by James Oswald
She tapped the screen, lifted the phone to her ear. ‘Minister. How nice to hear from you,’ spoken with all the sincerity of a politician.
He leaned back into his seat, stared out the window and watched the motorway verge speed past as he tuned out a very one-sided conversation. Whichever minister it was clearly had a lot to say, and for that McLean was extremely grateful.
29
Janie tiptoed through the living room in her socks, trying not to make a sound as she gathered all her things for the day. On the couch, buried deep under a mound of spare duvet and blankets, Izzy DeVilliers snored like someone who’d drunk rather too much of Manda’s special Russian vodka the night before. Poor girl was going to have a head like an Orange Day parade when she woke up, but she only had herself to blame. Well, herself and Manda, maybe. Janie was glad she’d stopped after the first shot glass.
It occurred to her as she stooped to lace up her boots that she wasn’t entirely sure Izzy was old enough to drink. She’d have to check the record sheet from her arrest at the hotel. Except that she’d persuaded the duty sergeant to lose the paperwork when she’d first heard Con’s little sister was in the cells. That might come back to bite her if she wasn’t careful.
At least Manda had the day off too, another reason why the two of them had got stuck into the vodka. Janie left them to their slumbers, let herself out and hurried down the tenement stairs.
Outside, the air hung wet with a smir of rain. That annoying stage between fog and downpour that somehow managed to soak you through without you noticing. She hurried to the bus stop, pleased to have timed it perfectly for once, and was soon back in the warm.
On the bus, she pulled out her notebook and flipped through to the pages where she’d taken down Izzy’s description of her attackers the night before. Well, not so much of her attackers as the injuries she’d inflicted on them. A broken nose could be easily explained, and there were probably hundreds seen by A and E on any given night. Likewise, broken fingers were probably ten a penny. A ruptured testicle was a rather more esoteric injury, and the kind of damage that a well-placed kick to the knee could inflict would almost certainly both need medical attention and be remembered by whichever doctor administered it.
By the time the bus pulled up at the stop closest to the police station, Janie had called in several favours, and now there was nothing she could do but wait for her various contacts to get back to her. She wasn’t entirely sure why she was doing this. Not while in the middle of a murder investigation and looking into two other suspicious deaths. There was the connection with Fielding, of course. That was how she’d justify it if it ever came back to her. She couldn’t see DI McLean being upset, but Ritchie was a bit more of a stickler for the rules. And McIntyre might act like everyone’s mum, but she could be sharp as a paper cut if she wanted to be. Janie had seen her tear strips off enough constables, sergeants and even inspectors to know better than to cross the detective superintendent.
The major incident room was quiet when she let herself in, only a few of the night shift still hanging around to pass on the little information that had dribbled in overnight. Most of the talk was about DI McLean’s car, and how someone had managed to steal it from right underneath their noses. Reg, the duty sergeant when it had happened, was chewing up the furniture and shouting at anyone unfortunate enough to cross his path, as if it were his fault entirely that it had happened. Janie was glad she’d missed him when she came in.
She logged in to one of the terminals. Working through the routine emails didn’t take long, even if she wasn’t kidding herself there’d be more to deal with soon enough. DI Ritchie would be calling the morning briefing in a few minutes, and Janie glanced at her phone hoping something might have come through. Still no reply. She logged off the computer and stood up, scanning the room for the familiar figure and not seeing it anywhere. That was strange. It wasn’t as if he could easily hide.
‘You seen Lofty?’ she asked of a uniformed constable as he scuttled past, clutching a load of folders to his chest.
‘Phoned in to say his wife’s being induced today,’ came the answer, and then the uniform was gone. A little curt for a constable addressing a sergeant, but she let it go. She should have remembered about Lofty’s wife. He’d been unusually surly recently – he must have been worrying about her. Having a break during paternity leave might do him good.
Her phone rang as she watched DI Ritchie stride into the room, followed by a gaggle of detective constables. About time they had some new blood in the place, even if what they really needed was experienced officers. She checked the caller, one of her friends who worked at the Royal Infirmary.
‘Hey, Ali. You got my text then?’
‘Aye, Janie. Wondered about that. You’re not usually one to miss a chance for a chat. This all a bit hush hush?’
Alison Perry had been one of her closest friends at school, but their careers had taken different paths since and they only met up occasionally now. An A and E nurse, she could be a useful source of information sometimes, and a dreadful gossip the rest.
‘I was on the bus. Didn’t want to upset any of the other passengers.’
‘Fair enough. Can you tell me what this is all about then? Only I think I might have dealt with your two miscreants last night.’
Janie looked up at the clock, then over at the crowd gathering for the morning briefing. Sandy Gregg was there, so they had at least one detective sergeant to cover. If she slipped out now before anyone noticed, she could always catch up later.
‘You at work now?’
‘Aye. Shift’s no’ over for another hour. Then I’m away to my bed.’
‘OK, Ali. Can’t tell you on the phone, but I’ll be over in about a half an hour. Buy you breakfast.’
The squad car she’d cadged a lift from dropped Janie at the main entrance to the Royal Infirmary forty minutes after she’d snuck unnoticed out of the morning briefing. She’d sent a quick text to DI Ritchie and Sandy Gregg whilst en route, hoping she wasn’t volunteered for some unpleasant duty or shift in her absence. If her hunch paid off, it would be worth it.
She found Alison getting herself ready to leave A and E at the end of what had clearly been a long night. Janie hung around until the clock swung to the hour, then followed her old school friend to the staff canteen and bought her a coffee.
‘Probably shouldn’t have this,’ Alison said as she sipped her latte. ‘Going home and straight to bed, and I don’t need anything keeping me awake.’
‘Bad night, was it?’
‘Ach, I’ve had worse. It just never ends, though. Especially now the nights are long and dark and it’s getting cold. Folk are just accidents waiting to happen.’ Alison took another sip from her mug, put it carefully down on the table and rubbed at her eyes with the heels of her hands. ‘You didn’t come here to talk about me though, did you? It was the bloke with the ruptured testicle and the wrenched knee, right?’
‘The same. And if he had a friend with a broken nose and fingers, I owe you big time.’
‘Might take you up on that.’ Alison reached into the pocket of her nurse’s uniform and pulled out a thin sheaf of printed A4 sheets, placed them face down on the table and slid them over as if she were in some spy movie and any moment now James Bond was going to walk in and sweep her off her feet. He could do worse, Janie thought. Ali had always been pretty, even if the exhaustion on her face was doing its best to hide the fact.
‘That’s technically confidential information, so you didn’t get it from me. Two men, I’d say late thirties, early forties? Came in around ten last night. I didn’t deal with them myself, that was Cara. She says they told her they’d been drinking, slipped on the steps at the top of Fleshmarket Close, and tumbled down them together. It’s plausible. Happens more often than you’d think. One bloke loses his footing, grabs at his mate for support, the two of them end up at the bottom with broken
bones.’
‘So they might have been telling the truth then?’ Janie asked. Fleshmarket Close wasn’t so far from the place where Izzy said she’d been attacked, but it wouldn’t have been much fun getting there with a ruptured testicle and blown out knee.
‘It’s possible. Cara reckoned they were hiding something, though. They said they’d been drinking, but they didn’t seem all that drunk. Not like the usual evening crowd we get to patch up. And the one with the injured bollock? That’s not something I’d associate with falling down the stairs. That’s a Saturday night brawl kind of injury. Come to think of it, so’s a busted knee.’
‘Well, if they’re who I think they are, they were both taken out by a teenage girl not a lot taller than me. They thought she was an easy target.’
It was perhaps a measure of how tired Alison must have been that she barely raised an eyebrow at this. ‘Well good for her. Friend of yours, I take it?’
Janie considered the question for a while before answering. She hardly knew Izzy DeVilliers, and yet the young woman was crashed on her couch right now. There was something about her Janie couldn’t help but admire. ‘Aye. I reckon so.’
30
McLean had been to the Crime Campus at Gartcosh a couple of times since its opening, but it wasn’t somewhere he felt the need to visit often. It was too far from his usual stomping grounds, for one thing, and it represented a very different approach to policing from the one he was accustomed to. Then again, crime had evolved in directions nobody could have even dreamed of when he had still been a beat constable. The internet had barely been a thing back then, and yet now maybe half of the crime they dealt with was directly linked to the web. Even everyday criminals used smartphones and encrypted emails, and the old boundaries between countries had all but dissolved away.
A case in point was the theft to order of high-end cars, as he was finding out at far greater length than he would have cared to know. Detective Inspector Maurice Ackerley of the National Crime Agency was part of a team tracking down a gang who operated throughout the UK and Europe, sourcing expensive and exotic machinery.
‘Your car would have been in a container and on its way to Africa or China before you’d even noticed it was gone,’ he said, as they stood in an incident room that looked more like the starship Enterprise than somewhere organised crime was investigated. Banks of computer equipment lined the walls, far more modern than anything McLean’s team had access to, and in one corner a massive screen showed an electronic map of the greater Glasgow area.
‘It has a tracker in it.’ McLean knew this was what Ackerley wanted him to say; he wasn’t an idiot after all. The DI came across as extremely proud of his technical facilities.
‘Ah, but those are easily traced and disabled. And I’ve no doubt you thought your Alfa Romeo was well protected by its alarm and immobiliser, and yet they proved no more of a problem to overcome than the lock.’
McLean tried to ignore the hint of triumph in Ackerley’s voice, as if the DI was impressed with the ingenuity of the thieves. Almost as if he respected them. He glanced across to where the chief superintendent was standing by the door, and tried not to smile at her raised eyebrow and ever so slightly rude hand gesture.
‘That much would seem obvious,’ he said. ‘Along with the fact that the wee toerag who stole the car might have had all the technology he wanted, but he still didn’t know how to drive.’
Ackerley’s animated excitement evaporated in an instant, his whole body slumping like a teenager asked to take the rubbish out. ‘That’s what doesn’t add up,’ he said. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong. Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio. That’s not your average policeman’s ride. Five hundred horsepower through the rear wheels?’ He made a little ‘poof’ noise and flicked the fingers of both hands open to indicate an explosion. ‘Plenty of them parked backwards in hedges when they first came out. But these guys . . .’ and now he turned towards the big screen, even though it didn’t show anything that might indicate the gang stealing expensive cars to order. ‘They know how to drive, Tony. They’re some of the best. They don’t show off. They steal the car, then get it as quickly and safely to their lock-up as possible.’
‘Well this one obviously hadn’t read the script. You know who he is? Was? Whatever.’
Ackerley tapped his keyboard. The big screen changed to a profile page, and finally McLean got a look at the man who had stolen his car.
James ‘Jimmy’ McAllister had been twenty-six years old when he died. Average height, a skinny sixty-five kilos, he had the pasty white complexion of a north Edinburgh housing estate and a surprisingly clean criminal record. He’d been cautioned a couple of times as a youth, both for joyriding offences, and then from his eighteenth birthday until the day of his death he appeared not to have put a foot wrong. He appeared not to have had a job either, or paid any tax. And yet his address was one of the modern apartments in Fountainbridge. Not somewhere you’d live if you were eking out your dole money.
‘That’s pretty close to where he crashed,’ McLean said, all too aware that he was stating the obvious. ‘Do we know where he was going? Not home, I take it.’
Ackerley tapped his keyboard again, and the screen changed to an Edinburgh street map. A red line from McLean’s police station to the point of the accident took an odd, circuitous route first north, then west, and finally south again.
‘That’s what we can’t work out. From the reports we’ve had, and the CCTV we’ve managed to collate, he came roaring up the Lothian Road from the Princes Street end. But if he’d been heading from your station car park to Tollcross, he’d have gone across the Meadows. It’s a stupid route the way he went. Makes no sense.’
‘And I had to come all the way here to be told that?’ McLean spread the question between Ackerley and the chief superintendent. ‘Could you not just have phoned? Or maybe sent me a copy of the report?’
‘Well, I was hoping you could answer a few questions about your daily use of the car, where it’s parked at night, that sort of thing. We need to work out how McAllister knew where to find it.’ Ackerley’s tone was one of mild confusion rather than annoyance, which made things worse as far as McLean was concerned.
‘I don’t know if you’re aware, Detective Inspector, but I’m currently SIO on a murder investigation and my team is looking into two other suspicious deaths that will probably turn out to have also been murders. We’re short-staffed enough as it is, without my being dragged across the country to deal with this. The theft of my car is quite low on my list of priorities right now.’
Ackerley looked across the room at the chief superintendent, who shrugged unhelpfully. This really wasn’t how policing was supposed to be done.
‘OK.’ McLean conceded defeat. He was stuck here anyway, might as well make the best of it. ‘I’ll answer your questions as best I can. But I’d like something in return, if it’s not too much to ask?’
‘Name it,’ the NCA man said, which was perhaps a little foolish of him.
‘Your vast database of stuff.’ McLean waved a hand at the big screen. ‘I’d like you to run a name through it, see what pops up.’
‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’ Ackerley stepped up to the keyboard again, flexing his fingers like he was expecting a fight. ‘What’s the name?’
‘Slater. Lady Cecily Slater.’
‘You didn’t need to be quite so hard on Maurice, you know. The NCA can be very helpful when you’re nice to them.’
Much later, and McLean sat next to the deputy chief constable as they drove back to Edinburgh, wondering how he was going to catch up with a wasted day. He’d climbed into the back when they were finally ready to leave the Crime Campus, thinking that the same two constables would be in the front seats as before. To his annoyance, only the driver reappeared, and now he eyed up the front passenger seat with deep longing. Anything to get away from the too-close proximity of Gail Elmwood.
‘Everything we did today could have been done in an email,’ he said. ‘There was really no need for me to travel halfway across the country for any of it.’
‘And would you have dealt with that email straight away? Or would it have lain unread in your inbox for a fortnight?’
McLean didn’t want to admit that she had a point there. ‘A phone call, then. Or sending a constable over with some questions. Instead I’m stuck in a car in traffic when I should be . . .’ He stopped speaking, aware that he’d been about to say ‘out there investigating a murder’. That would have left him open to the accusation that as SIO he should most certainly not have been ‘out there’, but back at the incident room co-ordinating his sergeants and constables to go ‘out there’ and do the job their pay grade demanded. And which they had no doubt spent the whole day doing. Without him.
‘You did OK out of it though, didn’t you?’ The chief superintendent nodded towards the brown folder McLean held on his lap like some kind of protective ward. It contained a printout of everything the NCA database had spewed out for him about both Cecily Slater and her nephew, the eleventh Lord Bairnfather. Ackerley had even promised to send more over if he turned anything up about the Bairnfather Trust and the hotel, although he’d admitted there was nothing on their radar he was aware of.
‘Again, if I’d needed it I could have emailed them or picked up the phone. I only asked face-to-face because I was already there.’
‘Relax, Tony. You can’t be fighting crime all the time. You have to let others deal with all the details, sort and sift the information they bring to you. Delegate, in other words.’ The chief superintendent took her own advice literally, loosening her collar and leaning back in her seat as if she were a vacuous celebrity in a stretch limo on the way home from some gaudy awards ceremony, and not one of the most senior police officers in the country, on duty.
