Hour Of Darkness

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘But how would he do that? You took his car, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why did you do that?’ Wilding asked her, staying so casual that I knew he, too, had picked up a vibe. ‘Yours was parked in front of your house. Why would you take David’s?’

  ‘To punish him again, I suppose.’ A moment of spite flashed across her face, and for that instant I was looking at a different woman.

  ‘So how did David go anywhere?’ I continued. ‘He didn’t take your car, so how did he run off?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. He must have got a taxi, then a train.’

  ‘I’ve got a problem with that, Cheryl,’ I confessed. ‘I’m asking myself, how did he pay for it? His cards haven’t been used either, and no money’s been pulled from your accounts other than that two grand you took.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she protested. ‘Maybe he stole a car. Maybe he had a card you didn’t know about. Maybe he got a fucking Wonga loan!’

  ‘Calm down, Cheryl, please,’ I said, quietly. ‘I’m concerned about him, just as you must be.’

  She composed herself. ‘I’m sorry. I know. I’m just out of my mind with worry.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. Answer me something else, about David, if you will. If he was in real trouble, where do you think he would go . . . or rather to whom? I’ve been wondering about that and given what I’ve found out about David’s background, I could make a guess. I’m wondering if it would be the same as yours.’

  Her eyes narrowed, as if she was looking a couple of questions ahead, then she replied to the one in hand. ‘Father Donnelly,’ she murmured.

  ‘That’s his priest?’ I added for Wilding’s benefit. ‘The man who more or less adopted him in his teenage years?’

  ‘Yes, that’s him.’

  ‘But he hasn’t gone there,’ I told her.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ she said.

  ‘You’re right. It is. I know he didn’t because just before you got here I called Father Donnelly, and I asked him that point-blank. He told me that he hadn’t.’

  I let that sink for a second or two before I went on, to what by then she knew was coming.

  ‘But you did, Cheryl,’ I murmured, lowering my voice, because I didn’t want to frighten her. ‘You went to see Father Donnelly on Monday, in Tighnabruaich, where he lives now. When we check with your bed and breakfast I think we’ll find that you checked in there on that same day, having taken the ferry to Tarbert from Portavadie. It’s not that far from Tighnabruaich.

  ‘That answers another question: why someone had been checking out ferry routes on your computer. It begs another, of course. Did that person check so many just to confuse Ray here?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know,’ she whispered.

  ‘I’m afraid that I think you would, that you know all too well. I’ll tell you what else I’ve worked out. You must have slept in David’s Honda on the Sunday night. If you slept at all, that is; it must have been pretty challenging in that confined space, all things considered.’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she snapped.

  ‘Yes you do, Cheryl. Father Donnelly couldn’t tell me what you and he talked about. Couldn’t, I repeat, not wouldn’t, which can only mean that he took your confession, as a priest, and is bound to keep it secret.’

  She sagged in her chair and I knew that we had gone as far as we could.

  I rose from mine. ‘I’m going to stop there, Mrs Mackenzie,’ I said. ‘DI Wilding will now arrest you on suspicion of the murder of your husband, and you’ll be formally cautioned. You’ll be re-interviewed by other officers, no doubt. What you’ve told us here won’t be offered as evidence, but we will be able to use it to put together a complete picture of your movements.’

  I stood, and she looked up at me, nothing much in her eyes any more other than exhaustion.

  ‘I have one more question, Cheryl,’ I concluded, ‘but I think I know the answer already. I expect we’ll find that you checked out of your B and B on Wednesday or on Thursday, at the latest. After that, did you visit your Uncle Max?’

  Sixty

  Karen Neville was still more than puzzled by the news from Missing Persons as she drove into Stockbridge. So much so that she had almost called her former husband once again, only staying her hand when she realised that he would probably be with Alex Skinner, not wanting to be suspected of phoning him at any excuse.

  Mary Chambers was waiting on the pavement when she pulled up outside her partner’s flat. The whole force knew that the DCS was involved with the sister of Griff Montell, a fellow Edinburgh cop. He had taken the news badly when he had found out, but a transfer to Special Branch, which operated outside the CID network, had been the diplomatic solution.

  ‘It’s called Oakmount,’ Chambers said as she buckled herself into the passenger seat, ‘and it’s in the Grange. I’ve got the location on my phone. Head for the area and I’ll find it when we get there.’

  Neville obeyed, staying silent for a while as she concentrated on navigating her way through three sets of the temporary traffic lights which had become a curse of the city. The head of CID left her to it, uninterrupted, until they had crossed the Meadows, and were heading up Kilgraston Road.

  ‘What’s this boy like, Karen?’ she asked.

  ‘I found him okay,’ she replied, ‘but what Jack and I told him changed his whole lifetime thinking about his father, and made him part of a family he never knew existed. When Mr Partridge said he seemed disturbed, that was enough for me.’

  ‘Me too. I’ve got a car up there, with orders to stop anyone other than family from getting to McGrew. Mind you, from what I heard from DI Pye, we’re only postponing the inevitable by keeping him safe.’

  ‘More than that, ma’am,’ Neville said. ‘I’ve got some questions to ask him.’ She told the DCS about the latest finding from the DNA trawl of the Caledonian Crescent flat.

  ‘Was he, by God?’ she hissed. ‘But we were told he’s physically harmless.’

  ‘Himself, perhaps,’ the DS conceded, ‘but he might not have been alone. There’s so much DNA he could have had a platoon of known heavies there without us finding them. The only questionable thing is, the DNA was found in the living room; that wasn’t affected by the burst pipe from above, so it wasn’t redecorated. He could have been there at any time and not just in that short window between the workmen finishing and Watson being killed.’

  ‘Then we do need to have a serious chat with Hastie; maybe he was meeting the folk in the Spanish van.’

  ‘There’s a thought,’ Neville murmured as she stopped for a red light, and as Chambers’ phone rang.

  As the head of CID took the call, she seemed to straighten up in her seat as she listened to what she was being told. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said, and her sergeant knew at once who the caller was. ‘As soon I’ve wrapped up the urgent matter I’m on at the moment, I’ll be there. Allowing for the weekend traffic, I should be at Gayfield in an hour.’

  She whistled as she took the mobile from her ear. ‘Fucking hell!’ she exclaimed. ‘That was the chief. If this here gets complicated I might need to haul in Haddock to join you. I’ve just been ordered to meet ACC McGuire at Gayfield, to do a formal interview with Cheryl Mackenzie. Ray Wilding’s just arrested her for murdering her husband.’

  The bombshell was still reverberating in Neville’s mind when her boss called out, ‘Take a right here,’ as she approached a junction. ‘Second on the left next,’ she continued as they made the turn, into a quiet suburban street, in which only a single pedestrian could be seen, ‘and we should be there.’

  She had barely finished speaking before her driver slammed on the brakes. ‘That’s him,’ Karen shouted, as she freed herself from her seat belt and jumped from the car. ‘Marlon Hicks.’

  By the time Chambers’ feet hit the pavement the DS had pinned the lightly built youth against the wall of the house he had been passing. ‘Don’t run, Marlon,’ Karen warned him. ‘There’s no point
and there’s no need. We want to talk to you, that’s all.’

  ‘What about?’ he retorted. ‘I ain’t done nothin’.’

  ‘That’s true, and we want to make sure that you don’t. What are you doing here?’

  ‘Just walkin’, lady, that’s all. I got a right.’

  As he spoke she patted him down. Her hand came upon something in a pocket of his hoodie; she reached in and withdrew a kitchen knife.

  ‘You don’t have a right to carry that,’ the head of CID said, as she reached them. ‘Give us some sensible answers, son, or we’ll arrest you.’

  ‘We know where you were going, Marlon,’ Neville told him. ‘And I don’t like the fact that you were going there with a knife in your pocket.’ She dropped her hands to her sides, freeing him, but ready to stop him instantly if he tried to run again.

  ‘I wasn’t going to use it,’ he murmured. ‘I only brought it to scare him.’

  ‘I don’t think it would,’ she replied, fingering the blade. ‘You could barely cut butter with this thing. Why did you want to frighten him?’

  ‘I wanted to make him tell me why they killed my father. They took him from me before I was even born, those people.’

  ‘Didn’t the newspaper stories explain it?’ the DS asked. ‘Your father was murdered because the man he worked for was having an affair with Hastie McGrew’s sister Alafair.’

  ‘They killed him for that?’

  ‘They did. McGrew’s father paid the men who did it; he was a ruthless and evil man, and his son’s no better. When the police looked like tracing them, Hastie killed them to keep them quiet. That’s who you were on your way to try and frighten with a blunt potato peeler. I don’t think it would have worked, Marlon.’

  Tears filled the young man’s eyes. ‘Why did my mum and Duane keep it from me?’ he moaned. ‘I grew up hating my father.’

  ‘I’d imagine they did it to stop you from growing up to fuck up your life by doing something as bloody stupid as this,’ Chambers replied. ‘Fortunately you didn’t, so this is what’s going to happen. You’re going to buy a kitchen knife to replace that one, because we’re keeping it, then you’re going to pack in your job with the McGrews’ company and you’re going to move in with your granny. I’m told she’s a good woman. Is all that agreed?’

  Marlon nodded. ‘Yes, lady.’

  ‘Good. I shouldn’t need to say this but I will, just in case you take another daft turn. If you come anywhere near the Oakmount Nursing Home again, you’ll be lifted and I’ll charge you with the first thing that comes into my head. Now go on, son, and think yourself lucky that DS Neville saw you when she did.’

  They watched him as he walked away, until he reached the junction and passed out of sight.

  ‘Do you think he’ll behave himself?’ the head of CID asked the DS as they returned to their car.

  ‘I’m pretty sure he will. He’s a nice kid at heart. I wouldn’t like to have a shock like he’s had.’

  She drove on, taking the second turning on the left as she had been instructed, and seeing the nursing home immediately, a modern three-storey building taking up half the street on which it stood. She swung into the car park and slid into a bay next to a police patrol car. Its occupants, two constables, were waiting for them in the home’s reception hall.

  ‘You can stand down,’ the DCS told them. ‘The panic’s over. But wait for me; I’m going to need a lift to Gayfield Square. Do you happen to know which floor McGrew’s on?’

  ‘He’s in room one eleven,’ the older officer told her, ‘first floor. Not that we went up there: I heard a woman asking for him at reception a few minutes ago. She said she was his sister. There was a guy with her, a baldy fella. He’d a walking stick; looked as if he belonged in here himself.’

  ‘That’s handy,’ Chambers observed. ‘It might save us a second visit.’

  The two detectives took the stairs up to the first floor. ‘The baldy guy will be the husband, Derek Drysalter,’ Neville said.

  ‘Mmm,’ her boss murmured. ‘I saw him play for Scotland once. He had hair then. And speak of the devil . . .’

  Drysalter was standing in the corridor, outside room one hundred and eleven. He frowned as they approached him, warrant cards in hand. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he exclaimed. ‘At a time like this? What do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Visiting the sick,’ Chambers replied, sharply. ‘We need to talk to your brother-in-law.’

  ‘You’ll have a job,’ Drysalter snapped, trembling with anger and tension. ‘He went into a coma two hours ago; my wife and I have just seen his doctor. She says he’ll probably not come out of it. Tough shit, eh. He does nearly twenty years and then gets only a few months on the outside.’

  ‘Life’s a bitch and then you die,’ the DCS said. ‘Look at it this way: in another era, they’d have dropped him through the floor with a rope round his neck. Anyway, a man can do a lot in a few months; possibly even enough to earn him another twenty years, him and anyone involved with him.’

  ‘Listen,’ the former footballer protested, ‘I know nothing about any of that stuff, any of it. I didn’t join the family firm when I married Alafair.’

  ‘In which case we’ll need to talk to her. You know,’ Chambers told him, as she moved past him, ‘I used to have a Scotland shirt with your name on the back. Pity about the hair, by the way.’

  There was music playing in Hastie McGrew’s room, just loudly enough for Alafair Drysalter, who was standing at the end of her brother’s bed, not to hear the detectives as they entered. When Neville coughed, she gave a little jump and spun round.

  ‘Who the . . .’ she began, stopping short as she saw the cards. ‘Oh no,’ she sighed. ‘Do you people never stop?’

  ‘We tend not to,’ the DS said. ‘We came here to interview your brother, but it looks like we’re going to have to talk to you instead.’

  ‘About what this time? Are you still on about my father’s death?’

  ‘No, it’s not about that, for now at any rate. The situation is that we can put your brother in Bella Watson’s flat. So far your DNA hasn’t shown up there, but it won’t surprise me if it does.’

  ‘Look,’ she exclaimed, ‘Hastie couldn’t have killed the bloody woman. I thought you’d established that.’

  ‘But he knows people who could.’

  ‘In which case he’d have been bloody silly to go with them while they did the job, and silly, Hastie is not. And by the way, you can stop looking for me there, because I wasn’t.’

  She nodded towards the still, pale, hairless figure on the bed. ‘As for my brother, look at him. What’s the point in pursuing this any further?’

  ‘Because a woman’s been murdered,’ Chambers replied. ‘She might not have been a very nice woman, a monster in fact, and she might have been involved in the drugs trade, but she was still murdered, and whether we can be arsed or not, it’s our job to find out who did it. So, why was your brother in Bella’s flat? Was it because he was involved in the methamphetamine racket with her?’

  ‘No!’ Alafair snapped. ‘It’s because he wasn’t. That’s all I’m prepared to say.’

  ‘In that case we’ll be charging you with obstructing justice. You don’t want that, Mrs Drysalter, do you? Up to now you’re the clean one of your family. My officers tell me you have a child at Mary Erskine. How’s she going to take that?’

  ‘Are you threatening me?’

  ‘Are you really that naive?’ Karen Neville laughed. ‘Of course we’re threatening you. And we’ll follow through on it unless you tell us what the bloody hell’s been going on here.’

  ‘Okay,’ she sighed in defeat. ‘The fact is that Hastie was approached almost as soon as he got out of prison and offered a deal to import and sell methamphetamines. He told me about it and said it looked pretty foolproof. The quantities would be very profitable but there would never be silly amounts in circulation.

  ‘He reckoned it could stay under the radar for quite some time if it was handl
ed properly. Well, I went bat-shit, let me tell you. I said that I’d done my last prison visit, and I forbade him to have anything to do with it. Believe it or not he does listen to me. He said okay, if I was that set against it he’d pass it on to somebody else.’

  ‘To Bella Watson?’

  ‘Yes. He told me he’d found out by accident from a guy in the jail that she was living somewhere in Edinburgh, and that he’d been able to track her down. He went to see her and offered her the deal; he told her it was compensation for what happened to her boy. Hastie always did think Dad went too far with that,’ she offered in explanation. ‘That’s why he was in Bella’s flat, to set up the drug route. The old cow went for it, but for security, Hastie didn’t tell her who the supplier was.’

  ‘Not ever?’

  ‘Not that I know of. I told him never to mention it to me again.’

  ‘Who approached him? Who was the supplier?’

  ‘He never told me that, and frankly I didn’t want to know.’

  ‘Is that the truth, Mrs Drysalter?’ Chambers asked.

  ‘Yes it is. There’s no point in holding anything back. What can you do to my brother now?’

  Sixty-One

  When Karen Neville walked back into the Leith CID room she was surprised to see that the DI’s cubicle was illuminated by the faint glow of a computer monitor. She opened the door to find Sammy Pye seated behind his desk.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘has it suddenly stopped being Saturday?’

  ‘It has for me. I called Jackie for another update; when she told me everything that had happened, I couldn’t sit on my arse at home any longer. Have you traced Marlon Hicks?’

  ‘Yes. He isn’t a threat any longer . . . not that he ever was really. The way it is now with Hastie McGrew, the only threat to him will come from the angry souls waiting for him on the other side.’

  She explained that the man had been comatose when they had arrived at his nursing home, and that no bets were being placed on him seeing out the weekend.