Free Book of Souls by James Oswald Page B

haven’t been easy on her.’
    Razors MacDougal was smaller than his police photograph and reputation suggested. Or maybe it was just that he surrounded himself with such enormous muscle that any normal man was going to look small in comparison. Besides the heavy who had shown them in, there were three more equally large men in the house, which turned out to be both halves of the semi knocked through. Looking around the large living room into which he had been shown, McLean saw a number of professional portrait photographs of a strikingly beautiful woman and could only agree that Mrs MacDougal had taken the disappearance of her daughter hard. He could also see the unmistakable similarity between mother and child, which didn’t really make his job any easier.
    ‘I’m very sorry, sir, madam,’ McLean nodded at Jenny MacDougal who had curled herself almost foetally into an oversized armchair. ‘There’s no easy way to say this, really. But we think your daughter may be dead. We also think that her death was not an accident.’
    ‘Is this some kind of sick joke, Inspector McLean? Only I don’t find it fucking funny.’ MacDougal’s low growl reminded McLean of how he’d got his nickname.
    ‘I can assure you, sir. This is no joke.’
    ‘What do you mean, you think Violet might have been killed?’
    The question threw McLean, both because of the unfamiliar name, and the fact that it was Jenny MacDougal who had voiced it. Her face had drained of all colour so that she looked even more like her daughter laid out on the slab. McLean nodded to MacBride. ‘The photographs please, constable.’
    A4 glossies, fresh from the colour printer that afternoon. It was difficult to make a corpse’s head look anything other than what it was, but the pathology photographer had tried.
    ‘This young woman was found in a stream near Gladhouse Reservoir on Monday evening.’ McLean handed the photographs to Razors MacDougal, trying not to notice the shake in the gangster’s hands as he took them, avoiding the man’s eyes. MacDougal looked at them for less than a second before dropping them to the floor, cupping his face in his hands and running his fingers through his straggly, greying hair.
    ‘In the water, you say. She drowned?’
    ‘No, sir. She was put there after she died.’
    Suddenly MacDougal was on his feet, and he didn’t look so small now. His face was bright red with anger, veins straining through skin, eyes wide. He was too close. McLean could feel the gangster’s breath on his own face, but he stood his ground. There were two ways this could go, and one of them wasn’t at all appealing.
    ‘What’re you saying, inspector? She was murdered?’
    McLean was about to answer when a screeching wail rose up from the floor. He looked down to see Jenny MacDougal sprawled out on the carpet, clutching the discarded photographs, screaming incoherently. He bentdown to help her, but Razors pushed him roughly aside, stooped, picked up his wife.
    ‘Get her out of here,’ he said to one of the bodyguards. Jenny fought and kicked as she was hauled bodily from the room, but it was a weak effort, worn down by two years of worry.
    ‘Jesus, but you’ve got a nerve.’ MacDougal paced back and forth, flexing his over-large hands into fists. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing, bringing this in here?’ He swept an arm in the direction of the crumpled photographs.
    ‘I take it that is your daughter, Mr MacDougal?’
    ‘Aye, it’s her.’ For the first time he looked like he might actually be grieving, a rime of tears forming in his eyes. He sniffed hard, wiping his face with a sleeve. ‘So what happened? And why’s it taken this long for youse lot to come and tell us?’
    ‘When we found her she was naked, no personal effects. Missing Persons didn’t come up with a match. I’m sorry about that, they really should have done. It wasn’t until we put an e-fit out that a name came up. She was calling herself Audrey