In his left hand, he held a pair of surgical gloves.
‘You should sit down,’ the man said gently, his voice cultured, educated. Scottish, but with the refined accent of someone who’d spent time in better circles. ‘The paralytic will take effect soon, and falling will only make this more unpleasant.’
Mark tried to speak, tried to move, but his body was no longer entirely under his control. The tightness in his chest was spreading, a warm numbness creeping through his arms and legs.
‘Why…’ he managed to gasp.
The man stepped into the kitchen with the unhurried confidence of someone who knew exactly how much time he had. He pulled on the surgical gloves with practised efficiency.
‘You’ve been very persistent, Dr Finlay,’ he said conversationally. ‘I have to admire that. Most people would have let the discrepancy slide. Put it down to lab error, sample contamination, human mistake. But not you.’
Mark’s knees buckled. He caught himself against the refrigerator, sliding down until he was sitting on the cold linoleum floor. His vision was tunnelling now, darkness creeping in from all sides.
‘The whisky,’ he wheezed.
‘Succinylcholine, yes. Though I’ve refined my delivery method considerably since the early cases.’ The man knelt beside him, close enough that Mark could smell his aftershave – something expensive and subtle. ‘The beauty of neuromuscular blocking agents is their elegance. No violence. No mess. Just a quiet shutdown of the respiratory system that looks exactly like cardiac arrest to anyone who isn’t specifically looking for it.’
Mark tried to focus on the man’s face, tried to memorise details that might somehow matter, but his thoughts were becoming sluggish, disconnected. ‘Why?’ he spluttered again.
‘Because you found something you weren’t supposed to find. Because you asked questions when you should have accepted answers. Because you kept digging even after every reasonable person would have walked away.’ The man’s voice remained perfectly calm, almost kind. ‘I don’t take any pleasure in this, Dr Finlay. You seem like a good man. But you’ve become a liability.’
The paralysis was nearly complete now. Mark could barely breathe, each shallow gasp requiring enormous effort. But his mind, terrifyingly, remained sharp. He could hear everything, understand everything, feel everything except the ability to move or speak.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ the man continued, checking his watch with the casual air of someone waiting for a bus. ‘You’re wondering how your life would have ended if you hadn’t gone snooping. At least, that’s what I would be thinking, just before death gripped me…’
Mark wanted to scream, wanted to fight, wanted to do anything except lie helpless on his kitchen floor while this monster calmly explained his death. But his body had betrayed him completely.
‘The unfortunate truth is that no one is looking for connections, Dr Finlay. The authorities are satisfied with their explanations.The families have their closure. The media has moved on to fresher tragedies. You were the only one still asking uncomfortable questions.’ The man stood, brushing lint from his coat. ‘Your death will be unfortunate but not surprising. A retiree, living alone, under stress from recent bereavement. These things happen. The paramedics will find you here, they’ll note the lack of trauma, and they’ll make the obvious conclusion. Another statistic.’
Mark’s vision was fading now, darkness closing in like water.
He watched as the killer took a bottle of whisky out of his pocket, half size, just like the one Mark had. The killer then put Mark’s right hand on the bottle and his left on the screw cap before putting it on the kitchen counter. He emptied the contents of the glass down the sink, washed it thoroughly, still with his nitrile gloves on, and dried it and his hands before pouring some of the uncontaminated whisky into the glass and putting it in Mark’s hand for the prints, watching as Mark dropped it. Perfect. They could examine the whisky all they wanted and all they would find was… whisky.
Mark’s last coherent thought was of Maggie, of how she used to worry when he brought difficult cases home, how she’d insisted that some truths weren’t worth dying for. She’d been right, as usual.
The last thing he heard was the soft click of the front door closing.
The paramedics arrived two days later after a neighbour became worried about Mark. They found him on the kitchen floor, no pulse, no respiration, body temperature consistent with death occurring several hours earlier.
Myocardial infarction, they determined. Massive heart attack. No signs of trauma or foul play. The bottle of whisky on the counter was clean, showing no unusual residue when tested. The house was undisturbed, nothing missing, no indication of forced entry.
Dr Mark Finlay was buried beside his wife on a grey December morning. Seventeen people attended the service, mostly former colleagues from the lab who remembered him as thorough, dedicated and perhaps a bit too stubborn for his own good.
Three weeks later, when his nephew cleaned out the flat, he found a folder tucked behind the computer in the small office. It contained newspaper clippings, printed articles and handwritten notes in what looked like some kind of scientific shorthand. Most of it was incomprehensible to a layman.
The nephew, a practical man who worked in IT and had no patience for conspiracy theories, threw the folder into a cardboard box with the rest of Mark’s papers and shoved it up his attic. He kept only the photographs and a few pieces of jewellery that had belonged to his aunt. All the rest of his belongings were put out with the rubbish, furniture donated to charity.
And somewhere in the city, a pale man in an expensive coat made a note in his own files:
The Embalmer’s work continued.
8
PRESENT DAY
The Royal Edinburgh Hospital’s secure wing looked like what it was – a place where dangerous people were kept away from the world. Brodie signed in at reception, surrendered his phone and keys and submitted to the metal detector with the weary patience of someone who’d done this before.
Dr Gabriel Kane was waiting for him in the consultation room, sitting behind a table bolted to the floor. He looked exactly the same as he had three years ago when Brodie had helped put him here – thinning hair, the kind of unremarkable appearance that had let him kill seventeen people before anyone suspected the quiet pathologist. He looked the same as he had two weeks ago when he had last seen him.
