Evidence of Death

by Peter Ritchie

  ‘You know who I am and why I’m here,’ he said, blowing smoke and the rank odour of his breath into her face.

  She looked up at him, her eyes stretched wide in the hunt for a way out of the trap, before she nodded slowly.

  ‘I’m going to take the tape off then ask you some questions, and you’re going to answer. If you give me the wrong answers, I’m going to hurt you again.’

  Under the excruciating pain in her side and back there was a growing feeling of nausea, which she couldn’t know at the time was from the damage inflicted on her left kidney.

  As he tore the tape from her mouth, she recoiled at the sensation, but it was nothing to what her body was trying to endure.

  ‘I need to go to the bathroom please,’ she gasped, but he wasn’t interested because as far as he was concerned the discomfort would help get him the answers he wanted.

  Orlova felt sick to her core and knew that something had gone seriously wrong inside her. She knew she might die, but she remembered her dreams from earlier in the evening of escape to a new world, free from men like her tormentor. He was a savage, and she knew that if she admitted anything he would kill her. He’d probably taken and killed Joe and his son. She’d heard the story that Joe’s wife had been taken by them and that whatever had happened had broken her mind. What would the man do if he knew that she’d set up Andy Clark? If he did know she would probably be dead already, so there was at least some hope. He couldn’t know, or else why would he have gone to all these lengths?

  The sensation in her bladder was becoming unbearable. She forced the thought of survival into her mind and refused to accept what this man had come to do to her.

  He put his hand on her cold, damp face then his nose wrinkled as he saw the tan-coloured seat turn dark with bloodstained urine. He untied her and decided to carry her to the toilet and try to find a way out of the mess he’d created.

  As he removed the tape from her hands Orlova channelled all her anger and all her hopes into one last effort against the man in front of her. She had come too far to die at the hands of a beast.

  She didn’t move fast, but he’d made the mistake of being distracted at a crucial moment, and she heaved upwards and drove her knee into his testicles with all the strength that she could summon. The strike was perfect. He moaned with shock, caught completely off guard and staggered backwards, helpless for the few moments that she needed. She staggered towards the dressing table and picked up a lamp, dragging its cable from the socket and hit Nelson weakly; that was all she had left. She walked to the door, trying to stay conscious just long enough to get to people.

  Out in the corridor, Orlova lost her sense of time as she edged along the wall to stop herself falling over. She made it to the lift and felt for the down button. It could have been minutes or hours later that the lift opened and she staggered into it. The buttons were swimming in front of her, but she couldn’t make out the numbers next to them. She thought the lowest one must be ground and stubbed her finger against it with barely the strength to make it work.

  When the doors opened again, Orlova crawled out and sat with her back against the wall, gasping the stale air, until her mind slipped into the dark and she felt the pain leave her. Orlova had escaped only to lie unconscious in the basement of the hotel.

  Although he wasn’t aware of that, it gave Nelson enough time to recover, tidy the room and put on his fedora and plain glasses. It didn’t matter if the girl had pressed the panic button, he had no other choice but to try and brass it out of the place – or fight if need be.

  But he opened the lift door to the ground floor and found everything was as it should be – no panic and no police. He explained at reception that his business arrangements had been changed at the last minute, paid cash and walked out calmly. He had no idea what had happened to the girl, but his only thought was to get clear of the hotel before she was found.

  His groin ached, and the lump on his head pounded, reminding him that he’d completely fucked up.

  Orlova was found unconscious about half an hour later by a cleaner. It was presumed that she’d had an accident of some kind, and although the concierge remembered her, he had no idea who she was meeting. The paramedics worked on her all the way to A&E, and she was struggling to hold onto life when she was wheeled into the operating theatre. A couple of uniforms arrived at the hospital in response to the ambulance call, but there was nothing to find and nothing to identify her. Nelson had had the presence of mind to take her bag with him when he left the hotel.

  Nelson walked as far away as he could, cursing his aching balls, and then caught a taxi home. Once inside, he tore off his clothes, pressed a cloth full of ice against the pain and gulped down a glass full to the brim with whisky. The surge of warmth stopped his hands shaking, and the pain eased as the alcohol swamped his system. He knew that only months earlier the girl wouldn’t have been able to get him the way she had in the hotel. He felt weak and curled up into a ball on his bed.

  It was the following morning before a cleaner went into the room and found the stained chair, which had dried in the overnight warmth of the room. She’d come from Brazil three years earlier and found strange and disgusting situations and debris all the time. She didn’t get excited about it though, as she had been told not to get too interested in the excesses of the occasional high-paying guest.

  At the end of her shift she mentioned it to her line manager, who made sure the seat was dumped in the storeroom with all the other soiled and damaged furniture that was written off as collateral damage in the business of the hotel.

  The uniforms who’d attended the incident at the hotel took all the details they could and let the CID know that it seemed to be an accident but would need to be looked at when the girl recovered. They had nothing to identify her till she came round. The fact that she had no money or ID didn’t make sense as the concierge remembered her carrying an expensive handbag. The night-shift DI was overrun with two suspicious deaths and a couple of alleged rapes that were stretching his team to the limits, so he decided to leave the hotel incident to the dayshift and allocated it to DC Donnie Monk.

  28

  Macallan walked into the Leith incident room for the first time and found the dozen officers involved were squeezed into a space designed for half the number. DS Grant Baxter looked up and nearly smiled. He’d met Macallan a couple of times, and despite his reservations about female detectives he knew that she was up to the mark and rated by people he regarded as the real deal.

  The force was overstretched and because the case lay somewhere between missing persons and a murder investigation with no bodies, they did what they always did and went for a halfway fudge. Baxter didn’t have the rank to head a full-scale murder squad, but because of the circumstances and the fact that he was more than capable, he’d been left in charge until they could dump the investigation on a more senior officer. It was the case that no one wanted, so Baxter had already worked out that Macallan had probably upset someone, and in his book that gave her credibility.

  Macallan knew that Baxter was rated as well, and Harkins’ appraisal was that he was a boring bastard but a fuck-off detective – so that was alright. Harkins had told her that the neds thought Baxter was a right bastard, but away from the job he was a pussycat, though a bit of a moan about his private life.

  ‘Welcome, Superintendent,’ he greeted her. ‘Glad you’ve arrived. I really need someone to take the blame rather than me.’

  He stuck out his hand and she shook it warmly, glad he was there. She needed a street detective on the case rather than a systems man who believed that simply following the instruction book would bring home the bacon. The case was about criminals, and she needed people who knew how they worked.

  ‘Good to see you, Grant, and glad you’re on the team.’ She said it with as much warmth as possible because she needed the team and Grant Baxter onside.

  ‘I’ll show you what’s laughingly called your office.’ He walked her through a corrido
r where the light bulb had gone out weeks before and no one had thought to replace it. This didn’t bother her; years in the service had taught her to expect the worst when it came to office accommodation. When he pushed open the door though she did laugh, because there was nothing else to do.

  ‘My God. This is humble.’

  It had been an old storeroom, had no windows and she guessed she would never get so comfortable that she wanted to put her feet up and enjoy the ambience. There was a desk, a lamp and a computer terminal that had definitely seen better days.

  ‘Does that work?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘It does, but you’ll find it’s a bit slow and will drive you mad. Never mind – it’s always this way in Leith.’

  He took her round the office and she was reassured by what seemed like a team of doers, but she guessed that Baxter, like Harkins, would have made sure that was the case.

  ‘Let’s get some coffee – or what passes for coffee – and you can brief me up on where we are.’

  She felt charged despite her reservations about the office; she wanted to get going and had the kick of energy at taking a challenge face on. Her normal intelligence role was always in the shadows, watching people, picking at pieces of information and trying to make sense where there might be none. This was full frontal – and there were only two choices. She knew she could mope and let the chief super see her suffer, or she could do what she’d always done before and give it her all – Grace Macallan was not one for moping.

  It was a guiding principle that there should be a firewall between the overt investigation and covert intelligence gathering in order to keep the sources safe from exposure in court. So although she would still be working in cooperation with the intelligence teams, they would be entitled to withhold some of the intelligence from her, but she would just have to live with that and make the relationship work.

  Baxter cooked up some coffee, stuffed another chair into her office and told her where they were with the investigation, which didn’t take long.

  ‘So far we’ve been taking statements, but to tell the truth we’re not getting far. No one wants to talk and Eddie Fleming is only telling us so much, definitely not all. Lena Fleming is a basket case, and we can’t get anything out of her that makes sense. The poor woman has been through something terrible, but who knows what that was?’ He poured the coffee and shook his head. ‘The docs think she’s deteriorating and will never make a full recovery. These are bad guys, and I guess you’ll know more about them than I do, but unless we can get someone to talk, we’re going to have to go straight for them, and you know that all they have to do is sit tight and we’re beat.’

  Macallan nodded; she didn’t expect anything else and certainly not a miracle. ‘Any forensics?’ she asked hopefully.

  ‘We don’t have bodies or a locus for the murder, if that’s what it is, so zilch. However we did get a hold of Lena’s clothing from the hospital and that’s being looked at by the lab. Strictly speaking it’s not our case, but obviously we might as well have it on the assumption that whoever did what they did to her is good for the murders as well.’ He paused and smiled. ‘If they’ve been murdered and if she was abducted. Good, isn’t it?’

  ‘Let me have the statement files and give me a few hours to read through them, then let’s see what we can do.’ Macallan said this with more confidence than she actually felt. ‘I think the TV detectives would say, “We need a break,” at this point, and hey ho it would drop on their desk.’ She sighed.

  ‘Aye, but this isn’t a TV drama and won’t be solved in a half-hour slot. I’ll get you the files, such as they are,’ Baxter replied, closing the office door behind him as he left.

  ‘No one said it would be easy, Grace,’ Macallan said to herself, quoting one of the favourite maxims of the pissed-off detective.

  She opened the first file and groaned quietly at the thought of ploughing through the bulging mass of statements inside, most of which would say next to nothing of importance.

  At the same time, over in the specialist crime directorate, Thompson sat down with the intelligence officers and her surveillance team for the morning briefing. McGovern and his mob had been back out on the job at 6 a.m., reporting a light on in Nelson’s house and that they could see him moving about. It was unusual to see him up and about so early, but Thompson breathed a quiet sigh of relief and thanked her God that he was home.

  She ran through the force information bulletins and the relevant events that had been extracted from the mounds of information that had come into the unit over the previous twenty-four hours. Most of it affected the other regions, the eastern federation having had a reasonably quiet night, although Edinburgh city had caught a string of serious crimes. The CID had needed to call out extra bodies during the night to cope.

  The DS from the intelligence unit ran through what there was and although it was interesting, it had no bearing on the team’s work or other operations.

  ‘Anything else?’ Thompson asked, beginning to relax after her sleepless night worrying about the decision she’d made at the hotel.

  ‘Only an unexplained event at the hotel where Nelson was lost.’

  ‘Go on.’ She tried not to look too interested, but the whole team’s radar had gone live, waiting to see if it was marked fuck-up or unrelated.

  ‘There was a girl found injured in the basement. They think it’s some kind of accident, but the strange thing is they can’t find any personal effects on her. Robbery seems unlikely as she was wearing an expensive watch. The injury was to one of her kidneys and apparently they had to remove it this morning to save her life.’

  Thompson felt a knot forming in her stomach. ‘Has she been able to speak?’

  ‘Not so far – she’s unconscious and still in post-op sedation. CID has it for enquiry and we’ll keep you informed.’

  The story didn’t really stand out in the stew of unusual events that cropped up every day, and there was probably a simple explanation for the missing bag – the most likely being that some poor, underpaid member of staff had taken their chance, which happened all the time. That’s what Thompson tried to make herself believe, but deep down she knew that it was too easy an explanation.

  ‘Who’s the CID officer involved?’ she asked as her mind spun the possibility that Nelson had a connection to the girl. She wasn’t sure there was any need to disclose to the CID that her team had been at the hotel. After all, she was running a covert operation and there was no obligation to declare anything to CID when they hadn’t seen any crime committed.

  ‘The DC involved is Donnie Monk so don’t expect a result. The man’s worse than useless,’ the intelligence officer said, eliciting a few nods of agreement round the table.

  Thompson’s phone went. It was McGovern.

  ‘Just to let you know that our boy has got on the road early and we’re heading over the Forth Road Bridge, so it may be something interesting. Keep you informed.’ He rang off.

  Thompson closed the meeting, went into her office and closed the door. She wished she had someone to give her advice, but McGovern was on the road and she wasn’t sure she could look herself in the mirror if she asked Macallan. She felt her first stab of guilt that she was working to undermine the woman who was her boss. She saw how the team reacted to Macallan and asked herself what that meant. Could they really all be so wrong to show such obvious loyalty?

  She wondered what sins the woman had committed that seemed to obsess O’Connor and the chief super. She’d blindly accepted what she’d been told because all she wanted was O’Connor, but for the first time Thompson contemplated that she might be on the wrong side. She’d seen something in the team she was with, and that was changing her view of the job. She’d watched the men and women interact, seen comradeship and wanted what they had – to be part of something that mattered – something she could be proud of.

  29

  Nelson headed north on the M90 towards Perth, trying to listen to the news, but his mind kept w
andering to the mess of problems he had to sort out. He kept the car at sixty on cruise control because the last thing he needed was a pull over by some smart-arsed traffic cop. He’d too much on his mind and had to be back in Edinburgh by the afternoon to get the results of his tests.

  He looked at his reflection in the rear-view mirror and winced at what he saw. There was no shine in his eyes, like a photograph with a matt finish. He’d never had much colour but his skin seemed stretched and thin and had a waxy dullness about it, and his cheekbones were more obvious. He was sick and he knew it.

  The surveillance team were well behind and they didn’t need to be close on such a long stretch of road. The tracker they’d fitted to his car let them know exactly where he was, and if they entered a built-up area they could close up using the cover of other traffic.

  Nelson lit up a cigarette and the first lungful should have buzzed his senses but the taste was wrong. He threw it out of the window and called Donnie Monk to see if the useless fuck had anything for him. The call was made on his clean phone, which he only used when he was going to discuss business; it was safe and wouldn’t come back to him. The other phone he used was registered to him, and if the police intercepted those calls, what they would hear would be no good to them.

  Monk answered the call and it was obvious that he was hungover with booze or the after-effects of the cocaine Nelson supplied to him. The detective’s voice was ragged and Nelson shook his head, wondering how the man had ever made it into the CID.

  ‘Billy, what can I do for you?’ Monk said it without much enthusiasm.

  ‘I’ve not heard much from you, Donnie, and that worries me. I feed you with your free prescriptions, and you’re supposed to tell me things. I take it you read the papers, so is there anyone on my case?’ Nelson tried to keep his voice neutral but his dislike of the detective was intense, and he found it hard to contain himself. The minute Monk became surplus he intended to piss on him from a great height.