Our Little Secrets

by Peter Ritchie

  ‘You’re beginning to look like a mother, Grace. In a good way. Christ, I never thought I’d see that tortured detective from Northern Ireland turn into an advert for domestic bliss. But there you go. Maybe you can advertise domestic products when you retire – baking an’ all that shite.’

  Macallan laughed and that was always a rare sight. ‘You look good, Jacquie, but God knows how you do it.’

  ‘Told you before, science has got it all wrong. Fags and booze – they’re the answer to all the world’s problems. If we all just stayed pissed there wouldn’t be half the problems. Where’s that hunk of a man of yours?’

  They sat down at the kitchen table and Grace poured the almost syrupy Italian wine. They smiled at each other just before the glasses touched their lips. The mood had changed though, and even though Macallan didn’t know what the problem was, she knew enough to understand this wasn’t going to be good news.

  ‘Okay, Jacquie, tell me the problem and then we can gossip later.’ She wanted to get to the point and listened without interrupting as the reporter told her exactly what Frankie Mason had told her, and that she’d had to sit on it.

  The smile gradually dropped from Macallan’s face as she absorbed the story and what it might mean. When Bell finished and waited for a response, Macallan put the glass down and took a moment before answering.

  ‘Christ, Jacquie. You sat on a story about what might be a corrupt relationship and you tell me now? You know the problems we might have with this.’ There was annoyance in her tone but it was controlled; Macallan knew it was easy to be judgemental with hindsight. It was a problem, a difficult one, and her concern was that someone could take the wrong view of what Bell had done then try to hurt her.

  ‘Sorry, Grace. Sod’s Law – I get the story and something else comes up. I’m not claiming to have done the right thing. Look, you know I’m an unscrupulous bitch, and if it wasn’t for you, I might have left it buried, but I have a bad feeling about it. Just the wrong mix of chemicals. Cards on the table, I know Arthur Hamilton, and let me tell you, that boy will want to lick some poor bastard’s blood. He’s a bit of an old smoothie now, but cut him open and he bleeds acid. Bad guy, Grace. If I need to take a kicking I’ll have that, but over to you, girl.’

  Macallan stayed quiet for a moment and studied her friend. She sipped the wine and wondered why she’d never drunk it before. It was like warm chocolate, with a delayed buzz as it hit the spot.

  ‘Must get some of this.’ Then she put the glass down.

  ‘Right, Jacquie, it’s late so I’ll get in touch with Ronnie Slade in the morning. There’s two things we have here: the murder, although for all intents and purposes it’s solved from what I hear, then there’s the possible corruption. We need to be careful because there might be an explanation for what Janet Hadden has been up to, though Christ knows what that could be.’ Macallan knew it was pointless to press the panic button, and she believed her friend when she said she’d come forward only because of her.

  ‘It’s important to understand if anyone else knows apart from your source?’ Macallan raised her eyebrows to emphasis the question.

  ‘As far as I know my source was going to tell Arthur Hamilton everything apart from the Belfast thing. That was probably for my benefit – he thought there was a story for me.’ She paused and a half-grin spread her lips. ‘He has a wee thing for me.’

  ‘Don’t they all? It’s your capacity for drink that impresses the boys.’

  ‘Tell you the truth, Grace, Arthur Hamilton is a scary man, and if he suspects Dominic of being involved he’ll shake the trees to get the evidence. I can’t guarantee the source won’t tell him it all, including the Belfast connection. It’s the visit to Davy McGill though that’s going to stir him up, and my source will definitely tell him that bit. As I said, he’s a scary guy.’ She tapped the table with her fingers and watched Macallan’s mind working.

  ‘Christ, if this thing about Janet Hadden is true then it’s a weird one. God knows what that means,’ Macallan said. ‘But if anything else comes up, Jacquie, you let me know – and that means right away.’

  ‘You have it, my friend, although I think I’ll stick to pulling down bent politicians in future. I’m getting too old. Less hassle and more brownie points.’

  She raised her glass to Macallan, glad she knew her. Grace was one of the few people in her life that seemed to be there just when she needed her.

  She felt light now; the wine was working its magic. She was gasping for a smoke but knew that was out for Macallan, who always said she was just one lungful of smoke away from being hooked again.

  ‘Why don’t we finish this and I’ll open something else? Stay the night, Jacquie. I need to chew the fat and drink. Don’t do that enough these days. Being the perfect mum has its drawbacks.’

  Bell raised her eyebrows mischievously. It was her go-to every time she liked to wind Macallan up. When they’d first met, they’d spent one night together when Macallan was still at a low point and trying to recover from the horrors of the Troubles. She’d never been able to explain why it happened, but Bell loved never letting her forget.

  ‘There’s a lovely spare room, Jacquie – you’ll love it. Now tell me all about these politicians you’ve been harassing.’

  It was the early hours when they both realised that the third bottle was done, there was still work to do and that they needed an early start. But they had needed that night and being able to talk without any guards in place. There were no great problems resolved, but both of them wondered how so much could have happened in the short years they’d known each other.

  Macallan went out like a light, the night having purged some of her worries about the present and future, whatever they might hold.

  Bell, on the other hand, leaned out of her window as Macallan slept and for the first time she could remember, she felt lonely.

  ‘Getting too old for this shite, girl,’ she murmured.

  She blew a stream of smoke into the night and a tear bulged before zigzagging down her cheek.

  54

  As Jacquie Bell stared into the Edinburgh night and reflected on a past and present that she was beginning to question, Arthur Hamilton stood at his own window looking at the same night sky. He’d been there for hours, alternately sitting at his desk chair or standing behind the glass, trying to come to terms with what was left of his life. His daughter had turned against him, but he’d always dreamed of a reconciliation and that she’d come to realise that everything he had would have gone to her or the grandchildren he’d never know now. It hadn’t occurred to him till that night that he was now the end of his particular line of forefathers. For such a hard man, he’d nursed all the same fears as the mere mortals he’d steamrollered over during his years in crime and business. He’d been robbed, and people just did not rob Big Arthur Hamilton.

  Occasionally he groaned as if he was in pain; his heart felt like it was being squeezed and rage boiled inside him. He pressed his forehead against the cool glass and closed his eyes, trying to work out what the fuck life was supposed to mean for him now.

  He played the recording again, watching the woman Frankie Mason had said was a detective knock fuck out of the punter in the boozer. What the fuck was a DI doing in that position then turning up with a different look at Grainger’s office? he thought over and over again. She was bent in some way, no doubt about it, and he’d had a lot of experience of detectives on the take, but not the female variety wearing a fucking disguise. She was part of whatever had happened, guilty as fucking sin, and he just had to work out why, or if the worst came to the worst, make her tell him why.

  ‘Fuck it.’ He ground his teeth before and after the words left his lips, squeezing the crystal whisky glass in his hand until it broke. He let the pieces drop to the floor and ignored the blood running from the open cuts in his palm. The pain was nothing to the poison beating through his blood vessels and in his head.

  Eventually he looked at his hand as if he
’d just realised what had happened. The side of his dressing gown was covered in blood, and in the moonlight, there was a dark, almost black patch on the carpet. He wondered if it had been the same where his daughter had been killed.

  ‘It must have hurt, Jude,’ he said to the daughter who only existed in his imagination now.

  Hamilton decided in that moment that he couldn’t wait for payback. What happened to him didn’t matter, and in a way he was free to carry out whatever action he decided, but he believed in the old adage that revenge is always a dish best taken cold. Dominic Grainger was guilty, but to what degree? He could wait to see if he could find out more about what his reasons might be. He would get Frankie Mason to look at him again, dig a bit deeper.

  It was always the same reasons for most things: money, sex or revenge. His bet was money. Grainger gave the impression that he was a sharp, minted operator, but the private detective had told him that he was a gambler.

  He thought back to what he would have done back in the day if a rival operator had killed one of his. It had happened, and in those days, he hadn’t just taken out the fuck who’d left his brother in a vegetative state; he’d set fire to the family home. The boy’s mother had barely made it out alive. Then he’d taken every part of their business, and it had sent a message to all the other predators who might have thoughts of taking on Arthur Hamilton.

  There wasn’t anything to suggest that Tonto was working under the direction of Paul or Sean Grainger, but so what? Guilt by association – it wasn’t court-of-law rules of evidence, but they weren’t in a fucking court of law, and better that an innocent man died than some guilty fuck got away with it. It didn’t matter; there was enough to say Dominic Grainger was guilty of enough to warrant a death sentence. It needed blood.

  He headed for the shower, and the plan that was forming played through his mind as he stood under the hot shower, watching the blood mix with the water then disappear down into the darkness of the sewers.

  55

  Macallan woke early and heard Bell coughing in the bathroom. She switched on the kettle and searched for the packet of aspirin she hadn’t needed for a while. It was still early, but she knew Ronnie Slade would be in the office already if he was working a case. She had a lot of time for him and they’d been friends since they’d met at the locus of a shooting that was remembered in police legend as the Gunfight at Ricky’s Corral. It had been a bloodbath, but as far as most detectives were concerned a bit of a result, because the Fleming brothers, two Leith villains, had been treated to the wrong end of a shotgun. Macallan had recognised Ronnie Slade as the real deal back then, and he’d proved her right. Apart from anything else, he had respect among the ranks, though it had come at a price. When there was a difficult case, the signal went up to get Slade, and it had already cost him a couple of serious relationships. But that was the price they paid, and she knew what that meant as well as anyone in the job.

  When Slade answered, he sounded tired and claimed that he hadn’t had his first shots of coffee to keep him alive another day. He was happy to hear Macallan; they hadn’t seen each other for a while and had both been preoccupied with difficult cases.

  ‘Jesus, Grace, it’s good to hear from you. Hope this isn’t an official call that I’m in the shit,’ he joked. ‘Enough problems as it is with this case. Anyway, what can I do for you? Hope it involves meeting up for a drink.’

  She cut to the chase and gave him brief details without going too far on the phone. She heard something in his tone, and his brief questions suggested this wasn’t a total surprise to him.

  ‘That’s roughly it, Ronnie. Know you have this one solved, but there’s two issues here, and one of them is in my domain and the other in yours. Might be nothing but had to let you know. I’ll put this on paper for your eyes only as soon as I get to the office.’

  ‘Is this from an official source, Grace?’

  ‘One of mine, Ronnie, and rock solid in the past.’

  ‘Look, I’m having a closed session with Lesley Thompson and Felicity Young to go over what we have. The forensics are more or less complete, and we want to make sure it’s all being covered. Truth is, Grace, it should be solved, done an’ dusted on the label, but something just doesn’t feel right with this. You know the problem – further up the tree want it run down and I’m fighting a losing battle. Come over to the briefing and see what you think.’

  ‘Good for me, Ronnie, be great to see the old team again and no doubt Felicity will have a story. What time?’

  They agreed to meet mid-morning. Macallan had some breakfast but couldn’t convince Bell to have anything more than coffee plus a couple of bites of toast that were obviously grudged and just to keep her friend off her back.

  ‘Honestly, Jacquie, I worry about you. The clock ain’t going backwards, but then you know that.’

  ‘I’ll keep in touch, Grace, and be careful out there.’ Bell grabbed her jacket and bag and was already on the phone when she closed the door behind her.

  Macallan walked into Slade’s office three hours later and her face lit up when she saw Lesley Thompson and Felicity Young get to their feet. There was a bond that stayed with them no matter how long it had been since they’d last seen each other. They exchanged a few stories, and Slade smiled but stayed well out of it. He knew what their shared experience meant and that it was special.

  They eventually settled down and there was almost a discussion about Brexit until Macallan put her hand up and called time on politics till they got the job in hand done.

  Slade took over, handing each of them a summary of the evidence and forensics from the locus of the murder. He kicked it off with a note of caution.

  ‘Look, this is just a discussion, and I haven’t explained why Grace is here, but we’ll come to that. This is need to know and I trust everyone to keep it that way at the moment till we decide if we go any further. First of all, Felicity, can you run through what we’ve got so far from the locus?’

  Felicity Young, who was known in the job as The Brain, was a superb analyst, but more than that, she never saw herself as separate, just part of the machinery of the team. Solving a case gave her as much of a thrill as the detectives, although she was less demonstrative about a result.

  ‘First of all—’ The analyst stopped and pulled the glasses off her nose. It was a habit they all recognised. ‘McGill was at the locus, and we have more than enough evidence that he entered the house through the back window. It was easily forced and we have fibres on the ledge that match what he was wearing, plus we have good footprints in the soft earth at the back of the house that match his shoes. There are soil samples as well that match.’

  Slade’s phone went off and there was a bit of leg-pulling because he was hard on anyone who made the same mistake in a briefing. He refused the call and put his hands up. ‘Okay, I owe you all a drink, but don’t grass me up to the troops – I just forgot, right? Sorry, Felicity, and on you go.’

  ‘He was in the bedroom and we have a number of confirmations of contact or close contact with the deceased. I don’t want to run through them all, but there is cross-contamination of blood and fibres, plus soil deposits from the garden. He must have picked up blood on one of his boots and I’ll come back to that. There’s nothing on the weapon to tie him, but he was wearing gloves, and I’ll come back to that as well. There’s an area where he vomited and we have DNA plus a hair in the vomit that matches his. We think he took his balaclava off because it seems he vomited when he had it on.’ She scribbled something on the margin of her notes before continuing. ‘There is a pattern of blood back towards the bedroom door and stairs, consistent with coming from the sole of his boot. There’s more but that’s enough to say he was there – there’s a full report from the SOCOs and lab we’ve read and you can have, Grace.’ She looked at Slade, who nodded confirmation and took over from her.

  ‘The thing here is that tied to what was found in Davy McGill’s flat, there’s enough to convict him in any court, but
there are unresolved issues. There’s the fact that Davy McGill was one of Paul and Sean Grainger’s team and not known for this level of violence. He was no saint, but although he’d been a decent housebreaker years ago, there’s nothing on intelligence that he was still at that game.’

  ‘Before we go any further – Grace, can you fill everyone in on what you’ve been told then we’ll get to the issues.’

  Macallan told them exactly what she’d been told by Jacquie Bell, apart from who her source was. Thompson shifted in her seat; the seeds of doubt were growing arms and legs in her mind, though Young remained impassive, apart from fiddling with her glasses. Slade let Macallan finish then took over again.

  ‘Okay, this might mean absolutely nothing, but the deceased’s husband visited the alleged killer days before the crime, though according to him he only knows McGill by sight. He’s a liar, but then so what? Now we get to the issues. Can you pick it up again, Felicity?’

  The analyst sipped a glass of water and picked up her notes again.

  ‘I’ll go over a few things, but let’s start with the gloves found in his rucksack. There’s no blood, hair or material from the deceased, and if he had them on when he used the weapon there should at least be spattering on the back of the glove holding the weapon.’

  She put her glasses back on and looked round their faces for a moment, letting the picture develop.

  ‘Now we have the cupboard where the box was removed. If he’d gone to that after killing the deceased there would have been blood traces on the carpet from his boots. There aren’t, so the hypothesis is that he went to the cupboard before she was killed.’

  She paused again and waited for the question she knew was coming.

  ‘So does that mean he must have broken into the house, gone upstairs and then been disturbed by the deceased?’ Macallan asked the question the others in the room had already been struggling with. Slade came back in.