Chapter 7
The silence had become unbearable.
Not the comfortable quiet of a Saturday morning lie-in, or the peaceful silence that settled over the flat when Maggie dozed off reading her crime novels in the armchair by the window. This was different. This was the hollow, echoing quiet of absence.
Mark Finlay stood at the kitchen window of his house on Perth Road, watching the grey November sky settle over the Tay.
The house felt too big now. Four rooms that had once buzzed with Maggie’s energy – her morning radio show competing with the coffee grinder, her phone conversations with her sister in Glasgow that could last for hours, her habit of reading newspaper headlines aloud whether he was listening or not.
She’d been gone eight months now. The stroke had taken her quickly, mercifully, but it had left him rattling around like a marble in an empty jar.
He’d kept her coffee mug in the dishwasher for three weeks before finally washing it and putting it away. Her reading glasses still sat on the side table next to her chair. Some mornings, he caught himself setting out two plates for breakfast.
The converted office beside the kitchen had become his refuge.
Maggie used to call it his ‘mad scientist lab’ because of the way he’d spread case files across every surface when he brought work home.
Now it housed his growing collection of true crime books, his computer and the manila folders he told himself he wasn’t supposed to have taken when he’d cleared out his desk.
But some cases didn’t let go easily.
The Embalmer case still haunted his quiet hours.
The first two victims had been textbook cases: Sarah Morrison, twenty-eight, a nurse from Kirkcaldy; Jennifer Walsh, thirty-one, a social worker from Kirkcaldy.
Both had elevated levels of succinylcholine in their systems – a paralytic agent that mimicked natural cardiac arrest and metabolised quickly, making it nearly impossible to detect unless you knew exactly what to look for and tested within hours of death.
The cause of death was simply cardiac arrest. Before their blood had been drained.
But another woman, Lisa Patterson, was different.
Mark had run those tests himself, twice, because the numbers hadn’t made sense.
The official cause of death matched the others, but when he’d analysed the blood samples, the chemistry told a different story.
The succinylcholine levels were wrong – too low for the timeline, too inconsistent with the other markers.
And there had been traces of something else, something he couldn’t immediately identify.
He’d flagged it immediately. Sent his concerns up the chain to Detective Superintendent Chris Breck. Asked for permission to run additional tests, to dig deeper into what might have been a different MO or a copycat.
Breck never responded.
Three weeks later, Mark had tried calling directly. Breck’s DS said he was in meetings. Then she said he was away. Then she stopped taking Mark’s calls altogether.
Someone had performed a very thorough cleaning job.
Mark had tried to let it go.
But scientists were curious by nature, and Mark had always been particularly stubborn when the evidence didn’t fit the conclusion.
He’d started his own quiet investigation six months ago. Nothing official, nothing that would raise alarms. Just an old toxicologist reading old newspapers, cross-referencing dates and details, making notes in the shorthand he’d developed over decades of lab work.
What he’d found made his blood run cold.
The pattern was there, hidden in the statistics, scattered across jurisdictions and months.
Unexplained cardiac arrests in people with no prior heart conditions.
Deaths that occurred in isolation, with no witnesses, no signs of struggle.
Victims who all shared one common thread: they had all, at some point in their professional lives, come into contact with sensitive information.
A lawyer who’d handled high-profile divorces.
A social worker who’d investigated abuse in wealthy families.
A nurse who’d worked in private clinics.
They all died the same way, but no embalming had taken place, no bleach put into their bodies.
But death had come for them anyway, and possibly at the hands of a man who was killing in other ways, keeping the focus of the police’s attention on people who had met their end at the hands of a serial killer.
All heart attacks. All unexplained. All conveniently timed. They were being dispatched at an alarming rate.
He had wondered who he could talk to about this and there was only one man that he could trust. Now, he was waiting for that man to get back to him.
The clock on the mantel chimed three times, jerking Mark from his thoughts. The afternoon was slipping away, grey light fading towards the early darkness of a Scottish winter. He stood, stretching his back against the familiar ache of too many years bent over microscopes and lab benches.
The house felt oppressive in the gathering dusk. Too quiet. Too still. He needed air, needed movement, needed something to break the cycle of thoughts that had been circling like water down a drain.
He walked to the kitchen, habit guiding him to one of the cupboards. Second shelf, behind the coffee mugs. Hidden away like he was an alcoholic. He took the bottle out, twisted off the cap and poured a healthy measure.
The whisky burned its way down, exactly what he needed.
But something was wrong.
It started as a flutter in his chest, so subtle he might have dismissed it as anxiety. Then his heart skipped – actually skipped. He set the bottle down carefully, his hand suddenly unsteady.
The tightness came next. Not pain, exactly, but pressure. His breathing became shallow, laboured.
Mark gripped the edge of the counter, his scientific mind already analysing symptoms even as his body began to betray him. Chest tightness. Irregular heartbeat. Sudden onset. The symptoms were textbook, exactly what he’d expect from—
His legs went weak beneath him, but he caught himself on the countertop.
‘No,’ he whispered, understanding flooding through him like ice water. ‘Not like this.’
He lunged for the phone on the kitchen wall, fingers fumbling with the handset. His vision was starting to blur at the edges, dark spots dancing in his peripheral vision. He managed to dial the first two digits – 9-9 – before his hand cramped and the phone clattered to the floor.
That’s when he heard the voice.
‘Dr Finlay.’
Mark spun around, nearly falling, and saw him standing in the doorway between the kitchen and the lounge.
Tall and lean, wearing a well-tailored dark coat that looked expensive.
His hair was dark, perfectly styled. His face was pale and unremarkable except for the eyes – pale blue behind rimless glasses, and completely, utterly calm.
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.