Hour Of Darkness

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Bugger!’ Pye moaned. ‘I’d been hoping . . .’

  ‘. . . that he’d wrap up the murder investigation for you? Come on, Sammy, that was never going to happen. The visit wasn’t a total loss, though. We couldn’t talk to Hastie, but we did find his sister there. She’s still nervous about being implicated in her father’s death, so she was very frank with us.’

  Neville related Alafair Drysalter’s account of how the methamphetamine had found its way into Edinburgh and how her brother had involved Bella Watson in its distribution.

  ‘Do you really think he gave her the deal because he had a guilty conscience?’ Pye asked sceptically.

  ‘Let’s say I’m not convinced,’ the DS replied. ‘I think it’s more likely that he didn’t want to be hands-on himself . . . his father never was, from what we’re told . . . and that he took it to Bella because having been away since the mid-nineties, she was the only person he knew from those days who was still around.’

  ‘I’ll buy into that. But Alafair wouldn’t tell you who it was approached Hastie?’

  ‘No, she said she didn’t know.’

  ‘Did you believe that.?’

  ‘Not for a second, but it doesn’t matter. We think we know anyway. Did Jackie tell you about the name of the owner of the Spanish van?’

  ‘Yes.’ Pye grinned. ‘Nice one. Maria Centelleos, equals Sparkles, Mia Watson’s old radio name.’

  ‘And more than that. Andy’s people have established, subject to chemical testing, that the methamphetamine was made in a place owned by her.’

  ‘Wow. That really does land it at her door. Has she been arrested?’ he asked, hopefully.

  ‘No.’ She explained that the bodega had been destroyed, and that the Centelleos mother and son had vanished.

  ‘There’s a son?’

  ‘Yes. So, unless there are other young Watsons scattered around Edinburgh, we now know whose DNA we’ve found in Bella’s flat.’

  ‘But I’m investigating a murder, not a family reunion,’ the DI pointed out.

  ‘Forget the murder for now,’ Karen told him, ‘focus on the drugs.’

  ‘Okay, I will. What you’re suggesting is that Maria Centelleos made them. But why would she, of all people, approach Hastie McGrew with a drug deal? That’s what I don’t understand.’

  ‘Neither did I but I do now. The DCS had to leave, but I stayed on and the pair of us went for a coffee, leaving Derek to watch over his brother-in-law in case he decided to croak.

  ‘I had something else to ask Alafair, something I only discovered today. After Mia Sparkles disappeared, Alafair filed a formal missing person report and in it she claimed to be her sister.’

  ‘Did she?’ Pye’s eyebrows rose. ‘Are you sure about that? I mean why the hell would she? We know who their parents were, both of them.’

  ‘She did, though, and my first thought was that it was a simple matter of the last of the Holmes family wanting to eliminate the last of the Watsons. I guess the same must have occurred to Bob Skinner, for he had the report flagged up for him to be notified as soon as Mia was traced. But we were wrong. Alafair told me that the two of them were brought up together for a few years.’

  ‘They were what? How the hell did that happen? In their day, those two families were the local equivalent of the Hatfields and the McCoys.’

  Karen contradicted him. ‘Not always. If you go far enough back, Bella’s brother Gavin used to work for the Holmeses. He was their dealer in his housing scheme, one that’s long gone, thank God. Alafair told me that dear old Gavin, before he came to a sticky end, pimped his niece Mia, then well underage, to her Uncle Alasdair, who was notorious for liking them young. Bella knew about it and wasn’t bothered. But when Perry Holmes found out about it, he was; he was very bothered indeed.

  ‘He took Mia away from Alasdair, and from Edinburgh altogether, and installed her with his own kids, in Hamilton, where they lived with their mother, Miss McGrew. He looked after Mia all the way through university. So you see, to all intents and purposes, a Watson became a Holmes.’

  ‘Ele-fucking-mentary,’ Pye murmured. ‘But why should she vanish? Did Alafair tell you that?’

  ‘She doesn’t know, but back then she feared the worst, that Mia might have been murdered too. So she filed her formal missing person report, in the hope that her disappearance would be investigated.’ She frowned. ‘Now that I think about it, Bob Skinner couldn’t have thought she was dead, since he had that note put on it. Leaving that aside though,’ she continued, ‘that makes sense to me, Sammy. It explains why Hastie didn’t tell Bella who was the source of the crystal meth and how the route was set up so that the two of them never met. Remember, Patrick Booth always collected and dealt the stuff; Bella always handled the money.

  ‘I’ve spoken to our drugs squad leader,’ she added, ‘to pass on what Alafair told me. Booth’s given them the rest of it, how the money thing worked; he got his cut then she’d take hers, and send the rest to the supplier, to Mia.’

  ‘How? Did he tell the squad that? Did he even know?’

  ‘Yes, he did. He said she used a money broker to transfer it to a Euro account in Gibraltar.’

  ‘Could there be someone else involved? Could this Mia woman be a front for someone?’

  ‘There’s no trace of anyone else. Her van was seen approaching her mother’s flat, her son’s DNA was in the place.’

  ‘So why did it all blow up?’ the DI asked. ‘What brought them over here . . . assuming it was her driving the van, and that she didn’t let the lad come on his own?’

  ‘There’s only one person can tell us, and that’s her,’ the DS pointed out. ‘When it comes to finding her, it looks as if we’re in the hands of the Spanish. Once they do, though, we’ve cracked it.’

  ‘Not quite,’ Pye pointed out. ‘Proving she was in the flat . . . and we haven’t done that yet . . . that’s one thing; linking her to the murder, that’s another. Before she can even become a viable suspect, we need to tie her, evidentially, to the body. If we can do that, we’ll be in business.’

  ‘Yes,’ Neville agreed; then she smiled. ‘It’s too bad you’ll miss out on the glory.’

  ‘That’s not why I’m in the job,’ he insisted, ‘but what do you mean?’

  ‘If I were you,’ she advised him, ‘I’d get Mary Chambers’ okay to have a press conference today. No, we haven’t made an arrest for Bella Watson’s murder, but you can tell the media that we’ve got a strong suspect, and we’ve broken a drugs ring in the process.’

  ‘Why should I rush it?’ Pye asked, intrigued. ‘The investigation’s been going on for weeks.’

  ‘Maybe so,’ Karen said, ‘but I think you’ll find that a story is going to break very soon that’s going to blow it right off the front page.’

  Sixty-Two

  There was a time in my life when I’d have been as high as a kite walking out of that interview room, a time when I’d have thought that any result was a good result, regardless of the feelings of the innocent caught up in the backwash. After Myra died, I’d spent years making myself impervious to my own pain, and been so successful that the hurt of others had meant nothing to me.

  I knew that my intensity could scare people; I’d even been proud of the fact and prepared to use it as a weapon. It’s still there, but not to the same extent. Too much has happened to me over the years, and too much has happened to others. I’ve hurt too many people close to me, most of all, Sarah.

  It took my own wounding by Aileen, Sarah’s successor in my life, now gone to wreak, her havoc on English politics, to make me understand how much harm I’d caused Sarah. I’ve made both of us a promise that I’d never do so again.

  That’s why I told her about Mia Watson, after Alex’s phone call, told her all about her, and why I’d hoped she’d stay away for good.

  Sarah thought about it for a while, and then she asked, ‘If I’d been around at the time, would the outcome have been any different?’

  ‘I’d
like to think so,’ I replied, honestly, ‘but given the man I was back then, I can’t be certain.’

  She kissed me and said, ‘Well, I have faith in the man you are now, and that’s enough for me.’

  How tragic it was, I thought as I drove, that David Mackenzie had never experienced such self-discovery. He had died, as I knew for sure by then, as he had lived, self-centred, uncaring and ultimately self-destructive. It was an even greater tragedy that he had destroyed three other people alongside himself.

  Cheryl was bound for a life sentence. Their children, Alice and Zach, faced one that would be even longer, as they would discover. They would carry their parents’ story with them for life, and they might even be condemned to an institutional upbringing, unless the uncle that I knew they had was big-hearted enough to take them on . . . always assuming he wasn’t a clone of the one who had blighted David’s life.

  Yes, I was more than a little depressed as I drove west. I hadn’t gone in there with Wilding intending to unmask a murderess, although the information that Father Donnelly had finally got round to giving me had made that a highly possible scenario.

  No, I’d gone in there hoping against hope that Cheryl would tell me that her volatile husband had pissed off to cool down in Benidorm and work off the jealousy that he harboured towards everyone he encountered in his professional life.

  My optimism had faded when she said that she had withdrawn all that cash, not David. She hadn’t been trying to throw him off her scent; she’d been trying to fool us.

  Even then, though, it wasn’t until I told her that I knew about her confession to Tom Donnelly, the secrets that he could not, rather than would not divulge, and I saw the look on her face, that the last doubt left me.

  The Allans’ cottage wasn’t actually in Lanark, but in the surrounding countryside, near to Hyndford Bridge which crosses the River Clyde, near the old Winston Barracks, a place I’d heard my father mention. There was a car parked just along the road when I arrived, but I ignored it. Instead I turned into the short drive that led into Max’s place.

  The old ex-ACC wasn’t surprised to see me when he answered the summons of the big brass knocker. ‘Come in, Bob,’ he said. ‘Julie told me you’d been to see her.’

  He led me through the house and out into the back garden. Actually ‘garden’ was an understatement; it was more of a paddock, and there was an old building at the far end that might have been a stable.

  ‘Sit yourself down,’ he insisted, pointing to a green metal table, with a couple of folding seats. ‘Would you like a beer?’

  At that moment I would have loved a beer, but something stopped me from accepting; it wouldn’t have tasted right. ‘No thanks, Max,’ I replied. ‘The tap water’s nice in this part of the world, though.’

  He disappeared back indoors, returning with a jug and two tumblers, all blue plastic. ‘This’ll be about Mackenzie,’ he murmured, as he poured.

  ‘Yes, Max,’ I told him. ‘And don’t tell me you weren’t expecting me, even before your wife called you. I’m too good for that.’

  ‘I never made any secret of the fact that David was married to my niece,’ he said, anticipating my first accusation and denying it, all in one breath.

  ‘Come on, Max,’ I sighed, probably sounding as sad as I felt. ‘That’s exactly what you did. You never declared it, and you should have. I’ve asked around and I can’t find a single officer who knows about the relationship. In my book that’s secrecy. You could have volunteered it when Dan Provan came to see you in your local, but you held it back, even then.’

  ‘I didn’t think it was relevant,’ he said.

  ‘Aw, man,’ I protested, ‘please don’t insult me, or yourself for that matter. A police officer, a former colleague, and his wife had disappeared. There were clear signs that he might have harmed her, possibly even killed her. Everything you knew was bloody relevant.’

  ‘But how was I supposed to know all that had happened?’ he countered. ‘Wee Dan was very circumspect when we had our chat.’

  ‘Not that bloody circumspect. I know that he told you Mackenzie was missing, yet you virtually denied knowledge of the man.

  ‘Let me ask you something, Max. Your wife, and her sister-in-law, the two Julies, do they not get on? Do they never speak to each other? Sorry, chum, I believe that you knew from early on that Cheryl was missing too and that the worst was feared. When you heard you panicked.’

  ‘Why would I do that? Are you going to tell me that?’

  ‘Sure,’ I retorted, ‘and before you ask, yes, I can prove it. You were scared because you intercepted David’s application to join the police, with its accompanying document and the full disclosure that would have ruled him out, almost certainly in those days, as a candidate. In doing so you saddled the force with a guy who was emotionally unstable, and borderline psycho. That’s criminal, and I’m duty bound to report it to the fiscal.’

  My old friend threw back his head and gave a short laugh. ‘Aye, fine,’ he exclaimed. ‘You do that. You’ll look like a clown at the trial, though.’ He peered at me, over the top of his reading glasses. ‘When you took him off my hands, Bob, one of his line managers was insisting that I refer him for psychological assessment. I had no grounds for refusing that, but you turned up and took the problem away. So yes, go ahead, report me to the Crown Office and see if you like the way you come out of it.’

  I sensed relief in him, as if he’d just dodged a bullet. So I fired again.

  ‘I wouldn’t hesitate, Max, but I’m not really here about that. I’m here about Cheryl. We know, chum. She’s been charged.’

  It happened in an instant. The light left his eyes, the colour left his face and his cheeks seemed to collapse as he turned into a very old man, far older than his years.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I told him, sincerely. ‘There’s no triumph in this.’

  ‘I love that lass,’ he whispered. ‘All the more since our wee Rosina was taken so young. I warned her about David right at the very start. If you’ve found out about his past, you’ll know I was involved right at the very start.’ He looked at me again. ‘You do know all of it, I take it?’

  I nodded.

  He frowned, deeply. ‘David had taken some terrible beatings from that uncle of his,’ he continued, ‘but he never showed a scrap of remorse for what he did to him in revenge. It’s easy to assume that his nature was beaten into him but maybe it was there all along.

  ‘I told Cheryl to be careful when she took up with him, but she had her heart set on him. So I did what I could. I pushed Tom Donnelly towards him, you know. I thought his influence would make him better, and it did, or I thought it did.’

  ‘Why did you tell Provan about Father Tom?’

  ‘Because at the time I thought that David would go there. When Julie told me, I thought what you all did, that he’d finally snapped and done something terrible to the lass. In sending Dan to Tom, I thought I was sending him after David. It never occurred to me that it would be Cheryl who’d turn up on his doorstep. It never occurred to me then either that our relationship need come out, or that it would be seen as relevant if it did.’

  He looked me in the eye. ‘You’re right of course, I did change his application form. Cheryl made me promise to help him get into the force, and that was the only way I could be sure of it.’

  ‘She told us he knocked her about,’ I said.

  ‘Aye, she told me that too, but only lately. The abused became the abuser, and not just physically; there was mental cruelty there too. It’s not that he didn’t love her; he did, no question, but as you said, he was borderline psycho, Bob, and sometimes he strayed over on to the other side.’ Max buried his face in his hands and rubbed it, vigorously, almost violently.

  ‘If only she’d told me about that sooner,’ he moaned, ‘but she didn’t because she knew I’d have finished him in the police, and without the police, he’d have had no restraint, none at all. She put up with it, until she snapped herself. She did to him w
hat he did to that uncle years ago, only she was better at it.’

  ‘How?’ I asked, as horrific visions flashed through my mind.

  He must have read them in my eyes, for he exclaimed, ‘No, no! Nothing as cruel as that. You know she’s a pharmacist?’ I nodded. ‘She had some stuff in the house that she probably shouldn’t have, diazepam, sedatives that she gave him when he got really disturbed, that time he had his serious breakdown. She ground enough into a bottle of beer to knock him out and then she suffocated him with a plastic bag.’

  He removed his specs to wipe away tears. ‘I think she sees it as something of a mercy killing,’ he said. ‘She told me he was raving about your man McGuire, and about Andy Martin; he said that given half a chance he’d kill them both. She believed he meant it, so in the end she killed him to save him from himself.’

  I gazed at him, directly. ‘Where is he, Max?’

  He stamped his foot on the ground. I looked down and saw that some of the paving on which we sat was new, or had been replaced. The concrete grouting between the slabs was much less weathered than the rest.

  ‘I’m sorry, Bob,’ Max sighed. ‘I know. After forty years as a police officer, I shouldn’t have had a second thought. I should have called you as soon as she turned up here on Thursday evening. She phoned me, you see, and told me she needed my help. She needed my help,’ he repeated. ‘I love the lassie like a daughter. What was I going to do?’

  I couldn’t answer him. A long time ago, I disregarded my own duty, even if it wasn’t on such a serious scale.

  ‘What next?’ he asked.

  ‘Lottie and Dan are outside,’ I replied, quietly. ‘They’ll take you into custody, then we’ll get the excavators in. Your house is now a crime scene.’

  ‘Tell them to put it back the way they found it, Bob, please. My Julie loves this garden.’

  His Julie. Another life shattered.

  I couldn’t look at him as I phoned Lottie Mann, telling her to join us.

  I couldn’t bring myself to hang around either. I didn’t want to see him being put into the back of a police car with the ridiculous over-precaution of an officer’s hand on his head. I didn’t want to see the paper suits crawling over the place looking for samples of the bleach Max said he’d used to scrub out the luggage compartment of the Honda that his niece had used as a hearse.