1

‘The important thing is to get the drop right. Nothing else matters,
really.’

He stands on tippy-toes, balanced on the
precarious chair, hands behind his back like a good boy. His fingers are
trembling slightly, as if in anticipation, but he’s not struggling. I knew he
wouldn’t. Not now. He wants this, after all.

‘Of course, to work that out I need to know
your height, your weight, your build.’

I tug at the rope. Good, stout hemp; none of
that nylon rubbish for a job like this. Getting it over the beam was a
struggle, but now it’s secure, ready. His eyelids flutter as I slip the noose
over his head, gently snug it around his neck past his ear, let the excess loop
over his bare shoulder.

‘Height’s easy, as long as you’re not wearing
platform shoes. Clothes can be deceptive though, make a thin man seem fat. And
then there’s build.’

He doesn’t respond, but then why would he? He’s
not here any more. I can see the movement of his eyes under closed lids, the
flick, flick, flick as he watches something far off in his mind. I reach out,
run the backs of my fingers down his cheek, his arm, the muscles of his taut
stomach. Young skin is so soft and pure, not corrupted by the cankers and
blemishes of age. A shame young minds are so fragile, so hopeless.

‘Muscle’s so much denser than fat. You know,
most rugby players are technically obese.’

The spirit shivers in me, drinking deep from the
well of despair that fills this room. There is nothing here worth saving, only
the joy of release from a life not worth living.

‘A handshake is usually enough. You can tell so
much from a person’s hand, their grip. I knew as soon as I met you how long a
piece of rope we’d need.’

I let my hand drop lightly down, stroking him
with my nails. He rises to the occasion, a soft moan escaping from his lips as
I reach in, cup his barely-dropped testicles, tickle them with my fingertips.
The touch is both exhilarating and revolting, as if some tawdry sex act could
ever be as intimate as what we have, this boy and me.

He shivers, whether from cold or excitement I
will never know. I withdraw my hand, take a step back. One second, two, the
pressure builds as the spirit rises within me. I see the rope, the knot, the
chair. Clothes neatly folded and placed on the bed a few feet away.

There is a moment when I kick the chair away.
Anything is possible. He floats in the air like a hoverfly, trapped in that
instant. And then he is falling, falling, falling, the loops of rope untwining
in lazy rolls until nothing is left. And then.

Snap.

2

‘You sure about this, Tony?’

Detective Chief Inspector Jo Dexter sat in the
passenger seat of the Transit Van, staring out through a grubby windscreen at
the industrial wasteland around Leith Docks. Street lights glowed in orange
strings, roads to nowhere. The first tinge of dawn painted the undersides of
the clouds, marching north and east across the Forth to Fife. The high-rises
that had sprung up along the northern shoreline were dark silhouettes pocked by
the occasional light of a shift-worker coming home.  This early in the morning there wasn’t much
activity, least of all from the dark bulk of the freighter they were watching.
It had docked two days ago, a routine trip from Rotterdam bringing in
aggregates for the new road bridge. As if they didn’t have enough rock and sand
in Scotland already. A team had been watching around the clock ever since,
acting on information thought to be reliable. Beyond the unloading of a large
quantity of gravel, nothing interesting had happened at all.

‘According to Forth Ports, she sails on the
tide. In about two hours time.’ Detective Inspector Anthony McLean checked his
watch, even though the clock on the dashboard told him it was almost five in
the morning. ‘If nothing happens before then, we’ve been played for fools. I
dare say it won’t be the first time.’

‘Easy for you to say. You’re not the one having
to justify the overtime.’

McLean looked across at his companion. He’d
known Jo Dexter of old. She’d joined up at the same time as him, but had hit the
promotion ladder early. McLean was happy for her, though he preferred his own
niche; a career of chasing prostitutes and pornographers had hardened Jo
Dexter’s once pretty features so that she looked far older than her thirty-nine
years. Vice did that to a person, he’d been told. And now he was finding out
first hand thanks to bloody Dagwood.

‘Well, you’re the one reckoned the tip-off was
good.’ The temperature dropped by several degrees. Even in the darkness, McLean
could see that this was the wrong thing to say, no matter how true it was. The
letter had appeared in his in-tray on the first day of his secondment to Jo
Dexter’s team in the Sexual Crimes Unit. It didn’t have a stamp on it, and
no-one knew how it had got there. Nevertheless, the information in it was
convincing enough that whoever had written it knew a great deal about the
sleazy underbelly of Edinburgh’s sex industry, and the final nugget had
concerned a highly organised people smuggling operation and this very ship.

‘It’s just that normally these things happen in
container ports. How the hell do you smuggle people off a boat like that
without being seen?’

‘Your guess is as good as mine.’ McLean
switched his focus away from his temporary boss, across the empty yard to where
a large box van had appeared at the security gate. After a short pause, the
guard let it through. It continued its slow journey around the seemingly random
piles of rocks, sand and other unidentified materials that were the port’s
stock in trade, headed in the general direction of the ship.

McLean picked up his radio set, called the
guard house. ‘Who was that?’

‘Catering firm. Provisions for the ship’s
galley. Guess they’ve got to eat, aye?’ The guard sounded bored. Hardly
surprising given his shift.

‘They check out OK?’ McLean asked.

‘On the roster, aye.’

‘OK then. Keep your eyes peeled for anything
unusual.’ He put the radio back on the dashboard as the box van arrived at the
ship’s side. In the semi-darkness, with nothing to compare it to other than the
distant buildings, the ship had seemed small. Now with the box van alongside,
McLean could see just how big it was, high in the water without its ballast of
rock.

‘You think they might try something here?’ Jo
Dexter stretched as best she could in the confined space. She’d have been
better off in the back, were it not for the half-dozen officers already in
there, snoring gently.

McLean picked up the binoculars he’d
appropriated from stores earlier that day, focused on the box van as the driver
got out. A single lamp lit the steps leading up from the dockside to the deck,
casting more shadow than anything else.

‘Even if we weren’t here watching, nothing gets
out of this bit of the port without the excise boys checking it. There’s no way
they’d be able to smuggle anyone out unless they’d paid somebody off.’

‘Stranger things have happened, Tony. What can
you see?’

The driver opened up the back of the van and
clambered into the darkness. After a moment he jumped back out again, grabbed a
box and carried it up the steps. At least that’s what McLean assumed he’d done.
The way the van was parked, it obscured the foot of the steps, and the top was
in shadow. Only a small part in the middle was visible, and by the time he’d
adjusted the focus, the driver was gone.

‘A man unloading groceries, by the look of it.
Yup. There he goes again.’ Movement at the back of the van, and the driver once
more grabbed a box, heading for the steps. McLean flicked the binoculars up a
fraction, and caught a fleeting glimpse of someone before the darkness swallowed
them. It wasn’t much, but there was something wrong. He couldn’t put his finger
on it; the way the driver moved, perhaps?

A moment later and the figure passed across his
view again, heading up the steps with a bakers tray in its hands. But that couldn’t
be right, could it? How had he missed the driver coming back down the steps?
Unless there were two people in the van. That would make more sense anyway.

Another figure cut across the narrow pool of
light, this time carrying a large cardboard box, struggling under its weight
and bulk. McLean squinted through the binoculars, wishing the magnification was
better. This figure seemed different from the first and second. There couldn’t
be three people working the van, could there? And how much in the way of
provisions did a cargo ship need to make the crossing from Leith to Rotterdam?

Dropping the binoculars back onto the seat,
McLean started the engine, slammed the Transit into gear and shot forwards.
Beside him, Jo Dexter grabbed for the handle above the door, too stunned to say
anything.

‘Not smuggling them in. Taking them out. Wake
up you lot. It’s time to go to work.’ McLean shouted to the team in the back. A
couple of muffled grunts and a high-pitched yelp was all the answer he got as
he accelerated as hard as he could, covering the distance to the ship in less
than a minute. The back of the box van was open, and as he swept round behind
it, the Transit’s headlights threw aside the shadows, revealing what was
inside.

‘Go! Go! Go!’ The team burst out of the back of
the Transit, fanning out and securing the van. A commotion up on deck was
followed by a shout of ‘Armed police. Drop your weapons.’ McLean and Dexter
watched from the Transit as a large cardboard box fell from above, twisting
once, twice, before smashing against the concrete of the dock in an explosion
of oranges.

It was over in seconds. The sergeant in charge of the armed response team came over to the Transit and signaled the all clear. McLean didn’t need to hear it; he could see with his own eyes. Out of the back of the box van they began to clamber into the light. Pale, almost cadaverous some of them, scantily clad despite the cold and all bearing that same terrified expression. A dozen or more young women, no more than girls, really, though their faces showed they’d seen more than any girl their age should ever see.

Book three in the Inspector McLean series

A young man is found hanging by a rope in his Edinburgh home. A simple, sad suicide, yet Detective Inspector Tony McLean is puzzled by the curious suicide note. A second hanged man and another strange note hint at a sinister pattern.

Investigating a brutal prostitution and human trafficking ring, McLean struggles to find time to link the two suicides. But the discovery of a third convinces him of malicious intent.

Digging deeper, McLean finds answers much closer to home than he expects. Something terrifying stalks the city streets, and bringing it to justice may destroy all he holds dear.