Nora’s hand flew to her mouth when I said the word murder, and she took a step back, shaking her head in disbelief. The man followed her and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her in close to comfort her. I was guessing he was probably the boyfriend.
“Broderick wouldn’t have had anything to do with a murder,” Nora insisted. “He’s a good man. He wouldn’t do something like that.”
“We believe the murder was an accident,” Fletcher said. “Some group robbed the bank your brother works, and the manager killed when he surprised the robbers. We think your brother might have had a hand in helping them get into the bank, not the murder itself.”
“That’s-- No. Why would he do that?” Nora demanded, her voice breaking as tears threatened to overflow. “He loved that job. Everyone at the bank was like family to him. Why would he help anyone rob it?”
“Money is a powerful motivator,” I said. Nora looked like her whole world was falling apart, and I felt for her, I really did, but we needed her to focus on the matter at hand, on where her brother might be right now. “Do you have any idea where he might have gone? What he might do?”
“I--I don’t know. I’m sorry,” Nora said helplessly. “Broderick and I, we live pretty separate lives. We reconnect for dinner every so often, but he doesn’t exactly tell me his secrets or anything like that.”
I gritted my teeth and worked hard to keep the frustration off my face. “Is he likely to come here? To you?”
“Wouldn’t he guess that you would find me, eventually?” Nora pointed out. “If I were him, I’d stay away.”
I’d do the same in his shoes, but I was still hoping that Broderick wouldn’t be thinking clearly enough to leave his sister out of it. But unfortunately, it didn’t seem like there was much else we could do for the moment, not until Martin got us a hit on that plate. Nora’s had been a dead end.
I took out my wallet and stepped closer to Nora to give her one of my cards, letting her bridge the last of the distance between us so I wouldn’t spook her.
“Will you give me a call if you do hear from him?” I asked, and I stared right into her face to make sure she wouldn’t lie to me when she answered.
Nora looked down at my card, its typeset plain and utilitarian. Then she glanced back up at me, her eyes wide and frightened. She nodded, her throat too tight to speak even after she tried to swallow the lump in it, and I found that I believed her.
“We’ll get out of your hair then,” I said. “Thank you for your time. Sorry about the takedown.”
The boyfriend rubbed at the back of his neck and gave me a rueful smile. “Sorry for trying to hit you. I’m not in trouble, am I?”
“I’ll let it slide,” I told him. “Just don’t let there be a next time, yeah?”
The boyfriend’s shoulders sagged with relief like I’d granted him the greatest boon of all time, though really, I just wasn’t in the mood to do all the paperwork.
The two of them let us see ourselves out, staying in the back garden as we slid through one of the narrow gaps between the boxy houses, and I groaned as we hit the street and were out of their sight.
“So that was a bust,” Fletcher sighed, planting her hands on her hips as we paused on the pavement.
“Yup,” I said, popping the ‘p’ at the end. “I doubt he’ll make his way here. I wish he would, that would make our jobs so much easier, but I don’t think that’s going to happen.”
“Me neither,” Fletcher agreed. “So, what’s next?”
“Best I can think of, we should head back to the station and check in with Martin. We should put a few feelers out to banks in other cities as well. Maybe something like this has happened to them, too.” I checked the time on my phone. The afternoon was growing late, though we still had a few hours of light left. We probably wouldn’t find anything today, and though a large part of me ached to press onward, I knew it would be better to hit pause for a second and take stock, craft a solid plan before we continued. Also, I could really use some sleep, not that there was time for that quite yet.
Six
The moment Fletcher and I arrived back at the station, we went to find Martin, but he told us he hadn’t gotten a hit on the plate yet and to stop bothering him until he called us with information. So we were left to slink back upstairs, properly chastised. Reilly was sitting behind my desk, and he stood the moment he saw us come out of the lift, his steps quick as he crossed the room to join us.
“Reilly, hey,” I said, running a hand down my tired face. “Look, I’m sorry for blowing you off earlier. What was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Martin got a hit off Charles’s phone,” Reilly replied. “He’s down at the harbour. He seems to be camped out there.”
“You didn’t want to go by yourself?” I asked. If Reilly was that worried about his friend, why wait for me rather than rush down there by himself right away?
“I wanted backup,” Reilly said, but there was the briefest hesitation before his answer that made me narrow my eyes at him. “I’ve got this feeling that Charles has gotten himself in bad somewhere. I didn’t want to run in there by myself. I’m getting old, you know.”
“You are? I had no idea,” I drawled, but I quickly sobered at the serious look Reilly gave me. “Alright. Alright. We’ll go check it out. There’s nothing we can do on our case right now, anyway.”
“Do you need some extra backup?” Fletcher offered.
“I think we’ll be okay, the two of us, thank you,” Reilly said, and Fletcher nodded, accepting the answer.
“I’ll do a bit of research while you’re gone,” she said. “Call a few other banks. See what I can dig up.”
“Thanks, Fletcher.” I smiled at her, and she gave me a small, two-fingered salute before she made her way over to her desk and sat down.
I hadn’t taken my overcoat off or anything before Fletcher and I ran down to see Martin, so I was ready to go, but Reilly still needed to grab his coat and hat, cramming the latter on his head before he stuffed his arms through the former and did up the buttons.
I made sure I still had my keys, and then I led the way toward the doors. Though the dark clouds were still threatening rain, they had yet to let loose again. I could taste the dampness on the air, cool and fresh, as the pavement still glistened wetly beneath my boots.
I unlocked my car so Reilly could get in, and then we swung out of the station’s parking lot, hitting afternoon rush hour the moment we landed on the street.
“Just what sort of trouble do you think Charles is in?” I asked Reilly. “You said you just thought he’d gone out on a bender. Why the escalation?”
“I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” Reilly said. He sat perfectly straight in the passenger’s seat, his legs crooked at almost a ninety-degree angle, with his hands resting loosely on his knees. “I never met his old dealer, but I heard stories. He was a bad man, through and through. I just worry Charles maybe couldn’t pay this time around, so his dealer might come to take a pound of flesh.”
“Do you know the dealer’s name?” I asked as traffic crawled along like a snail trying to cross the front path.
Reilly shook his head. “He just went by Rhombus. Absolutely horrible street name, if you ask me.”
I’d never heard of him, but Reilly had a lot more experience than me, and he’d taken on plenty of cases before I was ever his partner. Maybe this Rhombus was from before our time together.
Since Inverness was built right beside the firth, the harbour wasn’t far from the city centre, though it took us ages to get through those tightly packed streets, and by the time we did, it had started to rain again.
The dark water appeared out the windshield, tiny white caps erupting across its surface as the wind blew over it. There were only a couple of marinas within the city itself, and they mostly catered to fishing boats with the occasional tourist cruise when the weather was nice. I parked in one of their car parks, the one Reilly said was closer to the location Martin had pi
nged off Charles’s phone, and I reached into the backseat to snatch up the umbrella I kept on the floor. I pushed my door open and unfurled the umbrella before I actually got out of the car, holding it high above my head to ward off the water. It wasn’t actually raining all that hard, but it was the persistent sort of mist that would still soak a person through before they even realised what was happening.
Reilly joined me by the hood of the car, and I held the umbrella over both of us. “Where to?” I asked.
He shrugged, casting around the area without stepping out from beneath the protective barrier. “Martin was only able to give me a general location. We’re going to have to look around. I think Charles had a boat here at one point. Maybe it’s still here.”
“Lead the way,” I said, and we started across the car park toward the small fleet of boats bobbing beside the wooden docks. Even from here, I could tell that they were all covered to protect them from the weather, and the three empty slips were probably just unrented. It was unlikely anyone was out on the water in this rain. But I didn’t say anything to Reilly. He seemed determined to check each and every boat.
“Keep your eyes peeled,” he said as our boots hit the end of the first dock. “It’s possible Rhombus’s men are loitering about, looking for Charles just like we are.”
A large part of me doubted that. Reilly had made a pretty large jump from “I’m worried about my friend” to “I think a gang of drug dealers is after him.” Reilly wasn’t usually one to make leaps like that, not without a lot of evidence to back them up, and from what he’d told me, that evidence simply wasn’t there this time.
So what was he really up to? Or had he simply let his worry override his logic for the first time in his long life?
We checked each boat and looked in every nook and cranny of this side of the marina and then the other side. There were a few hardy souls out and about, having been out on the water when the rain hit again, so they had to make a mad dash for the shore and were now rushing to secure all their things and get somewhere dry.
Reilly hadn’t told me what Charles looked like, hadn’t even shown me a picture of him, so I had no idea what I was looking for when I studied the features of these people, but Reilly didn’t react to any of them, so I assumed they weren’t who we were looking for.
“I hear you’re not sleeping?” Reilly said as rain splattered against our umbrella and dripped down the sides toward our feet. He stopped at the end of the pier, and I halted beside him, the two of us staring out across the dark, churning water.
I shrugged. I would be sleeping if I didn’t spend most of my nights out at Loch Ness.
“Does it have to do with that guy, Kingston?”
I shrugged again. It was an easy out, but not one I was sure I wanted to take. Yes, his face featured in my dreams a fair amount, but just like Fletcher, I was slowly working through what had happened, processing it in my own time and in my own way. It still felt like a stone upon my heart sometimes, but it was a weight I was willing to bear if it meant Kingston was unable to hurt anyone else.
“Or your father?” Reilly hedged, and I glanced at him with a frown on my face.
He held up his hands defensively. As far as Reilly knew, I wouldn’t talk about my father and believed he had simply walked out on us one day.
“Martin told me about that photo your sister found,” Reilly explained. “And that you’d gone through some of your father’s old things. That’s not like you. What’s changed?”
“Nothing’s changed,” I said, though my voice was a little colder than I’d intended. “Sam wanted me to look into it, so I did just enough to appease her. I didn’t find anything. As I expected.”
“Okay. Okay,” Reilly said, his tone promising that he’d back off.
I sighed as I looked across the water. Reilly was the best inspector I knew. He would no doubt be of great help in the hunt for this shadow organisation, but he was retired, and I wasn’t about to drag him back into anything.
“Do you want to ask the people in the shop if they’ve seen Charles?” I asked him, effectively changing the subject away from my own woes.
Reilly glanced at the shop closest to us. The lights were still on behind the windows, but it was no doubt drawing near to closing time. We stood close enough beneath the folds of the umbrella that I had a clear view of his face and all the thoughts flashing across his eyes, even if they were moving slightly too quickly for me to read fully. He was debating something, and I wondered just what it was.
“Couldn’t hurt,” he said finally.
I nodded and turned us around to walk back down the pier toward shore. We hadn’t made it more than ten steps before Reilly dropped a hand on my shoulder and pulled me to a stop.
“What?” I asked, but he put a finger to his lips and pointed at a dark-clad form walking quickly across the parking lot toward a white delivery van. There was nothing particularly untoward about the figure, they could have just been rushing to get out of the rain, but something about the sudden shift in Reilly’s entire demeanour put me on edge.
“What is it?” I hissed.
“I think that’s Rhombus,” Reilly said and began to walk swiftly but casually toward the white van.
“I thought you hadn’t met him before,” I called after him softly, but he didn’t answer, and I had no choice but to hurry after him.
The figure in black climbed into the driver’s seat of the van, and a second later, the engine rumbled to life. Reilly picked up the pace until I was practically jogging to keep up with him, my boots splashing through the shallow puddles on the ground.
The van pulled through the empty spot in front of it and swung in a wide circle to find the car park’s exit. As it went past, I got a clear view of the man’s face. He had a cheery, open expression, despite his dark clothing, and he’d shed his hat to reveal blond curls. He glanced out the window and raised a hand in hello to us, his smile friendly. Reilly and I came to a halt as the van completed its turn and stopped at the junction out of the lot. It paused there for about five seconds before smoothly sliding into a gap in the traffic and disappearing from sight.
I crossed my arms as I waited for Reilly to say something. Something about this whole situation had my hackles raised, and it wasn’t the rain or the dark harbour or even the white delivery van, which were perfectly common in the city but had been used by bad guys in one of my past cases.
No, it was something about the way Reilly had been acting ever since he’d arrived in Inverness. It was something about this case he’d dragged me on that had no real clues or facts, that had led to two dead ends already, that could have been solved in a much simpler way than we’d gone about it if it actually was a real case.
I just wasn’t sure how to best broach the subject with him. If his friend really was in trouble, then I didn’t want to be callous and accuse him of making everything up, and there was enough worry in Reilly’s eyes to make me doubt my theory.
“I-- I guess not,” Reilly said eventually, his eyes still locked on the spot where the van had turned out of the lot. “Sometimes, it’s so hard to tell in the dark, you know?”
“Right,” I agreed without mentioning that there were plenty of streetlamps illuminating the scene. “So the shopkeepers?”
I almost thought Reilly was going to tell me to forget about it, that we should just go home, which would have completely confirmed my suspicions that he was lying to me for whatever reason, but instead, he nodded, and we made our way over to the nearest marina shop.
The inside was quiet as it was nearing the end of the day, and most everyone had made their way home, so it was just the old man behind the counter and us. He was busy carefully counting the money in the register, small piles of each denomination set out in front of him. He looked up when the bell over the door tinkled, gathered all the money up, and put it away as he offered us a somewhat creaky smile.
“We’re closing in ten,” he reminded us.
“Of course,” Reilly ack
nowledged. “We just wanted to ask you a quick question.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded photograph, opening it up so he could show it off to the man. “Have you seen this man around recently?”
I stepped up so I could see the image as well, leaning an elbow on the counter, which had decorative fishing flies embedded in the glass top. Reilly was about twenty years younger in the picture, his arm around a man of similar age with thick, curly hair and a handsome face. I didn’t recognise him, but at least now, I had a face to put to Charles’ name. That made Reilly’s story seem just a little more real to me.
The old man peered at the picture, leaning forward and pushing his dense glasses higher up his nose. He took a couple of seconds to study the faces in the photo, and then he shrugged and settled back in his chair.
“Don’t think so, sorry.”
Reilly sighed, sounding truly despondent, and tucked the photo back into his pocket. “That’s alright. Thanks for your time.”
He turned and walked for the door, leaving me to fall in line behind him. I opened the umbrella up as we stepped outside, though Reilly didn’t even wait to make sure he was under its shelter before he took off toward the second shop. I had to hurry to catch up with him so he wouldn’t get too wet, and neither of us spoke as we walked over to it.
The conversation with the next shopkeeper went almost exactly the same as the first. Reilly showed the woman there the picture. She studied it, then she apologised and told us she’d never seen the man.
It didn’t necessarily mean anything. Some people, especially retail workers, simply didn’t recognise faces because they saw so many each day that they didn’t register individual ones. And if Charles had been here, he may not have actually come into the shops, preferring to stick around the docks and all the boats. The better option would be to come back in the middle of the day and canvas the marina regulars, but that would be a hefty endeavour and not one I was sure I wanted to embark upon while also embroiled in the bank robbery case.
Fatal Transaction: A DCI MacBain Scottish Crime Thriller Page 9
