports and photographs spread out on the table in front of him, the slide show of mugshots projected onto the screen that hung from the ceiling. He was finding it hard to care.

  It wasn’t that Operation Fundament was a waste of time, far from it. Closer work with uniform was important too, so this was exactly the sort of modern policing he could get right behind. It was simply that his unwanted seniority meant he would be stuck here at headquarters overseeing things, not out there in the field doing some actual detective work. Hard to muster much in the way of enthusiasm for driving a desk.

  ‘You still with us, Tony?’

  He looked away from the rooftops outside, focusing back on Detective Superintendent Jayne McIntyre. Another one recently promoted above where she wanted to be.

  ‘Sorry, Jayne. Zoned out there. Late night, and it gets a bit stuffy in here with the projector going.’

  McIntyre narrowed her eyes, not convinced by his excuse but neither too fussed to make anything of it. ‘Almost done, anyway. Was there anything you wanted to add, Tom?’

  All eyes turned to the man sitting at the head of the table. The flow of replacement senior officers from the old Strathclyde region had slowed of late, which might have explained how they’d ended up with Chief Inspector Tom Callander running the uniform operation in the station. A Dundee man born and bred, he’d worked all his life in Tayside, but seemed to be fitting in just fine in Edinburgh.

  ‘No, I don’t think so, Jayne. We all know what we’re doing here. Hopefully this demonstration will be peaceful.’ He looked towards the window McLean had been staring out of. ‘Who knows? If the weather stays bad they’ll probably cancel anyway.’

  ‘Chance’d be a fine thing.’ McLean picked up the first of a pile of photographs from the report in front of him, studied the face staring out at him from the paper. Eyes too close together, floppy blonde hair on top, shaved to the skin around the ears, a single black swastika stud in the left earlobe. Andrew Chester could do with losing some weight if he wanted to become one of the master race, as could most of his unsavoury colleagues. Flicking through the rest of the photographs, McLean saw a bunch of young men with too much time on their hands and a seriously misplaced sense of grievance. But he’d read the reports too, knew what drove them to demonstrate, agitate and at times militate. A few snowflakes weren’t going to dissuade them.

  ‘Well, if they come we’ll be waiting for them,’ Callander said. ‘Chief Constable’s sanctioned the cost. Christ knows where he got the money from. I’m inclined to agree with him though. These wannabe Nazi loons want to come up here and kick up a fuss, we’ll be ready and waiting.’

  The meeting broke up without any more discussion. It wasn’t necessary: everyone knew what their roles were. McLean didn’t get up, comfortable in his chair and still staring at the angry, piggy expression on Andrew Chester’s face. There was something in that expression, his defiance mixed with disdain, that suggested a fuss was exactly what Andrew and his bunch of neo-fascist idiots were looking for.

  A low buzz of conversation filled the CID room when McLean entered half an hour later. He stood just inside the doorway, waiting to see how long it would take for anyone to notice him, pleasantly surprised at how busy everyone seemed to be. It still wasn’t the full house he remembered from his detective sergeant days: first the creation of Police Scotland, then the endless austerity cuts, and finally the drain of the best and brightest to the Crime Campus over on the other side of the country. The permanent plain-clothes team in the station was a pale shadow of its former self.

  ‘Looking for anyone in particular, or just lurking?’

  McLean turned to see Detective Sergeant Laird standing beside him. From the set of his shoulders, it looked like Grumpy Bob had been there a while.

  ‘Just thinking, Bob. Where did everyone go?’

  ‘And here’s me thinking we were just about back up to decent numbers. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts.’

  ‘Still grumbling about having to retire?’

  ‘Maybe. A wee bit, aye. Should be plenty still to keep me busy down in the basement with Dagwood, mind
.’

  ‘Anything exciting going on right now? I feel kind of out of the loop up on the third floor. It’s all strategy meetings and finance meetings and God knows what else.’

  Grumpy Bob’s face crumpled into a smile, and he put a fatherly hand on McLean’s shoulder. ‘That’s what happens when you clamber too far up the pole. Ambition always has a cost.’

  ‘You know I was bounced into taking the position, Bob. Christ only knows who they’d have foisted on us if I’d refused.’

  ‘I know. Just kidding. As for anything exciting going on, I was just coming to collect a few detective constables. We need to get down to the Royal Mile soon. Spread out a bit so it’s not obvious we’ve all come from the same place.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Whole thing kicks off in an hour and a half.’

  McLean thought about the meeting he’d just left, the mugshots of the usual suspects they were hoping to spot in the crowd. Everyone was briefed for the operation, and looking across the CID room he could see most of the detective constables were dressed for the part too. Fewer dark suits, more casual winter coats and heavy walking boots. He’d put his own pair in the back of his Alfa before coming in to work that morning.

  ‘Reckon an extra pair of eyes would be helpful?’

  Grumpy Bob’s smile widened, and he shouted across the room to where the unfeasibly tall figure of Detective Constable Blane loomed over everyone else. ‘That’s a tenner you owe me, Lofty. Looks like the boss is coming with us after all.’

  3

  ‘You got a moment, sir?’

  McLean had been on his way to the canteen, a cup of coffee and possibly some cake. Anything to distract himself from his ostentatiously large office on the third floor and the endless round of reports, staffing rotas and other management bollocks he had to attend to. There was no point in him going to the march until later, so he needed something more appealing to fill the next hour. Coffee and cake were good, but a ‘You got a moment, sir?’ from the duty sergeant had the potential to be much better.

  ‘What is it, Pete?’