What Will Burn

by James Oswald

‘Ah, Detective Chief Inspector McLean.’ He stood up, presenting a hand to be shaken. Fielding’s grip was firm but damp, and he wore an expensive suit that he somehow managed to make look cheap.

  ‘It’s just Detective Inspector now, remember?’ He resisted the urge to wipe his hand on his trousers. ‘You got the message I was coming, then.’

  ‘An explanation as to why no charges are being pressed against the harridans who broke into my seminar and threatened my guests? I am eager to hear it, Detective Inspector.’

  Fielding had made no indication that they should sit, and McLean was quite content to remain standing. If nothing else it should make the meeting short. ‘You know how it is, Mr Fielding. Everywhere there’s cutbacks. Too many demands on too few resources.’

  ‘Are you suggesting these women get away with it simply because you can’t be bothered sorting out your budgets?’ Fielding put heavy emphasis on the word ‘women’, managing somehow to convey that he had utter disdain for them. But then McLean already knew that.

  ‘Far from it. We take our duty towards protecting the people very seriously indeed. However, our investigations have discovered that the hotel entrance through which the women . . .’ and here McLean put his own, subtly different emphasis ‘. . . came was not locked, and indeed was a public entrance to the building, albeit from the rear.’

  Fielding’s frown returned. ‘They burst into my meeting room, screaming obscenities and threatening us.’

  ‘So I’m told. However, I wasn’t there to witness it, and apart from yourself nobody else has agreed to come forward and corroborate your story. My team had some difficulty in tracking down a list of the . . . what was it you called them? Oh yes, the guests. And those they did manage to speak to gave rather conflicting accounts of the events. The women themselves of course deny doing anything worse than stumbling into the wrong room when they were looking for the bar.’

  Tiny beads of sweat had begun to form on Fielding’s forehead now, and his skin had taken on that hue more normally associated with Glasgow lads after the first sunny day of spring. When he spoke, McLean was glad of the space between them as flecks of spittle almost covered the distance before falling to the floor like slimy rain. ‘This is preposterous. You can’t be suggesting I made the whole thing up? These women have been camped outside this hotel for weeks, screaming at anyone who comes inside, waving around banners with claims on them that are defamatory at best.’

  McLean let the slightest hint of a smile show. ‘It’s not that I don’t believe you, Mr Fielding. Quite the opposite. But you’re a man of the law. You understand how these things work. We could press charges, send these women to the Sheriff Court, but you and I both know what the outcome of that would be.’

  ‘So you just, what? Let them go?’ This time one fleck reached McLean’s lapel, but he ignored it. The suit was due a clean anyway.

  ‘Not at all, Mr Fielding. As you’ve no doubt noticed, the demonstrations have stopped. All the women involved have been officially cautioned. We have their details on file should they breach the peace again. If we had sufficient evidence, you can rest assured that we would have pressed charges. We can’t have women bursting into private meetings and trying to disrupt them, can we?’

  Fielding’s eyes narrowed in suspicion. McLean was trying hard not to wind the lawyer up, given the warning he’d received from McIntyre. It wasn’t easy though. There was something about the man, his haughty, puffed-up nature, that begged to be poked. Harrison certainly had the measure of him.

  ‘Indeed not, Detective Inspector. They should know their place. And you can rest assured, I’m not happy with the situation even if I do understand your reasoning. I will be mentioning it to the chief constable the next time I see him.’

  On the golf course at the weekend, no doubt. McLean inclined his head slightly to indicate he thought this reasonable. ‘I’ll let the new chief superintendent know too. I believe you know her? Gail Elmwood?’

  Had he not been trained in interviewing suspects, with more than two decades of experience behind that training, McLean might have missed the almost imperceptible flicker that crossed Fielding’s eyes at the name, the tiniest moment of utter stillness as the thoughts tumbled through his sharp, lawyer’s brain. It was there though, plain as day if you knew what to look for. And if you’d set up the trigger on purpose.

  ‘Well, I’ll not waste any more of your precious time, Mr Fielding,’ he said, before the lawyer could respond. ‘Pleasure to meet you again.’

  ‘Detective Inspector McLean, sir?’

  McLean stopped mid-stride as he was heading for the door, turned to see the receptionist he’d spoken to earlier. She had one hand raised to catch his attention, in case her shout had been insufficient. He changed course and went to see what she wanted.

  ‘Sorry to shout like that, sir. I wasn’t sure when you would be finished with Mr Fielding, and I didn’t want to miss you.’

  ‘No problem, Ms . . .’ He squinted to see the name on the badge pinned to her chest. ‘Elaine?’

  ‘You were asking about the CCTV footage from the lobby here. I spoke to Colin in security and he pulled it all on to a memory stick. It’s all digital these days, amazing what they can do.’ She held out her hand, and McLean saw both a tiny, company-branded USB memory stick and a neatly folded sheet of A4 paper. He glanced at the door to the Walter Scott bar before taking both and slipping them unobtrusively into his jacket pocket.

  ‘A guest list, I take it?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘You didn’t get it from me, sir.’ Elaine straightened her uniform as if she’d just emerged from the stationery cupboard moments after her boss. ‘Some of us were a bit uncomfortable with the conference, the sort of things that were being said and the way the guests treated us. Those ladies outside were much more polite, if you get my meaning.’

  ‘I do. Thank you.’ McLean tapped his pocket. ‘And don’t worry about this. No one will know where it came from, but it may prove very useful.’

  43

  The major incident room was in a certain amount of turmoil as the last few actions of the Cecily Slater investigation were tidied away. Someone had already taken down the photographs of the dead woman and the burned-out gamekeeper’s cottage, which meant both that nobody had to see them any more and that they were no longer a constant reminder of the horrific crime they were supposed to be investigating. Somewhere out there the men, and McLean was as certain as he could be that they were men in the plural, who had done this terrible thing to a helpless ninety-year-old woman, were still walking free. Might even continue to walk free until they died. It wasn’t the first time he’d had to wind up an investigation without any result, and every time the injustice left a bitter taste in his mouth.

  ‘How did you get on with Fielding?’

  Lost in thought, McLean hadn’t noticed Detective Superintendent McIntyre follow him into the room.

  ‘As well as could be expected. He wasn’t happy, but he conceded the lack of evidence was a problem. That’s got to hurt, really. He could have given us any number of witnesses, but he doesn’t want to upset his base. Last thing any of them want is to be on our radar.’

  ‘Well, at least I won’t get an irate call from the chief constable.’

  ‘Oh, don’t count on it. I imagine he’ll be in touch after this weekend’s golf round. Unless something more urgent comes up.’

  McIntyre arched a thin eyebrow. ‘Oh aye? Something I should know?’

  ‘Probably best if you don’t, Jayne. Plausible deniability and all that.’ McLean looked around, remembering why he’d come in here in the first place. ‘You haven’t seen DS Harrison, have you?’

  ‘Janie’s away with Kirsty on another case. Any reason why you needed her?’

  McLean stuck his hand in his pocket and pulled out the memory stick. ‘She was after some CCTV footage and I managed to sweet-talk it out of security.
I was hoping she’d be able to have a quick look over it, but I guess there’s no reason I can’t do it myself.’

  ‘Can’t you get a constable to do it, Tony? That’s what they’re for, you know.’

  ‘I could, but by the time I’d found them and explained what they’re meant to be looking for, it’d be as quick doing it myself.’

  ‘Oh aye? And what are you looking for?’

  ‘A specific person in a small group of people at a specific time. Don Purefoy, to be precise.’

  ‘Pure . . . ? Oh, right. The estate agent. Where was he seen?’ McIntyre nodded at McLean’s hand, still clutching the memory stick.

  ‘Probably—’

  ‘Best I don’t know, aye. I get it. Plausible deniability.’ The detective superintendent shook her head. ‘I don’t know why I bother, Tony.’

  ‘Call it following up on a hunch. If it doesn’t play out, then best nobody knows.’

  ‘To save you from the embarrassment of being wrong? That’s not usually bothered you before.’

  ‘Not me, Jayne. You know I don’t give a damn what other people think about me.’ McLean waved a hand at the collected team of detectives, uniformed officers and support staff quietly dismantling the apparatus of investigation around him. ‘It’s this lot I’m concerned for. The fewer people know about this, the less chance of it getting back to the wrong person.’

  McIntyre wasn’t stupid. You didn’t get to her level in an organisation like Police Scotland without being clever, although the time she’d broken a reporter’s nose had been a lapse. Not that anyone who’d ever worked with her didn’t think the reporter deserved it. Now McLean could see the wheels turning in her mind as she put together the various pieces of information and came to a perfectly valid conclusion.

  ‘I wasn’t joking when I told you to be very careful, Tony. This is not something you want to be wrong about. Hell, it’s probably not something you want to be right about either. But I know better than to tell you to stop.’

  McLean tilted his head in understanding, pocketing the memory stick as he turned to leave. ‘I will be the soul of discretion, have no fear.’

  ‘It’s too late for that, Tony. Several years too late.’

  McLean had almost reached the door before McIntyre spoke again, loud enough for everyone else to hear. ‘And don’t forget this evening. Seven o’clock.’

  McLean stopped by the canteen on his way back to his office, aware that if he was going to spend the last hours of the afternoon staring at grainy CCTV footage on a tiny laptop screen he would need tea and at least a half-packet of biscuits. Somehow the day was mostly done, and he’d completely failed to eat any lunch. Emma would tut at him when he got home and immediately raided the fridge for a sandwich. Except that Emma was half a world away in the sub-Saharan sun, and he wouldn’t be heading home until he’d suffered the torture that the chief superintendent’s reception was likely to be.

  Mindful of McIntyre’s warning, he closed his office door before slotting the memory stick into the laptop he’d borrowed from Mike Simpson in the IT department. He didn’t expect the stick to be riddled with viruses, but you could never be too careful. And this machine had no connection to the building’s network, so if something went wrong it could easily be contained. It took a moment to work out the unfamiliar program, and at first he was confused by the four different video files. Then it dawned on him that they must be for different cameras covering the same time, and soon enough the video footage expanded to fill the screen.

  He recognised the view in the first file. The camera was mounted in the ceiling above the reception desk, pointing at the front door. People came and went, although there were surprisingly long stretches of nothing much happening at all. A timestamp ticked over in the bottom left corner of the screen, minutes flicking past like seconds as he viewed it on fast forward.

  Nothing much happened until about half past five, when a commotion of people appeared from off-camera. Some made their way across the reception hall in the direction of the bar, but most simply left the building as quickly as they could. Members of staff bustled backwards and forwards, clearly dealing with the incursion into the conference room by Izzy DeVilliers and her friends. After perhaps twenty minutes a couple of uniformed officers entered, but mostly hung around the lobby doing nothing. And then, at about a quarter to seven, the front door opened and DS Harrison stepped in, dwarfed by the looming figure of Lofty Blane behind her.

  McLean closed the file and opened another one. It showed a corridor, which if ancient memory served was the route from the Walter Scott bar to the toilets. It also led to the kitchens and other service rooms, judging by the occasional appearance of hotel staff about their business. McLean fast-forwarded the image to around the same time the mass crowd had erupted from the conference hall, and was rewarded by the view of Tommy Fielding and a group of five other men as they walked towards the bar. The angle of the camera wasn’t good for identification, but he made a note of the file name and timestamp for future reference.

  The third file was a camera mounted behind the bar in the Walter Scott, its fish-eye lens taking in almost the entire room but distorting the image at the same time. There was no sound on any of the files, so when McLean found the footage of Harrison and Blane as they spoke to Fielding and his friends, he couldn’t hear what they were saying. It wasn’t necessary to hear anything to understand the tone of it though. Fielding’s face was a picture of barely constrained rage, his anger at having his precious little men’s rights meeting disrupted by a bunch of uppity women compounded by the appearance of DS Harrison to deal with his complaint. The other men at the table were mostly obscured, except for a young lad nursing a pint of what looked like fizzy lager. Then, after a silent rant from Fielding which had Harrison almost rocking back on her heels, all of the men got up and left. And as they filed out past Lofty Blane, each one looked at the taciturn giant, their faces perfectly lined up with the camera as if they’d been posing for a mugshot.

  ‘You beauty,’ McLean muttered under his breath as he paused and screen-grabbed each face in turn. Then he switched on his own computer and brought up the file on Don Purefoy. It might have been strange that the man’s body hadn’t been completely mangled in the rock fall, but the fact that Purefoy’s head had been left unscathed meant his face was easy enough to recognise, even if it was pasty white with death in the mortuary photo.

  And there, on the CCTV footage, just as Harrison had thought, was the man alive. McLean increased the magnification, checking between the two screens just to be sure, but there was no mistaking it. Don Purefoy had not only been at the men’s rights seminar, he was pally with the big man himself.

  McLean remembered the sheet of paper the kindly receptionist, Elaine, had given him. He pulled it out, unfolded it and stared at the list, noting as he did so that the title at the top of the page said invited guests, not attendees. No way of knowing if they’d all been there, but the names were in alphabetical order, which made finding Purefoy easy. As he scanned the rest of them, Christopher Allan sprang out, mostly because he was right up there at the top. McLean didn’t know what the man looked like, but Harrison would. Near the bottom of the list, between Charles Weston and Samuel Yates, was another name McLean knew, Steven Whitaker. Was this the same night he had gone home and somehow managed to set himself on fire? He’d have to check the dates.

  His phone buzzed before he could do anything about that, and McLean picked it up, seeing the text from McIntyre reminding him of his appointment with doom. A glance at the digits in the top corner of the screen told him it was time to go if he didn’t want to risk the wrath of the chief superintendent. He slipped the phone into his pocket, then picked up the guest list, intending to fold it up and put it somewhere safe. The last thing he wanted was to be asked how he had acquired it. As he went to fold it, another name caught his eye, nestled in among the Gs. Brian Galloway had been at the sem
inar too, which raised some uncomfortable questions. But it was the final name that had him staring in disbelief, even as his phone pinged another text. McLean remembered the phone call Fielding had been on when he’d first entered the Walter Scott bar, Fielding’s assurances to someone he called Reggie. Well, there was a Reginald on the guest list who might very well have been the same man.

  Reginald Slater.

  Lord Bairnfather.

  44

  McLean had to check the address he’d been given for the reception twice. He knew that it was being held at the deputy chief constable’s home, which in itself had surprised him, but when he saw the house it piqued his curiosity even more. Elmwood was single, he knew. She’d not long moved up from London, so surely had to be renting. A chief superintendent’s salary was on the generous side, and there would have been relocation expenses to tap into as well. Even so, the vast terrace house in Stockbridge must have been eating into her wages.

  There was also the rather unsettling fact that he had been to this very house before, and not all that long ago. It had belonged to Alan Lewis, a hedge fund manager with a side interest in money laundering on a massive scale. Unless you counted hedge funds as money laundering anyway, in which case it wasn’t a side interest at all. Gazing up at the facade of the building, McLean could pick out the windows that looked out from what had been Lewis’s bedroom, and the en suite bathroom in whose bath the financier had died. Possibly from a heart attack, possibly from the curse of a vengeful ghost. Neither cause appeared on the death certificate though. As far as the world was concerned, Alan Lewis had committed suicide by electrocuting himself, rather than face the consequences as his dark dealings were brought to light.

  The fact he had died in that bath might, of course, have made the house difficult to sell and cheap to rent, so maybe that was why the chief superintendent was here. It was disquieting nonetheless.

  Two uniformed constables were on duty at the front door, looking bored and a bit grumpy. McLean could understand. Walking the beat would be far preferable to guarding your boss while she hosted a party. They both came to a sort of attention as he approached, but he waved for them to relax.