Blood Torment

by T F Muir

  ‘You bastard,’ he hissed, as the camera zoomed in to catch him and Tosh breathing hard, their breaths gushing in the morning chill. Gilchrist paused the recording, replayed it, stopping and starting in jerking motions, and came to see that at the exact moment he hit Tosh, the camera’s focus was on the barn door, although he and Tosh were still in the frame.

  He clicked the video forward frame by frame, until he and Tosh were in sharp focus. And there he stood, back half-angled to the camera, clapping Tosh on the shoulder, asking if something had caught in his throat. As if to satisfy his own curiosity, the camera zoomed closer until the back of his head and Tosh’s face filled the screen.

  The hatred in Tosh’s face was impossible to ignore, whereas his own body language – tense, he knew – looked relaxed to an onlooker. He felt relief flood through him as he played the recording all the way to the end without seeing evidence of violence, then ran through it one more time.

  This time he saw it, an out-of-focus movement as his arm shot forward. Tosh’s body jerked, not much, but enough to have any half-decent solicitor argue the case. With a bit of work, any competent IT expert could clean it up and present it as evidence.

  Gilchrist let out his breath in a defeated gush.

  If Tosh charged him with assault, in the face of what could prove to be compelling evidence, Gilchrist could do little to deny it. But for someone as twisted as Tosh, there was always more to it than just straightforward revenge.

  There was only one way to find out.

  He eyed the number on the Post-it, then dialled it.

  The call was answered with, ‘You took your time calling.’

  Gilchrist could not fail to catch the glee in Tosh’s voice, and he focused on keeping his tone level. ‘You were instructed to hand over all notes and statements regarding Katie Davis’s disappearance—’

  ‘Oh, listen to this. Instructed to hand over. I’ve already done that.’

  ‘All I’ve got is an out-of-focus CD of you and me having a friendly chat.’

  Tosh forced a laugh. ‘Friendly my arse.’ He cleared his throat, and grunted in what sounded like him gobbing to the side. ‘You always were a smarmy bastard, Gilchrist. Well this time I’ve got you good and proper, yeah? I’m going to take you down—’

  ‘And I’ll be reporting you for deliberately withholding evidence in a—’

  ‘I told you I’d handed everything over, but you’re not listening, see?’

  Gilchrist’s thoughts stumbled. Had he missed something?

  ‘I gave it all to Mhairi with the tidy tits, and told her to deliver them to you in person, before midday, like you said.’ Another laugh. ‘But I tell you what I’m going to do, yeah? I’m going to contact Professional Standards and let them know that some DCIs use physical violence against members of their own team.’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll be interested, too,’ Gilchrist said, ‘to learn that some DCIs receive death threats.’

  Tosh forced another laugh. ‘You’re as slippery as they come, Gilchrist, and you’ll try to find some way to deny it’s even you on that CD. But remember what I told you earlier. Night-night. Sleep tight.’

  The line died.

  Gilchrist replaced the handset, then stared out the window.

  The skies had turned a sullen grey, with brooding clouds low enough to touch. He didn’t think it would rain, but in Scotland no one took bets on the weather. It troubled him that one detective would have the audacity to threaten another. Tosh was the kind of person who should never have been in the constabulary; someone who abused power, strode through life bullying others. And it struck Gilchrist that he had only one option.

  The answer was simple.

  He would have to end Tosh’s career to save his own.

  CHAPTER 8

  Gilchrist’s call to Mhairi confirmed that Tosh had indeed handed all his files over.

  ‘Sir, he said you were coming back within the hour to interview Andrea Davis again, and that I was to hold them until you collected them. I’m sorry, sir. I should’ve phoned when you never turned up.’

  ‘That’s okay, Mhairi. Did DI MacIntosh, did he . . . was he rude to you in any way?’

  ‘Not really, sir. Just that he’s sort of sleazy, and gives me the creeps.’

  Gilchrist gritted his teeth. Tosh would have stripped her naked in his mind’s eye and nailed her to the floor in his dreams. But fantasising left no proof. He needed hard facts if he was going to have Tosh fired. Maybe an exploratory call to Strathclyde Police HQ was on the cards. If anyone knew what Tosh was up to, DCI Peter ‘Dainty’ Small would.

  He thanked Mhairi, and told her he would collect the files from her after lunch.

  Next, he called Dick, a retired policeman who made extra cash building websites, on the face of it, but in reality did anything and everything related to computers and IT, legally or illegally, a fact which Gilchrist kept to himself. For a fee, you could buy a copy of the US President’s or the Queen’s phone records, with everything in between, if you wanted to.

  ‘Got a video recording I’d like you to look at,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Maybe you could advise me what to do about it, once you’ve checked it out.’

  He delivered the CD to Dick’s house, then set off to meet Jessie.

  The Central Bar thrummed. Students, visitors, and some faces he recognised – caddies already back from a morning’s work on the links, trying to spend their day’s earnings in one sitting – had every seat in the place taken, it seemed. He found Jessie in a corner booth, and managed to squeeze in beside her.

  ‘You look fit to be tied,’ she said.

  ‘Didn’t know it showed.’

  She took a forkful of chips, then shoved the plate his way. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Help me out. I can feel the fat doubling up with every mouthful.’ She stabbed at a piece of white fish meat, and mouthed it.

  Gilchrist fingered a chip, slipped it into his mouth, but whatever appetite he’d had was drowned in his thoughts of Tosh. He watched Jessie nibble her food for another couple of minutes, then said, ‘I know an infallible way to lose weight.’

  She looked at him, a loaded fork poised at her lips. ‘What’s it called?’

  ‘Work.’ He pushed to his feet. ‘Let’s go.’

  Jessie caught up with him as he was easing the BMW through the pend. He held his foot on the brake as she clambered into the passenger seat.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ she said. ‘What’s got you so fired up?’

  Tosh, he wanted to say. But he depressed the pedal and powered up North Street.

  If anything, the throng at the entrance to Grange Mansion had thickened.

  Journalists, photographers, and hangers-on stood like the spectators they were, eyeing the driveway, as if willing the mother of the missing child to venture out and have a chat with them. Gilchrist eased his car towards the entrance. One local hack – a scruffy little tubby man called Bertie McKinnon – recognised him and broke free from the scrum to jog alongside his BMW, hand slapping the roof.

  Jessie lowered her window. ‘What’s your problem?’

  ‘Have you found Katie yet?’ McKinnon shouted to her.

  ‘We’re working on it, what do you think?’

  ‘I think you’re fucking it up like you always do.’

  ‘Why don’t you print that, then?’

  ‘Oh I will, hen, don’t you fucking worry about that.’

  Gilchrist drove forward as a uniform – a young face he couldn’t put a name to – lifted the police tape and waved him through. He eased along the gravel track, the car rocking and bucking through the potholes, and warned Jessie about the perils of talking to reporters, particularly wankers like Bertie McKinnon.

  ‘Is that the first time you’ve come across Bertie?’ he asked.

  ‘And the last, I hope.’

  ‘Be careful around him. He’s a piece of shit who writes what he likes. He hates the police for some reason that no one understands.’

  ‘Seems to be par for the cou
rse up here,’ she said.

  He nosed the BMW into the branches of an overgrown shrub, and parked.

  They met Mhairi in the Mobile Incident Room, a 7.5-tonne vehicle parked next to the barn, which buzzed with the chatter of a busy office. Whiteboards sported black lines that ran like a genealogical chart, listing names, places, dates, times, phone numbers with occupations ranging from pizza delivery man to plumber. He scanned the names to confirm that neither Vera Davis nor Sandy Rutherford were listed, then added both to the whiteboard.

  He compared Tosh’s records against the notes on the whiteboards, handwritten notes of phone interviews – not surprisingly, only four in total; not quite as diligent a detective as Tosh would have you believe. Then he called the team together, and they spent the next hour exchanging notes, messages, expanding what little information they had. They did confirm that the bulk of Andrea Davis’s income came from a personal trust fund valued at well over a million pounds.

  ‘So she’s a bloody millionaire?’ Jessie gasped.

  ‘Bloody millionairess,’ someone corrected, which brought a scowl to Jessie’s mouth, and an under-the-breath, ‘Fuck sake.’

  ‘And we still haven’t received any ransom note?’ Gilchrist asked, eyeing the group.

  Their silence gave him his answer, which had him dreading the alternative – Katie had been taken for sex. Not good. Not good at all. He spent the next ten minutes assigning everyone to specific tasks, then said to Jessie, ‘Follow me.’

  They found Andrea Davis in the main lounge, sitting on a threadbare sofa with her feet tucked up beneath her, reading a book – Gilchrist caught Dickens on the cover. Chivas lay asleep on the floor, and could have been dead for all the attention he gave them.

  Andrea looked up from her book, but neither stood nor spoke, and it struck Gilchrist that here was a woman as cold and emotionally distant as her mother and sister.

  ‘We’d like to ask you a few more questions,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Have you found my daughter yet?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be out there searching for her, instead of in here pestering me?’

  ‘We spoke to Rachel,’ he said.

  The name seemed to confuse her, and she tilted her head, as if catching the telltale sound of someone creeping up behind her. Gilchrist found his gaze following her line of sight as it settled on the bookshelves by the fireplace. Then she blinked, and faced him.

  ‘How is she?’ she asked him.

  Chivas almost stirred – an ear twitched, a paw moved, then sleep stilled him.

  ‘Why didn’t you mention you had a sister?’

  ‘Why should I? I haven’t seen her in years.’

  ‘When, exactly?’

  ‘What difference does it make?’

  ‘We’re trying to build a picture of your and Katie’s lives, see who might—’

  ‘Rachel isn’t in my life, and has never been in Katie’s.’ She slapped her book shut, placed it on the cushion by her arm. ‘For God’s sake, where are you people from? Why waste time talking to someone in London when Katie’s gone missing from her home in Scotland?’

  ‘How do you know Rachel lives in London?’ Jessie asked.

  ‘Please tell me you’re not serious.’

  ‘Oh, we’re serious all right. You haven’t been in touch with your sister for years. So how do you know where she lives?’

  Gilchrist caught another flicker towards the bookshelf.

  ‘I’m sure I heard it from my mother,’ she said.

  ‘We’ve spoken to your mother, too,’ Gilchrist said.

  ‘Oh, you have been busy little bees.’ She pushed herself from the sofa and walked to the window, more to hide a flush that coloured her face, Gilchrist thought, than to check out the weather. ‘So how is the bitch?’

  ‘Concerned over Katie’s disappearance.’

  She turned to face them both, and something akin to anger tightened the set in her jaw. ‘As concerned as you are?’

  Gilchrist let a couple of beats pass. ‘When did you last talk to your father?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He’s already been on the news, making an unauthorised personal appeal.’

  ‘Well, he would, wouldn’t he?’

  ‘Why would he?’

  ‘Other than the fact that Katie’s his granddaughter, you mean?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  She glared at him for a long moment, then shook her head as she turned from the window. ‘I don’t believe this,’ she said. ‘I’ll show you out,’ and strode to the door, her hand sweeping something off the bookshelf, slipping it into her pocket.

  Gilchrist nodded for Jessie to follow, and received a glare in response.

  At the end of the hall, Andrea twisted the handle, and pulled. A cold draught chilled the hallway. She stood to the side, as if sheltering from the wind.

  Gilchrist paused on the doorstep. ‘You never answered my question.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘All of them,’ Jessie snapped.

  Gilchrist stepped in with, ‘About when you last talked to your father.’

  ‘I can’t remember the last time I talked to him,’ she said, and made a display of shivering off the cold. ‘Why don’t you check it on my phone records?’

  ‘We will.’ Jessie walked past her, and strode towards the barn.

  Gilchrist gave Andrea a quick smile. ‘We’re doing everything we can to find Katie. But we can’t leave any stone unturned. If that means touching on subject matter that might be too close for comfort, then I apologise for that.’

  She returned a look as cold as slate.

  ‘I may want to speak to you later,’ he said, and crossed the threshold.

  The door slammed behind him like a kick to the spine. But the memory of a nervous glance at the bookshelf, and a hand brushing something into her pocket, pulled up the ghost of another possibility.

  CHAPTER 9

  The first thing Gilchrist did was have one of his team go through Andrea Davis’s phone records again, and check every number she’d called in the past couple of months. They were missing something, he was sure of it. For a mother whose child had been kidnapped, her behaviour was not normal. So he emailed Jackie as well, instructing her to check Andrea’s phone records also, see if anything jumped out at her. Were these numbers new? How often were they called? Who did she phone the most? How and when did she pay her bills?

  Leave nothing out. Check everything and anything.

  Jessie wanted to bring Andrea to the Office for some hard questioning, but Gilchrist reminded her that she was the mother of a missing child, and it would be more considerate, even prudent, to put all thoughts of arresting Andrea to the side.

  ‘At least for the time being,’ he said, which seemed to appease Jessie.

  Gilchrist and his team spent the remainder of the day tracking down, and talking to, everyone who had been at Grange Mansion within the past three months. But everyone to a person seemed to have a genuine and innocent reason for their visit.

  By the end of the afternoon, he was no further forward.

  He called the Computer Crime Unit, but they’d not been able to identify the wee girl on Bell’s laptop. They had, however, uncovered a hidden file containing initials and phone numbers, which looked like a list of individuals to whom Bell had been supplying drugs. It pleased him that his impromptu visit to Bell’s home that morning might have uncovered a link to a drug supply chain, but it was still only a tiny splash in a big ocean – jail everyone on that list, and another list would pop up the following week. They could be pulling weeds from a spring garden for all the good they were doing.

  Although not yet connected to Katie’s disappearance, Gilchrist instructed Baxter to detain Bell on suspicion of supplying Class-A drugs. Bell could spend the next several days behind bars while he waited for his court appearance.

  But a phone call from Greaves, late afternoon, reminded Gilchrist that Chief Constable McVicar was keeping a clos
e and personal eye on progress – or lack thereof – and demanding a press conference in time for the six o’clock news. ‘We have to seek the public’s assistance,’ Greaves told him, no doubt regurgitating McVicar’s exact words.

  That evening in the Mobile Incident Room, Gilchrist watched himself on TV, standing at the end of the gravel drive, Grange Mansion silhouetted in the background, an image of Katie Davis staring over his shoulder in one corner of the screen. He thought he looked tired and defeated – leather jacket slack at the shoulders, hair greying, lips unsmiling. By his side, an alert DS Jessie Janes looked positively youthful.

  Old footage of ex-MSP Dougal Davis was included in the news bulletin, with viewers reminded of his forced retirement from Scottish Parliament. A futile attempt to interview his solicitor resulted in a hand being shoved at the camera by a grim-lipped Simon Copestake, who bustled past a group of cameramen to slide into the back of a chauffeured limousine.

  ‘Charming bastard,’ someone said to the TV screen.

  At the end of the televised conference, a phone number ran like a banner across the screen, which viewers were encouraged to call with complete anonymity if they had heard or seen anything remotely suspicious. Gilchrist ordered his team to work on for another hour, to follow up on any calls that might come in. But by eight o’clock nine calls had been received, two of which were identified as crank. Uniforms sent to check others had come back with no leads. To crown it all, Baxter reported that Bell had slipped surveillance and was not answering his door, and that all attempts to reach him had failed.

  ‘Check up with the Computer Crime Unit for the latest,’ Gilchrist said. ‘Then find out where the hell Bell is. And when you find him, bring him in.’

  By 8.20 p.m., Gilchrist had set up shifts through the night, and was ready to call it a day.

  ‘Right,’ he said to no one in particular. ‘I’m off. If anything comes up, you know where to reach me.’

  Jessie walked with him to their cars. She had parked her Fiat by the barn. Through the trees, open fields fell away to an invisible sea. Blushing clouds streaked a darkening horizon.