A sense of panic filled him, a primal fear, and the ropes began to slowly unravel in front of his eyes

Mclean pushed himself up off his seat, pocketed his notebook and made to leave. “I’ll send the files over to your printer. Should be waiting for you by the time you get there.” “You can do that?” Wonders never ceased.

“Aye, no bother. Beats driving them across town. Mind you, I’ll be heading up your way soon anyway.

“You’ll be going to the pub with all the others, won’t you?”

“Pub?”

“Aye, Duguid’s standing everyone on the Smythe investigation a drink.

“I’m told it’s not often he puts his hand in his pocket, so I guess the place’ll be packed.”

“Dagwood buying drinks?” Mclean shook his head in disbelief. “Now that I have to see.”

True to Miss-not-ms Baird’s word, a stack of freshly printed photographs awaited Mclean when he returned to the station.

He carried them down to the small incident room, empty and quiet in the late afternoon.

On the wall, the dead girl still stared back at him, screaming her 66-year silent scream, accusing him of not doing enough, not finding out who she was and who had killed her.

Sinuous

He stared at her, then down at the photos, each almost completely white.

Thin black lines showed the edges of the floorboards and circled the occasional knot in the wood.

Barely distinguishable under the fluorescent lights, a sinuous pattern of pale grey snaked through each photograph.

Mclean found a permanent marker pen with a narrow tip and tried to trace the edges of the pattern on the first photograph.

It was almost impossible to make out, but as he worked his way through the pile, the repeats became more obvious and the task easier.

He moved the tables back against the walls, trying to make as much room on the floor as possible, then spent half an hour arranging the photographs in a circle around the centre of the room.

As he put the last piece of the jigsaw in place and looked over what he had done, a cloud passed over the setting sun outside and the air turned suddenly cold.

He stood in the middle of a complex circle made up of six intertwining ropes. At six points equidistant around the circumference, they coiled into fantastic knots, impossible shapes that seemed almost to writhe like snakes as he looked at them.

He felt trapped, his chest constricted as if it were wrapped tight in bandages. The lights dimmed, the ever-present rumble of the city outside quietened to almost nothing.

He could hear his breath passing through his nose, feel his heart beating slowly, rhythmically. He tried to shift his feet, but they were glued to the floor. All he could move was his head.

A sense of panic filled him, a primal fear, and the ropes began to slowly unravel in front of his eyes. Then the door opened, knocking some of the photographs out of line.

The lights snapped back on. The tightness in his chest disappeared and his head felt suddenly light. Somewhere in the distance what sounded like a howl of rage echoed in the night.

His invisible restraints broke and Mclean lurched forward, off-balance, as Chief Superintendent Mcintyre walked into the room.

“What was that?” She cocked her head slightly, as if listening for an echo that never came. Mclean didn’t answer. He was too busy getting his breath back.

“Are you all right, Tony? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Chilled

He crouched down and pulled the photographs towards him, starting with the knotted sigil that had been unravelling.

On the glossy paper it was nothing more than a few lines in green marker pen, but it still chilled him to look at. “I just stood up too quickly,” he said, and even as he said the words, it started to make sense. “Well, what were you doing down there anyway?” Mclean explained about the photographs, the markings he had seen and how they had led him to the hidden alcoves. He said nothing of his strange hallucination.

Somehow he didn’t think the chief superintendent would be all that sympathetic, and besides, it was fading from memory, becoming little more than a vague feeling of disquiet.

“Let’s have a look at those.” Mcintyre took the photos from him, leafing through them, pausing at the ones showing the six marked points.

“Do they mean anything to you?”

“I don’t really know.”

“I thought it might be some kind of circle of protection.”

“What?”

“You know, circle of protection. Five-pointed star, candles, traps the demon inside when you summon it, kind of thing.”

“I know what a circle of protection is, I’m just not sure how you go about arresting a demon.

“There’s this little problem that they don’t actually exist outside the imaginations of pulp novelists and thrash-metal fans.”

“I know that, ma’am. Christ knows our job’s hard enough as it is without supernatural forces intervening.

“But just because demons don’t exist, it doesn’t mean someone can’t believe in them enough to kill.” “Aye, I guess you’re right.”

“Doesn’t make it any easier trying to track down just which brand of lunacy gave birth to this, mind you.”

Mclean rubbed at his eyes and face in a vain attempt to chase some of his weariness away.

“Well if it’s magic circles and demon worship you want to know about, then you need to talk to Madame Rose, down on Leith Walk.”

“Err... I do?”

Initiative

“Trust me. There’s not many know more about the occult than Madame Rose.”

From the way she spoke, Mclean couldn’t really be sure whether he was having his leg pulled or not.

If he was, then he needed to remember never to play poker with the chief superintendent.

He decided that if she was going to play it straight, then he would too.

“I’d better pay her a visit then. I could do with having my fortune told.”

“You do that, Tony. But it can wait for now.” Mcintyre shuffled the photographs together and placed them firmly on the table.

“I didn’t come looking for you to talk about raising demons.

“Not this kind, anyway. Charles has been bending my ear about the Smythe case. Did you sanction DC Macbride to requisition information from immigration services?”

Mclean hadn’t in as many words, but he wasn’t about to punish the lad for his initiative.

“Yes, I did. I thought it was important to establish motive, and maybe corroborate that with some of Okolo’s co-internees. His post-mortem threw up some difficult questions.”

More tomorrow.