Haddock led the quartet to the bungalow’s front door. When he reached out and pressed the bell set in the centre, to his surprise it swung open. ‘Mr Reid,’ he called out, his voice echoing, ‘it’s the police, we need to talk to you.’
They waited, for more than a minute. Haddock repeated his call, again with no response.
‘Fuck this, Sauce,’ Mann muttered. She pulled on sterile overshoes and gloves and strode past him, indoors. He and the sergeants followed suit and joined her.
The house was open plan, a single living space, much larger than the frontage had indicated. The kitchen and dining area was to the right; the rest was dominated by three large armchairs, facing a vast wall-mounted television set. The floor was wooden, without carpets or rugs, and everything was shining.
‘Jackie, John,’ Haddock murmured, ‘get back outside. One of you look out for the Gartcosh team. They can’t be far away. One of the main reasons we’re here is to get a sample of Reid’s DNA; we don’t want to be doing anything that compromises it.’
‘True,’ Mann agreed. ‘There’s something very off here, Sauce. The place smells of something. I can’t put my finger on it.’
‘It smells of clean,’ he replied. ‘It’s shining, everything’s spotless. Do you want to take a look?’
She shook her head, her greater experience giving her an authority that he recognised. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you were right. We should wait for the SOCOs. Reid’s not here to be found. Did you see a car outside?’
‘No,’ he admitted, shaking his head.
‘No,’ she repeated. ‘Something’s spooked him. I can only hope it wasn’t Karen Neville calling him to warn him. Whatever, he’s gone.’
‘Agreed,’ Haddock murmured. ‘Was he ever really here? It seems that our mysterious author’s a work of fiction too. So, who the hell is he?’
Seventy-Two
‘DCI Neville,’ Lowell Payne said, wearily. ‘You work in counter-terrorism and intelligence-gathering. I know you signed off on leave, and I know that you needed a clear head to sort out your personal life, but the first rule of the turf for officers in our department is to be contactable at all times. That means never switching off your mobile.’
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she replied, contritely. ‘I know that, and I shouldn’t have, but things have been quiet lately, so I took a chance. It wasn’t the office I was thinking about; I didn’t want Andy contacting me at that time. My head was a mess.’
‘At least you’ve still got a head,’ the ACC grunted, ‘unlike Clyde Houseman’s brother. What about Houseman?’ he added. ‘Do we have a problem there?’
‘No. I called him and told him that Andy’s no longer a suspect. It took a wee while, but eventually he believed me. I’ve heard from him since. He’s been in touch with his boss, and she’s told him to contact the SIO in the case and cooperate, without any mention of the Security Service. As far as Lottie Mann’s report is concerned, he’ll be an ordinary civilian.’
‘Is there really no chance at all,’ Payne wondered, ‘of this being a terrorist incident, given what Houseman used to do in his special forces days?’
‘I did ask him that,’ Neville said. ‘He says no. When they went on a mission they never left anyone behind to identify any of them, and they wore no ID themselves, not even dog tags, in case of capture. I can barely believe it, but the only suspect, so far,’ she added, hoping to be contradicted but knowing that would not happen, ‘is Uncle Matt.’
‘In that case,’ Payne said, ‘it’s probably best that you continue your leave.’
‘I was planning to anyway,’ she told him. ‘Andy and I have stuff to sort out. We’re getting married again.’
‘Jesus,’ he laughed. ‘DCI Lady Martin. How’s that going to look on your warrant card? If that’s the case, it’s all the more important that Lottie and Haddock catch Matthew Reid before he finds out.’
Seventy-Three
‘The early indications are,’ Arthur Dorward said, ‘that the place is pristine.’
‘All of it?’ Lottie Mann exclaimed. ‘The whole property?’
‘Yup. It’s been sterilised, everything has been wiped, probably room by room over a period of a few days. Everything that could have yielded a fingerprint or any bodily fluid or secretion, or hair.’
‘According to the photo on his book covers Reid’s stone bald,’ John Cotter pointed out.
Dorward glowered at him. ‘Only if he shaves his crotch, his chest, and his oxters,’ he barked.
‘What about his clothing? His underwear?’ Sauce Haddock asked.
‘There’s none here. It’s all gone. There are very few signs that anyone ever lived here.’
‘Crockery, cutlery?’
‘Every plate, cup, saucer, knife and fork is in the dishwasher, having been through a high temperature wash programme. He’s left not a trace behind,’ he paused, ‘except . . . we found his dog, locked in a puppy crate in a conservatory to the side of the house. My excellent technician Paola reckons she might have lifted a viable partial print from that. We don’t have Reid’s on record, obviously, but if it gives us DNA as well, we can compare that with the site in Glasgow and the two in Gullane where we have the same unidentified genetic material.’
‘The computer,’ Mann said. ‘Even if that and the keyboard are clean, there may be helpful material in there. I’ll have that back in Glasgow.’
‘Or I’ll have it in Edinburgh,’ Haddock countered.
‘You might as well take half each,’ Dorward chuckled, ‘because there’s no hard disk in it.’
The DCIs looked at each other. Mann sighed. ‘There’s nothing at all? No physical evidence?’
‘Well, there’s this.’
Dorward brought his left hand round from behind his back and held up an evidence bag, containing a large, bladed object. ‘It’s a kukri,’ he announced, ‘a type of machete made famous by the Gurkha soldiers. It was wall-mounted in his office, and it’s sheathed. That of itself is interesting, because there was another empty mount below it. I’m thinking that used to hold the sheath, separately. Legend has it that the blade couldn’t be re-sheathed until it had drawn blood. Are you a betting woman, DCI Mann?’
‘The Candleriggs murder weapon,’ she said, anticipating what was coming next.
He nodded. ‘It’s sharp enough to do the job, that is for sure.’
The sound of Haddock’s ringtone cut into the silence that followed. His colleagues watched him as he took the call, taking in his reaction to the message he was being given, waiting until it finished.
‘Reid’s car’s been found,’ he said, ‘beside the Whiteadder reservoir, up beyond Garvald. There’s no sign of him, though. Arthur, you need to get people there, now.’
The veteran scientist frowned at him. ‘Tell me something I don’t know, boy.’
Seventy-Four
‘I appreciate you coming here, officers,’ Paul Dorward said as he walked into the meeting room at Gartcosh Crime Complex. ‘My dad meant to meet you himself, but he’s working in the lab, double-checking everything. What I’m going to tell you is subject to confirmation, but I don’t have any doubt that it’ll stand up.’
Mann and Haddock gazed back at him. Their respective partners had each given them a degree of grief over their early start, on a weekend, but they knew that the forensic team had been working through the night and so they simply nodded understanding.
‘The Candleriggs murder,’ the younger Dorward began. ‘This is going to be incredibly frustrating for you, DCI Mann, but we can’t say categorically that Matthew Reid’s kukri killed Calder Bryant. The handle is absolutely clean; there are no traces of the user, none at all, on either the weapon or the sheath. We even looked inside the sheath hoping for deposits there, but we found nothing. As for the blade, we hoped, maybe even expected, that we would find microscopic traces of blood, skin, flesh or bone,
possibly all four, but we couldn’t. The knife has been subjected to the same cleaning process as Reid’s house was. Without his DNA for comparison, we can’t put him in Glasgow for you, nor can we prove that his knife was ever in that flat.’ He turned to Haddock; the younger DCI saw him frown and found it ominous. ‘I have more for you, Chief Inspector, but you are not going to like it.’
‘I haven’t liked a single thing about this investigation so far,’ Haddock replied. ‘Why should that change?’ His baby’s favourite toy was Winnie the Pooh’s dolorous donkey friend, Eeyore; he felt a sudden kinship.
Paul Dorward smiled, but only briefly. ‘Matthew Reid’s car,’ he continued. ‘Mercedes C Class, Night Edition, a lovely piece of kit. That had been super-cleaned as well, like the house and office, but we did lift identifiable prints from the steering wheel. They were a match for the partial print that Paola lifted from one of the bolts of the puppy crate where we found Reid’s dog . . . which is now in police kennels,’ he added, ‘in case either of you were wondering.’
Mann was no dog lover. ‘I wasn’t,’ she growled.
The young scientist blinked, then returned his gaze to Haddock, more than a little nervously. ‘We’ve identified those fingerprints,’ he continued, hesitantly, as if he was delaying the moment, ‘although this is the part that my dad is double-checking. They belong to Sir Robert Skinner.’
Seventy-Five
‘What the f . . . have we got to do here?’ Mario McGuire pondered aloud.
Lottie Mann had headed home from Gartcosh, frustrated, deflated, and sworn to keep the secret even from Dan Provan. Sauce Haddock, on the other hand had called his immediate boss, ACC Becky Stallings, who had considered the situation for less than ten seconds before instructing him to call the DCC.
They sat at McGuire’s kitchen table, hands clasped round mugs of coffee, with ciabatta stuffed with Italian sausage on a plate between them.
‘We can’t ignore it, sir,’ Haddock said, regretting his words immediately under the weight of the deputy chief’s heavy black eyebrows.
‘Of course not,’ he murmured. ‘Those are Bob’s prints, no question, and we have his DNA on the scene of all three deaths that you’re looking at. We’ve got to question him, as Lottie did with Andy Martin, but without the less-than-helpful input of a twat like Cotter. We’ll need to do it formally too, if it comes to that.’
‘If?’
‘If we can’t sort it out informally.’ McGuire picked his phone up from the table and opened WhatsApp. As Haddock watched, he went through his list until he found ‘Bob’, clicked the audio symbol, and put the device on speaker.
There was a delay of a few seconds, but eventually they heard a tone. A few seconds later, they heard an answer. ‘Mario,’ Skinner said. ‘What’s up on WhatsApp?’ Neither McGuire nor Haddock reacted to the pun.
‘We have a problem, Bob,’ the DCC said.
They heard a laugh. ‘As in Apollo Thirteen? Houston? You sound like Tom Hanks.’
‘I wish this was a film, Bob, but it’s not.’
‘How can I help?’
‘Matthew Reid, the author, you know him, yes?’
‘Yes, I know him. He’s a friend and a near neighbour. We’ve been working together in the village resilience group. What’s wrong with him? He hasn’t died, has he? We’ve had too many seniors passing away lately, and he is definitely in that age group.’
‘How much do you know about him, gaffer?’ Haddock asked.
‘Are you there too, Sauce? This must be really serious.’ Skinner still sounded amused. ‘As it happens, I know less about Matthew than I thought I did.’
‘Have you ever had a problem with him?’
‘Only when he forgot to get his round in at the Mallard one Friday. Otherwise, never. Why?’
‘Because he’s disappeared,’ McGuire said. ‘He’s gone and all traces of him have been wiped from his house. All traces of everything in fact, apart from fingerprints on his dog crate.’
‘What about the dog?’ Skinner asked, suddenly engaged in the discussion.
‘He’s okay. However,’ the DCC continued, ‘his car was gone too, but it turned up, also clean as a whistle apart from the same prints on the steering wheel. And Bob, they’re—’
‘Are you going to tell me they’re mine?’ Skinner asked.
‘How did you know?’
‘Never play poker, Mario; you offer every fucking card in your hand, every time, even on audio. A blind man could read you.’
‘Bob, do you need to make a statement?’
‘No, I need to ask a question. When’s all this supposed to have happened?’
‘Within the last couple of days.’
‘I see.’ They heard a deep breath. ‘Mario, put me on video.’
‘Okay. I’ll switch you to my tablet as well.’ He opened the app on his iPad, then pressed the camera icon. A few seconds later, Skinner appeared on screen. The background was unfamiliar to either detective, but clearly it was an office. ‘Hold on,’ he said. As they watched they saw him pick up another phone, from a desk, and say a few words. ‘Now wait.’
They did as they were told, listening to a door opening in the background and to a brief conversation in a language neither understood fully, although the DCC’s Italian background offered him fragments.
Skinner pointed his phone at the newcomer, a man in his mid-thirties. ‘Tell them who you are, Hector.’
‘Certainly,’ the man said, in accented English. ‘My name is Hector Sureda, and I am the CEO of the Intermedia communications group. I report to Senor Robert.’
‘Where are we, Hector, you and I?’
‘We are in the group headquarters, in Girona, in Catalunya.’
‘Why am I here and when did I arrive?’
‘We are negotiating the takeover of a media group in Florida, and you are involved as Presidente of our company. You have been here for four days, and we are still not done. Almost, but not quite.’
‘Thanks, Hector, I think that’s all my friends will need.’
Skinner came back on camera. ‘Somebody’s been playing games, boys. It’s up to you to prove who it is.’
‘Have you ever driven Reid’s car, gaffer?’ Haddock asked.
‘No, never. I’ve never even sat behind the wheel. Nor have I ever touched his puppy crate.’
‘Then how did your prints get on them both?’
‘That’s a very good question,’ Skinner conceded, as a slow smile spread across his face. ‘I think I know the answer, but I’ll let you two work it out for yourselves. That, as they say, is why they pay you the big bucks.’
Seventy-Six
‘I’m sorry to call you in at the weekend,’ Sauce Haddock said to the colleagues seated around his table, ‘but I thought you’d all want to be involved given the amount of effort you’ve put in. Jackie’s excused,’ he added, ‘as she promised to look after her wee nephew today.’
‘It feels like the end of a Poirot novel,’ Tarvil Singh remarked, ‘only there’s no cast of suspects. Did you ever consider a waxed moustache, Sauce?’
‘Fuck off, Sergeant.’ He laughed, in spite of his gloom. ‘Your analogy’s a good one, though. We’ve all worked our arses off here, you, Noele, Tiggy . . . especially you Tiggy, brand new in the door . . . and what do we have to show for it? Sweet Fanny Adams as my grandpa used to say whenever my granny was near enough to hear him . . . what he said when she wasn’t you can all guess.’
‘We’ve been played, haven’t we?’ McClair sighed. Me more than anyone, she thought, and yet maybe I wasn’t, as her denial gene kicked in. Maybe it was just two single people having a fuck, and nothing to do with the rest.
‘We don’t even know that for certain,’ the DCI replied. ‘If anyone has, it’s the gaffer. He was at the scene of all three sudden deaths at one time or another and he even found two
of them. Plus his prints were planted in Reid’s house and car.’
His eyes narrowed. ‘What can we prove, Noele? Not a fucking thing. It’s still entirely possible that all those three deaths were what we assumed them to be. Equally it’s possible that Mr Stevens’ blood-thinning drugs were doctored, and he was fed an overdose in a whisky – although if he was, we’ll never know whether it killed him; it’s possible that Mrs Alexander was hit with the shelving that’s gone missing; and it’s possible that Mrs Eaglesham was tasered to subdue her like we know the Glasgow victim was, before having her arm plunged into that machine, earthed through a nail that had been raised for the purpose.
‘With the involvement of young Rory and his camera footage showing how all these things could be done you might even say it’s overwhelmingly likely, but nothing is overwhelming if you cannot fucking prove it beyond a reasonable doubt and, Goddammit,’ he snapped, ‘we can’t!’ Haddock was furious in his frustration, a side of him that neither McClair nor Singh had ever seen in the years they had worked together.
‘We can’t find Rory’s Alan Campbell,’ he continued, ‘and we have no physical description of him, meaning we can’t prove either, that he and Matthew Reid are one and the same . . . that’s if they are. To put the tin helmet on it, in the absence of proof of Reid’s role in the deaths, and with his total disappearance, maybe we’re wrong in our assumptions and he’s now a victim himself. Maybe he and all his clothing really are lying weighed down on the bottom of the Whiteadder Reservoir, as the evidence suggests, too deep for any angler ever to snag his line on. We can’t rule anything out, not even that.’
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