“And you’re repaying that how?” I asked. “By getting his two accomplices to take the fall? Or what?”
“I mean, that was supposed to be the plan,” Lamwood admitted, though he sounded relieved to finally have it off his chest. “I’d distract you two by pitting the two of them against each other, Carmichael would lead you on a wild goose chase for the money that you’d never find, and he’d go and reclaim it once he got out of jail. But I’m not, well, I’m not terribly good at my job.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, and Lamwood reddened considerably. “Has he told you where the money is?”
Lamwood shook his head. “No, but he promised me a cut of it if I helped him with this.”
“So why are you telling us all this?” Fletcher asked. “A cut of that haul sounds pretty good, especially if he’s no longer splitting it with two other people.”
“I guess the whole thing made me feel icky?” Lamwood answered as he spread his hands wide in an almost shrug. His briefcase immediately slipped from his fingers and clattered to the ground, and he jumped at the sound it made. “I know my whole job is advising criminals and whatnot, but this just felt like going a little too far. I don’t know. Maybe it’s time for me to find a new line of work.”
“Maybe,” I agreed, wondering how this man had ever passed his exams or gotten hired at a firm. I took out my phone while Fletcher backed away and finally let Lamwood breathe, and I spent a minute emailing Martin, asking him to look into the clay thing. I didn’t think it would turn anything up, but we still needed to cover our bases.
“Time to talk to Carmichael then,” I said as I put the phone away. “Did he tell you anything we might be able to use against him? Other than the whole bribery thing?”
An aghast expression ran across Lamwood’s face. “He’s still my client! I’m not going to help incriminate him!”
“But you just said…” I began, then cut myself off. “Whatever. We’ll figure it out on our own. Do you want a minute alone to admit to him that you just threw him under the bus?”
The colour poured out of Lamwood’s ruddy cheeks, and his face started to look a little like raw bread dough. “No, no. That’s okay. Maybe don’t mention that to him, yeah?”
“Why? So you can still get a cut of the money if we don’t find it?” I asked snidely, and Lamwood at least had the decency to blush. “I’ll make no promises on that account. I’ll do whatever it takes to find that money. Fletcher, are you ready?”
Fletcher wiped her hands off on her trousers and flashed me a thumbs-up, taking the time to crack her neck once more, though she’d already done it so many times that I had no idea how she was still getting pops out of it or what that meant for the state of her joints.
And with that, we walked into Carmichael’s interrogation room.
The man somehow managed to look totally at home, even handcuffed to a metal table. I’d banged him up halfway to hell during our fight, and he had more than a few scrapes and bruises blossoming across his face, but none of them seemed to bother him, and he’d even managed to comb his hair and gather it into a neat ponytail at the nape of his neck. There were a few spots of dried blood on his collar since no one had given him a change of clothes when he’d been booked, but he’d brushed off all the dirt and river mud as best he could, and he was still flicking bits of it off his trouser leg onto the floor.
He glanced up as we entered, clocked us, and then dismissed us just as easily, focusing back on the task of cleaning his trousers. I wanted to tell him that this little act had no effect on me, but the cleaner would be furious with him later tonight, and I knew he wanted me to comment on the mess, so I kept my mouth shut as I took my seat.
“So…” I said as I crossed my legs again and leaned back in my seat, matching Carmichael’s own nonchalance. I wondered just how much lying I could get away with before someone stopped me and if the fib I had in mind would even work on Carmichael. I decided to go for it, anyway. It felt worth a shot. “Both of your partners claim that you’re the one who killed Barney Crane.”
Though I hadn’t warned Fletcher about my plan, she still managed to nod sagely along with my words, leaning forward, so her elbows rested on the metal table while she stared at Carmichael, unblinking. Lamwood didn’t have the same sort of poker face, though luckily, Carmichael wasn’t looking at him at the time. At least Lamwood didn’t give up the gig right away, his mouth screwed shut with confusion. I’d figured that he’d be uncertain and unskilled enough to let me get away with this, at least for a little bit, but I hadn’t been totally positive. I was glad my gamble had played off.
But Carmichael’s reaction was the most important, and I watched carefully for it. I knew he was a shrewd and calculating man, but I needed to know if there was a layer of anxiety somewhere within him that I could exploit.
His hand froze just for a second, poised above his trouser leg with a bit of dirt clenched between two fingers, the moisture of his hands quickly turning it back to mud that began to coat his skin. Then, just as quickly as he’d stopped, his fingers picked up motion again, and he wiped them off on his thighs, smearing that small bit of mud into the dark fabric. He switched legs, resting his other ankle on his knee, and began to pick away at the stuff crusted around the trouser cuff, staring back at me with a face that was almost a little too impassive.
“That’s what they say at least, and with the both of them corroborating, I’m almost inclined to believe them,” I continued as casually as I could manage. “Unless, of course, you want to give me some helpful information like, say, where a certain amount of money might be hidden? That might convince me to change my mind.”
“Alec MacGowan was working with you, wasn’t he?” Carmichael asked, instead of responding to anything I’d just said.
I didn’t answer his question. I had promised Alec not to give him away or possibly incriminate him.
Carmichael tsked and shook his head, jumping to his own conclusions. “I should have known better. It seemed just a little too convenient to be true, but I suppose I let myself become desperate. That’s never a good thing in this line of work.”
“The money?” I prompted after he trailed off for a second as if in thought.
“If you see him again, tell him there are no hard feelings,” Carmichael said, continuing on his tangent and giving me a firm nod to show that he meant it. “Sometimes you do what you have to.”
His words surprised me, and I found myself struck silent for a moment. Carmichael heaved a great sigh and finally stopped picking at his trousers, putting his foot down on the ground so he could adjust his position in the chair.
“I know Ella and Owen didn’t actually gang up against me. Those two are a lot of things, but they aren’t disloyal. It was a nice trick, and you even had me there for a second, but I’m afraid I know my team just a little better than you do, DCI MacBain.”
I shrugged like it didn’t matter to me at all, though I still felt a small stab of disappointment that the ploy didn’t work.
“You’re not going to tell us where the money is, are you?” Fletcher asked.
“I’m still thinking about it,” Carmichael said. He looked over at his lawyer, who quailed a bit beneath his gaze. “I’m guessing you also managed to get this sorry excuse for a lawyer to spill his guts?”
“It didn’t take long,” I replied, and Lamwood shrank even further down in his chair.
“I sort of figured it was a long shot,” Carmichael sighed. “But you always have to have a contingency plan.” He paused and drummed his fingers against his thigh, the motion making the chain on his handcuffs rattle softly. He stared intently into my face, though I wasn’t entirely sure what he wanted to read there, so I simply let him look without guarding or revealing too much.
“If I tell you where the money is, will you cut me a deal?” he asked. “I had nothing to do with the bank manager’s death, and I certainly don’t condone it. I should have cut ties with O’Connor the second it happened, but he’s
so young, and he’s honestly a little pathetic, so I couldn’t help it.”
“Why’d you dump the crowbar in the bin?” I asked since I was still curious about that. “You had to have known we’d find it and that it might lead us to you.”
“I knew his fingerprints weren’t in any system,” Carmichael said. “And I knew the longer we kept it in our possession, the better the chance we’d get caught with it. I suppose it wasn’t my best plan, but O’Connor’s panic had gotten to me just a bit.”
He shrugged again and sounded a little embarrassed about his lack of judgement. I nodded slowly as I looked him over. This was a very different Carmichael than we’d seen before. He was still confident, assured, but there was less of a bite to it now like he knew when he’d been beat and had finally accepted the results of the game.
“I need to have a word with my partner before we discuss a deal,” I said, and I motioned for Fletcher to stand and come with me.
We stepped outside the room, and I made sure to close the door tightly behind us, rubbing at a spot on my forehead where a small pain had woken up.
“What do we think?” I asked Fletcher as she scratched at her chin. “Are we willing to cut a deal with him to get the money back?”
“Dunnel gets the final say in deals,” she said. “But he did say to do whatever it takes to find the money, so I would say that’s our best bet.”
I fished my phone from my pocket to check if there was any news from Martin on that clay. He said that he knew of five spots in and just outside of town that had clay deposits, but without being able to analyse the specific substance Carmichael had on his shoes, he had no way of narrowing it down or verifying it. He’d sent us the list anyway, though chasing each one of them down would involve a lot of legwork, especially when we didn’t know what kind of hiding spot we were looking for.
I locked the phone and put it away. “Let’s go make a deal,” I said, and then we stepped into the interrogation room once more.
Twenty-Two
“Here,” Carmichael said, pointing to a spot on a map of the city and its surrounding lands that I had spread across the table. We’d unhooked him from the table but hadn’t taken the cuffs off him completely, so he had to gesture with both hands, his wrists pressed awkwardly together. The spot he’d indicated was a few miles out of town, at an old factory, and it lined up with one of the places Martin had picked out for us.
“I stashed the bags in the basement,” he explained as he sat back down. “There’s a broken window at ground level that you can climb through, and I hid everything in an old trunk.”
“Alright,” I said. I drew a circle around the location so we wouldn’t lose it, then folded up the map and tucked it under my arm. “We’ll hash out the exact specifics of the deal with our boss once we return with the money, but I should say thank you for not making this any harder than it needed to be.”
“Oh, believe me, I was tempted,” Carmichael said dryly. “But I figured that would just hurt me in the long run.”
“Probably,” I confirmed. “Have a nice life, Mr Carmichael.”
“Ouch,” he replied with a faint grin since we both knew he was going straight to prison.
I smirked at him, and then Fletcher and I headed out the door, sealing him inside with Lamwood, who hadn’t said a word since his poorly executed double-dealing had been exposed. Fletcher and I bumped fists and shared congratulatory grins as we hurried up the hallway.
First things first, we made a beeline for Dunnel’s office since we knew he’d want to hear what we learned. I knocked on the closed door and let myself in without waiting for an answer, though I reddened and backed off when I realised he was on the phone. He waved me back in, unperturbed by the intrusion.
“Listen, I’ll call you back,” he said to whoever was on the other line. “Something’s just come up.” He listened for a second, then put the phone down, swivelling his chair a few inches to the right so that he was facing us fully. He raised an eyebrow instead of saying anything, waiting for us to speak.
“Carmichael gave us the location of the money,” I said quickly, and a light went on behind Dunnel’s eyes. “We were about to head over to check it out now.”
“Very good,” Dunnel practically purred. “I’ll call Mr O’Donnell and have him and his insurance agent meet you here.”
“We cut a deal with Carmichael for the information,” I said. “Would you be willing to hash out those details, assuming he’s not leading us on?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he promised, and I nodded my thanks.
“We’ll be back soon,” I said.
Dunnel dismissed Fletcher and me, and we let ourselves out of Dunnel’s office as he turned his attention back to his own work. Fletcher and I retrieved our coats from our desks, and I patted my pockets to make sure I had my keys on hand after I’d stuffed my arms through the sleeves.
“Ready?” I asked Fletcher.
She gave me a double thumbs-up, looking excited by the next step of our mission. I understood the feeling. We were essentially off to uncover some buried treasure, and there wasn’t much that was cooler than that.
We hurried out to my car, and I unlocked it so we could climb inside. It was a sunny day, though there was still a haze in the sky as the sun struggled to burn off all the moisture in the air. I peeled out of the car park as soon as we were both strapped in, the GPS directing us toward the location of the old factory. It was about a forty-minute drive, and Fletcher spent some time fiddling with her seat, though she didn’t seem able to get it in just the right position.
“I’m guessing you don’t want to talk about the Lena thing until after we get the money?” she asked.
“That would be preferable,” I said, relieved that she’d suggested the wait herself and hadn’t just pressed the issue. I wanted to bask in the exuberance of retrieving such a large sum of money, and I didn’t want it coloured by… however I felt about Lena’s disappearance. I had a lot of things to deal with after this case wrapped up, and they all felt overwhelming in their different ways, so I was just going to take it one problem at a time.
“Alright,” Fletcher agreed. “But I’m here as soon as you need me.”
“Thanks,” I said sincerely, taking my eyes off the road just long enough to give her a grateful smile. Fletcher returned it and patted my arm before settling back in her seat to watch the city go by through the window.
Forty minutes later, we were pulling up outside the old factory with Fletcher muttering something about how it would have been a much quicker journey if I’d let her drive. I ignored her. The factory had clearly gone out of business several years ago. All of its windows were boarded up, aside from the ones that had been smashed in by kids or vandals. There was dirt caked along all the walls where the bricks weren’t covered in ivy. A tall fence ran around the property with barbed wire at the top, and there was a heavy chain and lock holding the gate shut.
“Spooky,” Fletcher said as she got out of the car and slammed her door shut.
I shut off the engine before I followed suit, a breeze catching on the long tails of my overcoat just as I reached my full height, and a short shiver ran through me.
“Let’s get in and out of here as quickly as possible,” I suggested as I walked toward the fence and started looking around for any way through that didn’t involve getting sliced to ribbons by the barbed wire. “This place looks like a tetanus shot waiting to happen.”
Fletcher and I prowled along the fence in opposite directions since there was no way we were getting through the locked gate, and I hadn’t gone more than twenty feet before I found a spot that had been cut and then patched up with zip ties again.
“Fletcher!” I called, waving her over. As she hurried my way, I pulled out my penknife and cut through each of the plastic ties, revealing the slit in the fence. Fletcher peeled part of it back so I could scoot through, crouched down as I carefully eased myself through the break, and then I did the same for her on the
other side, her boots scuffing through the damp dirt that had nothing growing in it.
I glanced around as I stood back up. Some of the dark windows on the upper floors definitely felt like they had eyes peeping out of them, like little ghosts or devilish creatures were watching us from afar and giggling as they prepared their traps.
Without having to suggest it out loud, Fletcher and I stuck together as we went looking for the broken window that Carmichael had mentioned. We started walking around the entire building, inspecting each window for a way in. Both of us were kept quiet by the spooky air the old factory gave off. We found it on the opposite side of the building from where we’d parked. The wooden boards had been pried away, and the glass smashed, leaving a dark and shadowy entrance into the building. I turned on my phone’s torch and shined it inside, trying to get a peek at anything that might lay beyond, but the blackness was fairly complete, and I couldn’t make out a single detail.
“So, who wants to go first?” I asked Fletcher as I sat back on my haunches.
“You, obviously,” she said, taking a short step back like she thought I was going to try to throw her right through the open window.
I sighed, but I scooted closer to the opening and made sure there was no broken glass sticking out anywhere before I carefully eased myself through, dropping to the dusty concrete floor below with a soft thump. I shone my torch around, not that it did much to penetrate the gloom.
I turned around to give Fletcher some illumination as she hopped through the window, holding out a hand in case she needed help to get down, but she ignored it, and her landing kicked up a fresh plume of dust that swirled around us and seemed to glow in the light of my torch.
“This isn’t creepy at all,” Fletcher said as she took out her phone to add to the light.
“Carmichael said he stashed the money in the basement,” I said. “I guess we look around until we find some stairs.”
Fatal Transaction: A DCI MacBain Scottish Crime Thriller Page 33
