They gave their sister the honour of the first drive. I thought the seat might collapse, but the sand was packed tight, and it took her weight. It even supported Jazz when he stepped over the edge and into the passenger seat. I took a few photographs on my family phone and sent the best of them in an MMS to their mother, with a note that said, ‘Being a dad, when the phone allows.’
The work one allowed for another hour, by which time we had started the walk back home. . or rather three of us had, for Seonaid decided that she’d rather ride on my shoulders. When it rang I was able to reach it without having to set her down. The incoming number wasn’t available for display; hardly surprising since the caller was the deputy director of MI5.
‘Where do I find you?’ she asked. ‘At work or at play? Don’t bother pretending,’ she added, grinning, I imagine. ‘I have technology in this building that can tell me exactly where you are.’
‘Who’s that, Daddy?’ Seonaid chirruped. I put a finger to my lips to hush her.
‘Ah,’ Amanda said, ‘I see.’
‘Yes, but don’t worry, I can still listen.’
‘Okay. Your call yesterday, and those items you sent; it seems we have a situation on our hands, one that needs handling, urgently. This isn’t one that can be passed down the line, Bob, not too far at any rate. Who’s been involved in this investigation, since the body was discovered?’
‘The legwork’s been done by a young detective constable. He was reporting to me about something else, but I asked him what he’d been up to on Mortonhall Man. . that’s what they call him. When he told me, I reckoned it might be one for you. His line manager’s in the loop, though. DI Becky Stallings; she’s one of my best, ex-Metropolitan; I can call her in on this. Will I do that?’
‘No,’ she replied, ‘not at this stage. I would like to brief you on this, personally. Once you’re up to speed, you can advise on what happens after that.’
‘Fair enough,’ I told her. ‘When can I expect you and where do you want to meet? My place or somewhere anonymous, like the airport hotel?’
‘Sorry,’ she chuckled, ‘communication breakdown; I should have said “we” rather than I. You never get involved with our regional offices but you know we have them. I have a very bright and very promising man in charge of our Glasgow location. He’s heading in your general direction as we speak. Now that we’ve established where you are, would you mind very much if he came to your home? We can trust your wife’s discretion, I know.’
‘That’s more than I can,’ I retorted. ‘In any case,’ I added quickly, ‘she’s not here; only the kids and their carer. But yes, he can come; I’ll tell Trish he’s an insurance salesman.’
‘He doesn’t look much like an insurance salesman, but that will do well enough. How soon can he arrive?’
‘We’re about twenty minutes away from home, maybe less if Little Madam gets a pony ride all the way. Any time after that.’
‘Good. He was heading for your office, but I’ll tell him to divert to your home address. He should be with you within the hour.’ She paused. ‘By the way, Bob, I’m not sure why, but he’s absolutely bricking it over the prospect of meeting you.’
‘He should be,’ I said. ‘He’s buggering up my quiet family Saturday. What’s his name?’
‘Houseman. Clyde Houseman.’
Mario McGuire
It would not be an exaggeration to say that I was fucking cheesed off over the absence of Jock Varley from the place where he had been told to go and to remain, when we’d turned him loose the day before. It had been touch and go as to whether he was bailed. I’d been against it, in case we were accused afterwards of special treatment, but Andy Martin was in one of his mellower moods, inspired, possibly, by the prospect of a weekend with Alex, and he persuaded me that it would be all right.
I phoned him. I couldn’t help it. When he answered, I could hear someone female singing in the background. ‘Mario,’ he said, as if I didn’t know that, ‘this is a surprise. You’re not going to tell me you need me again, are you?’
‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘In the circs that the last thing I’m going to do. Guess where I am? I’m at Inspector Jock Varley’s house. And guess where he is? I mean it, go on, for your guess is as good as mine!’
‘What?’ he barked, laid-back no longer. ‘You are joking.’
‘Do I sound like Les Dawson? DCI Payne, our Strathclyde colleague, and I are outside the place now; Varley’s vanished and so has his wife.’
‘They’ve probably gone shopping.’
‘That’s been suggested already,’ I said, ‘but I’ve gone off the idea. Jock wouldn’t be stupid enough to break his bail conditions for a trip to the Co-op. No, he’s done a runner. We’ve turned up a solid link between Freddy Welsh and him, or to be exact, his wife. Lowell and I are here to put the thumbscrews on him over it. My feeling is that he’s anticipated that and the pair of them are off their mark. They can afford to; they’ve got going on for a hundred and fifty grand in an offshore bank account, and it won’t be easy for us to touch it.’
‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.
‘Wait here for a bit, just in case I’m wrong and Ella has made him take her up to the Almondvale Centre to push the supermarket trolley. When I’m satisfied she hasn’t, I’ll put a general call out for them, stop on sight.’
‘Will Varley be safe with you if he does turn up?’ Andy wasn’t kidding; he meant it.
‘Probably,’ I replied, ‘if only because my minder’s with me. But you’re right. I’m probably better off picking up Freddy Welsh than sitting here. I’ll talk to the chief before I do that, though.’
‘Best to do so,’ he acknowledged. ‘He’s got his teeth in this one. And he’s got other problems. He needs handling with care just now. One thing I can do,’ he continued, ‘and I will. I’ll warn Alice Cowan. I can’t imagine him being crazy enough to go after her but. .’
‘That really would be crazy,’ I growled. ‘Alice would fucking kill him. But you do that, Andy; you might even ask her if she has any idea where he might go, somewhere we don’t know about, a caravan maybe.’
‘I’ll do that. I’ll let you know if she has any ideas.’
I ended the call. ‘Come on,’ I said to Payne, ‘we’re out of here. We’ll head back to the office and then I’ll call Jack McGurk. . he should be on duty at Torphichen Place. . and tell him to go and lift Welsh.’
There was no way of avoiding that bloody awful traffic around the shopping centre. I took advantage of the crawl to call the Gayfield Square office and ask them to find the number of Jock Varley’s car, figuring that it was bound to be noted somewhere in the station, since he was bound to drive to work from where he lived, and must have had a parking space there.
The duty officer wasn’t too sure where to look. I told him to call the station commander if he had to, even if it meant hauling him off the golf course, and get back to me, pronto. ‘Is it that urgent, sir?’ he asked. I could sense Lowell Payne wince as the question boomed from the speaker of the Lexus’s Bluetooth system.
‘It’s a matter of life and death, Sergeant,’ I snapped. ‘Yours, unless you get the finger out and do what you’re bloody told.’
I was beginning to feel a little peckish as we reached the outskirts of Edinburgh. ‘Fancy a bite of lunch?’ I asked Payne. ‘There’s a nice Indian in Davidson’s Mains.’
‘Sound good to me,’ he replied. ‘I’ll pick up the tab and put it on my expenses.’ He may have been joking, he may not.
‘Which I will probably have to sign,’ I pointed out. ‘There may be a slight ethical dilemma there, Lowell. My idea, so I’m paying.’
They do very nice pakora in that place and an exceptional lamb bhuna; I was beginning to salivate as we got there. I found a vacant parking slot right outside and pulled into it. I was on the point of switching off, when my phone sounded. ‘Bad timing,’ I muttered but I took the call, expecting it to be the Gayfield sergeant, or, with a large piece of luck,
somebody from the Livingston office to tell me that Varley had turned up at home and had been arrested, as I’d ordered.
But it wasn’t. Instead, I heard the crisp, controlled voice of Detective Inspector Sammy Pye, who is so blatantly hell-bent on being a high-flyer that some of his more cynical colleagues call him Luke Skywalker, a nickname that secretly I love. I’m sure he’ll get there, but it’s not my job to make it easy for him; rather the opposite, I have to make him prove his worth.
‘There’s been an incident, boss,’ he reported. ‘I’m there now. You might want to see this for yourself.’
‘It better not be a shoplifting, Sammy,’ I warned him, ‘or a flasher in the Commonwealth Pool.’
‘No, sir,’ he replied smoothly, ‘it’s a bit more serious than that. It’s a double homicide; found on an open area in Leith that you can see from your house.’
‘Are you suggesting that I failed to report it?’ I growled. I like to rattle Sammy’s cage every so often, for reasons aforesaid.
‘No, boss,’ he replied, ‘but Paula did.’ Before I could nail him for that he moved on. ‘We have human remains here, burned very efficiently. Dr Grace has just arrived and had a look. She says she won’t even go firm on the gender until she’s got them back to the mortuary. Are you coming down or will I let her have them as soon as the photographer and video guy are done?’
I glanced at Payne. He didn’t look hungry any more, and I confess that I’d lost my appetite for pakora, let alone the lamb bhuna. ‘I’ll be down, Sammy,’ I told him. ‘Won’t be long.’
I left our parking place for the next lucky punter and headed for Leith. I didn’t need specific directions; the area Pye had described is my home patch. But I hadn’t a clue what he had meant about Paula. I thought about calling her, but decided against it, not on hands free with a passenger by my side.
When we got to the scene a perimeter had been set up, bounded by tape. A couple of dozen, maybe thirty spectators stood along it, ogling. A few of them held pint glasses, overspill from the pub along the road, no doubt. ‘Excellent,’ I grumbled. ‘For the benefit of those who didn’t know that something had gone off here we have to advertise the fact with a fucking Day-Glo border.’
The entrance was guarded by a couple of plods. The younger one stepped in front of my car. ‘Sorry, you can’t come in here,’ he said.
‘Oh dear,’ Payne whispered and put a hand over his eyes as if he didn’t want to witness something awful, but I’d been that young rookie myself once.
I showed him my warrant card. ‘I can, Constable,’ I told him before he had time to say ‘sorry’ again. I patted him on the shoulder. ‘But I like to see the job being done right.’ I nodded towards the watchers.
‘One suggestion: you might like to ask those people with the pint tumblers if they know there’s a by-law against public drinking.’
‘Yes, sir,’ he responded, and headed towards them.
‘Is there?’ my passenger asked, when he was out of earshot.
‘To tell you the truth, Lowell,’ I admitted, ‘I’m not sure if it covers this area, but all I said was to ask them if they know.’ As I parked, I looked across, and saw about one-third of the audience heading back towards the pubs in Pier Place.
Luke Skywalker was headed for us, but I waved him off, for I’d forgotten about a call I’d intended to make. I found the Torphichen Place CID number and hit the button; when Becky Stallings answered I was surprised. ‘What are you doing there?’ I asked. ‘You’re not on today.’
‘No, sir,’ she agreed, ‘but my newly promoted partner, the shiny new DI Wilding, is being conscientious. He decided that he needed to go into Gayfield to do some more reading up on the open investigations.’ I understood that. Ray’s new division had rather a lot of unsolved files; that was one of the reasons why he’d been put there. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘faced with a choice between redecorating our bedroom or coming in here to chum McGurk. .’
‘No contest,’ I agreed, ‘but come on, Becky. Get the professionals in. You’ve got two inspectors’ salaries coming into the house now; put some of it back into the economy, even if it is the black part. Anyway I’m glad you’re there; this is probably a senior officer job. I want you and Jack to find Mr Freddy Welsh, and invite him to join us for a chat.’
‘I thought we were holding off on him, boss,’ she said, ‘till we had something firm on him.’
‘We have,’ I told her. ‘He’s got an offshore company that we didn’t know about, and weren’t meant to, I’m sure, and he’s been using it to bung the Varleys regular slabs of cash, also out of the reach of the tax man.’
‘Nice one. That will be an interesting chat. Will Inspector Varley be sitting in on it?’
‘That’s what I’d hoped, but the so-and-so’s disappeared. He seems to have jumped bail and done an effing runner. I’m waiting for Gayfield to get me his registration number so I can put out an alert.’
‘That’ll be a waste of time,’ Stallings chuckled. ‘I had my old man in my earhole last night about Varley’s bloody car. It’s still in the station park, in Ray’s space, so he can’t get his in. He had to put it up in Greenside yesterday. It cost him eighteen quid, so maybe this isn’t the time to be telling him to get the decorators in.’
‘Oh Christ,’ I moaned, ‘that’s all I need. Becky, run with this, will you? Varley was bailed yesterday lunchtime; he was lifted from Gayfield first thing Thursday morning, and told not to go back there when we let him go, so he couldn’t have picked up his car. I should have worked that out. I doubt if he’d have time to get on a flight to anywhere last night, but he would have this morning. Alternatively, he could have caught a train.’
‘He or they, boss?’
‘Yes, yes, both of them of course; she’s gone too. Get people on to checking all the Livingston taxi firms. See if any of them picked up Jock and Ella. If so, where were they taken? That’s not exhaustive though; they may have had a lift from a neighbour. Get some uniforms into their street knocking doors, asking of anyone did help them out but also when they were seen last. Then check with the airlines; find out if anyone flew them out, not just from Edinburgh either, Glasgow and Prestwick as well. They could be in Spain by now. They could be any fucking where.’
‘What about the train?’ she asked.
‘Yeah I know,’ I conceded, ‘that’s just as likely, maybe more so. Not all train tickets are booked on the internet. Simple souls like me can still roll up at Waverley, buy a ticket and get on.’
‘Not so easy on a Friday,’ she pointed out. ‘They’re packed that afternoon and evening, with English people who work here going home for the weekend.’
‘Do what you can, Becky,’ I sighed. ‘They could be on bloody Eurostar by now. They could be in Paris. They could be in Bruges. . that’s in fucking Belgium,’ I added, lifting a line from one of my favourite movies of all time.
‘Get it under way, then you and Jack go and lift Welsh. He’ll probably scream “lawyer” at you. Let him have one, without question, but don’t talk to him until I get there. The chief’s steaming about this; he may even want to sit in on it himself. Go to it; you’re a star. Princess Leia, no question.’
‘Who?’
‘Sammy Pye’s sister,’ I chuckled. ‘Never mind; it’s my day for movie metaphors, that’s all. It’s a habit I picked up from Bob Skinner.’
The van was fifty yards away from where I’d parked. Sammy hadn’t mentioned it when he’d called but I knew that was where the action was, as there were lots of people in paper suits gathered around it. Payne was among them by that time; the look on his face made me glad that we’d been summoned before we’d eaten and not after. Arthur Dorward met me halfway there, with a suit for me. The Edinburgh force’s forensic genius works for a national resource centre now, but he’s still the peppery, irreverent wee bastard that we’ve all come to know and tolerate over the last twenty odd years.
‘Wear it please,’ he said. ‘We’re not anywhere near finished ye
t and I don’t want you contaminating my crime scene; especially not you. With your lineage your DNA must be like a kaleidoscope.’
I did as I was told; there’s never an option with Arthur. I approached the burned-out vehicle carefully stepping round several wheel tracks that the SOCOs had marked off for impressions to be taken. I doubted that it could do any good, since some of them must have been made by the van itself and its tyres no longer existed to be ruled out, but thorough is thorough, and it is spelled D. O. R. W. A. R. D.
I knew what was inside the van. I’d been at another fire scene a few months before and I was still having flashbacks to that, but I couldn’t bottle it. Word would have spread faster than the flames that had consumed what had once been a Vauxhall Movano, according to the half-melted markings on its grille. I put on a face mask then took a look inside; a long look. The trick is to imagine a bonfire, one made with tree trunks rather than logs and twigs, and pretend that’s what you’re examining. As I did that, in the same moment I realised what Sammy had meant about Paula.
I had a vague recollection of her getting up in the middle of the night and muttering something when she came back to bed about ‘kids having a party over there’, and about Guy Fawkes night not being in July.
Mario, Mario, the things we come to dwell on; the destinies, the lives, that hinge on a single action, or on the lack of it. If only you’d got up to see for yourself, and raised the bloody alarm, a lot of things might have been different and maybe, just maybe. . somebody might still be alive.
But you didn’t; instead you merely grunted and went back to sleep.
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