‘Prints or DNA traces?’ McGuire asked.
‘Both.’
‘Is your profiling good enough to indicate geographical or ethnic origin?’
‘Up to a point; it’s not something we focused on. Why?’
‘Tarvil Singh’s looking at CCTV of Carrie’s abductors; we’re certain one of them is Asian.’
Dorward nodded. ‘I can review all the unidentified profiles for ethnicity. Asian, you said. Asia’s a big multiracial place. Can you narrow it down?’
‘He thinks the man might be Pashtun.’
‘A good chunk of the British population’s Pashtun these days. We might find it in more than one profile. Even if we do narrow it down to an individual, it won’t take you far in terms of identifying him.’
‘No, it won’t, but maybe someone else can. If you can pin him down, we can ask other countries to check their databases.’
‘You can ask, but will they?’
‘Favours can be returned in the future.’
‘Okay. I’ll see what we can come up with; I’ll include it in my formal report. Good luck with tracking down Gerry Heaney. He looks like a piece of work who’s better off as one of Her Majesty’s guests.’
Fifty-Three
‘Is this weather ever going to break?’ Jackie ‘Always’ Wright asked as she wiped melted ice cream from her wrist with a tissue. ‘How hot is it?’
‘Thirty-one degrees,’ Haddock told her. ‘Anyone who does not believe in global warming is an idiot, a politician, a fossil fuel industry lobbyist or all three rolled into one.’
‘Then why are we not in our nice climate-controlled car rather than standing here failing to finish our Nardini’s cones before they melt while waiting for a ferry?’
‘If we were in our nice climate-controlled car we’d need the engine running to control the climate, and that would contribute to global warming.’
‘Can we just sit in the shade with the engine switched off?’
‘That I can live with.’
They returned to their saloon; after only a couple of minutes, Haddock relented and switched on the engine.
‘You’ve been quiet ever since we left Motherwell,’ Wright observed. ‘Are you disappointed that we didn’t wrap the case up there and then?’
‘That would have been good,’ he answered dryly. ‘If they’d admitted that they dropped a slab of steel on her by accident then tried to cover it up by destroying the body.’ He grinned. ‘Maybe someone else was under it as well, hence the mystery of the second set of remains in the crematory.’
‘How do we know that didn’t happen?’
‘I don’t suppose we do for certain, nor will we until we find out whether she made it to her meeting with Noele’s ex. But just for now, let’s leave that thought in the “silly” box. Yes, I’m disappointed that we didn’t come away with something, even if it was only confirmation she was there, without knowing why. Mr Butt offered to show us his passport, so we can take it as read that he really was in Pakistan. The foreman guy, O’Donnell, said categorically that he didn’t see any strangers in the plant on Friday. Dunno about you, but my impression was that he isn’t a practised liar.’
‘I agree with that,’ Wright said, watching the flatbed ferry approach its mooring. ‘What about the son, the preening Zaqib, who his dad thinks is useless?’
‘He’s still in Pakistan, according to Wasim, who again doesn’t strike me as a man to say anything he can’t prove. Nevertheless,’ he concluded, reaching for his phone. He found Tarvil Singh’s number and called it. ‘Sergeant, I have another task for you. I need you to check on the directors of the steel stockholder we’ve just visited. It’s a limited company, WZB, and I’m assuming it’s registered in Scotland. The man we saw is named Wasim Butt; he’ll be one, I imagine. He has a son called Zaqib, and you may find him there also. Mr Butt is denying that Carrie McDaniels ever visited his premises. I’m not calling him a liar, but just to be sure, I’d like to know everything there is to know about him.’
‘Got that, boss,’ the DS said. ‘Hot enough for you over there?’ he added. There was a hint of laughter in his tone.
‘And then some. Just for rubbing it in, here’s another task. So far Jackie’s come up with nothing in her attempts to find PC Spider-Man Parker, one of the key witnesses in the Marcia Brown shoplifting case. Have another go; I want you to ask the DWP whether he might have been issued with, or sought, a replacement National Insurance number. Check with the DVLA for anything noted on his driving licence – speeding convictions and the like; check with the passport office to see whether he’s tried to renew his UK passport; and check with our own HR people in case he’s made an attempt to rejoin the service here since his return to Britain. Finally, since he has dual British–Australian citizenship, ask the Aussie High Commission whether they’ve had any contact with him. Have a nice day in your nice climate-controlled office.’
Wright smiled as he ended the call. ‘That’s him told. Sir,’ she murmured, ‘that second body in the crematorium. I can’t get my head round it. Where do we even start trying to trace him?’
‘You were at the team briefing yesterday,’ Haddock retorted. ‘You heard what I said. It’s a complete bolt from the blue, unfathomable, unpredictable; the only thing we can do is the obvious, and that means looking at the missing persons register for adult males.’
‘You don’t suppose the crematorium owners . . . what’s their name?’
‘McGough.’
‘You don’t suppose they have a business on the side? “Discreet disposals for the criminal underworld”, the sort of thing you might advertise on the dark web?’
‘Jackie, the heat’s getting to you. The McGoughs called the police, remember.’ He put the car in gear and moved it slowly forward towards the ferry.
Fifty-Four
‘What do you know about this man Heaney?’ Alex asked her father.
‘Nothing more than I was told by Mario. He’s a small-time professional thug, with no obvious talent for anything else. If you ask me to speculate, it wasn’t him who broke into this building, and into your place. If the guy who did that has a record, given the sophistication of the systems he got through, he’s more likely to be a safe-breaker . . . although there are damn few Johnny Ramenskys around these days.’
‘Do they have any leads to the second man?’
‘Thanks to various CCTV systems, they have a half-decent image. The probability is that he’s ethnically Asian. Face recognition might pick him out of the database, but don’t expect me to go blue in the face from holding my breath.’
‘If it was Heaney who had the knife,’ she said, ‘as his criminal CV suggests, don’t imagine that the other man isn’t a threat too. I took Heaney down with a saucepan; the other one scared me more. If Griff hadn’t come in when he did . . .’ She shuddered.
‘Hey, are you all right?’ Bob asked anxiously.
She looked towards her office window, then shook her head. ‘I can’t say that I am, Pops,’ she admitted. ‘I’ve had some scrapes – Griff bailed me out once before, remember – and not been bothered afterwards, but this is different. They were in my house, and after what they did to Carrie, I feel threatened in a way I never have before. Life was never like this when I was a corporate lawyer. It might have been boring and I might have questioned the ethics of some of it, but I slept well enough. I haven’t done that since Sunday morning. I feel completely secure at Dominic’s, but still I’ve barely closed my eyes. Even when these guys are caught and put away, I’m not sure I can get over this.’
He sighed, then smiled, trying to keep his own fear from showing. ‘You will, I promise you. Post-traumatic stress doesn’t just affect soldiers, you know. I’m a walking example; when I was a plod, I saw something so awful that I literally blocked it out of my mind for years.’
‘In that case, you know what I’m saying.’
‘Yes, and I’m promising you that you’ll recover.’
‘Pops, Carrie McDanie
ls took on an investigative job for me and wound up dead as a result. I’ll always have to live with that.’
He held up a hand. ‘Hold on, that has still to be established. It’s possible that Carrie’s murder was unrelated to the Marcia Brown investigation.’
‘Are you holding your breath over that one?’ she challenged.
He winced but did not answer.
‘Exactly! Pops, this is a world where something like that can happen, and I chose to inhabit it. Maybe I should change my mind and switch back to corporate work. Mitch might even have me back at the firm.’
‘He might indeed,’ Bob agreed, ‘but he’d have a sliver of doubt about you for ever more. You’d have the same.’ He frowned, and his eyes seemed to go somewhere else. ‘Alex, do you think I’ve never been scared? Twelve years ago, a bloke broke into my house. He was going to shoot me; he did fucking shoot me,’ he exclaimed, ‘but I got lucky and it was him who wound up dead.’
She stared at him. ‘Pops, are you serious?’
‘Never more so.’
‘You never told me anything about that,’ she said, her voice tremulous. ‘You said that you’d been using a drill and the bit had broken and gone into your thigh! You were actually shot? And the man who shot you died? Who killed him?’
He looked at the ceiling. ‘Who do you think?’
The silence hung between them like a barrier. ‘How in God’s name was that kept quiet?’ she asked when she was able to break it.
‘It was spook stuff,’ he replied, ‘and that’s all I’ll tell you. I woke up in a cold sweat for weeks after it. I was having a fucking PTS breakdown, but I couldn’t tell anyone. It faded, though; I came through it. You will too, I promise you.’
She smiled weakly. He could tell that she was still shaken by his revelation; he regretted having made it, but it could not be taken back. ‘I’ll do it all the faster when these guys are caught and put away. How’s the investigation going?’
‘Slowly, because almost all traces of Carrie’s movements have been erased. Sauce and his team are having to go back over the trail that she did leave behind her.’
‘Why not revisit the Marcia Brown investigation?’
‘They will in time. Once they’ve established that’s all that she was doing. For example, they had her going to a steel warehouse in Motherwell. What’s that got to do with a supermarket shoplifting?’
‘It’ll be connected,’ she insisted, ‘for sure. Carrie promised she’d work only on my brief. The whole thing started, according to Marcia, with a beef between her and the council leader, the Stephens woman. Has she been interviewed?’
‘Her name wasn’t in Carrie’s diary. It’s up to Sauce to determine if and when to interview her. She’s a powerful woman, don’t forget.’
‘She’s a small-time local politician and she should have no special treatment. She was Marcia’s enemy. Marcia was framed, and now, God help us, you’re overseeing a team investigating her murder. Stephens must be a suspect, given their history.’
‘That’s for the investigating officers to determine.’
‘So fucking help them determine it!’ she shouted.
Fifty-Five
‘The first time I went on holiday to Spain,’ Jackie Wright reminisced as Haddock drove slowly past a line of palm trees, ‘there was a guy on the beach selling coconuts. If this weather keeps up, there’ll be an opening for him here.’
‘Give it a week and he’d be selling hot chestnuts. It’s not exactly the Riviera, is it?’
‘It’ll do.’
‘Oh yes? That ugly edifice on the mainland coast? That’s a nuclear power station. You won’t find many of those in Cap d’Antibes.’
‘What’s French for philistine?’
The DI was still smiling as his satnav told him they had reached their destination. He parked at the roadside, noting as he stepped out into the still searing heat that a tall, slender man was watching them from his doorway. ‘Mr Black?’ he called out as they approached him.
‘That’s me. You’re prompt; come on inside.’
They made their way up the path that led to Black’s imposing house, timing their approach to avoid the spray from the hose extension that was watering the lawn. ‘I’m doing this while I can,’ he explained. ‘I’m expecting a hosepipe ban any time now.’
He ushered them indoors to a study that looked out onto a back garden. Its grassy area was burned beyond recovery.
‘Can I offer you a drink, officers?’ he asked. ‘My partner’s out this afternoon or she’d be plying us with coffee, but I do have sparkling water.’
‘We’re fine, thanks,’ the DI replied. ‘We have supplies in the car . . . although we may ask to use your toilet before we leave.’
The lawyer smiled. ‘And if I refuse?’
‘We’d probably have to arrest you. Obstruction, I reckon.’
‘Well warned. Before we get to that stage, how can I help you? You were vague when you made the appointment. DC Wright is it?’
‘Our investigation is very sensitive,’ Haddock explained. ‘I’m heading the inquiry into the abduction and murder of a woman named Carrie McDaniels. We’ve got reason to believe she visited you here on Friday.’
‘That’s right, she did, poor lass. I heard on the TV news that she’d been murdered; I wondered if that was behind your call. What a shocker that was! Identified from remains, the news bulletin said.’
‘That’s one way of putting it; her body was burned. It was the serial number on her watch that told us who she was.’
‘I remember it: a Rolex, nice piece. Why would anybody want to kill her? Was it a random attack, or was she targeted?’
‘That’s what we need to establish, sir,’ Wright declared. ‘What did you discuss when she visited you?’
‘She asked me about the Marcia Brown business,’ he replied. ‘You know about that?’ Haddock nodded. ‘She was working on the instructions of Alex Skinner . . . or so she told me. I took that at face value, but given what’s happened, I begin to wonder if there was more to it.’
‘You needn’t wonder; it’s true.’
‘But that was just . . . Okay, it was a tragedy, but a storm in a teacup, no more than that.’
‘What was your role?’ Haddock asked. Seeing Black’s quizzical look, he added, ‘We’re coming from a base of zero knowledge, just putting together a picture of Carrie and what she was doing, how far she’d got in her search.’
‘There was nowhere for her to get to. It was a sordid episode with a very sad conclusion. My role, you ask? I was retained by Marcia after her arrest for theft from a Kilmarnock supermarket called LuxuMarket; a petty theft, I must say, one that other stores would have dismissed with a caution and a bar from the premises.’
‘Why did she choose you?’
Black peered at the detective constable, surprised by her question. ‘Why not?’
‘Weren’t you a family lawyer, sir?’
‘Our practice was broad-based; we weren’t strangers to the sheriff court. But yes, you’re correct, our original relationship was as family solicitor and client; I helped Marcia and David Brass, her former husband, through their divorce. I don’t think she knew any other lawyers, so she came to me when the trouble happened.’
‘If she had lived,’ Haddock asked, ‘would you have got her off?’
‘No, because the evidence was overwhelming; I told her as much. I made such a good job of persuading her that she killed herself.’
‘Are you sure about that?’
‘One hundred per cent.’
‘What would her defence have been?’
‘Non-existent. She claimed she was the victim of a conspiracy.’
‘By whom?’
‘Councillor Gloria Stephens, the leader of the West Coast Council. Marcia claimed she had evidence Stephens was up to no good. In fact she was implying she was guilty of criminal behaviour.’
‘Did she have evidence to back that up?’
‘I don’t know; s
he refused to share it with me. I don’t even know if it ever existed. She hated Stephens with a vengeance.’
‘She sounds like the client from hell,’ the DI observed.
‘You can say that again; she certainly gave David Brass a terrible time during their marriage. Marcia could be a pain in the fundament. There was no end to the woman’s obsessive behaviour.’ He paused. ‘Well, actually there was, when she took her own life. They said it was out of guilt and shame. That’s bollocks. Marcia was a ball of disruptive energy. She had no friends on the council, only enemies. She had no shame either, not that I could detect. In life, her only allies were her sister Joan, who was as obsessive as her; David, even after their divorce; and Austin, their son. My suspicion is that she killed herself out of spite, out of sheer malice, out of guilt – not her own, but to inflict it on Gloria Stephens and everyone else who had crossed her.’
Fifty-Six
‘Dominic, can I ask you something?’
He offered her the slow, languid smile that Alex had come to realise was not easily won. ‘You just did, and the answer’s yes.’
‘I mean can I ask you something you might not want to talk about?’
‘There’s only one way to find out.’
‘How does it feel to be a prisoner?’ she ventured.
‘I’m happy to talk about that; as a matter of fact, I do quite often, in my lectures. There are many answers, but it all begins with fear. I don’t care who they are or what they’ve done, the first time a person is convicted and given a custodial sentence, the first time they walk through a door that they do not control and hear the key turn in the lock behind them, everyone is fearful.’
The Bad Fire (Bob Skinner series, Book 31): A shocking murder case brings danger too close to home for ex-cop Bob Skinner in this gripping Scottish crime thriller Page 24