Dark of Night

by Oliver Davies

  No, I didn’t snoop into anything else. I have my principles, so you can stop wringing your hands and moaning about people’s rights to privacy… as if you don’t know perfectly well that most governments, with their ‘plausible deniability,’ use my kind all the time. It doesn’t seem to bother you when it’s your ass that’s being protected.

  I got up to stretch and mix myself a nice, nourishing smoothie for dinner, switching screens on my laptop, just in case, when I realised that I hadn’t triggered the blinds yet. Light and shadow would still be showing through the curtains, if anyone was watching out for signs of movement. I fixed that, belatedly, but sure enough, a few minutes later, somebody knocked. I released the button on my blender and went to see what the hell they wanted this time.

  “Hi,” Jessica Kerr smiled up at me, Miguel at her shoulder, carrying a lidded casserole dish held in oven mitts. “We were just about to eat, and Miguel thought maybe you’d appreciate some hot food too, as you’re working on a deadline.”

  His idea, was it? I very much doubted that. I turned my inner snarl into a pleased but dismissive smile.

  “Oh, that’s very thoughtful, but I’m fine, really, thanks. I’d rather just keep working. I’ve got plenty of stuff to keep me going.”

  “Nonsense!” she declared. “Surely you can spare a few minutes to have some real, healthy food?”

  Real, healthy food? What did she know about real, healthy food? Miguel shrugged apologetically for her ignorance, even rolling his eyes a little. Dammit, she wasn’t going to back off! I made a big deal out of checking the time.

  “Twenty minutes, tops then, seriously. After that, I have to get back to it.” Well, it was worth a try. Resigned to more awful jabber, I retreated so they could invade, whisking a mat out for Miguel to drop the pot onto while I got the table set up. Jessica stared, frowning a little, at my laptop.

  “Is that Arabic?” she asked, surprised. She hadn’t expected to see anything like that.

  “No, it’s Farsi actually, same alphabet but four extra letters.” I walked over to flip the lid down then quickly grabbed more mats, cutlery and glasses, dumped them on the table, and finished blending my smoothie.

  “What does it say?” Good question.

  “Oh, a lot of nothing. It’s a boring interview with Joelle Behlok, a last-minute substitute article for an Iranian magazine that has to go to press at two… and they’re three hours ahead of us there.” That was a pretty smooth, fast bit of BS, I thought, rather pleased. I set places for everyone and claimed the single side of the table for myself. Miguel gestured for Jessica to seat herself so he could follow with the pot.

  “Who’s she?” Right, most people here didn’t know much about popular culture in other parts of the world or even in other European countries, unless it was shoved under their noses by the media.

  “She’s a former beauty queen, a fashion designer, and a TV star. Lebanese.” Which hopefully was more than enough information for her to drop the subject. I felt a little bad about my irritated ingratitude when I tasted Miguel’s spicy vegan feijoada. It was excellent, but knowing how incredibly filling that stuff was, I’d only served myself a modest half portion. I liked a good variety of beans as much as anyone, but there were limits to how much I was willing to eat in one hurried sitting. He went a bit ballistic when he tasted my smoothie, and I had to list the ingredients for him on the spot. I think he lost track partway through, and I promised to send him the recipe.

  Jessica didn’t seem too keen on his delicious, fiery stew and soon resorted to doubtfully sipping at the green gunk in her glass. “Oh, that’s rather nice,” she allowed, surprised, and immediately drank half of it down. I decided not to tell her how many calories per ounce it had in it.

  “How are you getting back to the house after?” I asked her, hoping to keep the notion of leaving soon in her mind. She brightened up immediately, totally missing the point. I was concerned for her safety, apparently, a promising development.

  “Miguel and Stewart are walking me down,” she told me. “They can come back up together. All very sensible.”

  I nodded my agreement and ostentatiously checked the time again before attacking my food a little more energetically. Miguel took the hint, Jessica did not. She kept interrupting the meal with more questions and chit-chat and slowing us down. My phone beeped again, and I gave them both a meaningful look before pretending to write another reply to my anxious client.

  “He can be a bit impatient,” I told them. “The sooner I can send him the piece, the better.”

  It helped. Just over half an hour after I’d answered their knock, I’d got rid of them again. Pretty good going, and I’d even made sure they took the damned pot with them. No excuse to pop back to fetch it in the morning, thank you very much.

  Back at my laptop, I opened up Conall’s new email. “Sorry, I was in the gym, or you’d have had these an hour ago. Jessica took some photos back in January, so I sent a couple of my DCs to get them.” This was followed by a brief but amusing description of the finding of the murder weapon and related evidence. That was great news, quite a break, and the scene it conjured was pretty funny. I’d worry about Con if he ever lost his ability to find reasons to laugh, even in the face of tragedy.

  I opened up the attached file and was presented with a series of photographs, including a couple of decent shots of Douglas Kerr with two unremarkable men: Mr Boyd and Mr Peters, presumably. I pulled up my photo editing software and cropped their faces and blanked out the backgrounds and the hats. One of them, unfortunately, was smiling in both shots, but I could tweak my software to focus on an exact match for the dimensions of the upper face. Once I’d done the best I could with them, I added them to my DVLA search and then set the Police National Database looking for a match on them too.

  By then, I found the doors to Mr Boyd’s email account had opened, but again, there was nothing there that we didn’t already know about. Not even a picture of that mysterious old letter they’d shown Jessica. That was a shame. I’d been rather looking forward to playing with that to kill a bit of time.

  I set an alert on the account, in case he used it again, and checked the locations that his emails to Jessica had been sent from. He’d connected to the public wi-fi in a different place each time. I made a list of locations, dates and times, in case Conall wanted his lot to check for CCTV footage at any of them, which didn’t seem likely now. It wasn’t even ten o’clock yet by then, but there was nothing else useful I could get on with, so I decided to get some kip in while I could. Getting up again at around four or five would be the most productive use of my time.

  I nipped out the front and watered the grass out of sight of the other vans then went to clear up the dinner things before getting myself settled. I can switch to sleep mode pretty much at will, so I was out within a few minutes.

  Nineteen

  Cousin Shay must have had an even busier night of it than I’d expected because I’d just got out of the shower when his text message came in. “Don’t check your emails until you’re at the station Con. Tick tock.” That was both promising and a little ominous. I’d grab breakfast later, I decided. Within minutes I was driving down the track through a thick, early ground mist. The weather forecast promised a clear, sunny day to come, and I hoped they were right. I think we’d all had more than enough grey gloom lately.

  I was early getting in, again, so only DC Collins, taking his turn on the dawn watch, was in our offices to greet me that Friday morning. He was in a cheerful mood and was pleased to be the one to tell me the good news. The Fort Augustus TV had been a match, and the ensuing raid had yielded up quite a horde of missing items, not just from our two open domestic B&Es, but also from a few older ones that McKinnon’s bunch had been handling. I congratulated Collins heartily on the win and headed for my office. Hopefully, HQ would handle their lion’s share of the follow-up work and not try to dump the lot on my team. They’d soon be hearing from me if they tried to pull that trick.

>   Once I’d booted up my computer and seen the bombardment that had begun to come in from Shay in the middle of the night, his text warning made perfect sense. This was all going to take a while to catch up with.

  The information package he’d put together on the criminal career of Pete Ferguson made me rather glad I hadn’t eaten any breakfast yet. I didn’t want to imagine what new, sub-zero level of fury my cousin must have reached whilst piecing all this together. Whoever had murdered poor Gareth Ramsay, at least there was now one shining, silver lining to have resulted from that terrible event. Mr Ferguson may never have attracted Shay’s attention if it hadn’t been for this case. Now that he had, the man would be in custody within days. By the time my cousin was done with him, his chances of ever walking free again would be totally non-existent.

  He’d found Billy McGregor for me too. The lad had changed his name legally, by deed poll, to William McIntyre and was now living and working in Kirkaldy, Fife. After finding him, Shay had run a few further searches and found that Billy had been seen at the A&E department of Victoria Hospital for injuries resulting from a ‘cycling accident’ back in December. He’d been pretty badly banged up, although x-rays had revealed no actual fractures. Not an uncommon type of incident when people were foolish enough to get on their bikes after drinking too much, and Billy had waited over twenty-four hours before going in to seek treatment, which would fit that theory nicely.

  I agreed with Shay’s comments, though. Billy just didn’t seem the type.

  The next email update to arrive had come in about half an hour later. Bradley Peters and Jimmy Boyd were a pair of con artists who had served time concurrently at HMP Barlinnie a few years earlier. Seeing them working together was a new development. Neither man had any history of violence. Both, according to statements gathered for their separate convictions, were capable actors who could convincingly pass as bankers, insurance agents, salesmen or any other role they found useful. Posing as a duo of enthusiastic detectorist hobbyists would not have been much of a challenge for either of them. But what was the goal of the scam they’d been running at the Kerr estate? Shay had declined to speculate on that subject, and I couldn’t blame him. If neither of us could see where any possible payoff might be, then maybe there wasn’t one. Had they simply been hired to infiltrate and report?

  He’d turned his attention back to Ferguson after that and compiled a list of known associates and hired enforcers, together with a good selection of photos for each of them. One pair grabbed my attention immediately, and not only because my cousin had chosen to prioritise them himself. A couple of bruisers who’d come up in Royston together and found their vocation as enforcers and debt collectors for a succession of Glasgow crime lords. Very nasty specimens, although none of their known victims, to date, could be persuaded to press charges against them, claiming equal culpability in what they insisted were nothing but drunken brawls.

  It was a depressingly familiar old story. They’d been fined a few times and served a paltry six month stretch each, but that was the most the police had been able to achieve. Their employers simply passed them along to a fresh associate after each arrest, and they’d go to work in their new patch with the same enthusiasm as before. They’d been with Ferguson for almost a year now.

  Shay’s last email was extremely brief and contained no attachments to read through. “All caught up? Call me.” So I did.

  “You’ve been busy,” I told him. “Where are you? Can you talk?”

  “In town, of course. Where are we meeting for breakfast?” There was a cafe I liked about five minutes’ drive from the station, so I gave him the address. “I’ll be there in ten or so,” he promised and hung up. Right. I grabbed my coat and went to have a word with Collins.

  “I’m popping out for some breakfast. You okay holding the fort here? The others should be in soon.”

  “All good, boss.” He gave me another happy smile, a timely reminder. They’d cracked a long odds case, so of course, I’d bring a goodie box back for the team. Victory should taste sweet, and my four DCs had spent a lot of time checking through the local sales listings, on a lot of different sites, over the past week. It was nice to see work like that pay off for a change; it rarely did.

  I parked up outside the butchers and crossed over to my cafe. No sign of Shay’s van but I hadn’t expected to see it. He’d find a quiet, tucked-away spot to leave it in and walk from there. I ordered my coffee and took my drink and my food order number to a quiet corner table. The next time the bell above the door dinged Shay slouched in, hat, scarf, sunglasses, the full works this morning. Once he’d put his own order in, he came over with his tea tray and slid onto the bench across from me before shedding any layers.

  “Managed to escape from your new fan club alright then?” I asked him.

  “I left Miguel a note. Meeting a friend, back after lunch and all that, then drove out with the electric motor running. That thing’s whisper quiet.” Jacket, hat and glasses off, he stirred his tea experimentally; not ready yet. “Billy McGregor,” he said coolly, “is currently being taken into protective custody. We’ll need to go up to the airport to fetch him later. I’ve wrangled a helicopter, but they won’t get into the air until after nine, so it’ll probably be ten-fifteen to ten-thirty by the time they land.”

  I swallowed the last of my coffee. There was no point in asking him if that had seemed necessary. If it was happening, then it had.

  “You’re sure Ferguson got to him then?”

  A glacial glance. Yes, he was sure. The tea was now satisfactory, and he poured himself a cup, the scent of cardamom wafting up between us as he did so. Our food orders arrived, unsurprisingly identical. Pita bread three-cheese paninis with sun-dried tomatoes and pesto, the most tempting item on the breakfast menu. Caitlin would have winced if she’d seen the way we tore into our piping hot flavour bombs, molten cheese exploding under the pressure of eagerly applied teeth. Hot food should be eaten hot. Why so many people couldn’t grasp that simple fact was a mystery to me.

  “How are we going to manage that?” I asked my cousin between bites. “It will seem a bit odd if I start leaving Caitlin behind, especially if I’m spotted sneaking around with ‘the delectable Mr Keane.’ She called you a ‘Seelie child’ too, and you know the kind of reputation they have for messing about with helpless, beguiled mortals.” He choked back a laugh, saving me from a spray of crumbs with a hasty swallow from his cup.

  “Lord! If any two creatures under heaven were safer with each other…” I just grinned, happy to see a real smile bloom. He destroyed another mouthful of his breakfast. “Do you trust her discretion?”

  “Yes.” Caitlin wouldn’t leak. She was too professional for that to be an issue.

  “We’ll bring her in then, as much as required.” A partial disclosure then.

  I nodded my agreement. Once our race against the rapidly dropping temperature of our breakfasts had been satisfactorily concluded, we sat back, relaxing a little, Shay sipping at his masala chai while I resorted to my water bottle.

  “What’s with the box?” Shay asked, curiously. My large selection of takeout pastries had arrived with our paninis and was sitting at my elbow.

  “Treats for the team. It’s sort of accidentally become a tradition when they crack a case.” I explained about the B&Es and last night’s successful raid.

  “Nice,” he allowed. “Most thieves are smart enough to move the haul to another area before trying to shift it these days.” He emptied the last of the pot into his cup and drank it down. “Got any other distracting little cases still open at the moment?”

  “As of last night? Just a thorough bit of malicious vandalism at a local solicitors’ offices. And McKinnon won’t throw any more at me whilst we’ve got the murder investigation on.”

  “Which solicitors? And when?”

  “Millar, Cockburn & Price, early last month. Why?”

  “My guy in Edinburgh, the one Douglas Kerr’s solicitors hired? That was the firm.
” I could see why he was interested, but it seemed like a bit of a stretch.

  “There was no evidence of any theft, Shay. Just a lot of paint poured into equipment and filing cabinets and furnishings.” Which, after he’d considered it for a few moments, got me a pitying look.

  “And what would you do with a drawer full of paint-sodden files, Cuz? With digital copies all tucked away safely, ready to reprint? Go through them one by one, trying to achieve the impossible by cleaning them up? I don’t think so.” No, when he put it like that, I didn’t either. You’d get a cleaning team in to come in and bag up the lot, without even attempting to separate them to check if any were missing.

  I frowned. “Alright, let’s hypothesise that the motive for the break-in was to steal one particular file in such a way that nobody even noticed it had gone. There were thousands of files there, but let’s further hypothesise that they were after a copy of the Kerr estate deeds. So, Peters and Boyd, or their employers, if they weren’t working independently, yes?”

  “For our hypothesis, yes,” he nodded. “Maybe they didn’t want to order a set and wait for a couple of weeks until they got them. Maybe they didn’t want to leave any kind of a trail which putting an order like that in would certainly have done. It’s really rather clever when you think about it.” It was, but it might also be only Shay’s overactive imagination at work here. “If Peters and Boyd really believed something valuable was hidden on the Kerr estate, but were stumped as to where to look for it, the plans might have been exactly what they thought they needed to work it out.”

  “You think their crossed letter might have been genuine?”

  Shay shrugged dismissively. “Irrelevant. I haven’t seen it, so for now, it’s Schrödinger’s letter, locked in a box, equally genuine and fake until opened. But if I knew they’d stolen that file, I’d at least be satisfied that they were really searching for something valuable.” Objects of historical interest? French funds for the Jacobite cause? Or Archie Ramsay’s gold sovereigns? Well, it was all quite interesting to speculate upon but not particularly helpful right now.