The Book of Souls (Inspector McLean #2)(52)
McLean considered the remains of his bacon roll, the thin slick of grease on the top of what was left of his coffee. He found he’d lost his appetite for both.
‘Do us a favour, Bob. Go see if you can find those keys, will you. God alone knows I’ve been trying to avoid it, but if our killer’s obsessed with Anderson, then I’m going to have to reacquaint myself with the sick bastard. Might as well start at home.’
35
Eighteen years ago, when Donald Anderson had bought his shop, this had been a seedy, derelict part of the city. That was before Donald Dewar had decided to build the new parliament just across the road. Now flats around the Canongate were fetching stupid money and most of the run-down shops had been turned into trendy coffee houses, wine bars and delicatessens. But there had always been antiquarian book dealers here, publishers too, and a few still hung on against the onslaught of yuppification sweeping this corner of the city. Even so, the boarded-up shop where Donald Anderson had plied both his trades looked like something from another era.
In the early days, not long after the trial, the place had been a mecca for troublemakers, but between the heavy plywood boarding and the thick metal bars McLean knew were on the insides of the windows, no one had managed to get in. Frustrated, they had taken to daubing obscene and threatening graffiti all over the frontage, as if the target of their fury was ever going to see what they had written. Over time, the public had more or less forgotten about Donald Anderson, and now the graffiti was covered over by many skins of bill posters advertising obscure touring rock bands and long-forgotten Fringe acts.
‘Just what are we doing here, sir?’ Grumpy Bob asked, stamping his feet against the cold.
‘I’m not entirely sure.’ McLean sorted through the bunch of keys, looking for one that would fit the large padlock attached to the front door with a heavy-duty hasp. He found it, then had to search again for another key to fit the lock in the door as well. It turned easily, recently oiled, and the door swung open silently. Inside, McLean had been expecting the place to smell of damp and mould, but it was dry. He tried the lights and was surprised to find that they worked, casting skeletal shadows from the lines of empty bookshelves. According to Needy, a firm of auctioneers had been in not long after Anderson’s death and cleared out all the stock that wasn’t sitting in the basement of the police station. They’d be along for that just as soon as someone made the decision that it was no longer needed.
The shop seemed strange, robbed of all the ancient leather and dusty cloth bindings. Still it was eerily familiar, sending an involuntary shudder through him as he stepped over the threshold.
Beyond the shop itself, the small office that connected with the back hall and the stairs up to the flat above looked somewhat more like a room abandoned for ten years should. The old desk was there, and the chair. Two filing cabinets stood in the corner by a window that would have looked out onto the concrete courtyard behind the building, had it not also been boarded up. Everything here was covered in a thin layer of dust, undisturbed by recent passage. McLean opened a couple of desk drawers, but they were empty. Anything that might conceivably have been evidence had been taken away during the investigation.
Through the office, McLean peered up the wooden stairs with their threadbare carpet to the landing above. The windows on the first floor hadn’t been boarded up, but neither had anyone cleaned them since Anderson had been taken away in a Black Maria all those years ago. Now they were encrusted with muck on the outside, thick with spider webs and dangling fly carcasses on the inside. He climbed up, going from room to room, not really knowing what to expect. He’d searched this place before, and nothing much had changed since then. Only the smell was different; where once it had been heavy with leather oil and glue, cooking odours and cheap aftershave, now it was just empty, dusty, slightly mouldy.
Grumpy Bob hadn’t come upstairs. He was still standing in the small hallway, looking back out to the shop when McLean came down. It was odd; if anyone should have been freaked out by this place, it was him, not the old sergeant. But he felt only a heavy sadness as he looked around.
‘You’re going down there, aren’t you.’ Grumpy Bob nodded towards the closed door under the stairs. By way of reply, McLean twisted the handle. It was locked, and even though he tried all the keys he’d been given, none of them fitted. He knelt down, feeling the wooden floorboards at his feet. In the edges, near the skirting boards, they were thick with dust. But in the middle, where people might walk, there was none. A path had been worn from the back door to the basement, and recently.
‘Give me a hand here, Bob.’ McLean put his shoulder to the door; it was only a flimsy thing with a single mortice lock. It shouldn’t have put up much of a challenge, but there wasn’t a lot of room to manoeuvre in the narrow corridor. In the end it took their combined weight to crack the frame.
The smell hit as soon as the door swung open. McLean gagged a little, covering his nose and mouth with his hand as he looked for the light switch. It hung on a cord by the door and he was about to reach for it when his brain finally caught up with him. He fished around in his pocket for a pair of latex gloves. Beside him, Grumpy Bob did the same. Then he gripped the cord close to the top and pulled.
Light flooded the basement below, but all they could see from where they were standing was a small patch of flagstone floor and the stairs. McLean knelt down once more, checking the treads for dust, finding them disturbingly clean.