Susie shook off the thought, focusing on the matter at hand. If Buchan wasn’t going to wait for her, fine. She would catch him at the court.
• • •
As ever, parking in Edinburgh was a pain in the arse. Susie finally found a space on Market Street, on the steep slope that led on to the Mound. Paying for her ticket, she looked out across Princes Street Gardens at the Scott Monument. An image of Katherine Buchan’s ruined body flashed before her mind; Dr Williams picking through the shattered remains, blood and gore streaked across his rubber gloves and surgical gown.
She shuddered, tried to push the thought away, concentrate on the here and now.
The court was only a two-minute walk away. She caught sight of Buchan as he was walking past St Giles’ Cathedral, a heavy sheaf of papers cradled under his arm, probably heading for the offices that backed onto the court.
Looking both ways, she jogged across the road to him, calling his name to attract his attention. When she was halfway across the road, something caught the corner of her eye. A familiar face in the steady stream of people moving up and down the street.
Who? Too late, Buchan was in front of her.
‘Ah, Detective Drummond. What a surprise, I didn’t think you were going to have the time to see me today.’ Susie ignored the dig.
‘Yes, well, I’m sorry about that, Mr Buchan. However, I have come across some interesting developments. I was wondering if you had time for a quick chat?’
Buchan made a show of checking his watch. ‘Well, I do have a meeting in twenty minutes, and I was planning on dropping into my office. But, I suppose, if it’s important, I could spare you a few minutes.’
Arrogant bastard, Susie thought as she muttered her thanks. Good to know that discussing his daughter’s death wasn’t too much of an inconvenience.
• • •
Buchan’s office was about the same size as Third Degree’s, with institutional decoration lurking behind haphazard attempts to make it liveable. Unlike Burns’ office, the walls were crowded with photographs. In most of them, Buchan was smiling for the camera – the perfect PR pose – as he was greeted by various people who Susie assumed meant something in political circles. She recognised one person, though: the Chief Superintendent, standing on what looked like a terrace overlooking a golf course, smiling with glasses raised. Fuck.
There was, as far as she could see, only one picture of Buchan with Katherine and his wife. It was an old shot; Susie guessed Katherine would have been about nine or ten in the photograph, all blonde hair and ruddy cheeks as she stood before her parents, Buchan resting a hand on her shoulder, Linda by his side.
It should have been the perfect family scene, and the picture quality was far better than the squint-eyed effort that hung in Burns’ office, but to Susie the photograph looked cold and remote, as staged as the other pictures it shared the wall with.
‘Now, DS Drummond,’ Buchan said, ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Well, sir, some new information has come to light regarding the photograph you received a call about yesterday.’
Buchan’s brow darkened. ‘Ah, yes. I take it those journalists involved have been appropriately reprimanded?’
Susie murmured a non-committal reply. If she told him the Chief Superintendent had granted Doug and the Tribune a stay of execution, she would never get anything from him.
She saw Buchan glance again at his watch. Time to get on with it.
‘Sir, we’ve managed to ascertain from the photo that Katherine sought treatment for a, ah…’ She paused. No easy way to say it. ‘…a drug problem at a residential programme in the Niddrie area in 1992. While she was there, it seems Derek McGinty was a fairly regular visitor.’
She tried to read Buchan’s face, gauge his reaction. Impossible, it was like talking to stone.
‘Did you know anything about her problem, Mr Buchan? Was she still using drugs?’
‘Of course not!’ Buchan snapped, snatching up a pen from the desk, grasping it hard enough to bleed his knuckles white. ‘I mean…’ He lowered his head, sagged back. ‘I’m sorry, DS Drummond. Forgive me. As you can imagine, this is a trying time. No, she wasn’t using drugs any more. She had been clean for more than ten years.’
‘So you knew about her problem?’
‘Of course I knew. When we found out, we got her into the programme, tried to get her the best help we could.’
Susie raised an eyebrow. A residential unit in Niddrie was hardly the best help a QC’s money could buy. ‘And did you also arrange for Katherine to attend the unit under a false name?’
The colour drained from Buchan’s face. He dropped his eyes, suddenly fascinated by the pen he had picked up. ‘Yes,’ he whispered after a long pause. ‘I thought it was for the best.’
For who? Susie thought. Looking at the photographs on the wall, the answer was obvious.
‘Mr Buchan,’ she began slowly, picking her words carefully, ‘regarding the £5,000 we discussed yester…’
The trill of her mobile phone cut her off. Shit. She had meant to turn it off. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said as she pulled out the phone. ‘If I could just have a minute?’
Buchan nodded. He didn’t do a very good job of hiding his relief.
Susie answered the phone. Listened to what Burns had to say, felt her jaw tighten.
‘Right, sir. Yes, he’s here with me now.’ Buchan’s head shot up. ‘Yes, we’re on our way, sir. I’ll see you there.’
‘What is it?’ Buchan asked, barely giving Susie the time to finish the call. ‘What’s wrong?’
Susie took a deep breath. ‘Ah… sir, I think you’d better come with me. There’s been a break-in at your house. We’ve got officers there, they’re looking after your wife now.’
• • •
A WPc was sitting in the lounge room with Linda Buchan by the time they arrived at the house, rubbing her shoulders gently as she rocked back and forth, tears streaming down her pale face. Her small, thin hands clasped together and released continuously, like two small animals having convulsions as her feet drummed at the floor.
‘A doctor’s been called to have a look at her,’ Burns whispered in Susie’s ear as he walked across the room to stand beside her.
‘Hmm,’ Susie nodded, watching as Buchan sat down beside his wife. He reached out to take her hands in his, trying to calm them in her lap. Linda flinched, as though surprised by his presence, then fell back to studying her hands, ignoring him.
‘What happened?’ Susie asked.
‘We’re not sure yet,’ Burns replied. ‘It was a neighbour who called the police, said she heard screams as she passed the house while walking her dog. When officers got here, they found her like this. No obvious signs of a break-in.’
Susie glanced around the room. Show-home neat, as ever. ‘Other than her,’ she nodded towards Linda, ‘why are we calling this a break-in?’
‘Two reasons. One, a car was seen driving off at high speed not long before the uniforms arrived. Second, and most important, the dog walker also said she thought she could hear a man’s voice over Mrs Buchan’s screams.’
Linda Buchan’s head whipped in the direction of Burns. ‘He said such horrible things!’ she screeched in a hitching sob as her hands flew to the sides of her head, as though trying to block out what she had heard. ‘About Katherine! Asked for money. Said that she was a drug user, that she… she… was … was …’
Her voice dissolved into hysterical, pitched wails that shook her whole body. She dropped her head between her knees and shrieked at the ground. Buchan put his arms around his wife and hugged her fiercely, ignoring the sudden stiffening of her spine as his arms closed around her.
‘She didn’t know?’ Susie asked gently as he looked up at her.
‘No,’ he said, his face an contortion of anger, distress and…embarrassment? ‘She adored Katherine. Telling her would have killed her. I thought if I could… could…’ He flailed for words, gave up and bent his head to his
wife’s back, hiding his face.
Linda shrugged him off, slid off the couch and fell to her knees, her cries becoming even more hysterical.
Buchan sat looking at her, paralysed. He half-reached out, then let his arms drop to his lap. His eyes darted around the room, glare challenging anyone who dared meet his gaze.
‘What the fuck are you people doing about this?’ he hissed. ‘My daughter is dead, my wife has been harassed in our home, my… my…’ He stuttered for a moment, face darkening. Linda sat on the floor, sobs now interspersed with pleas to Buchan to stop, just stop, it wasn’t their fault.
He shrugged her off. ‘What the fuck use are any of you?’
Uncomfortable shuffles around the room as officers busied themselves with notepads and cameras, studied the floor for vital clues. Burns stepped forward, arms open, voice as gentle as he could make it.
‘Mr Buchan, I can understand your distress. But my officers and I…’
Susie walked out of the room. She needed to get away from Linda’s sobbing and Buchan’s ranting. She stood in the hallway, tried to think.
‘What?’ Burns asked as he joined her in the hall. ‘If you’ve got something, I’d love to hear it.’
‘McGinty,’ Susie said, more to herself than Burns. ‘When she calms down, I’m betting her description of the intruder matches Derek McGinty. He was here, sir.’
Susie saw understanding dawn in Burns’ eyes. ‘You think…?’
‘Exactly. He took the £5,000 from Katherine, hush money so nobody knew her secret and dropped her dad’s career in the shit. Killed her and then decided he wanted more. But he couldn’t go back to her, so who else?’
‘Go straight to the source,’ Burns said.
‘Exactly. Why not blackmail Buchan himself? Except when he got here, told Mrs Buchan what he would do unless she coughed up the cash, she flipped out on him. He panicked and left.’
Burns stared at the front door, jaw working slowly as he ground his teeth. To Susie, he looked like a bad-tempered bulldog. He strode to the door, grabbed a uniformed Pc by the arm and spun him round hard enough for the young officer to stagger back.
‘Sir, what… I…?’
‘Get on to Fettes,’ Burns said, ignoring the Pc’s stammered confusion. ‘Tell them I want the description of Derek McGinty reissued to every uniform, every car and every patrol in the next hour. And this time, I want the cunt found.’
The Pc nodded and hurried outside to radio in Burns’ request.
‘I’ll have that bastard in cells by tonight,’ Burns hissed. ‘And then we’ll have a nice long chat with our Mr McGinty. That sound alright to you, DS Drummond?’
‘Yes sir,’ Susie replied. ‘That sounds just fine.’
37
‘… yeah, Carol, that’s it. Look, thanks very much. Bye.’
Doug hung up the phone and turned his attention back to the notes and documents spread across his coffee table. He had still been at his flat when Susie called, asking him to see if he could squeeze a story about the break-in at the Buchans’ home into second edition. He had glanced at the clock – just after 12.30. It was going to be tight, but he got typing – the chatter of the keyboard only interrupted by the soft flicking of his notepad pages as he paused to check his scrawled notes – and e-mailed the story in, then talked it over with Carol Jones, who was on the desk that day.
That done, he mulled over what Susie had told him about how she suspected McGinty had paid a visit to the Buchans’ home. It made sense to Doug, answered most of the questions that he had, but there were still loose ends that he didn’t like.
And then there was Lizzie Renwick. Why had she been killed so brutally? Doug guessed that could have been McGinty’s handiwork. He briefly thought McGinty had gone to the gallery looking for cash or something he could sell, had run into Lizzie and killed her when she refused to help him, but quickly rejected the idea. If he needed cash, there were a thousand other places he could have gone that would have offered richer pickings without the need to kill someone.
Doug picked through his notes on McGinty and the copy of his record that Susie had supplied him with. From thug to bouncer to rapist. Some career…
Hold on a minute. Bouncer. Doug flicked through the papers in front of him, looking for the notes on the clubs McGinty had worked in, including the place Bethany Miller and her friends had been on the night she was attacked. The club itself was gone now, destroyed by a fire that gutted a section of the city’s Old Town, but still, it gave Doug a lead.
In August a couple of years ago, when Edinburgh’s nightclubs were allowed to stay open until 5am to cash in on the huge influx of tourists that the Festival brought with it, the council had brought in a scheme to licence all doormen working in the city’s pubs and clubs. It was part of a drive to weed out the thugs who were merely looking for an excuse to beat the shit out of people and get away with it.
While working on the story, Doug had come across Rab MacFarlane. Rab ran Capital Events Management, one of the largest security and events companies in the city. Whenever a big star came to Edinburgh to perform, it was a fair bet that you would see a steward wandering around the gig with Rab’s company logo emblazoned across his T-shirt. Rab had started the company in the Seventies when he was a young man working on the doors himself, building it up to become one of the biggest doormen-for-hire and private security businesses on the east coast.
There were rumours Rab’s phenomenal success was partly down to knowing when to turn a blind eye to some of the more profitable and less legal aspects of the nightclub industry, but Doug had taken to Rab. He had a quick, sarcastic wit and was helpful and articulate when commenting on the story. He had spent a few nights with Rab touring the pubs and clubs in the city where his people worked. Everywhere they went, there were nods of greeting, claps on the shoulder, shaking of hands.
The idea of the tour was to give Doug a better idea of what doormen in the city had to deal with, get a feel for the need for tighter regulation, but really it was just a pub crawl. Though wherever they went and no matter how much they drank, Rab remained the same; calm and serene, willing to talk and be talked to. He seemed to live by a simple rule: don’t fuck with me and I won’t fuck with you.
Doug reached for his contact book, flipping through the well-thumbed pages until he found Rab’s number. If anyone could help him find out more about Derek’s working life in Edinburgh, it was Rab.
• • •
Rab ran his empire from a suite of offices in the basement of a building on Forth Street, only a few minutes’ walk from Princes Street. His neighbours were the local radio station on one side and a firm of architects on the other. Doug was met at the door by Janet, Rab’s perma-blonde wife, who was always just this side of orange. She and her man had clawed their way up from the gutter to the point where she could afford three sunbed sessions a week, a weekly hair-do and a cacophony of chunky gold jewellery. Janet also drove a two-seater Mazda roadster, which sat gleaming outside their offices.
Personal number plate and flame red, of course.
‘Hiya, Doug,’ she said, her voice pure Lanarkshire. ‘Christ, boy, you bin in the wars or someit? ’Mone in. He’s oan the phone, he’ll oanlae be wan minute.’
Doug nodded his thanks, complimented Janet on her hair-do. She flashed a row of capped teeth already beginning to stain with nicotine and sat back behind her desk. Whatever her faults, Janet was no fool. She deployed Rab’s staff with the military precision of a general at war.
The door to the main office boomed open as Rab steeped through. He was a tall man, dressed in a suit that probably cost more than Doug’s last car loan. A gold wrist chain peeked out from underneath the cuff of his shirt. His smile was warm and open, but the eyes shattered that illusion. There was a hardness in his gaze, something that said this was a man who had seen violence, and wasn’t afraid to use it if he had to.
‘Doug,’ he called, taking Doug’s hand and pumping it in a vigorous handshake. His eyes stray
ed over Doug’s bruises. ‘How are you?’ he asked pointedly.
‘Going well, Rab,’ Doug replied. He could feel pins and needles crawl through his palm. ‘Look, thanks for seeing me at such short notice.’
‘Ach,’ Rab waved a dismissive hand. ‘Think nothing of it. You put me across well in that paper of yours, only fair I do you a favour when I can. Come on in, we’ll talk.’
Doug followed Rab into his office, which was dominated by a huge oak desk that sat at the far end of the room. Next to the window a large plant with lush green leaves nodded lazily in the draft from the air-conditioning unit overheard. Doug recognised the plant, his mum and dad had one just like it in their home, but he couldn’t remember what it was called.
As Doug took a seat, Rab busied himself at a drinks cabinet behind his desk. He didn’t ask Doug if he wanted a drink, didn’t need to. To Rab, having a drink was as integral a part of doing business as a pen and a contract. Someone visited you, you played the host. It was the way he worked. Doug was glad he’d decided to get a taxi into town instead of bringing the car.
He set a generous whisky in front of Doug and then settled himself into his chair. Held up his own glass. ‘Cheers.’
Doug raised his glass, took a sip. The peaty tang of Laphroaig bit into his tastebuds. A little early in the day for him, but not bad. He murmured his thanks.
‘So, Doug,’ Rab said as he rolled his glass between his fingers. ‘What can I do to help you?’
‘I was wondering if you had ever heard of a guy who worked on the doors a few years ago. Derek McGinty?’
Rab turned his head up, studying the ceiling. ‘McGinty, McGinty, McGinty,’ he said, tasting the name. ‘Hold on a minute. Derek McGinty. He no’ that bastard who got sent down for raping that wee girl? The one your paper’s going doolally for?’
‘Yeah, that’s him. He ever work for you?’
Falling Fast Page 18
