The Book of Souls (Inspector McLean #2)(63)

‘I like the cold,’ Alphonse replied with his curious hybrid Edinburgh–Milan accent. ‘It brings the beautiful ladies into my little café.’

‘Flattery will get you a long way, Al, but I’m on a promise this morning. Someone owes me breakfast.’ Emma looked around as she spoke. ‘Ah, there you are Tony.’

If she’d waved and jumped up and down it could hardly have been more obvious. Still, he smiled, stood up and pulled out a chair for her. She slumped into it with all the grace of a dead swan.

‘I thought for a moment you weren’t coming,’ McLean said.

‘I thought for a moment I might not.’ Emma pulled off a pair of fingerless gloves knitted in a riot of primary colours and shoved them into a pocket. ‘It’s not nice waking a girl up at this time of the morning.’

‘I’m sorry, it was a mistake. New technology and all that.’ McLean picked up his phone from where he had left it on the table. ‘And besides, if you hadn’t put your number in the address book—’

‘Oh, so all of a sudden it’s my fault, is it?’ Emma pouted, but then broke into a big grin. ‘I guess you might’ve been sitting here with Grumpy Bob instead of me.’

‘Well, if you put it like that, then it’s just as well you did.’

There was a bit of an awkward silence, broken only by Alphonse arriving with coffee and a bacon roll. Emma ordered the same, then turned back to McLean. ‘So, was Santa good to you this year, then?’

It took him a while to realise what she meant. He’d long since given up on cards, and hadn’t got any presents in a couple of years. There wasn’t anyone left to give him any.

‘Oh, the usual. How about you?’

‘So so.’ Emma made a non-committal gesture with one hand. That topic of conversation was pretty much exhausted.

‘You didn’t go home to Aberdeen for Christmas, then.’ McLean realised the foolishness of the statement as he said it, and added: ‘Obviously.’

‘Couldn’t.’ Emma rummaged around in her pocket and pulled out her own mobile phone. ‘On call. The curse of the childless, eh. We always get to work the anti-social shifts.’

She put the battered phone down on the table and reached across for McLean’s shiny new one. ‘Still, some of us get better perks than others. I guess that’s the upside of being an inspector rather than a lowly technician.’

McLean was about to point out that he’d bought the phone with his own money, and perhaps add something about there being nothing lowly about being a technician, but before he could speak, his phone rang in Emma’s hands. She tapped the screen and held it up to her ear.

‘Hello? Detective Inspector McLean’s phone.’ She frowned at whatever was being said on the other end, then handed the phone over. ‘It’s for you. Grumpy Bob.’

‘What’s up, Bob?’ McLean asked.

‘I was going to tell you about the fire, but I guess you’re already there if Emma’s with you. Why’d she answer your phone?’

McLean felt his cheeks redden, and wondered why. ‘Er, what fire would this be, Bob?’

There was a moment’s pause before the detective sergeant answered. Enough time for a penny to drop.

‘Right you are, sir. It’s over in Slateford. Old factory being turned into apartments. Started about two this morning. Fire crews have got it out now, but, well it looks like another of our mystery arsons.’

‘According to the super I’m meant to be having the day off, Bob.’

‘Aye, I heard about that. And I’d no’ have bothered you. But I thought you’d want to know. There were a couple of casualties this time. Tramps getting out of the cold.’

‘They didn’t set the fire themselves?’ It seemed the most likely cause, and quite different from the empty, locked-up buildings he had been investigating before.

‘Not according to the fire investigator, no. I’m just heading over myself.’

‘I’ll meet you there then. Any ID on the dead men yet?’

‘One man, one woman. And no, not yet. But we might be lucky.

‘Oh aye?’

‘There was a third tramp caught in the blaze, and he survived.’





41





Grumpy Bob hadn’t arrived on the scene by the time McLean and Emma pulled up in her battered old Peugeot. He’d cadged a lift when her own phone had rung not long after his, demanding she get on over to a certain suspected-arson crime scene. There was a moment’s awkwardness as they both sat in the car, staring through the window at the burnt-out remains of an old factory, surrounded by fire crews and squad cars.

‘I suppose I still owe you breakfast, technically,’ he said.

‘That you do, inspector. Or possibly even dinner. I’ll give you a call.’ She made the universal hand-to-head signal for holding a telephone. Then she was out of the car and trotting away towards the white and rust-brown SOC van before he had a chance to say anything.

McLean found Jim Burrows, the fire investigator, over by the entrance to the old stone factory building. Its front was largely undamaged; black-soot charring to the walls above the burnt-out windows the only obvious sign of the fire. The roof was intact too, at least in the middle, where a squat tower rose above the roofline. No doubt an architectural flourish built to disguise chimneys or something. A large sign nailed to the wall was twisted and blackened, half-melted in the heat, but there was still enough of it left for McLean to make out the familiar logo of Randolph Developments. He tried to remember whether this was one of the model buildings he’d seen at the offices in Loanhead, but too much else had gone on since then.