Doug nodded like a naughty child. Oh Christ, it was Banks who had hit Rab. And now he was finishing the job.
“Good,” Banks said slowly. “It’s important to pay our respects in difficult times, isn’t it?”
Another dumb nod from Doug as he fought back the urge to down the rest of his whisky in a gulp. After all, might be the last drink he would ever get. But then Banks spoke. And Doug felt the world tilt and then fall away from under him.
“I know your work, Mr McGregor, and I know you’ve been asking questions about the Falcon’s Rest and my possible involvement with Paul Redmonds.”
Doug felt numb. “Yes. But, Mr Banks, I…”
Banks raised one skeletal hand, the cuff of his shirt dangling loosely from the branch-thin wrist. “And am I to believe you also asked Rab to look into this on your behalf?”
Doug felt the terror claw its way up his throat again, threatening to throttle him. His gaze darted around the room as his grip tightened on the whisky glass. He could throw it at Banks, make a break for it. Couldn’t he?
Instead, he just gave a slow nod. “Yes, but I…”
Banks shook his head again. “Enough, Douglas,” he said. “You really don’t need to talk at the moment, but you really, really need to fucking listen. Do we understand each other?”
Doug blinked. When he spoke, his voice was a dull, listless whisper. “Yes, we understand each other.”
“Good,” Banks said. “Then understand this. I knew Rab was asking around for you, and when I heard about Rab I knew you would jump to the conclusion that it was me who had him hospitalised. I know the two of you are, ah, associates. But I’m here to tell you, Douglas, on my word, it wasn’t me. If I ever decide to call on Rab MacFarlane, it won’t be as messy. Or incomplete.”
Doug shook his head, confusion punching through the numb terror that was rolling across his mind like a low morning haar. He spoke before he thought, Banks’ warning forgotten. “Hold on, you’re saying that you didn’t…”
Anger sparked in Banks’ small, dead eyes, and Doug sensed Phillip take a half-step into the room. He ignored it. “But if you didn’t have Rab attacked, then who did? And why?”
Banks glared at him then stepped forward, his movements remarkably fluid and lithe for a man who looked like an animated corpse. He folded himself into the seat opposite Doug, rested sharp elbows on bony knees and leaned forward. Doug had to force himself not to flinch back.
“That I do not know, Douglas,” he said. “But this is bad business. With Rab out of the picture, those Clarkson fuckers from the West are already looking to step into the void. And the last thing I need is a war on two fronts under the glare of the media spotlight you and your nasty little colleagues will bring. So here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to tell you what I told Rab. About the Rest, about Redmonds. And then you are going to find the fucker who did this. And when you do, you are going to tell me who it is. Are we clear?”
Doug couldn’t tear his eyes from Banks’. Was this a lie? A trap? If Banks really hadn’t taken out Rab, then who had? And why?
And then Banks started talking, his voice a parchment dry hiss in the silence of Doug’s living room. And as he spoke, Doug began to see a picture. A picture he didn’t want to see but knew he had to.
A picture that threatened to tear down the world around him, Becky and Susie, one brick at a time.
45
Lauren Carmichael had the kind of bored, disconnected beauty Eddie King had become all-too familiar with during his student days in St Andrews; women who had been handed the world on a silver platter, thanks to family wealth or connections, and who always assumed the world would work the same way – in their favour. He wondered, as he always did when he encountered such a woman, what it would take to shatter that glacial facade, knew he wasn’t the type of man who would or could do it.
They were sitting in a small office in the Docking Station in Leith, Eddie watching as Lauren picked through the company’s records for what they were looking for. The office was almost as stylish as she was, the table and chairs a mix of glass and stainless steel that sparkled in the strategically positioned spotlights above. A couple of abstract prints hung from the cool blue walls, along with a smattering of design awards that meant nothing to Eddie.
He sensed Susie shift in the chair beside him again, risked sneaking a glance. She was worrying at her phone again, refreshing the email app then, best he could tell, flicking back into the text messages. Eddie hadn’t seen her like this before, and he didn’t like it. She was normally so cool, focused, even when half the cops in the station – him, he hated to admit, included – were having a joke about her shagging that stupid little prick Redmonds. It was, he supposed, understandable that she would be on edge – Redmonds being murdered had reignited all the old gossip, but he got the feeling it was something more than that, something deeper.
He shrugged internally and turned back to watch Lauren work. The one thing he had learned about Susie Drummond was that she would tell him what she wanted to, when she wanted to.
“Ah, yes, here it is,” Lauren said, her accent warm with west central Scotland and upper middle class. Eddie dimly wondered if she was going riding with Daddy dearest and Farquhar at the weekend.
“You’ve found Mr Coulter’s employee file?” Eddie asked.
Lauren looked up, the glow from the iMac’s monitor playing across her perfect cheekbones as her face contorted into a smile so condescending it had to be practised. “I have Mr Coulter’s records, yes,” she said. “But he was hardly an employee, he built this place from the ground up. It was him who got the funding for the start-up, won the first big clients.”
Eddie nodded. This much he already knew from digging around the company’s website and the brief conversation he had had with Coulter’s parents. Nice people, he thought, normal, and having the normal reaction to the sudden death of their child: incomprehension.
Coulter had started the Docking Station back in 2002 out of university, taking on freelance gigs at first, cashing in on the emerging boom as companies finally twigged that their online presence needed to be more than a website with a logo and some contact details. He specialised in making websites and online content interactive and user-friendly, and the Docking Station grew from a small start-up to the largest independent graphic design and web content provider in Scotland, its only real rivals being in London. From all accounts, Coulter was successful and respected by his peers.
So why then, was he dead, less than twenty-four hours after the theft of computer equipment from his company?
“Can you give us a print-out and email the files to this address?” Susie asked, pocketing her phone and sliding a business card over the desk towards Lauren, who regarded it coolly.
“Well, I suppose I…”
“If you’re worried about commercial confidentiality, then don’t be,” Susie said. “We’re not interested in who your clients are, or how much you’re charging them. But we are interested in why Brian was killed, and the answer might be in here. We can get a court order and go the long way round, or you can help us out. Your choice.” Susie stared across the table at Lauren, her gaze unflinching. The ice maiden didn’t take long to buckle. She clicked the mouse and a small printer behind her started to whirr gently to life.
“So this will give us his client list and his diary for the last week?” Eddie asked.
Lauren shot him a look. “As you requested,” she replied as she handed over the sheaf of paper.
Eddie gave her a smile then took the sheets, started shuffling through them absently, finally coming to the week Coulter had died. It didn’t look much different from the other entries he had seen, a series of coloured boxes flagging up the different meetings, each box marked with initials.
Eddie spotted something marked for yesterday and paused. Looked over to Susie.
“Did you mak
e an appointment to see Coulter about the break-in?” he asked.
“Yeah, 9.30am, why?”
Eddie ran his finger across the page to an entry marked, SD – Pol Scot. Coulter had blocked out half an hour for the meeting. Generous. Eddie turned back to the print-outs and read out another as he looked up at Lauren. “MH, SG cont. ATD,” he said. “This was marked out for 6pm to 8pm the night before Mr Coulter’s body was found. Any idea what this could be?”
Lauren looked at him for a moment, as though he was a species she had never seen before. “I thought you wanted the client list to cross-check this yourself,” she said, before tapping away at the computer. “Ah, of course,” she said after a moment, more to herself than Eddie or Susie.
“Well?” Susie asked, an edge of impatience in her voice. Eddie saw that her phone was in her hand again.
“It’s a Scottish Government contract we’re advising on, a website built for new services they’re launching next year. Brian was heavily involved in that one, government work is always a big deal.”
Susie nodded. Made sense. “And MH? Who’s that? And what’s ATD, the name of the project?”
“MH is Mark Hayes,” Lauren said. “Used to work here a few years ago, got headhunted by the government in the run-up to the Games. But” – her brow furrowed – “the project is called Online Access Accounts, giving people all their information in one place. OAA. So I’m not sure what ATD means. At the Dock? They might have been planning on meeting here, although Mark just works across the road.”
“By across the road you mean Victoria Quay?” Eddie asked, conjuring up the image of the massive Scottish Government building in his mind.
“Yes, quite,” Lauren said, the boredom creeping back into her tone. “I suppose you could just nip across and ask Mark. After all,” she gave the sheaf of papers Eddie was holding a pointed glance, “you’ve got his contact details sitting in your lap.”
46
Doug watched Dessie and his men file out of the tenement from his living room window, Banks dwarfed by Phillip in front of him and another goon he hadn’t seen in the flat behind him. Christ, had he been in here as well? Or, worse, had he been in the stairwell the entire time, watching, and Doug had failed to spot him?
Banks got into a sleek Jaguar and then they were gone. Doug looked at the empty street for a moment, then turned back to the room. He had work to do. And, if he was right, not a lot of time to do it.
He walked through to the kitchen, grabbing a small stool that acted as a mini stepladder for the top cupboards, then headed for the front door. He locked and bolted it, propping the stool up at an angle. It was the world’s crappiest barricade, but it would hopefully slow down anyone who was determined enough to come through the door.
And someone was definitely coming through the door. After what he had been told, Doug was convinced of that.
He grabbed Redmonds’ laptop bag from where he had dropped it, dug out the cricket bat he kept under the bed, and sat down on the living room sofa, laying the laptop bag down in front of him.
The whisky bottle seemed to push its way into his line of sight, distracting him from the bag. He considered it for a moment, rubbing his hand across his throat where Phillip had grabbed him. One was okay, wasn’t it? After all, it wouldn’t be the first of the day, and he needed something to calm his nerves, help him think straight.
He glanced across to the other sofa, where Susie had sat only a couple of days ago. Remembered her words: I need you, not the booze-soaked, self-pitying twat you’ve become.
He looked back at the laptop bag. Remembered the shame he had felt in London. He had already searched the bag, but how sober had he been when he had done it? What could he have missed? And just now, the thug he hadn’t seen in the flat or in the hallway. Christ, if he was missing things like that, what else was he missing? And for what? Because he was being a typical taciturn Scotsman, turning his problems inward, letting them fester and grow into self-loathing as he tried to drown them with booze?
He weighed the bottle in his hand, decided. Placed it on the floor and slid it under the coffee table.
Time to get to work.
He went through the exterior pockets of the bag first, finding nothing but a charger cable and adaptor and a user manual that had obviously never been opened. Then he unzipped the main compartment. It was as he remembered, a couple of sheets of paper in the bottom where the laptop would sit, the pouches in the other half of the bag empty apart from a stack of business cards he had absently flicked through while they were still in the pocket.
Cursing his earlier sloppiness, he reached for them, eased them out of the pocket. They were cheap cards – probably bought from one of those Internet companies that offer to print a million for a fiver – bearing Redmonds’ name, his number and the title Security Consultant on them. Doug shook his head contemptuously, fanned the cards out and inspected them. All the same, nothing illuminating. Another dead end.
He turned his attention back to the bag, saw nothing out of the ordinary. Colin must have been wrong, there was nothing. If there was another flash drive or hard disk, it wasn’t here. But if it did actually exist, where the fuck was it?
Doug picked up the small stack of business cards, tapping them on the table as he thought, a Morse code of his impatience. What the hell was he going to do next? He sighed, reached forward to stuff the cards back in their pocket. They slid in, or at least the front half did. He felt the back of the stack hit something, splitting the deck and stopping him from pushing them into the pocket fully. Doug felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He put the cards aside, fished into the small pocket with his finger, fumbled around, felt something small and cool and hard at the bottom, wedged half in the pocket and half in the lining of the bag. He managed to get it between his thumb and forefinger and tease it out.
It was a memory card. Not like the flash drive with the image of Susie on it, but a flat, credit card-shaped device that Doug had seen photographers at the Tribune use in their digital cameras. What was it Colin had said? The camera that took the picture of Susie would have used a memory card like this, not a flash drive? Shit, was this it? Was this the master file, the card that Redmonds had first used?
Doug grabbed for his own laptop, booting it up, bouncing on the couch as he waited the eternity it took for the system to spring into life. Too long. He stood up, striding through to his bedroom, grabbing the digital camera he kept on his chest of drawers. He had bought it a few years ago to use on stories: quickly found that, as a photographer, he made a great reporter.
He ejected the memory card that was in it and slotted in the one he had just found. Switched the camera on and flicked it to Review, excitement and something he couldn’t quite place making his breath sharp and shallow and raw. But nothing came up, the display on the back of the camera merely reading, Card not recognised.
Doug frowned, felt the weight of disappointment and frustration bear down on him. What the hell was going on? Why had Redmonds hidden a faulty memory card in the lining of his laptop bag? And what now?
Doug heard his phone chirp in the living room and he made his way through. Saw the caller and smiled. Good news. Finally.
“Hal,” he said. “How’s it going?”
“Fine. Doug, listen, Colin managed to do something with the background on the, ah, picture, you showed us. He managed to get some faces, didn’t take me long to recognise them.”
Doug felt a small pang of guilt for what he was about to do. He could hear the excitement in Hal’s voice, the thrill of the chase, and here he was about to beat him to the punchline. He thought back to what Banks had told him then gave Hal two names. A guess. But a good one.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Hal said. “But how the hell did you…?”
“Contacts, Hal, contacts,” Doug said. “Listen, can you tell Colin that I found another memory card in Redmonds’ bag, but
it’s useless. Tried it in my camera and it’s corrupted or something.”
“Hold on,” Hal said, “you can tell him yourself.” There was a hiss of static as the phone was passed from Hal to Colin, the dull sound of discussion as Hal filled Colin in on what Doug had just told him.
“Doug?” Colin asked, “you moonlighting as a psychic now, or do you like me wasting my time?”
Doug laughed. “Yeah, sorry about that. I was just telling Hal that I’ve found another memory card, but it’s knackered.”
“How do you mean, knackered?” Colin asked, his voice all business now.
“Well, I tried it in my camera, it’s saying ‘card not recognised’. Must be corrupted somehow. I’ll try it in my laptop in a minute, see if there’s anything I can do with it.”
“No,” Colin said urgently. “No, don’t do that. Is it a standard SD card? Shaped like a small credit card?”
“Yeah, that’s it. But what?”
“Yeah, yeah, that makes sense,” Colin said, more to himself than Doug. “Don’t use it in your laptop, Doug, might cause problems. Listen, we’re on our way anyway, Hal wanted to give you the flash drive back in person and check on Susie. And my mum had been nagging us for some granny time with Jen anyway. We’re at City now, will be with you by 3pm. Just keep that card safe until we get there.”
“Why?” Doug asked. “What’s so important about a knackered memory card?”
Colin couldn’t keep the smile out of his voice. “Come on, Doug, I thought you were psychic. Don’t you know?”
Doug swore into the phone, arranged for them to text him when they arrived so he could go and collect them, then wished them a good flight and hung up. Hal and Colin, once again going out of their way to be there for him, help him. They deserved a better friend than he was, an over-demanding journalist who once wrote a nice story for their daughter.
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