Fatal Transaction: A DCI MacBain Scottish Crime Thriller

by Oliver Davies

  I hit play on the footage again, and it zipped forward. I saw Smyth pass by several times, no doubt making one of his many rounds. I only saw our victim twice, first coming out of the bathroom and heading back to his office and then carefully creeping back out into the hallway at about eleven p.m. After that, about half the monitors cut out, leaving nothing but static in their place.

  “What was that?” I demanded, still pressing the fast-forward button to find the moment when the cameras snapped back into place.

  “I have no idea,” Smyth murmured. “They must have found a way to cut the cameras before they came in.”

  “Why only cut these specific cameras then?” I wondered. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to turn all of them off?” I picked a pen up off the desk and tapped it against my chin, pausing the video once more so I could look back and forth between the static-filled screens and the map. Each feed was labelled, so I was able to sketch boxes on the blueprints that approximated the area each camera covered, crosshatching blocks to represent the cut feeds. Smyth looked a little bit put out that I was drawing on bank property, but he didn’t stop me, and before long, I’d parsed out a clear path from one of the side doors right down to the vault.

  “That’s how they got in,” I said, dropping back into my chair to study my handiwork. “We’ll have to tell Adams, so her people can focus on that door when they dust for prints.”

  Fletcher nodded thoughtfully as she looked over the map with her hands in her pockets, leaning on the edge of the desk. I spun back to the computer screens and hit play again, fast-forwarding through the lost footage until the cameras suddenly snapped back into place at five in the morning. Crane lay on the floor just down the hall from the bank vault, and maybe a half-hour later, Smyth finally staggered into frame and found the body, his shock seeming genuine as one hand flew to his mouth, and he stumbled back until he hit the wall.

  “And you really don’t know how the robbers might have gotten access to the security cameras?” I asked Smyth.

  His eyes leapt away from mine for less than a second before he dragged them back around to land on my face. “I don’t know. I mean, I’m not really much of a techy guy. I thought the cameras could only be controlled from in here, but nobody goes in here except me and occasionally Mr Crane. Maybe they forced him to cut the feed before they… you know.”

  Then we probably would have seen Crane come into this room, but I just hummed softly rather than pointing that out. Smyth was probably already well aware of that fact.

  “Alright,” I said after I’d taken a few beats to think about it, Smyth forever shifting from foot to foot in the corner. “I think we’ve got everything we need from you. I’ll have one of my constables take you to the hospital to get checked out. We appreciate you talking to us. I know this has to be hard.” I took my wallet from my pocket as I stood, flipping through everything inside until I found one of my business cards so I could hold it out to Smyth. “Call me if you think of anything else, yeah? I’m sure we’ll come by to talk to you again sometime soon.”

  Smyth’s fingers trembled just slightly as he reached out to take the card, and he stuffed it in his pocket, leaving his hand inside with it, his fist obviously bunched against the fabric of his trousers. He nodded and rubbed at the back of his head, though I noticed he didn’t really wince.

  I stood up from the desk and led the way out of the small security room, back out into the hustle and bustle of the other constables and SOCO hard at work processing the scene. I waved Fawkes over as soon as I caught his eye, and he hurried up to us, his thumbs looped through his heavy belt.

  “Can you take Mr Smyth here to the hospital?” I asked him. “Maybe keep an eye on him until he gets back on his feet?”

  “No problem,” Fawkes agreed. “Mr Smyth, if you’d follow me?”

  Fletcher and I stood side by side and watched as Fawkes and Smyth left the bank, Owens holding the door open for them. My view of the street was restricted from this angle, but I could tell that the constables outside had at least gotten most of the civilian crowd to disperse, though there were still a few more stubborn people hanging on outside the tape.

  “What do we think?” Fletcher asked me as Fawkes and Smyth disappeared around a corner.

  I pursed my lips and crossed my arms, drumming the fingers of one hand against the opposite bicep. “I think I’m not entirely sure I believe his story. He was definitely acting guilty, but I’ll admit that might have just been because a man was killed because he didn’t do his job properly. I think we need to keep an eye on him for the moment and question him again when we have more of the facts in hand.”

  “I agree,” Fletcher said. “I feel like it’s probably part of his job description to understand exactly how those cameras work in case one of them malfunctions. I don’t believe that he has no idea how they might have cut out.”

  I nodded. “That’s the point I’m running into, too. We’ll have to have Martin run a diagnostic on the system if he can. Maybe he can turn something up.”

  “Should we go talk to Adams next?” Fletcher asked.

  “Yes. Let’s go take a look at the body and the vault,” I decided. Fletcher began to turn around to head deeper into the bank, but I caught her arm before she got too far. She craned her neck round to look at me, one eyebrow raised.

  “Will you be alright?” I asked seriously.

  During the Active Eye case, a man had died right in front of Fletcher, in her arms, and she’d taken it hard. We hadn’t encountered any murders in the months since then, and I wanted to make sure she was in the right headspace to dive back into it.

  Fletcher locked eyes with me and nodded, all her usual flippancy gone from her expression. “I’ve been working through it,” she promised me. “I’m in a much better headspace now. I’ll be fine.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, offering her a smile.

  Fletcher flashed me two thumbs-up, and we walked out of the lobby and down the hall toward the bank vault. Back here, there were more lab techs than uniformed constables running around, bearing bags of equipment in every direction as they went about their tasks. I didn’t know them quite as well as I knew all the constables at the station, but I still offered them all smiles and nods hello as they went by, most of which were returned.

  We found Adams still studying Crane’s body through the lens of her camera. We couldn’t see the vault from here, as we were near the end of a long hallway, the vault no doubt around the far corner.

  “Hey, Adams,” I called as we walked toward her, not wanting to surprise her by appearing right at her shoulder.

  Adams didn’t even glance up from her camera, just took another shot, then shifted a foot to the left to line it up from a different angle. Fletcher and I stopped so that we were standing over her, staring down at the body of poor Mr Crane.

  “Barney Crane,” Adams explained without having to be prompted. “Looks like he died of blunt force trauma to the head, though we’ll have to get him to the morgue to get a more accurate read on cause and time of death.”

  “Between eleven p.m. and five a.m.,” I supplied. “That was when the cameras were out.”

  Six hours was still a wide window of time, but it was still better than the entire night.

  I tilted my head to the side as I looked down at Barney Crane. He was middle-aged, probably in his mid-forties, and he had the look of someone who had let himself go somewhere along the way, sagging stomach, flabby arms, loose jowls. His hair was starting to bald at the top, and he wore a white polo over beige trousers, his outfit about as bland as it could get. Well, except for the blood staining the fabric.

  He lay face down on the ground, his head tilted to the side so I could only see half his profile, the back of his skull caved in from a terrible blow. His hair was thin enough that I could see the bruises blooming around the wound, cooled blood pooling around his head, several drips of it running down the side of his face.

  “We think the robbers came in using th
e side door,” I told Adams, pointing down the hall to our left that followed the route we’d laid out using the downed security cameras. “You might want to focus your fingerprinting efforts there. And can we get Martin in here to look at all the tech? He could probably figure out how the security cameras were cut.”

  “I’ll call him,” Adams replied, shifting over a foot to get a shot of Crane’s wound from a different angle.

  “What about the vault?” Fletcher asked. “Have you had a chance to go over that yet?”

  “I’ve got my people checking it out,” Adams said. “Give me two minutes here, and we can go over and see how they’re getting on.”

  Fletcher and I nodded and let her get back to work. Rather than loiter against the wall, waiting for her, I took off down the corridor, off to check out the robber’s entry point. We had to take a bit of a circuitous route to get there as none of the hallways took us directly to our destination, but we found the small, unassuming door eventually. It was marked with a red EXIT sign overhead, and there was a keypad mounted on the wall by the knob.

  The light on the pad was out, though, and when I tested the door, a glove on my hand to preserve any DNA evidence that might have been there, it swung open to let me out onto a street that ran along the building. This was probably where they took deliveries with a black mat on the cobblestones just in front of the door so that people wouldn’t constantly be tracking mud and water inside the bank. There was a keypad on the outside wall, too, its light also dark.

  Fletcher held the door open while I stepped to the side to examine it, taking my pocketknife out and freeing the longest blade. I carefully unscrewed the four pins holding the pad’s faceplate in place, catching it in a gloved hand when it came free from the wall, revealing the pad’s wire guts.

  “Look, a wire’s been cut,” I said to Fletcher, pointing out the slit thread with the pocketknife.

  Fletcher leaned forward so she could get a better look, still holding the door open with one foot. “Wouldn’t that have set off an alarm?” she wondered.

  “I would assume so,” I answered. “Unless they managed to time it just right while Smyth was out on his rounds.”

  “Or unless they had help,” Fletcher suggested darkly.

  I’d been thinking that as well.

  “We’ll have to have another chat with Mr Smyth,” I said. “Really lay the pressure on this time.”

  “At least we’ve got eyes on him,” Fletcher said.

  I nodded as I slotted the pad back into place, though I didn’t push the screws in all the way. Adams would no doubt want to take a look.

  “I’ll text Fawkes, tell him to keep an extra close eye on Smyth until we get there,” I said and took out my phone to do just that.

  Then Fletcher and I stepped inside again and made our way back toward the bank vault and Crane’s body. The corridors back here were far more utilitarian than they were closer to the lobby, as the bank patrons didn’t come back this far, and employers never seemed to think that their workers might like a bit of decoration or light as they went about their days. I’d also be surprised if they never had people getting lost in these hallways as they all looked the same and seemed to turn at odd angles and intersections. It made the building seem a whole lot larger than it actually was.

  When we got back to the main hallway leading to the vault, Adams was just standing up from beside Crane’s body, her knees popping loudly as she did so.

  “Ouch,” I said, wincing at the sound, and Adams turned around with an eyebrow raised.

  “What?” she asked. “Oh yeah. I’ve got Rice Krispies knees.”

  I laughed at the analogy and shook my head. I definitely missed being eight and having springy joints that could absorb any impact.

  “Ready to go to the vault?” I asked her.

  “Yes,” she agreed. She motioned for one of her lab techs to come over and join us, and the young woman hurried down the hall, a camera clutched in her hands. “Collins, I want you to take a few more shots of Mr Crane here, then coordinate with the paramedics to get him bagged up and sent to the morgue. The ambulance should be arriving in about five minutes.”

  “Will do,” Collins said, and she took Adams’ place beside Crane as the three of us walked off down the hall toward the vault.

  “Is anyone else from the bank here yet?” I asked Adams as we turned the corner.

  “Mr Crane was the bank manager,” Adams answered, tucking her camera bag under her arm so she could flip through her little notebook and check the facts. “So he was the head honcho around here. We turned the other employees away when they started arriving, but the regional manager is on his way up here from Glasgow with an insurance agent. They should be here soon, and they’ll be able to tell us for certain what all was taken.”

  “Good,” I said as I paused in the middle of the corridor to take in the open vault from afar before we went in to look at the nitty-gritty details. Fletcher and Adams stopped beside me, though neither of them said anything as we studied the scene before us.

  The vault’s huge, circular door was still open, pushed out as far as it could go in the hallway. There wasn’t much to see within the vault itself from this angle. The back wall was made of security boxes, and there was a large but empty table in the centre of the floor, and multiple techs moved around inside and out of the vault, a couple of constables keeping watch from the vault entrance. As we watched, a couple of them worked together to push the door away from the wall so they could take a look at the locking mechanism on the outside.

  Curious to see if they’d find anything, I started forward again, Fletcher and Adams close behind. The lab techs scooted to the side to make room when they noticed us coming toward them, and I peered at the silver surface of the door, trying to see if there was anything out of the ordinary on it. A huge crank wheel sat in the very centre of the surface, and there were two combination dials mounted into the metal on the right side, but I didn’t see any signs of tampering or the like.

  “Theories?” I asked the lab techs, though I knew they hadn’t been studying the door long.

  “I don’t know much about bank vaults, sir,” the one closest to me as she ran her gloved hand over the metal surface and then gave the crank wheel a spin. Since the door wasn’t locked, it turned easily beneath her hand. “But I think it would be pretty obvious if someone drilled into it.

  “So you think someone cracked it?” Fletcher asked, sounding impressed and incredulous at the same time. The lab tech shrugged, unsure.

  “We can ask the regional manager just how hard that would be when he gets here,” Adams said as her phone dinged, and she took it out to check the notification. “Which should be in about twenty minutes. Martin is on his way as well.”

  “Let’s take a look inside while we wait,” I suggested.

  Fletcher nodded, and she, Adams, and I backed away from the door, leaving the lab techs to their attempts to figure out how it worked. Then we stepped into the vault itself, shivering as a blast of cold air washed over us. The vents in here were working overtime, keeping the small room cold. It didn’t look like any of the security boxes had been opened, but I checked a couple of them anyway, wiggling the tiny handles to see if they would budge. There were a couple of hundred-pound notes discarded on the floor, each one marked by a little yellow triangle with a number on it.

  “Any luck with fingerprints yet?” I asked Adams as we began to make a slow circuit around the vault, studying every inch of the place.

  “We haven’t found any yet, but there’s a lot of ground to cover,” Adams answered as she paused to snap a couple of pictures of the money on the ground. “We’ll be as thorough as we can, but it’ll take some time.”

  I nodded, thinking over the pieces we had so far. We had a dead bank manager and a security guard who claimed to have been knocked out, though I wasn’t entirely sure I believed his story. We had disabled cameras, a cut wire in a security panel, and a vault door that seemed to have been cracked ra
ther than broken into. All that spoke to some serious planning and probably a fair amount of skill on the team, and I was willing to bet there was a team involved since most bank robberies were a group effort. We didn’t have any faces, and so far, we didn’t have any prints either, so we didn’t have much to go on yet. Maybe we could go over the security footage from the past week to see if there was anyone who showed up more than once like they were casing the place.

  There wasn’t much of note in the bank vault itself, other than the glaring lack of any money. We’d need the regional manager to tell us exactly how much was taken. A constable came to get us when Martin arrived, and Fletcher and I left Adams to her examination of the vault to go meet him, following the constable back up to the lobby. Crane’s body was gone, picked up by the paramedics while we were inside the vault, though a large pool of blood still stained the floor, its edges marred where Crane’s form had lain across it.

  It seemed Martin had left Benson behind at the lab because he stood on the tiled floor alone, a case of equipment clutched in one hand. I raised a hand to grab his attention, then motioned for him to meet us at the door into the security office.

  “Thanks for coming,” I said as I opened the still unlocked door, revealing all the computer screens within.

  “What do you want me to look for again?” Martin asked as he hauled his case inside and plunked it down on an open patch of desk, popping the latches so he could open it up and pull a few pieces of tech out.

  “We need you to figure out how the cameras were tampered with,” I explained. “There’s also a door with a cut wire that you might want to take a look at. Do you think you could also make a copy of the footage from, say, the past two weeks for us? I want to see if we’ve got any repeat customers.”