What Will Burn Read online

  Copyright © 2021 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 2021

  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, Arden Court, Alcester, Warwickshire

  Cover design by Patrick Insole

  Cover images © Yolande de Kort/Trevillion Images, Phichai/Shutterstock (flames), nattapon sukjit/Shutterstock and warat42/Shutterstock (smoke)

  eISBN: 978 1 4722 7616 2

  HEADLINE PUBLISHING GROUP

  An Hachette UK Company

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.headline.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Author

  Praise

  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

  Interlude

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Interlude

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Interlude

  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

  Have you read Nothing to Hide?

  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. WHAT WILL BURN is the eleventh book in the Inspector McLean series.

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

  Praise

  Praise for James Oswald:

  ‘The new Ian Rankin’ Daily Record

  ‘Oswald’s writing is a class above’ Express

  ‘Creepy, gritty and gruesome’ Sunday Mirror

  ‘In a league of his own as a thriller writer’ Crime Squad

  ‘Oswald is among the leaders in the new batch of excellent Scottish crime writers’ Daily Mail

  ‘Crime fiction’s next big thing’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Creepy, gritty and gruesome’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘Hugely enjoyable’ Mirror

  By James Oswald and available from Headline

  Constance Fairchild Series

  No Time to Cry

  Nothing to Hide

  Inspector McLean Series

  Cold as the Grave

  Bury Them Deep

  What Will Burn

  About the Book

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

  The charred remains of an elderly woman are discovered in a burned ot gamekeepers cottage, hidden away in woodland to the west of Edinburgh.

  What is at first assumed to be a tragic accident begins to take on a more sinister aspect as Detective Inspector Tony McLean digs deeper.

  There is far more to the victim than her humble surroundings suggest . . .

  For all the witches

  Acknowledgements

  This book is very much a product of lockdown, even though the actual restrictions had very little impact on my rural and isolated life. You can’t write contemporary fiction in a bubble though, and the constantly changing and ever-worsening news made it hard at times to concentrate on the work. I don’t think I would have managed it without the regular emails from readers who had enjoyed Tony McLean’s previous adventures and took the time to let me know. There’s nothing quite perks a writer up like being told their words have been appreciated. So thank you, all the readers out there. You make what we do worthwhile.

  Rural and isolated my lifestyle might be, but a small army of other people have helped in the making of this book. I am as ever totally indebted to my amazing agent, Juliet Mushens, and her tireless assistant Liza DeBlock. Thank you both. I’m so glad it’s all about ME now!

  The team at Wildfire have done great service over the past year too. Thank you Alex, Ella, Jo and Serena. Your enthusiasm keeps me going. A big thank you to Sarah Bance, whose swift and detailed copy editing weeded out my worst errors. And a thank you and farewell to Jennifer Leech, whose heroic publicity efforts included bribing booksellers with chocolate and me with gin. Works every time.

  A big thank you to Ian Hanmore, too, for his audio narration over the course of the series. More than anyone else, he is the voice of Tony. And Madame Rose and Kirsty Ritchie and Janie Harrison and, and . . .

  And last, but never least, a huge thanks to Barbara, whose surname I stole for my detective all those many years ago.

  1

  She always knew she would die like this.

  They come in the night, crashing through the undergrowth and pushing through the trees. They don’t use the path that meanders up the slope from the road; that would be too easy. Neither do they come in one band, but surround her cottage as if she might slip away round the back while they hammer on her door at the front. She could no more slip away than stand, but that makes no difference to them. A mob knows no reason, and this is most surely a mob.

  She glances towards the unlit
fire, the cat lying hopefully in front of it. ‘You should go. While you can. Find a safe home.’

  It looks at her with wary eyes, ears cocked at the sound coming closer, ever closer. That stare is knowing, calculating. A moment’s hesitation, and then it rises, stretches, nods its head once, and disappears. She is relieved. Her time may have come, but the cat still has many lives to live.

  The sound of breaking glass comes a few minutes later. Stupid, really. The door wasn’t locked. Someone curses loudly as they climb in through the back window, and she catches a whiff of blood on the breeze before it is overwhelmed by the stench of men. Where before they were loud coming through the trees, now they are silent. Not stealthy, but not speaking either. She doesn’t know how many of them there are, although it feels like a multitude. Fit, strong, young. Angry. They swarm into her small room like cockroaches, start smashing things before they’ve even realised she is there waiting for them. Perhaps they thought she’d be in her bed.

  She doesn’t resist when they grab her; that would only encourage them. And besides, she is old and weak. Utterly at the mercy they so obviously lack. Her passivity only angers them more. She thought she was prepared, but nothing really prepares you for this. She hasn’t many of her own teeth left now, but they knock them out anyway. Arthritis has swollen her knuckles, and the pain when they break her fingers makes her scream. With the sound, their bloodlust grows, their animal instincts taking over. Except that no animal would do what they are doing. Not to one of their own. She folds in under their savage fury.

  ‘Don’t kill her, boys. We need her still breathing.’

  There’s a familiar edge to that voice, but she’s not sure whether she recognises it or simply the obedience it demands. She can taste blood in her mouth, feel the broken bones in her hands, her legs, the slide of fractured ribs that threaten with every breath to puncture a lung. It’s nearly over now, but there is one last thing to do before the end.

  ‘With my dying breath I curse thee.’

  The words come out as a mixture of whisper and bloody gurgle. She had meant to look up at her killers, but she is too old, too weak, too broken. A rough hand grabs her hair, pulls her head back in a yanking motion that sends a bolt of pain down her spine.

  ‘You say something, old crone?’

  He is very young, the one who holds her. Not much more than a boy. Shaven head, tank top straining to contain his gym-and-steroid muscles. There’s scarcely a spark of anything in his eyes, certainly not intelligence.

  ‘With my dying breath.’ She gasps in a lungful of pain. ‘I curse thee.’

  ‘Aye, well yer right about one thing.’

  The hand releases its grip on her hair, throwing her back as it does so. To some unspoken order, the men step away. Something wet splashes her arm, and for a moment she thinks they’re pissing on her. Then it hits her face, soaks into her clothes. Fumes reach the bloody broken mess of her nose, and she realises it is something far worse than piss.

  She barely has the strength left to lift her head. Petrol stings her eyes as she blinks to see the blurred figure standing in front of her. The leader. He has something in his hands, although she can’t see what it is. No need to see; she knows well enough.

  ‘With my dying breath . . .’ As she wheezes out the words, something flares in the man’s hand. She traces its passage as he flicks it towards her, a tiny flame on the end of a matchstick, tumbling over and over in impossibly slow motion.

  She always knew she would die like this.

  After all, she’s done it many times before.

  2

  The stench hit her long before she reached the crime scene. At first it was a lingering unpleasant scent on the air, but as she climbed the steep path from the woods, so it developed into something worse. Burned carpets, chemical reek and the unmistakable aroma of overdone barbecue. And underneath it all, a fug of decay that didn’t sit with the bustle and activity around her. Detective Constable Janie Harrison had attended enough fires in her short career as a police officer to know the usual unpleasant smells, and this place had them all. The fact that she was even here at all meant at least one person had died, but the question she found herself asking was when, rather than who and how. She should really have been with a detective sergeant of course, but that wasn’t going to happen any time soon. Never enough detectives, always too much to do.

  ‘Is it far?’

  The words were out before she could stop herself, and it left her with a feeling of having said ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ A false memory from a hundred or more dull car trips to the seaside or some boring ancient battlefield. Some kids might have reacted to that upbringing by taking to a sedentary life, and Janie had almost been one of them.

  ‘Not much further, no.’ The forensic technician who had met her at the roadside wasn’t one she’d met before. Or at least not one Janie could easily recognise from all that was visible of her face. Her overalls, hood tied tight, left little to go by. Harrison wore similar, although as yet she’d not pulled up the hood. The day was too warm for that, the air in the trees humid with the threat of yet more rain. Summer had been long and hot, but it was gone now, autumn making up for lost time.

  The buzz of forest insects gave way to a hubbub of noise as they left the trees and entered a clearing straight out of a children’s fairy tale. It was hard to believe the city was only a few miles away, although if she concentrated, Janie thought she could hear the dull roar of the bypass. Her attention was dragged away from idle musings by the cottage that stood a dozen or so metres away.

  Quite what such a building was doing up here in the hills she had no idea. Perhaps it had been a gamekeeper’s lodge or something, which would mean there was a huge mansion nearby, a great estate that would have built a tiny house out of well-cut stone and slate. She wasn’t sure of the area, so it might well have been that the mansion house had long since gone, only this more humble dwelling left. Fire had taken hold at some point, then apparently given up, leaving far more of the building intact than she’d been expecting, or indeed than the heavy smell suggested. Janie followed a marked path up to a point where a small section of wall had collapsed outwards, splitting the roof open to reveal a burned mess inside.

  ‘Reckon it’s more or less safe as long as you keep to the middle.’ The forensic technician who had shown her this far seemed reluctant to go any further. Janie could sympathise; fires were never pleasant, especially when people were involved.

  She picked her way along the route marked, careful not to turn her ankle on fallen rubble from the wall collapse. A couple of white-suited figures crouched beside the remains of an old stuffed armchair, not much left of it but springs and scorched wooden frame. At the same time as she noticed the battered case beside them, the older of the two turned. He frowned, looked past her as if expecting to see someone else, then returned his gaze to her and smiled in recognition.

  ‘Detective Constable Harrison. This is a pleasant surprise.’

  ‘Doctor Cadwallader.’ Janie nodded as the other figure turned. ‘Doctor Sharp.’

  ‘I take it you’re alone?’ Cadwallader asked.

  ‘Aye. We’re a bit short-staffed at the moment, what with Gru . . . DS Laird retired and, well.’ She shrugged. The pathologist knew as well as any what the situation was.

  ‘Still not sorted?’ He gave her a sympathetic smile and a shrug. ‘Well, you’d better have a look at our poor victim here before we move her, then.’

  It was only as he said the words that Janie realised the blackened mess lying at the feet of the pathologist and his assistant was not, in fact, the remains of a burned feather bolster cushion. Intellectually, she had known it wasn’t, but still the shock was visceral as her eyes took in more and more details. She swallowed down the bile that tried to rise up and choke her, took a shallow breath, and stepped closer.

  ‘Female, old. I’d say in her seventies at least
. We’ll know more once I’ve had a chance to examine her back at the mortuary. From the way she’s burned . . .’ Cadwallader leaned in close to the grisly corpse. ‘. . . And the smell. I’d say she’s been dead at least a week.’

  A week? Janie gulped again. She was no rookie, knew she could do this without being sick, but that didn’t make it much easier. She looked up from the body, around what little remained of the room. It was almost impossible to get a sense of the place, the person who lived here, anything really. ‘An accident?’

  Cadwallader stood up slowly, knees popping as he straightened. Beside him, his assistant tidied away the few instruments he had used in his examination before standing up herself in a much more fluid and graceful motion.

  ‘I’ll know for sure once we’ve done the post-mortem. We’ll get a better idea of when she died too. This is a remote spot, and the fact that she’s been here so long unnoticed would suggest she was a loner, wouldn’t you say? Poor dear likely fell asleep in her chair and then something shorted out. Wiring in these old places is never the best, is it?’

  Janie risked a glance down at the remains of the dead woman again, found she was able to detach herself from the horror of it and focus on what few details she could see among the rubble. The body lay on the floor, and she expected when forensics were done they’d show that the woman had been lying there before the fire started. Hopefully they could tell her where and how it happened, too. It felt off, though. There was something about this scene, this cottage and its setting that made her want to call DCI McLean. It was his kind of case, of that she was sure. If only he was available.

  ‘Can you let me know when you’re doing the PM, Doctor Cadwallader?’ she asked as the three of them retreated from the building.

  ‘It’ll probably be a few days, unless you want me to prioritise it. Could maybe get her seen tomorrow if you think it’s necessary.’

  Janie wanted to say yes, but she was only a detective constable. This wasn’t her call.

  ‘No, get to her as soon as you have a space, but unless we turn up something suspicious here I don’t think a few days’ delay is going to make a difference.’