Dakar turned around slowly, letting the door handle go. He looked at the guy in the chair, then over at Stewart. Stewart looked back, ignorant of what Dakar wanted him to say and terrified that whatever he did could break the pretence. After another couple of seconds, Dakar turned and walked back to the desk.
“Just tell us what you can.” Dakar sat back down. Stewart did the same, cautiously, studying Dakar with an attempted nonchalance as he looked for cues.
“We’re a small permaculture company. We don’t pull in massive amounts. But like Graham was saying, this is a growth area.”
“I know about permaculture, and I’m with you, it is a growth area. A lot of talk about the environment just now, a lot of people ready to part with their money for the sake of their conscience. But what makes you different to the other firms? Bigger firms?” Stewart couldn’t believe the assurance in Dakar’s tone.
“We’ve been doing it a long time, so we’re trusted. And we know our stuff, about the basics. We find a water tank under the house, we stick it on a hill so you’re using gravity, not fighting it. We plant certain types of plants together because they grow better. We stick yellow and purple together to attract insects. We use the edges, the zones, and we’ve got a lot of templates in place that we can tailor to individual needs. We’re much better than the big guys. They’re beginners.” The guy leaned across the desk, his voice gaining in enthusiasm the more he spoke.
Yellow and purple together … Stewart managed to keep up, but not by much. Pretty sure that Green and Sudgeon wouldn’t give a rat’s arse for this stuff, but he would stick it in the report anyway. They had wanted details, and come hell or high water, Stewart was going to provide them. Along with a very detailed six-minute billing breakdown.
“You guys have clearly been doing well enough for a while. What changed?”
The guy shrugged as he sat back into his chair, a gesture of frustration rather than ignorance. “Big companies moving into this area. Look, it was really niche for a long time. Other companies were all about landscaping for profit, and if that meant busting up nature, fine. If Madame Smith wanted a big bloody fountain that wasted water 24 hours a day, that was no issue so long as she could pay.”
The guy pronounced ‘Madame’ in the French way, although his thick Scottish accent ruined the effect.
“We were a small firm, working with the few people conscious of the problems back then. Now, everyone’s doing it, with the new environmentalist wave. And so we’re getting squeezed. Big businesses copy what we do, or they seem to, anyway, but do it at a loss at the moment so they can push us out the market. Then they can raise prices later, once all the small competitors are gone.”
The guy paused, his mouth turning down as he looked sourly at Dakar.
“And now Graham is getting his arse kicked by guys like you because these arseholes are coming in and undercutting him.”
“I’ve also heard your firm have a specific employment policy?”
The man sneered. “Going to hold that against us as well, are you?”
“I don’t have time for pointless questions.” Dakar’s voice was hard and flat.
The guy reached up and rubbed his jaw for a second, then brought his hand back down. “Yeah, we do. We employ ex-cons. Only ex-cons. Give them a way to get back into society. Graham always says his old gaffer took a gamble on him, and he’s willing to do the same for others.”
“Any issues so far?”
“Like what, mass murder?”
Stewart saw Dakar’s jaw muscles clamp together, and his head tilt down.
“No, no problems.” The guy spoke hastily in the face of Dakar’s displeasure. “A bit of thieving here and there, but we’re careful about that. The biggest problem is truancy. Graham doesn’t give too many extra chances out, but he makes sure everyone understands that right from the off.”
“What was your last annual turnover in a healthy year?”
There was a pause from the guy now. Stewart looked up. The guy was looking really suspiciously at Dakar now.
“In the good old days, say ten years back, we normally, after all was said and done, turned over about 30 grand a year, after tax. Now, we’re that far in the red regularly. Did you seriously not look at our presentation? Surely you know our business numbers? That’s what you guys are all about.”
“Presentations are one thing. Getting out and meeting people, getting it from the horse’s mouth, that’s where the real story is. That’s the only way you can tell who’s lying and who isn’t.” Dakar’s tone grew grimmer as he said the words, and an image of Frank welled up in Stewart’s mind.
Dakar stood up abruptly. “Thanks for your time, Mr …?”
“Morrison.”
Dakar nodded as they shook hands. “I’ll be in touch.” He turned and strode out of the small office. Stewart followed him out, hurriedly packing his notepad back into his satchel.
“Eh, Dakar?”
The man didn’t break stride.
“Did you just, eh, lie to that guy to get information? About the bank, and everything?”
Dakar didn’t look around at him, and walked swiftly over to the car. “I didn’t say a word of a lie. If he drew some wrong conclusions, it’s not my job to correct him.”
Chapter 27
They sat back in the car, slowly getting warm again. Stewart looked down at his notes.
So Graham’s business was in financial trouble, and pretty serious trouble by the sounds of things. But … He flipped back his notes. Yes, Martina had said it was ‘in good health’. Stewart circled the notation. Maybe Graham had lied to her about that as well.
He looked at Dakar, but the man was in his own world, staring out into the world but seeing nothing. Stewart checked the time. Ten in the morning. The sun was being defeated as the new set of dark clouds moved slowly but inevitably across the sky, squeezing the sunlight out. It was an impressive sight, nature on earth temporarily defeating the power of a star.
“So, what do you think? Dentist and her husband next?”
Dakar’s faraway expression didn’t change, but he replied straight away. “It’s time to pay a visit to Sandra, Jane and Russell. I want to know more about that drinking game.” Dakar turned to him. “And I need to test something else.”
Stewart nodded, turning down to his notes, as much to get away from Dakar’s intensity as to write. Going to see Sandra meant a trip to Glasgow. The office party loomed into his head, Sudgeon’s words and face accompanying it. Stewart surreptitiously set an alarm for ten to six on his phone.
Dakar, meanwhile, had taken out his smartphone and was typing in a number. It answered after a couple of rings.
“Good morning. My name is Sebastian Dakar. I’m investigating the murder of your stepfather, Daniel Mannings. I’d like to speak to you about it.”
Stewart couldn’t hear what the other person said, but the suspicion in the voice was clear.
“No, I’m not a journalist. Tom Mannings asked me to look into it. We already met your mother, Sarah-Anne, yesterday. She gave us your contact details. You can check with her if you want.”
The voice on the other end again. Sounded a bit less wary.
“Yes, we would come through there. In fact, we’re planning to head through to Glasgow now. Perhaps we could meet in a café near Arlington Street?”
Stewart strained to hear what the voice on the other end of the line was saying, but unless he actually put his face next to Dakar’s, it wasn’t really possible.
“Yes, Whisky sounds fine. We’ll meet you there.” Dakar took his phone away from his ear. “We’re meeting them at twelve thirty on Woodlands Road. A pub called Whisky.”
Stewart made his note. He actually knew the pub Whisky, on Woodlands Road, pretty much just opposite the Old School House and the Stand comedy club. When he’d been growing up, Stewart had always gone to the Garage. But as he’d grown older he had crossed the M8 and spent more time out towards the West End, getting drunk in a more sophisticated and expensive w
ay. Both Whisky the pub and whisky the drink had been a part of that, before he’d ended up fully in the West End, at places like the Oran Mór and down Ashton Lane, before going to clubs like Viper, the last showing that his sophistication was only skin deep.
The car pulled smoothly away, heading for the bypass. Stewart settled down, looking out the window himself. He always enjoyed heading back to Mother Glasgow.
They were soon at the bypass, the Pentland Hills now visible in the remains of the sunlight. Cultivated fields next to the bypass led up to bare rolling hilltops, darker and lighter patches delineating heather and grass.
Stewart looked over at Dakar. The guy seemed quite focused, eyes staring out the window.
“Eh, Dakar?”
“Yes?” No pause this time. His tone was a wary one.
“Eh, I hope you don’t mind, but eh, well, after what happened last night … Eh, well, I was kind of wondering, but who was that guy Frank?”
Dakar kept looking at the road as they left the bypass and got onto the M8. His voice was hard when he spoke. “Frank McPherson used to be a crime reporter, for the Daily Reporter, back when it was a print journal.”
“Ah, right. And, eh, you knew him, then, did you?”
“Yes. What he said was correct. We often worked closely together, and drinking together. We were quite good friends, in the end. And I did ask him for a number of favours, including running false stories to try and get someone to break cover, and he almost always did them for me.”
“Right, okay. And what happened to him?”
Dakar’s face hardened further, the hands gripping the steering wheel until his knuckles went white. “He …” Dakar stopped. His eyes flicked over at Stewart, a hard look, before they went back to the road again. There was a pregnant pause, one of someone trying to work out how best to say what was on their mind.
“There was a murder. A brutal one. A teenage girl, 19 years old, raped and dumped out in a wood. I was the DI in charge, and I was sure her uncle had done it. He just … well, he ticked every box for me. No alibi at the time. Relations between him and his niece not that good, but some contact. He was a loner, oddball. He’d always had a special liking for the niece, according to the family. She disappeared in an area near to where he lived.”
Dakar paused again, a deep breath before continuing.
“Frank wrote a number of stories about the murder, all of them about this uncle, based on information I fed him. They were pretty sensationalist. A number of other journalists jumped on the story as well. And under this avalanche of stories, the uncle was harassed by almost everyone.”
Dakar paused again, overtaking a car on the bypass before pulling back in. Stewart looked down at the speedometer. Yesterday, Dakar had driven at least five miles under the speed limit. Now he was breaking it by ten. It sounded like the little electric motor was at full pelt.
“He lost his job as a lecturer, people threw stuff at him in the street, he got animal shit put through his front letterbox … The court of public opinion can move quickly once a verdict had been reached.” Dakar’s tone was dark as he trailed off.
Dakar paused, another deep breath. “And then we, the police, found out another person, an ex-boyfriend, had committed the murder. Confronted him with DNA evidence, and he confessed to it. Nailed-on case. The uncle sued Frank and his newspaper, and was awarded hundreds of thousands of pounds in damages. You heard what happened next, to him. I … I was going through a bad time. Personally. I had just found out about my wife, and it was like my mind was … broken. I didn’t help him. I should have, but I didn’t. By the time I had sorted myself out, it was too late. He’d been crucified.”
A silence descended on the car, the only noise the air passing by them as they sped along the dual carriageway. Stewart watched as they passed the Livingston turn-off, and then went past the odd pyramid structures, Scotland’s own small version of the Ancient Egyptian structures, just smaller, covered in grass and with sheep grazing on them.
Stewart turned back to Dakar, and took a deep breath. You were as well hung for a sheep as for a lamb.
“Eh, and didn’t Frank mention something else as well? Some gangster or other people, who might be after you? Or the cops?”
Dakar nodded, his expression unflinching hard. “A man called Billy Crudup. He murdered two small children who were playing in a playground in Glasgow. He did it because one of the children was the only son of another gangster. Billy Crudup’s gang wanted revenge, and so they went after his boy. He was seven. The other child was killed because …” Dakar shrugged. “Because she was in the way, I suppose. She was eight.”
Dakar paused, heaved in a large breath, his hands twisting back and forth over the wheel, like they were trying to wring water from the black plastic. “Billy Crudup was convicted and sentenced to 24 years in jail. That was just over ten years ago. My last major case.”
Dakar looked like he was carrying a millstone around his neck, his shoulders hunched up around his neck, head low, staring forward. Stewart opened his mouth to ask more, but something about the way Dakar’s shoulders moved, his head lowering further, stopped him.
Instead Stewart turned away and pulled his phone out, its back angled towards Dakar. He went away from the BBC website, his default page, and typed the name Billy Crudup into a search engine. A lot of hits came up, so he narrowed it down by adding the words ‘murder’ and ‘24 years’. That got him the story he wanted, on the BBC ironically, of Billy Crudup’s conviction.
And there it was, in black and white. A double murder, Crudup shooting one child in revenge for some gangland murder, with the other one being hit and killed by one of the stray bullets, in the very city they were racing towards. Neither set of parents had commented, understandably, but when Stewart got to the end, there were some words from Detective Inspector Sebastian Dakar:
‘There is no sentence that can undo the carnage that Billy Crudup has wreaked on these families. At the very least, justice has been done and a cold-hearted killer has been put behind bars for a very long time.’
Stewart re-read the words, then scoured the article again. There wasn’t any kind of controversy, no loose ends that hadn’t been tied up. No mention of any gangsters called Jamie or Sam either. The rest of the story concerned itself with the gangland scene in Glasgow. Stewart went back to search engine, and read some other accounts of the trial. None of them mentioned any controversy, no potential miscarriage of justice.
He went back to the search engine again, this time typing in ‘Sebastian Dakar’. He immediately got about 36 million hits. The first page was all about Dakar since he’d become a Zen guru, with mainly book reviews plus some interview appearances on TV and radio.
He added the words ‘detective inspector’ and put the whole thing in quotation marks. A lot of older stories crowded his screen, all crime stories, where Dakar was giving interviews. He clicked through a few of them. Mainly murders, but also some big drugs cases. One or two kidnappings. They were fascinating, the backgrounds drawing Stewart in.
He was halfway through an extortion case when Dakar spoke.
“Stewart?”
“Aye? Eh, yes?” Stewart hurriedly closed the internet page, looking up at Dakar.
“We’re here.”
Stewart looked around. True enough, they were now back in Mother Glasgow, sitting idling on one of the streets just off Woodlands Road.
Stewart put his phone away. The Billy Crudup case would have to wait. Time to investigate the murder of Daniel Mannings again.
Chapter 28
Stewart gripped the table edge. Yup, absolutely solid, made of heavy wood. If Dakar went off the deep end, at least he’d have some trouble ripping the place up.
They were sitting at a table in Whisky. Stewart far preferred pubs to bars, and Whisky was certainly the former. Everything was more solid than its bar equivalent, from the furniture right through to the food and drink. Wooden tables that looked like they could withstand the nuclear apocaly
pse, ‘pub grub’ that put a bowling ball in your stomach and drinks called things like ‘heavy’ because they were basically a meal in a pint glass.
Bars, on the other hand, were more lightweight and fancy. Tables in weird shapes and sizes, the only food finger food and expensive drinks with odd names that came in tall glasses and small measures. Stewart always felt bars were wrong in Scotland. They belonged in places like New York, but not here. The Scottish psyche was born of terrible weather and fights for survival. Pubs reflected that. Bars did not.
Whisky was most certainly a pub pub, one of the newer variants that maintained the solid furnishings and refreshments while cleaning the place up and letting some light in, so it seemed a place you might actually want to be rather than be driven into by depression and loneliness. The wooden chairs had decorated cushions, and the wooded fixtures looked like they’d been freshened up too. The smoking ban had helped too, of course, removing the blanket of smoke that normally provided a low ceiling, at the same time upping Scotland’s general life expectancy by at least a few years.
Stewart was feeling the solidness of the table with a certain amount of relief because when they had first come in Dakar had paused for a few seconds, then plunged back out the door again. He re-entered a few moments later, swept a gaze around the place with narrowed eyes, and only then gone over to one of the wooden tables, Stewart following him tamely over.
The pub was almost entirely empty, minus two or three old men sitting at the bar, slowly supping their drinks/meals. They looked suspiciously at Dakar and Stewart, particularly after Dakar’s display, but Stewart ignored them. The old days of walking into a pub and facing down the locals had now disappeared, in big cities at least. They were the ones who were living in the past.
Stewart’s stomach had been letting him know that it had been a while since breakfast, and it was with great pleasure he ordered fish and chips with mushy peas. Combined with plenty of tartare sauce and some ketchup, it was basically the meal of champions. Dakar asked for water, and after a second’s hesitation, Stewart asked for some too.
The Price to Pay Page 15
