Maggie Steele believed that she would not have survived as a person, far less a chief police officer, without her daughter. She had been in the middle of her pregnancy when she had been hit by two piledrivers, the sudden and unexpected death of her husband Stevie, and her own cancer diagnosis.
At one point she had been given a likely choice between her own life and that of her child, but she had delayed the surgery until Stephanie Rose Steele had been safely delivered, and they had both pulled through, mother and daughter together.
It had been a fecund couple of years in her force, she had observed one evening to her sister, who lived with her and did much of the daytime child caring. ‘First Stevie and me, then Mario and Paula; now Ray Wilding’s gone and got Becky Stallings up the duff.’
Bet had reacted with a smile ‘That’s nice, though, isn’t it? That you all have something at home to take your mind off your jobs, especially the detectives.’
‘That’s easy for you to say, sis, but you don’t have to manage a team around maternity and paternity leave. Bloody nightmare!’
‘You set the example,’ Bet had pointed out.
‘Maybe, but I never thought then that I’d wind up as chief. Mind you, there were lots of things I never thought.’
Stephanie was playing happily at her feet as she faced Mario McGuire across her round kitchen table, the one that Stevie had built in when he had moved into the place, before they had been as much as a lustful gleam in each other’s eye. Her mug of green tea was warm within the circle of her hands. She had asked Mario to phone her after the interview of Cheryl Mackenzie was over, but he had called on her in person.
‘Were there any glitches at all?’ she asked.
‘No. She gave us it all without any pressure. They had a fight, over the way he’d reacted to an argument he and I had, and he hit her. He went crazy, she said. She thought he was insane, and maybe he was.
‘However, she may not be too attached to reality herself, because she’s decided it was a mercy killing. She talked us all the way through it, repeating for the tape all of the stuff that Bob uncovered in the first interview.’
‘Her lawyer was happy?’
‘As happy as you can be when your client’s confessing to murder, but yes; he didn’t raise any objections.’
‘I’m glad about that, for I was worried,’ Maggie confessed. ‘I thought Bob might have gone too far with her earlier.’
‘Me too,’ Mario murmured, ‘and that’s interesting. In all the years we worked under Bob, you and I never questioned the way he did things, never doubted his judgement. Yet now, even though he’s barely out the door, here we are second-guessing him.’
‘Welcome to command rank,’ she told him. ‘We are him, now. Back then he was responsible for everybody else’s mistakes, along with his own. Now we’re in that position, carrying the can for everything that’s done in our territory, by everyone . . . including him when he goes on one of his solo missions.’
McGuire laughed. ‘He’ll never stop doing that; doesn’t matter which office he’s in. That reminds me, is everything done and dusted on his patch?’
‘Yes, they’ve begun recovering Mackenzie’s body, and Max Allan’s been taken into custody. He’s being held in Pitt Street over the weekend, for court on Monday.’
‘Will they be tried jointly or separately, him and Cheryl? What do you think?’
‘That,’ Maggie said, ‘is the Lord Advocate’s problem, not mine or Bob’s. I’d guess they’ll be in court together, but the way things are just now, a trial looks unlikely. Max has a separate charge to answer, though, if the fiscal in Glasgow decides to go ahead with it.’
‘Poor old bastard. He’ll spend the first part of his retirement under lock and key.’
‘Maybe not,’ she suggested. ‘He wasn’t a party to the killing, only the concealment, and from what Bob said, Cheryl was like a daughter to him. With a good advocate, and a sympathetic judge, maybe one of the ladies on the Bench, he could get a suspended sentence.’
‘Yes, sure.’ Mario’s voice was smeared with sarcasm. ‘And maybe I’ll apply for the top job in Police Scotland and you’ll all be working for me in a few weeks. There’s no chance of any of that happening. He was a cop, Mags. I can’t think of a single judge who’d brave the media storm that not jailing him would cause.’
She was about to concede his point when she noticed Stephanie’s face going red, and rushed to pick her up. ‘Steph,’ she cried out, ‘you’re supposed to tell me when you need to poo. Get used to this, Mario, it’s coming your way.’
‘News for you, it’s here already.’
As he spoke, the door chime sounded. ‘Get that, please,’ Maggie asked. ‘I’ve no idea who it might be.’
‘Sure.’ He went down the few steps from the hall, wondering what casual caller would choose an early Saturday evening, and threw the door open.
A red-haired man stood on the threshold, confusion stamped on his face.
‘Arthur?’ McGuire exclaimed.
‘Mario?’ Dorward countered.
‘I’m here on business,’ the ACC said quickly, ‘before you get any ideas.’
‘Me too, before you do. But it’s maybe as well you are.’
‘You’d better come in, then. Maggie’s attending to some paperwork, you might say.’
He led the way up and across to the sitting room. ‘It’s Arthur Dorward,’ he called, ‘and I don’t think he’s come to sell you tickets for the Forensic Service dance.’
‘Minute,’ a voice replied from the nursery.
One stretched into two before Maggie appeared, carrying her refreshed child on her hip. ‘Mr Dorward,’ she said, ‘to what do we owe?’ Then she looked at his expression and her smile vanished.
‘Something’s come up in our analysis of the samples from one forty-two Caledonian Crescent,’ he began. ‘You’ll recall we found a trace of grandfamilial DNA, and established that it wasn’t from the lad you thought it was. Well, to try to identify it more clearly, we followed standard practice and ran it through the entire male database looking for a match.’
He stopped, and took a brown manila envelope from under his arm. ‘Most things I do over the phone. Some I send by email. But this one, this has to be done in person; it’s for your eyes only, and it’s bloody dynamite.’
Sixty-Seven
Mia was right; I could get there and I did. I went online as soon as I got home, and found a flight that evening from Edinburgh to Barcelona. I booked it with about half an hour to spare, and also a room for the night in the gastronomic hotel in Placa Reial that Sarah and I had enjoyed on our homeward journey.
Naturally I told her, about Mia’s phone call and her strange insistence. When I was finished, she looked up at me and said, ‘This woman meant something to you, Bob, didn’t she?’
‘I can’t deny that,’ I replied, ‘but it wasn’t for long. Sure, I had the hots for her, but I was glad when she left.’
‘No secret longings afterwards?’
‘None at all. Then or now. I wanted her gone, and I hoped she’d stay gone.’
‘Was she right about Clive Graham?’ she asked. ‘Would he like you out of the picture?’
‘Probably,’ I told her. I’d been asking myself the same question. ‘But that won’t be his decision. He set this Police Scotland thing up, against the wishes of most objective senior cops. Now he has to live with the consequences; if he doesn’t like them, fuck him.’
‘What do you think this secret of Mia’s is?’
‘I have no idea. Maybe she bought a lottery ticket in my name and it came up.’
She frowned. ‘Bob, don’t be flip. I’m worried about this.’
‘Then come with me,’ I offered, even though I was standing in the hall with my travel bag in my hand, ready to leave. ‘I’ll book another seat.’
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I’ve got three autopsies booked for Monday. Sweetheart, what if this is a set-up?’
‘If I thought that for
a millisecond, would I have asked you to come with me just now? Mia wants to meet on my turf. If she had bad intentions, she wouldn’t be doing that.’
‘If anyone calls and asks where you are, what do I say?’
‘Nothing. Whoever it is, tell them I’m going away for a couple of days, and can’t be contacted. I’ll do my best to get back on Monday.’
I kissed her, said goodbye to the kids and hit the road. I was on my way to Spain, but my preparations weren’t complete. One phone call from the car took care of the rest. It was to Sammy Pye; I asked him to have an overview of the Bella Watson murder investigation emailed to me the following morning.
I knew he was surprised by my request, and wondering whether he should comply. ‘I may be able to contribute something, Sammy,’ I told him, ‘so I’d like to see what’s been happening. But I may be wrong, so I’d rather this stayed confidential between us for now. There’ll be no flak over it, I promise.’
He agreed. Pye and I go back to his earliest days in the force. He was efficient even then, and so conscientious that he once tried to deny me entry to a crime scene.
I had no bags to check in when I arrived at the airport, and so I went straight to the gate. I was on the steps up to the airport and on the point of switching my phone to flight mode when it sounded, in my hand. I looked at the screen and saw that Maggie Steele was calling me from her home number.
An update on Cheryl Mackenzie, I guessed; frankly, I’d had enough of that saga, and the queue in front of me started to move just at that moment, so I rejected the call and went offline.
I have a confession to make here. I don’t like eating alone in a restaurant nor do I like spending a night alone in a hotel. I had to do both in Barcelona, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, I felt unhappy and anxious.
I had gone charging off in answer to Mia’s summons, lured by her secret, without having the faintest idea of what it was. What if Sarah’s fear was right after all? What if it was a set-up? The woman was a combination of Watson and Holmes, after all, and maybe that added up to a Moriarty.
What we call ‘the small hours’ in English, the Spanish call ‘madrugada’. I spent most of that time thinking about Mia, questioning my decision and my judgement and wondering whether she’d go through with her threat if I didn’t show up.
After all, I owed her nothing, I didn’t give a damn about her dead mother and I no longer gave a damn about her. Our relationship had lasted all of one night and ended in acrimony, so what the hell was I doing there, I asked myself in the Barcelona darkness?
And yet I knew I had to go. I had to find out what it was that I ‘could not possibly survive’. If it was real, I couldn’t let it do me in unknowingly.
I went back to sleep eventually, and I woke late. My body clock was set to UK time, and it’s pretty reliable. I showered, then went out for breakfast in a café on the Ramblas. My taxi driver from the airport had described it as a street ‘muy peligroso’, very dangerous. That’s an exaggeration, but it’s always been a mecca for pickpockets and the Spanish economic crisis has made it worse.
I wasn’t bothered though; in fact part of me was hoping that somebody would try to dip my wallet, for my madrugada edginess had given way to annoyance, and I was feeling pretty dangerous myself. What the hell right did Mia think she had to summon me with a cack-handed blackmail threat?
I fuelled myself with a chorizo sandwich, and an espresso . . . I was sure that Sarah would have allowed me one in the circumstances, although she’s been keeping a close eye on my intake . . . then walked back to the hotel. As soon as I reached my room, I retrieved my iPad from the safe and checked my email inbox.
The report was there, waiting for me. I read it slowly and carefully, taking in every step and every detail of the investigation, and when I was finished I knew why Mia wanted to see me . . . or I thought I did.
I caught a train from Passeig de Gracia, one of the slow ones that stops at Camallera, not far from my Spanish town. There was a taxi parked outside the bar across the street from the station. I found its driver inside, and once I’d satisfied myself that he’d been on coffee rather than brandy, I had him drive me home.
I had almost five hours before my meeting with Mia. I spent one of them swimming, thinking unrelated thoughts, and wondering in their midst how Cheryl Mackenzie and the uncle who had ruined himself for her had handled their first night in custody.
I’d begun to doubt whether Max would survive any term of imprisonment and so I’d decided to do what I could to try and keep him out. It wouldn’t be easy, but the least I could do was talk to the Lord Advocate, a golf buddy of mine. If that didn’t work, there was always the possibility of a word with Archie Nelson or Phil Davidson, two of the most influential judges on the Scottish Bench.
When I came out of the pool and back into the real world, I checked my emails once again. There was only one, another missive from Pye, updating the stuff he’d sent me earlier. I’d been wondering how I was going to play my meeting with Mia, and specifically, what I was going to do when it was over. Sammy’s message more or less made my mind up for me.
I dressed for the evening, in slacks and a light cotton jacket, then made a couple of phone calls on my landline. (The mobile had stayed switched off all day; I didn’t want any interruptions.) The second of them was to Sarah.
‘How are you?’ she asked me anxiously.
‘I’m missing you like hell,’ I told her, truly, ‘but otherwise I’m okay. The sooner this is over and done with the better.’
‘Maggie Steele called last night. She said she needs to see you, about something very important. I said she’d have to wait for a couple of days. She wouldn’t tell me what it was about, but she sounded really uptight about it.’
‘Uptight or not, she’s still going to have to wait. I may call her once this business is done, or I may leave it until tomorrow. I just want this woman out of my hair. I can’t look at anything else until she’s dealt with.’
‘You’ll call me when she is, yes?’
‘Promise.’
I wanted to walk to my dinner date. Normally it would take me half an hour, but I had a call to make on the way, so I left early. Summer was over, but the evenings usually stay warm until well into October.
How had I known for sure that Mia had meant us to meet in La Clota? She had more or less quoted directly from an interview I gave to the Herald newspaper in Glasgow, after I’d been confirmed in the Strathclyde job. That’s how closely she’d been tracking me. I had a vague and slightly ridiculous feeling of being stalked, but I laughed it off.
I paid that call en route, spoke to the people I’d arranged to see, then went on my way. I’ve never been any good at strolling, and so I arrived at the port area five minutes early. I didn’t want to be there first so I killed that time by taking a detour along the marina, admiring some of the larger boats that were moored there. The majority flew Catalan flags and pennants, but there were several other nations on show, French, German, Italian, British, and one single Scottish saltire.
I walked up to it for a closer look . . . and my stomach flipped. It was big by comparison with most around it, at least forty feet long, but it was the name that reached out and seized me.
Palacio de Ginebra. A Scottish boat with a Spanish comedy name, The Gin Palace. It was no joke of a yacht, however, but a serious open-water vessel, that needed proper crewing.
I knew that because unless there were two of them, and there weren’t, for the closer I looked the more familiar it became, I had been its deckhand myself for one glorious weekend. By one of those bizarre coincidences that make life completely unpredictable, Sarah had mentioned it not long before, and there I was looking at the very same vessel.
It was mothballed, its binnacle and hatches covered, so there was no clue to its current ownership, but when I sailed it . . . I know I should say ‘her’ . . . it had belonged to Alison Higgins’ brother, Eden, a Scottish furniture magnate.
She and I
and Alex had been invited for a weekend on the Firth of Clyde with Eden and his son Rory. It was a catharsis for me, that trip. Doing things that were completely new, being part of an entirely different kind of team, had made me think in an entirely different way. By the time we got back to Inverkip after our round trip to Campbeltown, I had decided that I was going to jack in the police, buy a yacht as big as Eden’s and sail it myself, for fun and commercially.
That notion lasted for a few minutes, until my next phone call, one that dragged me back into the live case I had then, at the heart of which was . . . Mia Watson. By the time that was over, the spell was broken.
I encountered Eden on a couple of occasions after that, the last being at Alison’s funeral. We haven’t kept in touch subsequently, for Ali and I had been ancient history by then, but he’d loved that boat, so I couldn’t imagine him having sold it. On the other hand, he’d loved his sister too. Had there been too much of her left in it?
I resolved to find out. It’s an intention that I still have, but that night I had other matters in hand.
I slipped into the restaurant through the back door in the decked, marquee-like outdoor section, rather than entering from the seafront as most people do. My thinking was that I’d rather see Mia before she saw me.
I looked around the place; half the tables were occupied, some by familiar faces in twos and fours, and as many unfamiliar. But there were no unaccompanied people, and definitely no Mia . . . unless she’d aged very badly since last I’d seen her, and acquired a fat Gauloise-smoking husband with a ludicrous Errol Flynn moustache.
‘Bob!’ John, the owner, called to me from the doorway to the main restaurant. ‘What you do here?’ He’s Catalan, but his mother is Scottish, so his English is pretty good; better than my Catalan, that’s for sure.
‘I’m meeting somebody,’ I replied. ‘It’s business; a lady.’
He nodded. ‘Ah, I understand now. The lady’s Scottish, yes. She call last night and book a table for three. She spoke Spanish good, but her accent is just like my mum. That’s you there.’ He pointed to a table with the best sea view in the place, with a ‘Reserved’ sign. As he’d said, it was set for three.
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