Ahead of the Game

by JD Kirk

  Detective Superintendent Mitchell, to her credit, had not immediately started tearing strips off Logan in front of Hamza and the Uniforms. Instead, she’d instructed him to walk with her, and then had set off along the street so she could deliver his bollocking in a marginally more private setting.

  A bollocking from this senior officer was quite unlike the bollockings he’d received from the last one, of course.

  Mitchell hadn’t once cast aspersions on his parentage, insinuated that he enjoyed sexual intercourse with members of the animal kingdom, or labelled him as any part of the female reproductive system. Nor did Logan feel, at any point during the conversation, that the Detective Superintendent was one wrong word away from breaking his nose with a well-aimed headbutt, or punching his mouth clean off his face.

  It was all quite refreshing, really.

  But, while the delivery style may have been different, the general gist of it was the same. Logan had fucked up, and for that, there would be consequences.

  “Is it my fault, Jack?” Mitchell asked, as they strolled side by side along the quiet residential street, nosy neighbours ducking out of sight when they passed, only to pop back up again at their windows the moment they had strolled on. “Did I not make myself clear?”

  The house, and the officers standing outside it, were some way behind them now. Logan had glanced back just once, and found Hamza and the Uniforms all pretending not to be watching.

  “No. I mean yes. You did,” Logan said. And then, in the howling void of silence that followed, he added the missing, “Ma’am.”

  “I made it clear that DI Forde was to remain in Inverness?”

  “You did, yes,” Logan reiterated.

  “Well, that is funny,” Mitchell said. “Because, DI Forde isn’t in Inverness. He’s in Fort William. So, if, like you say, I made my wishes clear, then either you misunderstood a simple instruction—which doesn’t bode well for your future career prospects—or you deliberately disobeyed a direct order. This, also, does not bode well for your future career prospects.”

  They reached a T-junction at the end of the road. Logan followed Mitchell’s lead as she hung a right and proceeded in that direction, her hands tucked in behind her back.

  Strolling along like that felt a bit like being back on the beat. So much so, in fact, that he automatically fell into step beside her.

  How many miles had he covered like that over the years, he wondered? How much shoe leather had been worn away down dodgy back alleys and shady streets?

  “So, which is it, Jack? Idiocy or mutiny?” Mitchell pressed, dragging him back to the here and now.

  Logan screwed up his face. “Bit of both,” he said.

  If he’d hoped this might thaw the ice a bit, he was sadly mistaken.

  “I really suggest you start taking this seriously, Detective Chief Inspector,” Mitchell warned. “I didn’t drive all the way down here to ‘banter.’”

  Just as well, too. In all the time he’d known her, Logan couldn’t recall the DSup ever displaying much of a sense of humour. There were rumours that she’d been fun once, but that person had long-since been buried under the weight of rank and responsibility.

  The primary school where Ross Lyndsay worked stood ahead on the left. Ross’s lollipop hut was locked up, but a surly looking man with silver hair and coal-black eyebrows was hobbling towards it across the school grounds, muttering below his breath.

  “It’s bad enough you disobeying my order, but then to not return my calls? To keep me out of the loop on the investigation? That’s disciplinary-level stuff, Jack. All of it is, in fact. And you bloody well know that.”

  “Aye. I should’ve called. I messed up,” Logan admitted. “Ben… DI Forde… He was desperate to get stuck back into things. We were coming down here, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him that he had to stay behind.”

  Mitchell shot him a look that was a sharper comeback than any words she could have said.

  “I know, I know, I should’ve just told him. I should’ve left him back in Inverness,” Logan continued. “But he’s been a godsend. We almost had a riot outside the station earlier, but Ben went out and calmed it all down.”

  “A riot?” Mitchell said, stopping abruptly.

  “Aye. But it was nothing, really,” Logan insisted. “Like I say, Ben…”

  His voice trailed away into silence as he realised his error.

  “You sent Detective Inspector Forde—a man recovering from a cardiac condition so severe it required an extended stay in hospital—to deal with a riot?”

  “It wasn’t that recent…” Logan began, but another look from Mitchell made him think better of it. “I take full responsibility, of course, but I didn’t send him. He went by himself. I wasn’t there at the time, so he was the senior officer.”

  “Who shouldn’t have been there in the first place,” Mitchell said.

  A movement from across the road caught Logan’s eye. He watched, only half-listening to the reprimands from the Detective Superintendent, as the silver-haired man unlocked the crossing patroller’s shed and withdrew a long, high-vis coat.

  “Shit!” Logan exclaimed, loudly enough to draw the man’s attention and stop the Detective Superintendent in her tracks. “Of course! What a bloody idiot.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Logan tore his eyes from the man in the shed and turned his attention back to Mitchell. “Are you firing me?”

  “What?”

  “Right now. Are you firing me right now?”

  Mitchell took a step back, caught off guard by the question. “There’s a process that needs to be followed. You know that.”

  Logan did know that. He was counting on it, in fact.

  “Right. Well, why don’t you head back up the road and get cracking on that?” he suggested. “Then, give me a shout when you’ve decided what you want to do.”

  “You don’t get to give out the orders here, Jack,” Mitchell reminded him. “You get to listen while I—”

  “Aye. Very good,” Logan interjected. “Listen, you do what you have to do. There’s just been a breakthrough on the case.”

  “A breakthrough?” Mitchell echoed. “How do you know?”

  Logan grinned at her, then turned and strode away. “Because I’m the one who just made it.”

  DI Forde sat at his computer, reading over emails and enjoying what was, by anyone’s definition, a good cup of tea.

  Some early toxicology work had come through for the victim. The report suggested that Fergus dabbled lightly in both alcohol and cannabis, although the second one was such a faint trace he may have just spent time in the company of someone who partook of the occasional puff.

  Another email had left him scratching his head. It was from the headteacher at Fergus’s old school. They’d contacted him after getting his details from Lochaber High to try to get some background on Fergus and maybe identify his next of kin.

  The message was a brief one. It read:

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t know a Fergus Forsyth, and have no record of one ever working here. Apologies.’

  Ben took a sip of his tea and contemplated the message for a few moments, then he rattled off a reply, and this time attached a photo of the victim that LHS had provided.

  Normally, they’d have sourced a few pictures from the victim’s social media, too, but Fergus didn’t appear to be on any. Not unusual for teachers, though. The last thing most of them wanted was their private lives being picked over by the kids in their charge.

  He had just clicked send when two things happened simultaneously—the arrival of Tyler and Sinead, and the ringing of his desk phone.

  The DI gave the junior detectives a quick wave and a nod, then picked up the phone and rattled off a third of a greeting, before the voice on the other end cut him off.

  “Ben. It’s me,” Logan said. The slight echo on the line and the rumble of an engine revealed he was driving. “What’s the latest?”

  “Hello, Jack. The latest?
Not a lot, really.” He explained about the toxicology report and the email from the headteacher. “How about you? Find anything interesting up the road?”

  “Just Mitchell,” Logan said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She drove down to talk to me,” Logan said.

  “Could she no’ have just phoned?”

  Ben could hear Logan shifting around in his seat. “Aye, well, she wasn’t having a lot of luck getting through,” the DCI said. “But anyway, what’s happening with the school kids and staff? They still out front?”

  “No, long gone,” Ben said. “Why?”

  “I need to talk to someone at the school.”

  “That works out nicely, then. I said someone would go in to update them this afternoon. You be back in time? It’s about three now.”

  Logan confirmed that he’d go straight there, then asked about Lana Lennon.

  “Sinead and Tyler are just back in from talking to her right this minute,” Ben said, beckoning the detectives over. “Here, I’ll put you on speakerphone and you can ask them.”

  “Alright, boss?” asked Tyler, leaning so close to the phone it gave a screech of feedback when his voice looped back around at him via Logan’s car.

  “Aye. Fine,” Logan said. “What’s the story?”

  “Do you mean with Lana Lennon?” Tyler asked.

  “Naw. In Balamory,” Logan spat.

  Tyler blinked. “Boss?”

  “Jesus fu—Of course, I mean with Lana Lennon. What did you get from her?”

  Deciding that it was probably in everyone’s best interests, Sinead took over from DC Neish. “Nothing concrete, sir. She was quite open about the domestic violence, though. He’s been hitting her for years. She’s adamant she doesn’t want to press charges, though.”

  “Tell him about—” Tyler began, but Sinead nodded and held up a hand to silence him.

  “There was something else, though. Lana said that Clyde claimed he’d been married before, but that his ex-wife was dead. Said he’d killed her.”

  The only sound from the speakerphone was the rumbling of an engine and the faint whistling of wind, then Logan said, “Jesus. Did she believe him?”

  “She says no. Not until now, anyway. But, given everything that’s happened…”

  “Get onto it,” Logan instructed. “And talk Lana into pressing charges for the DV. Easy arrest warrant, and it means we can batter down his workshop door and see what he’s hiding.”

  “We sent her home about half an hour ago,” Sinead said. “Escorted her up the road a little bit in case the press tried to follow her.”

  “Shower of arseholes,” Logan muttered, in case anyone on the call wasn’t already fully aware of his feelings on the loathsome, bottom-feeding, parasitic bastards. “And did they?”

  “No, sir. I think DI Forde singing Lady Gaga to a crowd of rioting school kids probably let most of them knock-off early,” Sinead reasoned. “Not going to top that for a front page.”

  “Fame at last,” Ben remarked, but Logan didn’t share his sense of humour on the matter.

  “They won’t have gone far. They’ll be around somewhere,” he insisted. “Up to their elbows in someone else’s shite, seeing what they can dig up. Do we have any word on Clyde’s whereabouts yet?”

  Sinead and Tyler both looked to DI Forde to provide the response on that one.

  “Not a thing,” he said. “Cameras on the trunk roads haven’t picked him up, and he hasn’t driven past any polis cars today. He’s probably still local, but laying low somewhere.”

  Logan cursed under his breath, too quietly for them to make out the actual words over the rumbling of the engine, but loud enough that they got the general idea.

  “Extend the search. Get Mantits to authorise extra resource. I want the bastard found,” the DCI instructed. “Tyler, Sinead.”

  “Boss?”

  “Get back onto Lana Lennon. Get as much information as you can from her about this supposed ex-wife of Clyde’s. And get her to press charges for the DV. That’ll make our lives easier.”

  “I’ll give her a phone,” Sinead said.

  “No. Go to her house. Do it face to face. You’re asking her to break the habit of a lifetime. She’s covered for the bastard for years. A phone call’s not going to cut it. Softly, softly,” Logan said. “Then, if that doesn’t work, play on her relationship with Fergus. Make her reflect on just what her husband is capable of. Whatever it takes to get us that arrest warrant.”

  The thinning of Sinead’s lips and the way she pulled back her hair suggested she wasn’t entirely comfortable with the order, but she responded with a, “Will do, sir,” and left it at that.

  “Good. Hamza and I will swing by the station on my way to the school,” Logan said.

  Ben checked his watch. “You’ll be cutting it fine for getting there before the last bell,” he said. “Wouldn’t you be better going straight there?”

  “No, I need to pick something up,” Logan explained. “The key Shona took from Fergus’s stomach. Have it ready for me, will you?”

  “The key, boss? You figured out what it opens?” asked Tyler.

  “No,” Logan admitted. “But I might just have thought of someone who can.”

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  His name was Alan Dunne. To the pupils—and most of the staff—of Lochaber High School, though, he was better known as ‘Janny.’

  He sat behind a shonky desk in a room that was forty percent office, forty percent workshop, and twenty percent ‘other’. The exact make-up of that ‘other’ was hard to define. It was part kitchen, part warehouse, part security station, and part cleaner’s cupboard.

  The janitor sat on a throne of boxes and paper towel bales, carefully studying the small sliver of metal that had been placed in a clearing on the desk before him.

  “Any ideas?” Logan asked.

  “Give us a minute.”

  Alan struck Logan as a man clinging desperately to the end of his tether. He’d eyed the DCI with suspicion when they’d been introduced, and had sighed heavily no less than six times in the brief conversation that had followed, before graduating to full-scale eye-rolling when Logan had asked him to take a look at the key.

  At first, Janny had given the evidence bag just the briefest of glances, before shaking his head and saying he had no idea. Logan had insisted he take more time, though, so the caretaker had begrudgingly led him to the office/workshop/other, and spent much of the time since then sitting staring at the thing in silence.

  With yet another weary sigh, Alan hefted his own bunch of keys onto the desk. It was much larger than the already impressive bunch the janitor at the primary school in Invergarry had unlocked the lollipop hut with, and touched down on the desk with a heavy thunk.

  Picking up the bag, he turned it over, checking the key from both sides. Then, he set it down again, and began rifling through his own bundle, fingers pecking away like hungry birds.

  “No, no, no. No. No, no,” he muttered, dismissing the first few keys without a second thought.

  “Could it be a locker or something?” Logan asked.

  Janny stopped long enough to give him a snide look, then went back to his bunch of keys. There had to be a hundred or more of the things on the big metal loop, Logan thought. They were all shapes and sizes, from big old-fashioned iron things to those designed for tiny padlocks.

  None of them were quite right, though, and as the caretaker continued on through the bundle, Logan felt his hopes begin to dwindle.

  Sure enough, some minutes later, Alan finished comparing his own keys with the one in the evidence bag, but failed to find a match.

  “Bugger it,” Logan grunted. “You’re sure you don’t have one like it?”

  “You watched me go through them, didn’t you? You watched me go through them there, just then.”

  Logan had indeed watched. Like a bloody hawk. There had been a few close calls, but nothing similar enough to warrant any further investigatio
n.

  “Aye. Shite. I thought, maybe…” It was his turn to sigh this time, although far less forcefully than the janitor had been doing for the past half hour. “Never mind. Worth a try.”

  “Sorry I couldn’t have been more help,” Alan said, getting to his feet, even as he slid the bag across the desk. “Now, I’ve fallen behind thanks to all this. So, if you don’t mind…”

  The janitor was a big man, yet he seemed to have been afflicted by Small Man Syndrome, making him more aggressive than there was any need to be. Logan thought about pointing this out to him, but bit his tongue. What would be the point?

  Besides, if he had to spend his days fixing the messes caused by several hundred teenagers, he’d probably be a right crabbit bastard, too.

  “Well, if you think of anything else,” the DCI said, pocketing the evidence bag.

  “I won’t,” Alan insisted.

  Logan smiled through gritted teeth. “Well, if you do…”

  “I won’t, though, will I? I’ve checked all my keys. You just watched me. And a right waste of bloody time it was, too. If it’s not there, then…”

  He blinked. Frowned. Shot a look at Logan’s pocket where the key had been stashed.

  “What?” Logan asked. “What is it?”

  “Forsyth…” the caretaker said, rolling the name around inside his mouth. “He was PE, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s right. Why?”

  Alan stepped past the detective without a word, then raised a hand, crooked a finger, and beckoned for him to follow.

  Tyler smiled and nodded, his hands gripping the wheel, his mind miles away. Beside him, Sinead spoke about seating plans for the wedding, the deposit for the photographer, the music they’d play, and the food they’d eat.

  They’d gone over all this before. So she had told him, anyway. He had vague memories of discussions not unlike this one, but was unable to recollect many of the details. He knew his own responsibilities for the day—turn up and follow instructions—and sort of glazed over the rest of it when Sinead brought it up.