Shallow Water

by Hunter J Walker

  ‘I’d put money on them being blanks or last weeks. We’ll get nothing from them, but we have to show willing. You take them back to the station and go through them. I’ll see if there are any private CCTV cameras covering this area.’

  Nicola held out the tapes and Douglas took them from her.

  ‘Wouldn’t Revenue and Customs be interested in his VAT returns rather than the MIU?’ Douglas commented.

  Nicola grinned and checked over her shoulder that nobody was able to hear her before she replied: ‘I just wanted to worry him; he knows full well it’s about the dodgy whisky and I want to see if he does a runner.’

  ‘Dodgy whisky?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it back at the office, I should be back by four.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Douglas said and waited until she was well out of range before muttering to himself: A Detective Inspector checking for CCTV cameras, the pigs will be in full flight this afternoon. He stomped his way to the bus stop. He knew she would have the afternoon free for shopping, after spending ten minutes getting the tapes from the one shop with a camera he could see that covered the pavement in front of the Blind Piper.

  *****

  James Cameron-Smythe mulled over the questions the woman detective had asked: Why had he been selected out of all the people on that street for an attack. No ready answer came to him: He wasn’t wearing blue or green clothing; or an England, or Ireland, or France, or anyplace T-shirt.

  ‘Let’s have a look at you, James.’

  James recognised the voice and looked up. He saw the woman doctor with the nametag, Dr Geraldine Lazelle, standing in a white coat at the bottom of the bed, behind her stood the dark-haired nurse, Carol Barnes.

  He made a half-hearted attempt to sit up.

  ‘Headache, dizziness, nausea, loss of balance, confused or dazed feeling, problems with vision or memory, any of those, James?’ Dr Geraldine asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Good, concussion is probably not on the agenda. Nurse Barnes will now remove the dressing and we’ll have a look at the state of your face.’

  Carol Barnes bent over him. ‘Hold still and try not to flinch,’ she said before she started to delicately pick at the edges of the old dressing. Once she had sufficient of the old dressing to grip Carol adjusted her position and held the side of his head hard against her breast, before firmly peeling the dressing away from his face. The pain flashed across his face and he bucked his head against her breast. When the manoeuvre was complete she stood back and smiled at him. ‘Was it worth the pain, James?’

  Dr Geraldine looked over her shoulder: ‘That’s healing nicely. However, Mr Delbridge said that the wound is too long and deep for much to be done cosmetically. You could try having it done privately, but most men just put up with it. Nurse Barnes is of the opinion that scars give a man character. Be that as it may, she will put on a new dressing while I prepare the paperwork.’

  Dr Geraldine returned an hour later and handed him a brown envelope and a white bag. ‘As wound is progressing well, so you can go home this afternoon. In here is a letter you need to give to your GP, a brochure about the symptoms of concussion and a survey. Please fill in the survey form and leave it in the box in the reception area. Your responses will help us to improve our performance. The bag has fresh dressings; if you are not up to changing them yourself pop into A&E, or your own doctor. Any questions?’

  James shook his head.

  ‘Do you have someone to pick you up?’ Carol asked when the doctor had left the side ward.

  James wrote the number on the pad, tore off the top sheet and handed it to her. He tried to smile but the pain from his cheek made it lopsided.

  Carol looked him: he was a presentable young educated man, well-cut hair, expensive watch, clear skin, but now he was marked as a hard man – it didn’t matter that he was the victim; the scar would make him one in the eyes of most people. She checked the name on the paper. ‘I’ll give the number a ring and see if Joanna can take you home,’ she said and smiled at him.

  *****

  He wandered around the reception area of the Hospital waiting for Joanna, his brother’s partner. She had been living with his brother long enough to be called a partner. Not that his brother ever referred to her as his partner, he preferred to keep them uncertain as to their status. James had never seen the point in this: If the girl wasn’t the one, then his brother should tell her that she wasn’t the one and then go find the one who was. He sat down on one of the seats and waited. He checked his mobile for messages in case she was outside already, but there was nothing. He started looking through the things nurse Carol Barnes had given him. First he read the booklet on concussion and decided he suffered from most of the symptoms after a Saturday night out and it was going to be a bit difficult to tell if he had concussion. He folded the brochure up small and threw it at the bin on the other side of the room. To his surprise it was a hole in one.

  The next piece of paper he examined was the customer survey asking for his feedback on his hospital experience. He reached inside his jacket and found his pen was still there. The first question was Family Name, for no particular reason he wrote Scarface. Given Name and he wrote Hamish. Occupation, he thought for a bit and then wrote Criminal Mastermind. Reason for hospitalisation he didn’t have to think about this one and he wrote Savage wounding by Jim Moriarty. He skipped to the end where there was a box for general comments. He considered this for a minute and then wrote Nurse Carol is hot – I would bend her over the operating table any day. Dr Geraldine is hot as well, but Nurse Carol is hotter.

  At this point, Joanna arrived. She quickly scanned the reception area, spotted him and beckoned him with some energetic arm waving. Must be parked on a double yellow again, he thought as he strolled over to greet her. He was in the car park before he realised that he’d dropped the customer survey. He decided it would be swept up with the rest of the rubbish and promptly forgot about it.

  As he walked out of the hospital he didn’t see an old woman pick up his customer survey, mutter under her breath and walk slowly over to the reception desk and drop it into the box marked: Completed Customer Surveys Only Please.

  *****

  He kissed Joanna on the cheek after getting into her Mazda sports car. ‘Where’s my brother today?’ He asked while trying not to move his mouth too much.

  ‘I have no bloody idea where he is,’ she replied in a tone of voice, which suggested to James that all was not well between them.

  ‘If you could drop me at my place it would be a great help.’

  *****

  Later in the afternoon a bored girl, one of whose jobs was to sort through patient surveys, emptied the box marked: Completed Customer Surveys Only Please. A lot of the forms were only half completed or not completed at all, or in some cases scrawled with obscenities. These ones, the girl shredded. Some patients filled the form out in an attempt to improve the Hospitals Customer relations and occasionally there were the forms making comments or allegations about members of staff and these she passed on to the appropriate departments. James’ survey, neatly written in joined-up writing, fell into a different category – one she could have fun with due to the nature of the comments. She dropped it Dr Geraldine’s in-tray before the end of her shift that afternoon; with a scribbled comment: This one fancies you, unfortunately he fancies Nurse Carol more.’

  ‘One tries to help these bloody men and all they think is that one should give them a quick shag in gratitude…and he seemed a nice boy,’ Dr Geraldine said as she dropped the survey on Nurse Carol’s workstation.

  Nurse Carol Barnes picked up the form. ‘I take it your not interested?’

  Dr Geraldine grimaced. ‘No way, now I must get on,’ she said and walked away.

  ‘I am,’ she murmured and opened James Cameron-Smythe’s folder, copied his address and telephone number onto the survey form, folded it and put it into her pocket.

  *****

  Douglas looked out of the
window at the crowds enjoying the afternoon sunshine after the morning’s rain. ‘Susanne’s away in Stirling today and she said would be doing some shopping if she can get away from the symposium.’

  Nicola snorted. ‘It’s all right for them in the Fiscal’s office, every weekend off.’ She put the DVD down on one of the piles of paperwork on her desk.

  ‘I hope she doesn’t spend too much.’

  ‘Huh, she can afford it and if she can’t her parents can bail her out without breaking stride.’

  ‘Can they? That pile of theirs costs a fortune to run.’

  Nicola looked at him quizzically. ‘That would be all the flunkies…do you go there often?’

  ‘I haven’t been there for a long while.’

  ‘I see…anyway getting back to today’s problem, it took me a long time to get hold of this DVD.’

  Douglas looked at the disc in its thin plastic wallet sitting on top of a pile of reports that littered Nicola’s desk. ‘They didn’t exactly splash out on the packaging.’

  Nicola scowled at him before extracting the DVD from the plastic wallet. She opened the DVD drive on her computer, placed it into the tray and carefully closed it. ‘Right, Douglas, bring your chair round here and I’ll show you what happened outside the Blind Piper.’

  The quality of the image on the screen surprised Douglas – it was streets ahead of the grubby images he had been scrutinising all afternoon. ‘Where did you get this? It’s too good for shop CCTV.’

  Nicola replied: ‘Don’t copy it and don’t leave it lying around, it goes in my safe when you’re done with it.’

  Douglas looked at his superior, but decided that further comment would not elicit any further details and turned to the computer. The video started about thirty minutes before the reported time of the attack on Cameron-Smythe. He ran it forward until the time-stamp read 8:25. At first he could only see just a flow of homeward bound pedestrians past the Blind Piper. There were no smokers hanging around outside. At 8:23:34 he recognised Cameron-Smythe walking along the pavement towards the camera and the door of the Blind Piper. He entered the pub and at 8:24:10 he left followed at 8:24:17 by a tall man in a dark overcoat and a wide brimmed hat. Douglas stepped through the images, each separated in time by half a second – he could see Cameron-Smythe stop and half-turn towards the man in the coat. The man in the coat raise his arm – but the hand holding the razor moved so quickly the actual moment when the razor cut was inflicted was not recorded. Douglas stepped between the frame before and the frame after – the razor was visible just before it came into contact with Cameron-Smythe’s face and just after. The two frames would be enough to convince a reasonable jury. He ran the video forward and he saw Cameron-Smythe put his arm to his cheek, then stumble backwards and fall.

  He had a clear image of the man in the coat closing the razor, but at no time did the man turn his face to the camera. Going back to the beginning he stepped the images forward one by one and at no point did the man show his face. He checked the Video right to the point where the man walked away though the pedestrians and out of view of the camera. Continuing to watch the images, he saw Cameron-Smythe lie on the pavement for 125 seconds before an old man in a donkey jacket stopped by the prone figure on the pavement. At 8:26:22 the old man took out his mobile phone and as he made a call, presumably to the control room, he looked towards the camera. The resolution was good enough for him to zoom in and print a recognisable image of the old man’s face.

  Douglas ran the video image backwards and looked for people leaving and entering the Blind Piper before the attack. At 8:20:04 he saw Shona Doherty walk out of the pub and down the street past the camera, three minutes or so before the attack. At 8:15:47 a man walked out of the pub and down the street in the same direction as Shona had taken. What struck Douglas about this man is that he walked in a very similar way to Cameron-Smythe; he zoomed in and printed an image of this man as well.

  He put the DVD back in the plastic wallet and handed it back to Nicola. She took it and opened the small safe sitting on top of the filing cabinet and placed it carefully on the top of the stack of paper inside. Nicola closed the safe door and spun the dial on the front to hide the combination.

  Douglas waited until she had finished the operation before asking the question that had been troubling him since he’d first seen the disc. ‘Why all the concern about this DVD…and shouldn’t it be sealed in the evidence room, covered in signed bits of sticky paper?’

  ‘It’s not evidence, it’s information. It can’t be used in court.’

  He raised his eyebrows and she continued.

  ‘It’s from an SCDEA investigation and we shouldn’t have it. I called in a few favours and they gave me an unauthorised copy. So it doesn’t exist and we don’t even make any notes about it.’

  ‘So what good is it to us?’

  ‘It gives us an accurate timeframe and it tells us who’s involved.’

  ‘Apart from Cameron-Smythe, who have we got?’

  ‘I know the man in the long coat and the hat is Big Man Doherty. We also have Shona Doherty in the picture and an image of the man who helped Cameron-Smythe and someone, who I’m guessing is Cameron-Smythe’s brother, or close cousin.’

  ‘Shona left the pub before the attack,’ Douglas blurted out.

  ‘You need to watch yourself, Dougie; you leapt to her defence just a bit too fast. She’ll know who’s involved in this and why it happened.’

  ‘Why are we spending all this time on this? Don’t we have more important things to be going on with?’

  ‘Anything that involves Big Man Doherty is important.’

  *****

  Douglas left Nicola’s office and went back to tidy his desk and shut down his computer. He was finishing up when he felt a presence behind him and turned in his seat to see Julie Bryce standing behind him. She leaned forward and whispered: ‘Have you seen the new girl?’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘You can’t miss her; she’s as tall as you without any heels and has muscles.’

  ‘No…can’t say I’ve seen her.’

  ‘Dave Knox has and he reckons he’s favourite in the shag-her-first stakes, but I reckon Superwoman wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole.’

  ‘Do you know where she came from?’

  ‘Lothian and Borders.’

  ‘Why come here then?’

  ‘Don’t know, why don’t you ask her when you bump into her?’

  ‘I’ll do that, Julie. Where are you off to now?’

  ‘I have some shopping to do. Where are you going?’

  ‘A lad’s night out.’

  ‘If it’s with Knox and the others, be careful, Douglas, they can sink an awful lot of drink on a Saturday night and they’ll probably drag you into a strip joint or worse just for a laugh,’ Julie said and turned to leave.

  ‘Bye, Julie, I’m sure it’ll be all right. It’s just a night out.’

  *****

  Douglas walked across George Square with his collar turned up against the cold drizzle. He turned the corner into St. Vincent Street and entered the bar of The Counting House. The crowd packed in tightly along the bar and he failed to recognise anyone. Turning towards the tables he slowly checked each one in turn until he saw Innes and Wyatt sitting with two other men – he stopped by the table and found that he recognised their faces although he hadn’t spoken to them.

  Innes pushed a chair towards him. ‘Hey, hey…here’s the last man. Did she keep you in for a lecture or a thrashing?’

  ‘Work, if you can call it that, I thought the team existed to investigate major things, not minor assaults outside pubs.’

  ‘You’re the new man, Dougie,’ Innes replied. ‘She’ll have you mucking around carrying her handbag and pushing your nose into anything she takes a fancy to.’

  ‘Doesn’t DCI Caddell run this team?’

  ‘Caddell’s a useless wanker,’ Knox said as he appeared by the table. ‘He lets Collins do anything she takes a fucking fancy to�
��now Dougie it’s your turn to get a round in.’

  Douglas returned with a tray of pints and found to his relief the conversation had turned to football and the sad state of Rangers, which seemed to be an obsession of Knox’s.

  After two more rounds of drinks they all left the pub and walked to a restaurant in Nelson Mandela Place. Everyone ordered a curry with all the accompaniments and three more rounds of drinks followed during the meal. As they wandered out of the restaurant Knox took charge and headed off at a stiff pace. Douglas followed along at the back, his head reeling from the alcohol. Knox nudged Wyatt. ‘How’s about we take in the lezzie sights tonight?’

  After five minutes walking in the cold Knox stopped by a pink door and Douglas took in the large black sign above the door with Pink Pelican Niteclub in pink writing. A small sign to the side of the door said: Saturday night girls only – Sunday to Friday nights mixed. He turned and weaved his way towards Douglas and put his arm around his shoulder and propelled him towards the door. ‘Dougie, my man, let’s see what‘s playing on the other side,’ Knox said and pushed the door open.

  As he stumbled through the door Douglas thought it strange there wasn’t a doorman, or doorwoman, in sight. The others followed him inside – a flight of stairs to the right led downwards and a pink door straight ahead. Knox headed down the stairs and he followed down. A sharp turn to the left at the bottom led them into a crowded bar with black and pink décor, black tables and pink chairs. Douglas ran his eyes over the clientele, which covered a wide age range and looked female with a few hard looking ones in leathers, boots and jeans whom he couldn’t make up his mind about. At the bar he noticed a tall woman with broad shoulders a head taller than the other women in the room.

  A beefy girl in denim jacket and short denim skirt, with big thighs turned in their direction and had no sooner registered their masculinity than she advanced towards them. A slimmer girl, dressed to match, put a hand on her arm. ‘Polis,’ was the only word she said. The beefy girl stopped to glare at them.

  Douglas dragged his eyes and focused his alcohol-laden mind in checking for other threats. The tall woman with broad shoulders had vanished, but the other women in the room were all focused on the five of them and outnumbered them twenty to one at least. Despite the alcohol he realised the stupidity of the situation and turned back towards the stairs. He reached the street and leaned against the wall by the notice. Seconds later the others shot out of the door laughing and Innes grabbed Douglas by the coat lapel, yanking him into motion along street.