Lawless

by Alexander McGregor

  ‘Only me. But I wasn’t aware you needed any assistance. I thought you did very well all by yourself.’

  They both laughed. But the knockabout wasn’t quite over.

  As he opened the door of the Mondeo he looked over at the nearest field and the remains of autumn crop which had been harvested. ‘Potatoes?’ McBride asked.

  ‘No, rape.’

  ‘Figures,’ he said.

  41

  He was ten minutes into the drive home when his mobile sounded. He allowed it to ring several times while he conducted the usual debate with himself about whether to break the law and answer it while he drove or be sensible and pull over. A hands-free kit was never an option. They were only for people who wanted to look like someone off the Starship Enterprise.

  It was a pleasant morning. A light frost was in the process of melting away under a struggling rising sun and a buzzard was circling over an unplanted field on his left. He wasn’t in any kind of a hurry. He drew to a halt.

  Petra’s voice did not sing as usual. There was no melody – just a losing battle with irritation. ‘You’re up bright and early, aren’t you?’ It was not an observation, more a remonstration. ‘I passed by round at your flat but you’d gone. Must be something important, I thought to myself, to get you on the road at such an uncivilised time.’

  He knew he was being asked where he was. He also knew he could not tell her without indicating where he’d been. It was not something he wanted to do. So he sidestepped it. ‘Pot, kettle, black,’ he said lightly. ‘What gets you out and about at this “uncivilised” hour?’

  ‘Just thought we should have a chat but you’re probably much too busy.’

  ‘Never too busy for my favourite detective,’ McBride said, trying to soothe her. ‘Anything in particular on the agenda?’

  ‘Bits and pieces.’ Lightness was returning to her voice. ‘DNA results are back. Can we meet?’

  They arranged to join up in an hour to run together. It was just enough time to allow him to drive back into town and shower once more. He did not want the scent of the woman he had slept with to still be on him.

  When he turned to lay his phone back on the passenger seat, McBride realised for the first time that he had stopped at the end of the narrow road leading to Castle Huntly half a mile away. He gazed across the flat expanse of fields at the sturdy fortress in the distance and thought about Bryan Gilzean. The 500-year-old castle had once been the home of the Earl of Kinghorne and later the first Earl of Strathmore but was now one of Her Majesty’s open prisons, a sort of Scottish Colditz but without bars, machine guns and jackboots. Nor was it remotely escape-proof. It was for inmates coming to the end of their sentence and held lifers, among others, being prepared for their eventual release back into society. They’d left the bars behind in their previous institutions.

  One day, McBride reflected, Bryan Gilzean would probably be scheduled for shipping down the motorway from Perth Prison a dozen miles away to finish his time in the splendour of the baronial halfway house. Unless he was released beforehand with a fat compensation cheque in his pocket for a wrongful conviction, McBride mused.

  * * *

  When they ran towards each other along the beach that separated their two houses, they raced to see who would be first to reach the bench at the end of the Esplanade where they had agreed to meet. The sprint was illogical but it made sense. Both were competitors. McBride knew he was. Petra pretended to herself she wasn’t. She ran hardest and arrived at the seat first.

  ‘What kept you?’ she asked, her words coming in short gasps as she fought to regain her breath. ‘I was about to go home.’ She smiled at her triumph.

  McBride took a long look at her. Studied the fashion-model, Slavic cheekbones, the slender neck, the light tan shining under the thin film of sweat her burst of acceleration had produced. He wondered how her bedroom was laid out and decided it was unlikely to be as clinically spartan as the one where he had just spent the night. He doubted, too, whether anyone lucky enough to share her bed would be subjected to a rigorous anatomical examination.

  He was still deep in admiration when she spoke again. ‘Do you need a rest or should we start out?’ she asked.

  McBride flashed a smile and, still without speaking, turned and ran away from her, sprinting quickly down on to the edge of the sand where it met the water and was firmest. ‘Tell me about the DNA,’ he called over his shoulder.

  By the time she caught up with him, her breathing was coming in gulps once more. She drew level with his shoulder and matched him stride for stride. They continued to increase the pace together for another hundred yards then gradually eased back. Behind them, twin sets of footprints marked their route along the damp sand.

  Petra’s composure returned first. ‘Clean as a whistle,’ she said suddenly. ‘The letters from your lethal friend contain a few prints and DNA traces but nothing unexpected. Needless to say, you’re all over the envelopes. So’s your local postman. We also took elimination samples from the delectable Janne at your publisher’s and the receptionist at the Apex Hotel. Beyond them, nothing. Not unexpectedly, there’s even less on the notes themselves. Apart from Janne’s traces on the first one, we found nothing.’

  ‘What about the stamps or envelope seals?’ McBride asked.

  ‘Stamps are self-adhesive – no spit required,’ she replied. ‘The envelopes had been moistened but not with saliva, with ordinary water.’

  She waited for his reaction. He remained silent.

  ‘You know what all this means, don’t you?’ she asked.

  McBride nodded. ‘Yeah, we’re not dealing with an amateur – never thought we were.’

  Petra turned to look at him. ‘So?’

  ‘So, if it’s not an amateur, maybe it’s a professional – like a cop or cops,’ McBride said flatly. ‘You might recall I’ve been trying to tell you that for some time.’

  They had come to the end of the shoreline and had struck out along a stretch of grassland where a group of boys were doing their best to fall off a roundabout in a small playground. Two dogs broke away from their careless owners and charged in the direction of the runners. Without speaking Petra and McBride lengthened their strides to outpace them. By the time they succeeded, they had reached a path within touching distance of the main rail line connecting Aberdeen and London. An express thundered past, disturbing a large gathering of swans which had settled in an inlet. They rose in unison and started running inelegantly over the water before of McBride and Petra in a perfect, unhurried, whispering formation of white feathers, as graceful as they had been awkward when they had fought to become airborne.

  Petra had been trying to read his thoughts, imagining he was still chewing over his killer-cop theory. She broke his concentration. ‘What if you’re only half right?’ she said quietly. ‘What if that’s what you’re supposed to think?’ She stopped speaking, looking at him, waiting for his reaction.

  McBride said nothing until the swans had disappeared over a clump of trees on the other side of the rail line. When he spoke it was not, as Petra had expected, to protest. ‘Been thinking about that too,’ he told her. ‘Could be an ex-cop. Could be someone who just hates them. Maybe the wrong person was banged up sometime. Maybe it’s an elaborate red herring. The bastard may just dislike women. Maybe it’s a load of old rubbish.’ He covered another ten yards before he spoke again. ‘So why involve me?’ McBride asked, suddenly serious. ‘I’m being played like some kind of monkey. What did I ever do to the organ-grinder?’

  Petra swivelled her head until she was looking directly at him. ‘Maybe you’re supposed to solve it,’ she told McBride. ‘Then again, maybe he just likes making a fool of reporters.’

  42

  McBride sat watching the four men in the far corner of the public bar of The Fort. He studied their faces but there was no discernible reaction to anything that was taking place. They could have been playing poker instead of dominoes. He marvelled, as he always did, at the ability of the
participants to hold so many of the oblong pieces in a single hand at the same time. Whenever he tried it, they fell on to the table – usually face up.

  McBride preferred the public bar when he wanted time to think. No one tried small talk unless you encouraged it and, if you didn’t, no one complained. Next door in the lounge they described you as peculiar if you remained silent any longer than five minutes. Nobody was ever going to chat you up in the wide room with the L-shaped public bar and you were unlikely to find anyone there who would make you feel like whispering sweet nothings in their ear.

  He was still intermittently contemplating the tabletop athletes and the remains of his pint of lager when he was aware someone had soundlessly appeared at his side and was preparing to engage him in conversation. He turned to look at the intruder and recognised the small, neat figure of Adam Gilzean. All McBride thought at first was how out of place he seemed in a bar.

  ‘I hope I’m not disturbing you, Mr McBride,’ Gilzean said, ‘but I was told I might find you here.’

  McBride couldn’t imagine who might have known he would be in the bar. He could think of nobody, far less anyone who also knew Adam Gilzean, but let it pass. He motioned to his visitor to take the empty stool beside him, asking, at the same time, if he wanted a drink. Gilzean accepted the seat but declined the refreshment. So, it isn’t exactly a social call, he thought. Not that Adam Gilzean was ever likely to make one on anybody. What does he want?

  McBride knew it would not take him long to find out. The precise man with the beard seated beside him was never anything other than direct but he was not normally as nervous. Maybe it was being in a bar that upset his composure.

  ‘I’m anxious for a progress report,’ Gilzean said. ‘Bryan is too. I visited him yesterday and he was asking – he always asks.’

  McBride did not know how to answer. There was a lot of progress – and none. And there was nothing he wanted to share meantime with the man who had come calling. What could he tell him, anyway? That another two women were also dead and that none of it made any sense? So, instead, he asked his unexpected companion a question. ‘Tell me, the tie that was used to kill Alison – any idea where it came from?’

  The response was swift, much faster than he had anticipated. ‘None,’ Gilzean said without pausing to think. ‘It was black, wasn’t it? It obviously belonged to the person who killed her. Bryan did not own a tie of that colour. I know because he had to borrow one of mine for his mother’s funeral.’

  McBride nodded, saying nothing. Before he could reply, Gilzean spoke again. ‘It could have been part of a uniform, couldn’t it?’ His eyes never left McBride’s face. He seemed anxious for a reaction.

  McBride was left wrong-footed. It was not an experience he was overly familiar with. Whatever he had expected from Gilzean, it had not been a probing question. He would play it out. ‘Hadn’t thought of that,’ he said lightly. Lying was easy when you had done it as often as McBride. ‘What kind of uniform do you think?’

  Gilzean hesitated, uncertain how to reply. He appeared to be turning something over in his mind. ‘Well,’ he said at last. ‘Not a lot of people wear black ties. Bus drivers … naval officers …’ He paused. ‘And prison officers.’

  ‘I can think of a few others,’ McBride said.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Undertakers. And waiters in Italian restaurants.’

  Gilzean smiled but only with his mouth.

  ‘And we’d better not forget policemen,’ McBride added finally.

  The man perched uncomfortably on the stool to his left laughed – but still without his eyes. ‘Yes, policemen,’ he said softly.

  Stay with it, McBride told himself. He raised his eyebrows, higher than was reasonable. ‘You think it was a cop?’ He tried to sound surprised.

  ‘Stranger things have happened,’ Gilzean said.

  ‘Why would a policeman murder Alison?’ McBride retorted.

  ‘Why not? They’re human like the rest of us – or inhuman.’

  They fell silent. McBride drained his glass. He pondered a refill. Wondered what was in Adam Gilzean’s mind. Deliberated where to steer the conversation. Sometimes he wasn’t as good at manipulation as he imagined. He decided to change direction. ‘Is Bryan bearing up?’ he asked.

  Gilzean’s intensity deepened. ‘Just,’ he said, ‘but I don’t know for how much longer …’ His voice trailed away. He briefly turned his head away from McBride then looked back at him, fixing him with an unblinking stare. ‘I did have a thought,’ he said. ‘Suppose Alison’s killer had struck again. If the murder could be linked to hers, that would prove Bryan was innocent, wouldn’t it? He couldn’t have done it if he was in prison, could he?’

  ‘You have a point?’

  ‘Perhaps that’s something for you to think about in your investigations.’

  Gilzean rose from his stool. His visit was at an end. He extended a hand to McBride and apologised again for his intrusion. McBride shook hands and told him to feel free to do the same any time he felt like it.

  As Adam Gilzean walked quietly from the bar into the street, McBride wondered if he had come to ask him something or to tell him something.

  43

  McBride had waited for daylight for the best part of two hours. When it came, it crept into the room the way a woman tiptoes into your head – softly at first so you don’t hear the approach but then she’s walking so loudly you can’t think about anything else except the sound she’s making.

  He’d had noisy females in his mind the whole time he’d lain in the darkness doing his best to hurry the arrival of dawn. Two of them – one he’d slept with, the other he knew he wanted to. But it hadn’t been Anneke Meyer or Petra Novak who had caused him to waken before he was due. It had been the man who had shared his company for a short time the night before – the man who wouldn’t accept a drink. Adam Gilzean was troubling him. He was prodding tentatively at him but leaving marks that wouldn’t go away.

  When he rolled the blind open, McBride knew it was the kind of day that wasn’t going to get much better – for the weather or anything else. Dawn hadn’t been accompanied with a rising glow of sunlight or much else to feel optimistic about. It was dull and grey and dropped over him like a prison blanket.

  On mornings like that he never wanted to run, especially if he also needed to think. These were the days when he oiled up the Trek and cycled with the weather. He didn’t ride fast, didn’t ride slow, just steady – and for several hours.

  When he took the machine he preferred to most women he’d met down from its hook on the wall of the room that doubled as his office and went outside with it, McBride searched the sky for a patch of blue. He couldn’t find any but somewhere in the north the shade of grey was paler. He settled into the saddle and pedalled towards it.

  Fours hours later, Adam Gilzean still loitered in his thoughts but the expenditure of energy had caused the endorphins to kick into McBride’s bloodstream and the familiar feeling of well-being they induced was permeating through him.

  Kirriemuir had dropped away behind him and he rose out of his seat and stood on the pedals for the deceptive incline that would carry him into Glamis. Over his left shoulder he caught sight of the turrets of the castle where the mother of the queen had spent some of her childhood. It awakened long-forgotten memories of an assignment as a junior reporter when he’d stood in the wrong place and finished up in a line of dignitaries being introduced to Her Majesty by someone who had no idea who he was. It was a story Caroline used to delight in recounting whenever he was in danger of forgetting his humble journalistic origins.

  He remembered other ways the woman who had once adored him used to keep his conceited feet on the ground. How she pricked his arrogant bubble but never with anything but gentleness – how she refused to take him seriously when he was at his most pompous. And he remembered Simon and the family they had once been.

  So his long, lone journey into the hills behind Dundee had been worthwhile, as he k
new it would. By the time he negotiated the last rises and falls in the road that brought him in a gentle sweep into the outer suburbs of the city, his head was at peace – even if his heart wasn’t.

  The feeling of euphoria lasted for precisely one minute.

  He passed a graffiti-camouflaged row of shops in a perimeter housing estate and glanced absently at the newsboards outside a dilapidated general store. An Evening Telegraph billboard screamed at him – ‘Brutal Murder of Young Woman in City Flat’.

  Instinctively he knew who had committed it even though he had no clue who that might be.

  44

  McBride cursed his foolishness at leaving home without his mobile. It was an illogical and pig-headed act he repeated every time he cycled. He knew he should carry it with the assortment of tyre levers and spare parts that filled the back pockets of his jacket. But it was a link with civilisation that seemed at odds with the sense of freedom he sought when he rode towards the best weather. It did not matter that it might be an invaluable aid for assistance in the event of an accident – or that it could be a hotline to the leading officer in a murder inquiry.

  He muttered obscenities about himself to himself and dropped his hands low on to the hooks of the handlebars. Then he eased the slick Campagnolo ten-speed Chorus gears into the highest ratio he could handle that would enable him to arrive home in the shortest time possible. He tramped hard on the pedals and ignored the excruciating surge of pain caused by the sudden release of lactic acid into his legs.

  Fifteen minutes later he was back in the Esplanade flat, sweat seeping from him, his thighs nipping in agony and his fingers stabbing out DI Petra Novak’s number on his phone.

  She responded immediately. ‘Campbell? Where have you been?’ she asked tetchily. ‘I’ve been trying to raise you all morning.’

  McBride did not attempt to explain his forenoon activities or his stubborn idiocy with his phone. ‘Sorry – been out of contact,’ he said pointlessly.