Franklin let out a low sigh, then unclipped her seatbelt. ‘I’m here because I punched a superintendent in the car park.’
‘In the car park?’ Callum smiled. ‘There’s a euphemism I’ve never heard before. Sounds painful.’
‘He deserved it. Next thing you know: no more Edinburgh for you, pack your bags, you’ve been posted to Oldcastle.’ Sounding about as pleased as someone who’s just discovered their routine check-up has turned into emergency root-canal surgery.
‘Welcome to Mother’s Misfit Mob.’ He pointed through the windscreen. ‘Shall we?’
They climbed out into the drizzle and hurried up the path to number 18. Stood beneath the little portico waiting for someone to come answer the bell.
‘So?’ Franklin stuck her hands in her pockets.
‘So what?’
‘What did you do?’
‘Oh …’ Well, she was going to find out sooner or later. ‘I cocked up. Contaminated a crime scene, because I wasn’t paying attention. Too busy trying to get a conviction.’ A shrug. ‘You know Big Johnny Simpson?’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘Well, he walked on a murder charge. Because of me. And no, I’m not happy about it.’ At least that part was true.
‘So the team’s a dumping ground for the unwanted and the incompetent. That’s just great.’
‘I wouldn’t say—’
The door opened. ‘Hello?’ A middle-aged woman squinted out at them, hair piled on top of her head, a red pinny smeared with grey stains covering polo-shirt and cords. She wiped her hands on a dishtowel. ‘Sorry, I was in the studio. Can I …’ Her shoulders dipped as she looked them up and down. ‘I’m flattered, but I honestly don’t want any copies of The Watchtower, leaflets about the Bible being a guide to modern life, or a discussion on accepting Jesus into my heart. So if you don’t mind.’ She tried to close the door, but Callum stuck his foot in the way.
‘Mrs Carmichael? Police. Is Glen in?’
‘It’s Ms, and no.’ Her nose came up. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got clay on the wheel.’
Franklin held out her warrant card. ‘There’s been an accident: we just found your son’s car in a field south of the city. He’s not in it. We’re worried for his safety.’
A hand fluttered to her mouth. ‘Glen …’
‘Now can we come in?’
The kitchen was warm enough, every surface covered with pots and bowls and mugs. Some less wonky than others.
Callum stuck the kettle on to boil, then picked up a blue mug with a white rim. ‘These are very good. Did you make them yourself?’
Ms Carmichael sat at the small kitchen table, worrying at her clay-greyed dishtowel. ‘Is Glen all right?’
Franklin pulled out a chair and sat down opposite her. ‘We don’t know. We’ve been in contact with the hospitals and doctors’ surgeries, but nothing so far. He’s—’
‘Oh God …’ Her eyes reddened. ‘Glen.’
‘Let’s not jump to any conclusions.’ Callum pointed out through the kitchen wall in the vague direction of Shortstaine. ‘We didn’t see anything in the car to suggest he’s badly hurt. He’s probably just lying low and feeling a bit bruised and stupid.’ That, or Glen had massive internal injuries and was drowning in his own blood somewhere, but his mum definitely didn’t want to hear that. Nothing wrong with leaving people with a little hope.
Franklin sniffed. ‘Ms Carmichael, your son had something in the boot of his car that we’re concerned about. Something that didn’t belong to him.’
She stiffened. ‘My poor wee boy could be lying dead in a ditch and you’re here accusing him of stealing?’
Callum put teabags in mugs. ‘I know it sounds a bit insensitive,’ he gave Franklin a pointed look, ‘but we’ve got to investigate this kind of stuff. It’s important.’
‘It’s because of those burglaries, isn’t it?’ She poked the table with a clay-greyed finger. ‘He was twelve, OK? Just a kid. His dad, God rest his useless little soul, ran out on us the year before. Glen had a hard time adjusting.’ A shrug. ‘His therapist said he was just trying to get attention. Pushing me to see if I loved him enough to put up with all his crap.’
The kettle grumbled to a boil, spouting steam into the air.
‘It wasn’t even money he took. It was stupid things: a standard lamp from next door, a bust of Daley Thompson from the sports centre, all the cutlery from Terry’s Bistro on Minerva Road. It wouldn’t even have been a thing if the bloody sports centre hadn’t insisted on pressing charges.’
Callum fished the steaming teabags out and dumped them in the bin. ‘What happened with the girlfriend?’
‘Gah …’ Ms Carmichael stared at the ceiling for a moment. ‘Angela. He wouldn’t leave her alone. Always buying her little presents and writing her little notes. Following her home from school.’ She looked down when Callum put a mug of tea in front of her. ‘I tried to talk some sense into him, but you know what teenage boys are like – all hormones, spots, and erections. Her parents called the police, and he was in trouble again.’
The fridge was mostly full of yoghurt and chardonnay, but there was half a pint of semi-skimmed that looked reasonably fresh, so Callum stuck it in the middle of the table. ‘Nothing since?’
She wrapped her hands around her mug. ‘It took a while, but he grew up a bit. Got over his dad abandoning us for some leggy tart in the roads department. Started doing well in school again. Went to university and got an MA in business management.’
‘Sounds like a bright kid.’ Callum passed Franklin a slightly wonky green mug, but kept his eyes on Ms Carmichael. ‘Is it OK if we take a look at Glen’s room?’
‘What?’ She blinked at him. ‘Oh, yes. Right.’ She scraped her chair back and stood. Led them out of the kitchen and down a small corridor to a room at the end with ‘SECRET EVIL VILLAIN LAIR’ printed on a sign hung on the door beneath a radiation symbol. She opened it and stepped to one side, mug of tea clutched to her chest. ‘Of course, by the time he graduated no one was hiring. That’s the recession, isn’t it?’
The floor was barely visible through the patina of discarded socks, T-shirts, jeans, and pants. Walls covered in bookshelves – science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, mostly. A TV hooked up to a PlayStation. A poster of a young woman in a bikini, riding a motorbike. Never mind leathers, she wasn’t even wearing a crash helmet. Some people just didn’t take basic safety precautions. A collection of photographs pinned to the wallpaper, above a small computer desk that was heaped with envelopes and bits of paper. And a double bed covered in more clothes.
Every breath in here tasted of stale digestive biscuits and mouldering cheese.
Ms Carmichael shrugged. ‘Don’t look at me, I told him when he turned sixteen: you’re a grown-up now. You tidy your own room, or you live in a pigsty. Your choice.’
Franklin picked her way into the middle of the room. ‘Was Glen interested in museums?’
‘When he was little we’d go to the art gallery, and we’d laugh at all the statues and their naked willies, but other than that …’ A shrug.
‘Hmm …’ She leaned over the desk and pulled a photo from the wall. Held it out. ‘Is this him?’ Her finger hovered over the central figure in a group of three. It looked like a selfie: three young men, all with grins and tins of lager. Checked shirts and tan braces.
The one on the left had a full-sized Grizzly Adams beard, two squint teeth dominating his smile, all crowned by brown hair cropped close at the sides and floppy on top. He’d got one of those piercings, where they stuck a big round plug in the lobe to stretch it wide – making a dirty big hole. As if he was a Masai tribesman, instead of a peely-wally wee bloke from Oldcastle with a lumberjack fixation.
The one on the right’s arm snaked out of the picture – so he’d be the photographer – a shoulder-to-wrist tattoo of Clangers, Soup Dragon, and the Iron Chicken blurring into a colourful mush where the lens couldn’t fo
cus. Long hair pulled back in a ponytail. A variety of studs spread about his nose, eyebrow, lip and ears.
And the one in the middle looked as if he’d inherited his great grandad’s haircut and glasses. Though where he’d got the massive soup-strainer moustache from was anyone’s guess. He was straightening his bow tie, showing off an oversized steel wristwatch on an oversized leather strap. More piercings.
Ms Carmichael squinted at the photo. ‘No, that’s his friend Ben. Glen’s the one on the left with the ridiculous beard.’ She grimaced. ‘Why these hipsters all want to look like old men from the thirties is beyond me. But there you go.’
‘I see.’ Franklin produced her notebook. ‘Can you tell me what your son was wearing when he left the house this morning?’
A snort. ‘This morning? He’s not been back here for six weeks. Him and his friends have been staying at the flat they’re doing up.’ She sighed, looking around the room with its explosion-in-a-laundry-basket décor. ‘Brett’s got a degree in environmental science, Ben’s got a BA in aquaculture, and none of them can find jobs. Recession.’
Franklin scribbled something in her notebook. ‘And where is this flat?’
‘They bought it at auction. The man who lived there killed himself in the living room – bank was foreclosing on his mortgage.’
‘Yes, but where is it?’
‘Hold on, it’ll be in here somewhere …’ Ms Carmichael rummaged through the piles of paper on the computer desk, before emerging triumphant with what looked like a council tax bill. ‘Flat twelve, one thirty-five Customs Street, Castleview, OC twenty-one, six QT.’ Then she turned and put a hand on Callum’s arm. ‘You’re sure Glen’s … not hurt?’
He gave her his best reassuring smile. ‘We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything.’
‘Why did you have to lie to her?’
Callum shrugged, slowing the car at the junction. ‘What did you want me to tell her: we’ve no idea if your wee boy’s dead or not? Think that would’ve helped?’ The bridge over the River Wynd made a graceful cobbled arc above the water, marking the border between Blackwall Hill’s twisted knot of housing estates, the Wynd’s well-ordered Georgian streets, and Castleview’s functional industrialisation. All of it grey and miserable in the drizzle.
He took a left at the next roundabout, down a long drab street – blocks of terraced flats, punctuated by shopping centres with more boarded-up windows than new shops.
‘What if Glen Carmichael turns up dead from a punctured lung, or a ruptured spleen?’
‘Then he’ll still be dead whether she’s panicking about him or not. Let her have … Oh, hold on.’ He slammed on the brakes and pulled their manky Vauxhall into a space between a delivery truck and a skip.
‘What the hell do you think you’re—’
‘I’ll only be a minute.’ He scrambled out of the car. ‘Honestly, five tops.’ Callum clunked the door shut, waited for a bus to grumble past, then hurried across the street and into one of the few shops still open.
The Royal Caledonian Building Society’s carpet was going threadbare in the middle, drawing a straight line from the door to the counter. A large middle-aged lady sat behind the bulletproof glass, reading a copy of the Castle News and Post. She looked up as he reached the counter and pulled on a smile about as natural as a porn-star’s breasts.
‘How can I help you?’
Callum thumped his warrant card on the countertop. ‘Someone stole my wallet and I need you to give me some money from my account.’
She made a face, as if he’d just slapped a used nappy down in front of her. ‘I’ll have to speak to the manager …’
The sharp-faced woman pulled on her glasses and peered at her computer screen. ‘Well, Mr MacGregor, you’ll be glad to hear that we appear to have recovered your cards. Someone tried to use them to redeem a number of items at … let me get this right … at a “Little Mike’s Pawnshop”? In Kingsmeath?’
Little sods were probably trying to get hold of samurai swords, crossbows, and ninja throwing stars.
Callum crossed his fingers. ‘Did they find my wallet?’
Please, please, please, please.
She poked at the keyboard. Frowned. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t actually have that information. But the proprietor has destroyed the cards, and as there’s been no successful purchase made on the account, there won’t be any excess to pay.’ The frown turned into an expectant smile, as if she was waiting for congratulations and a round of applause. ‘We’ll get new cards issued to you in the next couple of days.’
‘A couple of days? But I need to buy—’
‘I’m sorry, but the cards have to be reissued from head office. I’ll flag it as urgent, but it’ll still take a couple of days. Now is there anything else I can assist you with, Mr MacGregor?’
‘Yes: I need to take some money out of my savings account.’
‘Ah. I see …’ She made the same face as the woman behind the counter.
Franklin glowered at him as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat. ‘What happened to “five minutes, tops”?’
‘Don’t start.’ He hauled on his seatbelt and started the car. Pulled away from the kerb. ‘Just been bent over a bank manager’s desk for the last quarter of an hour, being shafted without lubricant. And do you know what for? Fifty-three pounds and seventy-two sodding pence.’ He held up the tiny handful of notes and coins. ‘Because that’s all the money we’ve got.’
Down to the end of the road, and right onto the main road.
‘It’s my sodding money! Why do I have to beg for my own fifty-three quid? How is that fair?’
Franklin shook her head. ‘Do you do anything other than moan?’
‘I’m not moaning, I’m ranting. It’s different.’ He took a right, into another street full of tenements, heading towards MacKinnon Quay. ‘How much did we pay to bail those thieving gits out? Billions. Whole sodding country up to its earholes in debt, people losing their jobs and their houses, all so they can enjoy their bloody yachts and champagne!’
A smile. ‘Do you honestly think the manager of a wee building society sub-branch, in a nasty little shopping centre, in a crappy corner of the mediocre cesspit that is Oldcastle, has a yacht?’
‘That’s not the point.’
Straight through at the roundabout and onto Customs Street. It skirted the edge of the docks, with their large blue cranes and towering tanks of offshore mud, all secured behind a twelve-foot-high fence topped with razor wire.
Just past the harbour, a row of small cottages – jammed in tight as teeth – lined the left side of the road, but the houses opposite were a lot less quaint. They were built into the side of the hill, about six feet above road level: the kind of buildings councils put up to punish people for being too poor to afford somewhere better to live. Long, brutalist rows of grey flats, four storeys tall.
Oh, they’d made an attempt to tart them up, put brightly coloured cladding on the top floor, arranged big concrete planters out front on the four-foot-wide strip of grass that separated the flats from the vertical drop to the road below. But the cladding was chipped and faded, the planters cracked and full of weeds, the grass a patchwork of yellow and brown – landmined by generations of terriers and Alsatians.
Callum slowed the car. ‘Which one is it?’
She checked her notebook. ‘Number one thirty-five.’ Then tapped a finger against the glass, as if she was counting time for a very small orchestra. ‘One fifteen. One sixteen. One seventeen …’
‘Glen and his mates had three university degrees between them, and they bought a flat down here? So much for modern education.’
‘One twenty-two. One twenty-three …’
‘Suppose they spend six months doing it up, who’d be daft enough to buy it when they’ve finished?’
‘One twenty-eight. One twenty-nine …’
‘Bunch of idiots.’
‘One thirty-two. Thirty-three …
’ She pointed. ‘That’ll be it there. Top floor.’
Callum parked outside, next to a dilapidated Transit van with, ‘DANNY & MIKE ~ CHILDREN’S ENTERTAINERS’ on the side. Someone had daubed the words, ‘THEYZ PEEDOFILES!!!’ underneath, in what looked like blue Hammerite.
He climbed out into the rain. Locked the car soon as Franklin joined him on the pavement. ‘You ready?’
She rolled her eyes. ‘It’s a wee boy with a degree in business management, Constable MacGregor, not Osiel Cárdenas Guillén.’ Franklin climbed the steps up to ground level, disappearing from view.
A sigh, then Callum followed her.
Down at road-level, the cottages opposite acted as a windbreak, but up here the drizzle came down sideways, driven in on frigid gusts. MacKinnon Quay sat off to the left, then the grey water of Kings River, then the green line of Dalrymple Park with its big granite monument on the other side. Castle Hill lost in the low grey mist.
On a good day it was probably quite some view, but this wasn’t one of them.
Franklin jabbed a finger at the intercom. Then grimaced and pulled it clear. She sniffed the end of her finger and grimaced again. Wiped it on the rough grey wall.
Callum took out a biro and used it to press the button marked ‘SERVICES’. Holding it down until someone inside finally got tired of the noise and let them in. He smiled at her. ‘Trick of the trade.’
Inside, the corridor was lit by a single flickering bulb in a flyblown fitting. Concrete floor, walls painted magnolia above waist-height and a grubby green below it. The smell of frying onions mingled with the hospital stink of disinfectant. An open stairwell led up into the gloom.
Yeah, Glen and his mates were definitely kidding themselves if they thought anyone was going to buy their flat.
Franklin led the way upstairs.
And Callum tried not to stare at her backside, he really did, but …
Heat rose up his face, making his ears tingle. Yeah, probably better not to ogle his new teammate’s rear end. But it was magnificent.
Across the first-floor landing and up another flight of stairs. And there it was, right in front of him again.
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