‘And while you’re there, chase up Edinburgh plod for me, will you? Supposed to have a lookout request on the go for Leah MacNeil. Make sure they’re not sat on their arses twiddling their thumbs.’
‘Yeah. You’ll have to wait till I’m done here, though. Got a media briefing in five. Hopefully I won’t be spending most of it holding Her Ladyship’s hair back as she barfs all over the front row.’ The smile in Rhona’s voice was loud and clear. ‘Not that most of them wouldn’t deserve it, mind. Then it’s back to interviewing nonces for the rest of the day. Which is about as—’
‘Thanks, Rhona.’ I hung up. Tapped the phone against my palm. Might be worth tuning in to listen. Then again, if Alice really was in that bad a state, maybe better not.
We passed a minibus full of grumpy-faced pensioners. A taxi with a sobbing man in the back. A Transit with two blokes singing along to something in the front. An ancient Ford towing a trailer full of logs.
Then a wide stretch of nothing but us and the river and the hills.
Franklin risked a glance back over her shoulder, even though there was a perfectly good rear-view mirror, right there. ‘They still following us?’
‘Will you keep your eyes on the road?’
‘I can’t see them, maybe they’ve … No. Rusty yellow Volkswagen Golf at twelve o’clock.’
I tried not to grimace, I really did. ‘Of course they’re at twelve o’clock, they’re following us.’ Poked at the screen on my phone, bringing up the web browser and scrolling down the Calmac timetable. ‘OK, we’ve missed the twelve fifteen, and the next ferry’s not till one.’
She glanced at the dashboard clock. ‘Plenty of time.’
‘Ah … According to this, we need to be there twenty minutes before it sails.’
‘Going to be tight, then.’ The car’s engine changed pitch as she put her foot down and the needle crept up to eighty. ‘Can’t believe we didn’t make the Golf, back in Glasgow.’
I slithered down in my seat. Three cars back, the Volkswagen accelerated to match our speed, pulling out to overtake the red van in front of it.
Gotcha.
Sat up straight again, turned in my seat and pointed my phone’s camera at the rear windscreen.
And immediately, Henry popped up like a gopher, big happy head filling the picture. ‘Get down, you daft lump.’
He stayed where he was, but his expression got even more glaikit.
Took hold of his collar and pulled him into the footwell. ‘Stay!’ Then took the shot. Turned and faced the front again.
‘You get them?’
‘Find out soon enough.’ Calling up the photo showed it wasn’t great, but there was just enough grainy detail when I zoomed in to make out the number plate. Right. Rhona was already doing me a favour, so I texted the pic to Shifty instead.
Run this through the PNC for me.
I need an ID, address, and anything else
you can get on the driver.
They’ve been following us.
SEND.
The response was surprisingly prompt, given he was meant to be giving a media briefing.
SHIFTY:
I am not your bloody skivvy! I’m running a
bloody murder inquiry here! I’ve got three
dead kids and one missing!!!!!!!
Which was actually a fair point. He really did have more important things to do.
I smiled across the car at Franklin. ‘You haven’t got DC Watt’s mobile number, have you?’
23
Franklin stood at the front rail, peering down into the ferry’s loading bay. The huge metal prow was raised, like the open beak of a vast blue-and-white metal parrot, banging and clanging coming from below as the last of the vehicles was driven on board. ‘Any sign of it?’
Wind grabbed at her hair, making it stream out to the side, water breaking in spumes of white against the dock’s pilings. Henry scuttered up and down on the end of his leash, ears flapping.
‘Over there.’ I raised a finger and pointed, past the apron with its twelve lines reserved for vehicles waiting to board – two of which were already full, ready for the next sailing – to the parking area away to the right, down by the pebbly shore. Where that rusty yellow Golf now lurked. ‘Must’ve missed the loading cut-off, so they either abandon the car, or abandon the chase.’
‘Hmmm …’ She narrowed her eyes at it. ‘So they’re definitely on board.’
‘Came a hell of a long way to give up now.’
Franklin turned, resting her back against the rail instead, looking up at the wheelhouse as it towered over us. Picking the hair out of her mouth and setting it free to writhe in the wind again. ‘Still nothing from John?’
‘Useless as he is ugly.’ I tried to flex out the knots in my right leg. ‘You want to run the PNC check instead?’
‘I’m not your—’
‘Do it myself, but they tend to frown on members of the public hacking into the Police National Computer.’
She made a pained expression, then slumped. ‘Fine, but you owe me a sausage butty, remember?’
‘Deal.’ I handed her Henry’s lead and sodded off inside.
‘Thanks.’ I pocketed my change, picked up the cardboard coffee-holder thing and the wee paper bag with the not-sausage-butties in it.
The ferry was busier than you’d think, for the one o’clock sailing on a blustery Sunday in November. The outside seating area at the stern was virtually empty, though. Instead people were clustered inside, on the rows of vinyl seats or around the puggy machines – feeding in their money and pressing buttons to a soundtrack of dings, tweedles, and flashing lights.
A couple of fake-tan tourists in neon hiking gear were going pale and sweaty as the ferry forged its way against the wind. Deck rising and falling, wallowing from side to side. Making limping anywhere with two decaf lattes and a pair of pre-packaged cake slices even more difficult than usual.
Should’ve been paying more attention to where I was going, but I was more concerned with not falling on my backside, and thumped sideways into a fat bearded bloke in a stripy top. ‘Sorry.’
‘Sorry.’ An apologetic shrug, even though I was the one who’d barged into him.
Still, at least …
‘Are you all right?’ He put a hand on my arm. ‘Only, you look like you’ve seen a—’
‘Hold this.’ I thrust the coffees and cakes at him, then pushed past, heading for the narrow passageway through to the other seating area.
Rows of angled seats, a couple of small tables, lots of bored-looking people, and a handful of screaming children running in circles. Piles of luggage against the bulkheads – wheelie cases and cardboard boxes of things.
Where the hell was …
There: by the window, staring out at the darkening sky.
I limped straight over, thumped a hand down on her shoulder. ‘What’s the matter, couldn’t get your car on the boat?’
Helen MacNeil froze for a moment, then turned and scowled at me. ‘It’s a free country.’
‘I told you I’d chase up that lookout request, and I did. They’re looking for her.’
Franklin burst into the passenger area, dragging Henry with her, making a beeline for me. ‘Ash: you’ll never guess who owns that yellow …’ She stopped and stared at Helen.
‘You’re too late. I already know.’ Pointing.
‘What’s she doing here?’ Franklin stepped closer. ‘What are you doing here, Mrs MacNeil?’
Wait.
I looked at Franklin. ‘It’s her car.’
‘No, it belongs to Nick James, the journalist who got washed away yesterday.’
Great. Of course it did.
‘You stole a dead reporter’s car?’
Helen opened her mouth, but a voice behind me got there first, ‘Technically, we borrowed it.’ No need to turn around to know who that was: Jennifer Bloody Prentice.
I turned on my heel, and limped off. Pausing only to retrieve my coffees and cakes from
the confused-looking bearded bloke.
Jennifer’s voice brayed out behind me. ‘Oh come on, Ash, don’t be like that!’
‘… all drivers return to their vehicles …’ The nasal announcement echoed through the metal stairwell as I hobbled down to the car deck, the air thick with the scent of diesel. Walking stick clanging on the steps.
Franklin was waiting for me, leaning on the roof of our manky Ford Focus, eyes narrowed, mouth pursed. Voice hard and clipped. ‘Like to tell me what that was all about?’
‘No.’
She climbed inside. Pulled on her seatbelt as I settled into the passenger seat. Radiated Arctic cold at me. ‘So, according to Ms Prentice, she had an arrangement with Nick James, where she could use his car if she needed to go incognito.’
‘And you believed her? That woman could lie for Scotland. If they ever make it an Olympic sport, she’d beat Donald Trump.’
Henry scrabbled his way between the front seats, covering the handbrake and grinning up at me with his tongue hanging out. That was the trouble with Vera giving the greedy wee sod a sausage.
Muscles rippled along Franklin’s jaw. ‘Prentice says you’re helping her write a book about Gordon Smith: “The Coffinmaker ~ hunting the world’s most dangerous serial killer”.’
‘Hmmph.’ She’d changed the title then.
The car thrummed as the ferry’s engines changed tone – a loud growl you could feel in your chest.
Franklin’s voice rose over it, spitting out the words as she bashed a hand off the steering wheel. ‘What the hell were you thinking? We’re in the middle of an investigation and you’re passing info to a journalist?’
‘Of course I’m not.’
A grating siren blared out, orange lights flashing as we bumped to a halt.
Franklin started the engine. Glared at me. ‘You’ve got a bloody cheek, writing about a case we’re still working on! You two-faced—’
‘I’m not writing anything! I want sod all to do with Jennifer … Pain-In-The-Arse Prentice, and I told her that. But she won’t take no for a bloody answer.’
‘Then why did she tell me—’
‘Because she’s a liar!’ My hands ached into tight fists. ‘I told you that already. You really think I’m going to slip her information? After what she did?’
Franklin’s mouth opened. Then closed again. ‘What did she do?’
‘None of your sodding business.’
The sirens got louder as a flap in the stern hinged down, a fat bloke in high-viz and a hardhat directing the cars and lorries out through it into the cold grey light of the afternoon.
Two minutes later we were rattling off the ferry and up onto dry land again, in a fug of angry silence.
Rothesay curved around the water, a marina full of yachts sitting between the ferry terminal and a line of old brown brick buildings. A three-sided town square straight ahead. And more bland buildings to the right. Someone had painted the last lot in faded shades of pastel yellow, pink and blue, presumably in an effort to distract tourists from their uninspired façades.
But in front of them sat the flat green carpet of a putting course. Three couples slowly whacking their way around it in jumpers and woolly hats.
Franklin jerked her chin at them, forcing a hint of jolly into her voice, as if that would make everything all right. ‘Looks like we found our photo location.’ Turned right, onto the main road. ‘God’s sake, is there nowhere to park?’
A weird end-of-the-pier-style building sat alongside the putting green – a big domed middle, fronted by a pair of red-roofed pagodas. Then another putting course on the other side. Another group of idiots out braving the wind.
I pointed. ‘Pull in there.’
‘It’s a bus stop.’
‘You’re a police officer. We’re hunting a serial killer!’
‘It’s still a bus stop.’
‘I’ve got a blue badge. Stop the damn car.’
‘Right!’ She slammed on the brakes, getting an angry fusillade of horn blasts from the Transit van behind us. ‘Out. You get out here and I’ll go find somewhere to park.’
And just like that, we were back at war again.
‘Fine.’ I clipped on Henry’s lead as the Transit launched into another barrage. ‘Come on, wee man.’
He followed me out onto the road, and as soon as I’d closed the door, Franklin roared off.
God save us from unreasonable detective bloody sergeants.
Henry and I crossed over to the other side, stomping along the pavement that skirted the putting course. Then took the tarmac path into it and did a lap of an ornamental fountain – its sprays of water jerking and twisting away in the wind. Definitely a lot colder than it’d been back home.
We followed a line of blue railings, up a long ramp, and out onto the promenade.
Had to admit, the view wasn’t half bad. Green-and-grey hills, buffeted by fast-moving clouds, light and shadow moving across the concrete-coloured sea. Probably was quite something in summer.
In November, it was freezing, though.
Henry sniffed at pretty much everything we passed, widdling on half of it as we hunched our way along the waterfront. Seals bobbing in the troubled water. Herring gulls scrawking as they scudded past, sideways.
Might not be a bad place to retire, this.
‘There you are.’ Franklin, hands on her hips, padded jacket zipped up to her neck. She cleared her throat. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know you and this Prentice woman had a history. I didn’t mean to upset you.’
Like I was a sulky toddler.
A sigh rattled out to be whipped away by the wind.
Maybe I was? Barging about, whingeing and moaning …
Yeah.
I nodded. ‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘Good. Thank you.’ Franklin stomped her feet on the tarmac. ‘Now we’re all friends again, can we get this over with, please? Losing all feeling in my toes here.’
Might as well.
I pulled out the photo of Peter Smith and the unidentified young woman, the paper crumpling in my hand as the wind tried to whip it from my grasp. ‘Over there?’
We went back down the ramp, out onto the putting course.
According to the flag, this was hole number seventeen, looking back towards the sea and the hills beyond, a palm tree off to one side.
‘Waste of time, of course.’
‘What is?’ Franklin dug her hands into her padded pockets, shoulders curled up around her ears.
‘All … this. Pointless. We should be out there hunting Gordon Smith, not faffing about here.’
‘You really are a ray of sunshine today, aren’t you?’ But she was smiling. ‘What about the victims’ families? Don’t they deserve to know what happened to their loved ones?’
‘Of course they do, but that’s not as important as catching the scumbag who killed them.’
Franklin gave me a half nod, half shrug. ‘Tell you what, how about I get us a couple of putters and we can play a round? Might cheer you up a bit. You can pretend it’s like a go on the “wooden horsies”.’
‘No thanks.’ I turned and hobbled across the grass, making for the road again.
‘Oh come on, Ash, I’m trying to apologise here!’ Hurrying after us. ‘What’s wrong with putting?’
‘Once upon a time, there was a man called Adam Robinson. He found out his wife was having an affair with someone at her golf club, so do you know what he did?’
‘Talk to her about it, like a rational grown-up?’
We’d reached the pavement. Stood there, waiting for a break in the traffic.
‘He started saving up his urine.’
‘OK, not so rational, then.’
A taxi drifted by and I hurpled across the road behind it, making the other side as an open-topped bus rumbled past. Kept going down a narrow street between one of the few branches Royal Bank of Scotland hadn’t shut and a carpet shop.
‘Adam collected it in two-litre bottles, you know, li
ke Diet Coke, that kind of thing. Then once a week, he’d take the most mature samples and go up the golf course in the dead of night. Filled each and every hole, from the first to the eighteenth with his rancid piss.’
‘Why on earth would he—’
‘So that every time someone sunk a putt, they’d have to stick their hand in the hole to fish out their ball.’
Franklin’s mouth opened wide, tongue sticking out, eyes creased almost shut. ‘Oh … Yuck!’
We crossed another road, and entered another tiny street, passed yet another carpet shop.
‘He kept that up for six months, then decided the only thing left to do was march into the clubhouse with a shotgun and blow holes in every male over the age of fifteen.’
We emerged from the tiny street into a big open space, with a moat and a partially collapsed castle in the middle of it. A saltire flag snapping and crackling in the wind above.
‘Killed three people, crippled six, injured about a dozen.’ I shook my head. ‘Genuinely a terrible shot.’
‘What happened?’
A gull worried away at a discarded polystyrene container, chips spilling out into the gutter.
Henry rushed at it, firing out sharp-edged barks till the lead brought him up short.
Unimpressed, the gull stared back and kept on pecking.
‘Well, by the time an Armed Response Unit got there, Adam had barricaded himself in the golf pro’s office, with his wife and a bottle of Glenfarclas he’d liberated from the club bar.’
‘This doesn’t have a happy ending, does it?’
‘Hell no.’ We followed the road, around the castle. ‘Took the crime-scene cleaners four days to dig all the tiny bits of skull out of the wooden panelling. So, no: I’m not keen on a game of putting.’
A wet popping wheezing noise gurgled out of Franklin and she rubbed at her stomach. ‘You still owe me that sausage butty.’
I leaned on the windowsill, rolling my right ankle in small clicking circles. That’s what I got for walking all the way to Rothesay Police Station from the putting course.
Our meeting room was pretty much identical to the ones you’d find in any Police Scotland building. Someone had tried to glam it up with a series of ugly watercolours and a wilting pot plant, but it hadn’t really worked.
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