Lies of the Land

by Chris Dolan

  DS Russell didn’t get the impression that Debbie Hart was pleased to see him. Particularly so early in the morning.

  “Debbie,” Russell thought he should try and be friendly, “Did you get that Fulton Construction file for me?”

  “I’m sorry, Sergeant. I spent all day yesterday searching and can’t find it anywhere.”

  “Well that’s very strange, isn’t it? Given that they were such a big client.”

  “There definitely was one.”

  Bill Crichton finally arrived – a couple of hours later than he used to. He was even less pleased to see DS Russell. “Are we never to be left alone?” he glowered. Russell thought he was looking a bit dishevelled. From a night of banging Marion Miller, or from sleeping on the couch at home? Almost certainly the latter.

  “Mr Crichton. I know I’ve asked you before. I’m sorry to hassle you.” Debbie spoke to him like anything she said might cause him to break down and weep. “The Fulton file. You haven’t got it, have you?”

  “I told you Debbie, why would I have it? Jules dealt with them.”

  “I know, but it’s not in his office anywhere.”

  “Don’t ask me. I’m not a secretary.” With a final glance at Russell he went into his office.

  Debbie Hart was upset. “He was never like this,” she whispered. “He’s taking Mr Miller’s death awful badly.” He isn’t half, Russell thought. Like he had a guilty conscience. Like he knew they were closing in on him. That he, DS Russell, was closing in on him. “The only other thing I can suggest is that Mr Miller took the file home with him,” Debbie said anxiously.

  “Was he in the habit of doing that?”

  “Not really. But it did happen. If he had it with him on Friday night… It wasn’t in his car?”

  “No. Okay. Keep looking. We need to see that file. What about the empty folder labelled Abbott?”

  “Another blank I’m afraid. But then I’ve never seen that one. I’ve checked with everyone and nobody has heard of a client called Abbott.”

  Debbie Hart thought of herself as the perfect PA but now when it really mattered, when her boss had been murdered in cold blood, her systems didn’t seem to work after all. She was frightened, feeling alone, abandoned and under pressure. Russell could see all that.

  “This is a major problem, Deborah. I need you to find these files.” Keep the pressure on her. If she was hiding something, even just a mistake, or covering for one of her bosses, he would know. “I’m going to have to go back to the station empty-handed. But I’ll be back. And I’ll keep coming back until I have the information I’ve requested.”

  Leaving, he noticed that Crichton had left his door ajar, listening in again? Lawyers. Forever trying to catch the police out in court, looking for errors, failings in their investigations, and they couldn’t even keep their files in order.

  While Russell was making his presence felt at JCG Miller, DI Coulter was in the station asking the HOLMES room manager to run checks on every registered company with Abbott in the title. Also, to add the name Stuart Anderson to his list, see if he came up with anything.

  When Russell got back they talked about the possibility that Julian Miller kept work files at home. Coulter considered requesting a search warrant immediately, then wondered if he shouldn’t just ask Marion Miller first. Then again, if she was involved with this in any way, it would give her a chance to hide or destroy anything of interest she had at home. Then again, she’d probably have done that already…

  There was somewhere else they should check first. The two of them set out for Fulton Construction’s Belvedere site.

  Maddy had tried to phone ahead. But the number she had for Morag Boyd was unavailable. The information was five years old. Chances were Boyd had changed her phone and her number several times since then. Let’s just hope she hadn’t moved house too.

  She went into the office, printed out some documents from the old Petrus files. She’d brought the car and left the office without speaking to any of her colleagues. Passing his office she caught Dan McKillop’s eye. He knew she was doing something she oughtn’t.

  Driving north and east from the city centre, Maddy thought, was probably more educational than doing three years at University studying sociology. Skipping round past the Merchant City where trendy wine bars attracted very different customers to the century-old drinking dens next door, Glasgow was at its most mixed. But although the penthouses and studio apartments of Bell Street backed on to the single ends of the Gallowgate, their inhabitants very seldom mingled socially. A mile further on and the regeneration of the East End, in the wake of the Commonwealth Games, had meant a multimillion-pound facelift. It turned out like one of those botched jobs you see on elderly celebrities. Everything was too tight, the streets straightened, wrinkles combed out. The overall effect was that the life had been sucked out of the place, leaving it rigid and anaemic when there used to be raucous exuberance. Plant a few trees, cram in some houses nobody locally can afford, it didn’t make up for there still being no jobs, no money. That couldn’t be concealed.

  Further out, all attempt at pretence was gone. Half-demolished houses, gap sites, crumbling factories and boarded-up shops. There were very few people on the streets she drove along. Maddy had no idea where the people who should be here were. She spent a lot of her life dealing with the misconduct and misfortunes these places fuelled and, much as she often liked the people, their mad energy and their endurance, she still couldn’t grasp what their day-to-day lives were like. Back in Girvan when the late-night drunk boys saturated the chippie she’d welcomed the noise and the unpredictability, but was relieved when they were gone, back to lives that remained a mystery to her.

  Louis had bought her a GPS gadget for the car. The posh English lady who directed her towards fantastical places like Sockiehall Street and Millengavvie was fun, but she’d never mastered the thing. It kept instructing her to drive into stone walls and over riverbanks. So she had to tour around a little to find Morag Boyd’s house. It turned out to be on the second floor of a low-rise block, a 1960s concrete exercise in brutalism. On a dreich morning like this you half expected Soviet soldiers in great coats and furry hats.

  She rang the bell, several times, but Morag Boyd wasn’t home. Perhaps just as well. God – her mother would have told her – had made sure she wouldn’t be. God didn’t seem too bothered by tsunamis and earthquakes and wars, but He took time to make sure Rosa and her family didn’t make little faux pas. She’d phone Coulter from her office and tell him about the connection between Boyd and Petrus and protests against Fulton Construction’s site. Do things the right way.

  Partially relieved, she was about to head back downstairs when she noticed the nameplate on the house next door was Maguire. Was that the name of the other woman who had been with Morag at Belvedere? Maddy decided to ring the bell anyway. If it wasn’t her she could just ask the whereabouts of Mrs Boyd. But there was no answer there either. Although Maddy got the distinct impression somebody was in. A movement inside just as she’d rung the bell. She tried again. No answer. Then she opened the letter box and called in. “Hello?” Still no one came to the door. Perhaps she’d been mistaken.

  Only going back down the stairwell did she notice that this block of flats was very well cared for. The steps recently brushed, a smell of bleach. Maddy was ashamed at herself for being surprised. Coming out the close she heard a door open above her. She crossed slowly to her car and eventually a man came out behind her, holding the hand of a little boy.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Not now. Sorry.”

  The man looked worried, and also genuinely sorry, giving her a sad smile. Whatever was worrying him was greater than his sense of civility and helpfulness.

  “Just, I’m looking for—”

  “—I’m in a rush.”

  He’d be in his late thirties, looking cold in jeans and denim jacket. The wee boy on the other hand was happed up to within an inch of his life – quilted anorak, scarf, b
eanie and gloves.

  “Wee one late for school?”

  He didn’t stop walking. “I wish that was all it was.”

  “I could give you a lift. Somewhere.”

  He slowed his pace, not quite stopping. He seemed interested for a moment then looked harder at her and his expression turned to suspicion. She knew what he was thinking – that she was a cop. It happened to her a lot.

  “We’re fine.”

  Maddy met the little boy’s eye. “Hiya. Off somewhere nice?” she smiled.

  The man lifted the boy up – in a way only a dad can, Maddy thought – and walked off. “As a matter of fact,” the man said bitterly, “we’re not. Off somewhere nice.”

  She got back in her car. At the end of the street where she reckoned she should turn left to retrace her steps she noticed a sign for Fulton Construction. It looked like turning right would lead her past the Belvedere site. Turning the corner she passed the dad with his boy again. He’d been stopped in the street by a man presumably from the site. He was dressed in green wellies, hard hat, a hi-vis jacket with his name – Joe – printed on it, and the number 7, like a footballer’s jersey. Joe was mussing the kid’s hair and neither the boy nor his dad looked happy about it. Then the two men faced each other in what looked, from her car, a fraught conversation.

  She found Belvedere – a massive pit in the earth, hectic with men scurrying and machines rolling at precarious angles – at the end of the street. She decided to drive round it, for no good reason she could think of. Probably yet more wasted time.

  And nearly a fatal mistake. Driving past the front entrance to Belvedere she passed Coulter and Russell parking at the gate. She slid down in her car seat and turned her head away from them. Please God don’t let them recognise her car. Russell wouldn’t, but Alan had been in it a couple of times.

  Her head turned the wrong way, she veered closer to them than she had meant to. Checking her rear-view mirror she was pleased to see she’d accidentally sprayed Russell’s trouser legs with mud. Less pleased that he was staring right at her car, furious. Coulter hadn’t noticed though. She might get away with it.

  The two men made their way in silence through the gates of the site, Russell cursing under his breath and shaking his muddied leg. They were surprised at how much progress could be made in construction in just a day or two. Trenches they hadn’t seen, or hadn’t noticed, had sprouted concrete block foundations and now a team of brickies were building walls on them, already reaching their knees. The walk to Hughes’s cabin was only a matter of a few yards but by the time they knocked on the door, Coulter’s shoes and ankles were as sodden with gooey clay as Russell’s.

  “Has Fulton Construction,” Coulter dispensed with the social niceties, “ever worked for or with a company called Abbott’s?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever traded under the name Abbott?”

  “No.”

  “D’you not want to think about that for a moment? Sir.” Russell stared at him.

  “I can think about it all day if you like, but the answer’d still be no.”

  “Can we see a copy of your accounts, Mr Hughes?”

  “I only keep the ones for this site, Belvedere, here.” Hughes hefted his weight out from behind his tiny plastic chair and desk, and opened an old tin filing cabinet behind him, while Russell stomped around the enclosed space making his presence felt, looking at the noticeboard, lifting cups and spoons. “If you want the whole company accounts you’ll have to go to the office in town.”

  “I think you could maybe do that for us, Mr Hughes,” Russell growled. “Seeing as how we’re trying to catch who murdered your friend.”

  Hughes scowled but nodded.

  “Do JCG Miller Solicitors appear anywhere in your financial records?”

  “They will. Along with other lawyers. A company this size, Inspector Coulter, undertaking projects as big as this, has to deal with lots of lawyers. The law’s a minefield for builders.”

  Russell’s histrionic search of the cabin unearthed something after all, as much to his surprise as Coulter’s. He picked up a torn, scrunched poster out of the wastepaper bin, smoothed it out and held it up. An A3 sheet with “Dump Fultons” scrawled in black and red marker.

  “We’re forever tearing those damn things down.”

  “Do you get a lot of this, Mr Hughes?”

  “I explained to your lackey there a few days ago. If the law’s a minefield, protestors are a pain in the arse.” He sat back down and spoke slowly as if trying to make an obtuse child understand. “This is a phase two operation here at Belvedere. Phase ones are bad enough, phase twos double up on the cranks. There’s more noise, more mess, more stuff in the newspapers. So, aye, we get a lot of that. Now is there anything else I can help you with, gentleman, only as you’ll understand I’m a wee bit busy here.”

  Coulter turned to go, Russell standing his ground. Hughes simply ignored him, and the sergeant after a moment followed Coulter to the door.

  Outside, Joe Harkins the watchman-cum-driver-cum-gopher was walking in through the front gate.

  “Aw’right, Joe?”

  Coulter smiled at Russell’s sudden Glasgow accent.

  “Back again, Wee Man?” In point of fact, Russell and Harkins were about the same height. The watchman could just as easily have said “big man”. It was clear to both the inspector and the sergeant that he’d chosen not to.

  “You seem to go off-site quite a bit, Joe,” Russell grumbled.

  “Places to go, things to do.”

  “You ever heard of an outfit called Abbott’s,” Coulter asked. “Builder, supplier, something like that?”

  “Not that I can think of.” Harkins responded with a little more respect to the senior officer.

  “You had any trouble lately with protestors?”

  “Just the usual. They put up their posters, I tear them down, they put them up again. It’s fine. Just like the rest of life, eh? Pointless waste o’ everybody’s time.”

  “The women who were here the other day,” Russell asked, “they local?”

  “Chances are. Then again some of these people are pretty committed, right? So who knows.”

  The policemen left him standing outside the cabin, taking out a pack of cigarettes. When they were driving away they saw Hughes come out, glance in their direction, then take the lit cigarette from Harkins’s mouth and smoke it himself. Harkins didn’t look happy about it, but took his pack out his pocket again.

  By the time they got back to the station they’d already been given the news. About ten times. Calls to both their mobiles, texts, car radio. William Crichton had had a fall and was in intensive care at the Royal Infirmary.

  Crichton had come home at lunchtime. “Dead on five past one,” one of the constables who had been posted outside the Crichtons’ house told Coulter proudly. The young WPC with him nodded gravely. “Then – we were at the front of the house – there was this, like thud, and—”

  “Son. Start from the beginning. Before the beginning. Start at four minutes past one.”

  The two of them were still flushed with excitement. It was the girl who settled first. “Mrs Crichton had brought us out a cup of tea, and we were standing at the doorway drinking it.”

  “Kind of her. Never thought she was the type.”

  “Surprised us too. She didn’t really say anything, just stuck the two cups in our hands.”

  “It was minging. Some herbal stuff,” offered the lad Coulter now remembered was called Eddie Something.

  “She’d been in a bit of a state all morning. We saw her through the window, pacing, and the phone to her ear but never talking.”

  “So far as we could see.”

  “Then Mr Crichton’s car pulls up. He leaves it outside on the street though there’s a garage at the back.”

  “He walks right past us, face like thunder. Don’t think he even saw us.”

  “Then there was an argument.”

  “We couldn�
��t hear all of it, but they were shouting so we heard bits, like.”

  “He goes, ‘Who told you?’”

  “And she goes ‘You’re pathetic, Bill!’”

  “We reckon, sir, she’d found out about him and Mrs Miller.”

  “Do you now? What about him and Mrs Miller? You been listening to station gossip? Just stick to the facts, Eddie.”

  “She shouts,” the young WPC – Morrison, wasn’t it? – took up the story. “‘Julian pokes you with a stick for years and now this!’ She’d been preparing lunch when he’d come in. We went round the back to see what we could see. She had the knife in her hand and she’s screaming like crazy at him.”

  “‘I swear Bill I could kill you.’ Those were her precise words sir.”

  “Very attentive. Well done. Then what?”

  “He leaves the room,” said Morrison.

  “But we couldn’t see where he went.”

  “Except he must’ve gone upstairs. Because five minutes later there’s the thud we heard.”

  “We didn’t think anything of it at first. But then it was really quiet.”

  “Like eerily quiet, you know?”

  “And I’m not sure what made us do it, but we went round the side of the house, where the driveway leads to the garage. And there he was. Lying on the ground.”

  “A window was open directly above him. In the attic, the third storey.”

  “There was blood everywhere,” Morrison said, paling again at the memory. “All around his head. And he was lying there in a really weird position. We phoned the ambulance and the station.”

  “She must have heard us on our phones, ’cause she came out.”

  “Where had Mrs Crichton been just before then?”

  “We couldn’t say for sure, sir. We lost sight of her after he went upstairs.”

  “When she comes out she hardly reacts. She just stares at him, lying there. Then she looks up at the open window, and all she says is, ‘When he has a fly smoke he sits on that ledge. He thinks I don’t know.’”