‘Give us ten minutes,’ he said, before putting the receiver down. ‘Get your coat then, Salter. We’re off into town.’
Crichton’s Close provided pedestrian access onto the Royal Mile and was a regular night stop for the homeless, courtesy of high walls at either side stopping the wind, and providing some shelter from the rain. As a no through route for traffic, it had the added bonus of excluding passing police vehicles. Only the drunks or unwitting tourists passed that way in the small hours. Unless you were looking for trouble. Lively and Salter took the car up Gentle’s Entry and parked it in Bakehouse Close, walking the few metres round the corner to where uniformed police officers and paramedics were doing their best to persuade a man to get medical help.
‘Who is he?’ Lively asked an officer as they approached.
‘Name’s Mikey Parsons. Long-term homeless, known drug user. We see him fairly regularly on the beat. Never had any trouble with him except for public pissing, and then he moves on without getting nasty.’
‘How’s it going, Mr Parsons?’ Salter asked, walking up to him.
The man swung round, trying to face her but missing by ninety degrees, staring instead at a poster for a gig that was hanging off the opposite wall. The whites of his eyes were an angry shade of red and his mouth was hanging open. Arms swinging at his sides, he swayed but remained standing. A paramedic took another step towards him with wipes, aiming for Mikey’s left cheek. As he mopped the dried blood away, the three slashes on his cheek became clearer.
‘That’s just fuckin’ great,’ Lively muttered. ‘We’ve got a deranged Zorro impersonator in the city.’
The top line of the Z ran from the bridge of his nose to the outer edge of his cheekbone, with the diagonal following down to the corner of his mouth and the final line reaching right back to his ear lobe.
‘Lucky they didn’t cut his neck,’ the paramedic said. ‘Mr Parsons, are you in any pain?’ he asked loudly.
Parsons groaned. His face was sweaty in spite of the chill and he seemed oblivious to his wounds.
‘What’s he taken, do you think?’ Salter asked.
‘I’d put my money on Spice,’ the paramedic said, sticking butterfly plasters every few millimetres along the slash to hold the sides together. ‘We’re seeing an epidemic of it at the moment. The accident and emergency room is stretched to capacity and it’s freaking members of the public out seeing people standing in the middle of the street like zombies. The drug causes hallucinations and psychosis. Total oblivion like this is common. It can render the user completely incapable of normal communication. If Mr Parsons is still in there, he may well be in agony. No sure way of knowing.’
‘Who notified you?’ Lively asked.
‘A shopkeeper walked past this morning, saw the blood, called it in. We didn’t realise what had happened until we got a proper look at his face. He was trying to hide his head in a bin when we first arrived.’
‘Well, it’s not accidental,’ Salter said. ‘What do you think, Sarge? Row with his dealer, unpaid debt, or a fight gone wrong?’
Lively took out his phone and got a few close-up shots of the wound as the paramedic finished up, then added a few more of the general area for good measure.
‘Not a fight,’ Lively said. ‘This is more of a branding. The lines have stayed pretty neatly on one side of his face and they’re quite straight. It was planned. Any blood on the ground around here?’ he shouted across to one of the uniformed officers.
‘Over there, by the pile of bin bags,’ came the response. ‘We think that’s Mikey’s stuff.’
Salter and Lively walked across to the mound of stinking clothes and cardboard that constituted Mikey Parsons’ home. An arrow of spattered blood decorated the external wall of a shop, a metre from the ground. Lively completed his portfolio of pictures with the images.
‘If he’d been sitting down on the cardboard there, the spatters would have been level with his cheek,’ Lively said. ‘Given that he’d have been hard pressed to have rolled a joint with half his skin hanging off, I’m going to put my money on him being well and truly stoned before he was attacked.’
‘You think someone just walked up to him while he was out of it, and decided to slash his face open?’ Salter asked. ‘Could it be another Spice user? If the drug causes psychosis, it’s possible they looked at Mikey here but saw something completely different.’
‘I strongly suspect that we’ll never find out,’ Lively said. ‘Mr Parsons here doesn’t seem to want to cooperate or go to the hospital, and he’s sure as hell not going to be giving any coherent statement to us about it. Have you done all you can?’ he asked the paramedics.
‘Everything we can out here. Ideally we’d have taken him to the hospital to clean the wound, administer antibiotics and stitch him up properly, but he won’t get in the ambulance and we’re not going to try restraining him.’
‘Fair enough,’ Lively said. ‘Salter, I hope you’re not wearing your best frock. You and I are about to get Mr Parsons here into the back of the squad car. Could we borrow a couple of pairs of gloves?’
‘Be my guest,’ the paramedic replied, handing over scrunched-up rubbery balls to each of them. ‘Good luck.’
They slipped the gloves on. Parsons remained in place, staring off into the distance, his mouth opening and closing as if trying unsuccessfully to speak. Salter went to one side of him and Lively took the other, guiding him slowly towards their car. It took some time to get him to fold his body into the right position to get in the rear seat, but eventually he was in. Salter closed the door and sighed.
‘It’s almost as if you planned this for me on my first morning back to put me off,’ Salter said.
‘Did it only take eight months for you to forget how glamorous and fun our job is?’ Lively replied. ‘I’m driving. You watch our guest.’
Salter checked out Mikey Parsons in the mirror. His head was bouncing up and down like a nodding dog with the movement of the car, and the white butterfly strips over his dark red wound resembled ghoulish Halloween face painting. He looked up suddenly, his pupils contracting as his eyes met Salter’s.
‘Hey, Mikey,’ she said. ‘Do you know where you are?’
He let out a long, whistling breath. The sourness from his mouth wafted through the vehicle. Fighting his seatbelt, Mikey threw himself forward to bash his head against the dividing screen at the rear of Lively’s seat, then thrust backwards to slam the back of his skull into his headrest. Back and forwards he went, hammering his head harder each time.
‘Stop the car,’ Salter said. ‘We’ve got to do something before he knocks himself out.’
‘No, we’re getting back to the station. If he’s unconscious by then, we’ll call an ambulance. I’m not touching him while he’s like that and neither are you. We’ve no idea what he’s capable of with that crap in his system. An officer got bitten last month during an arrest.’
‘How much do you know about this Spice drug?’ Salter asked.
‘They market it as an alternative to cannabis,
