Private Investigations

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Okay. This thing was pre-planned; I’m guessing that Dino was smart enough to have nosed around in Garvald, and to have established Grete’s school routine with the wee one. He’d have seen that they walked along a pretty much deserted road and that he couldn’t have imagined a better spot to snatch the child.’ He paused to take a swig of his latte.

  ‘Obviously, killing the kid was not the objective or he’d have done it there and then; he was ordered to take her. He chose Sullivan’s Beamer for the purpose, and kitted it out by cushioning the boot.

  ‘If the snatch had worked, but what would he have done then? He couldn’t have looked after a captive five year old. He’d have needed help to do that, and if it was female help, so much the better.

  ‘That’s where Anna fits in. We’ll never know what story he spun her; maybe he told her he was looking after a niece. Whatever, it worked. She was besotted with the scrote, and she fell for it. So he sent her to Marks to buy clothes for the child, and said that he’d meet her there.’

  Pye nodded. ‘I buy all that. If he hadn’t run into big Bob’s motor it would have worked.’

  ‘It would have worked,’ Haddock pointed out, ‘but only until they got wherever they were headed and opened the boot.’

  ‘True. It’s worth remembering that when Dino and Anna ran away from the scene of the accident, in different directions, neither of them knew that the child was dead. Sure Dino must have recognised that what he did to Grete left him in big trouble, but he may have thought he could get away with that.’

  He nodded, as if to confirm his thinking. ‘I imagine that he called Anna, as soon as he was clear. Probably they arranged to meet, then he headed for North Berwick, to pick up his cash, his passport and maybe his dad’s van. He nearly managed it, only we got in the way. At some point, he or Anna must have heard that Zena had died. Without that, maybe he hoped she could be kept out of it, but with it . . . even he must have been smart enough to know we’d crawl over everyone who ever knew him, and there was Anna, having bought kids’ clothes that very morning, on her credit card.’

  Pye stopped for breath and more bap.

  ‘And at that point,’ Haddock said, ‘Anna headed for home and packed her suitcase.’

  ‘Yes, and Dino phoned his client, paymaster, call him what you like, said he wanted the rest of his cash, and a meeting was arranged. All that we know, pretty much for certain.’

  ‘So what don’t we know?’ the DS asked.

  ‘Where were they going yesterday morning?’ Pye paused. ‘How many sets of clothes are in that bag?’

  ‘Three of everything.’

  ‘Which suggests that wherever they were headed they were planning to stay there for a few days, long enough for Zena to be ransomed.’

  ‘If ransom was the motive.’

  ‘What else, Sauce?’

  ‘Pain. Mental torture. Revenge. Which brings me back to the man Mackail. When are we going to front him up, gaffer?’

  ‘When we’ve answered the question that’s still open,’ he replied. ‘Where were they going to take her?’

  Haddock finished his bap, then nursed his coffee, staring at the table while Pye, a slower eater, polished off his. As he did so, his eyes began to narrow. ‘Hey,’ he whispered, ‘what did Nancy Walker say, about Glencorse Reservoir?’

  ‘Remind me.’

  ‘She said there’s a lot of activity around it, that it’s a bit of a resort for fishermen, hill walkers and the like. And she said there are holiday cottages up there. You don’t suppose . . .’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Pye replied. ‘But the fact that they met their killer close by might point in that direction. If that’s where they were planning to hole up, might we be lucky enough for the accommodation to have been booked by the person who was paying Dino?’

  ‘Let’s find out,’ Haddock said, reaching for his phone.

  Thirty-Six

  ‘There are seven holiday cottages dotted around Glencorse Reservoir and the Loganlea Reservoir beyond,’ Jackie Wright reported, before Sauce Haddock had closed the door of the CID room behind him. ‘I’ve located and spoken to all the owners,’ she continued. ‘There are four of them in total. Your guess . . .’

  ‘Guess?’ Haddock exclaimed, eyebrows raised.

  The DC grinned. ‘Sorry. Your intuitive speculation was spot on. At this time of year they usually lie empty, but one of them was rented for three weeks, beginning last Saturday.’

  ‘By whom?’ Pye asked.

  ‘That’s as far as your luck goes, for the tenant was a young woman; she paid the full rent in advance plus deposit, in cash, to the owner’s agent, a property firm in Walker Street. The description their guy gave me was a dead ringer for Anna Harmony, so I emailed him her photo. He confirmed it.’

  ‘Bugger,’ the DCI grunted. ‘A door opens, then some bastard slams it in your face again.’

  ‘So now,’ the DS said, ‘can we, please, go and tackle this Mackail man?’

  ‘Hold your horses, Sauce. You keep going on about him, but I still want to follow up on Sullivan. He had a link with Dino through the nephew, that was established, but for him to have known Anna as well . . .’

  ‘Come on,’ Haddock countered, ‘if you’re suggesting that Sullivan set up the job, even though he had no apparent reason, would he let Dino use his own car to do it?’

  ‘If he planned to kill them afterwards, why not?’ Pye smiled, then turned to another detective constable, the quiet man of the team, who was seated at the next desk to Wright. ‘Have you had any joy with that check I asked for this morning, William?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the thin, lugubrious DC Dickson replied. ‘Three weeks ago, Callum Sullivan withdrew twelve thousand pounds from his personal account, in cash. The money was in used notes, at his request.’

  ‘What a surprise,’ the DCI laughed. ‘And where does he bank?’

  ‘He uses the Clydesdale in Lothian Road; he does all his personal banking there.’

  Pye, smiling in triumph, looked at Haddock as if he were peering over imaginary spectacles. ‘Well?’ he asked.

  The DS glowered back at his boss. ‘Nobody loves a smartarse,’ he muttered. ‘Back to North Berwick?’

  ‘No, we’ve been there enough in the last couple of days. Jackie, I’d like you to call Mr Callum Sullivan and tell him we’d like his help with a couple of aspects of the inquiry, and we’d be grateful if he’d join us here at Fettes tomorrow morning.

  ‘William, while we’re talking to Mr Sullivan, I want to know everything there is to know about the man that we didn’t find out in the check we ran a couple of days ago: business life, private life, secret life, everything. Start now and don’t stop till you’ve answered all the questions.’

  Thirty-Seven

  ‘There’s no doubt?’ I asked, as I sat beside her on the edge of the bed, staring at the words on the stick that she had handed me.

  ‘None.’

  ‘This says it’s certain?’

  ‘It’s as certain as it gets.’ Sarah snorted. ‘We can do it again if you doubt it. You can even come in and watch me pee. But the result will be exactly the same. I’m pregnant, Bob.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘We can call him that if you like,’ she said, ‘as long as he’s a boy.’

  To my surprise, I started to giggle. ‘We might have to,’ I chuckled, a little manically. ‘We’ll be running out of boys’ names soon.’

  My mild hysteria passed very quickly. ‘Have you thought any more about this?’ I asked.

  ‘Pretty much all day.’

  ‘And?’

  She shrugged. ‘I’m forty but I’m fit. There’s no physical reason why I can’t deliver a normal healthy child. At my age any consultant will want to do an amniotic fluid test to check against the outside chance of Down
’s Syndrome and other foetal abnormalities. As for my work, maternity leave is my statutory right, regardless of my job.’

  ‘And?’ I repeated.

  ‘No,’ she said, firmly. ‘You first. How do you feel about another child?’

  I drew a deep breath, then exhaled slowly, and all the time I was thinking. I didn’t reply until I was truly certain of what I wanted to say.

  ‘I’m fifty-three,’ I began, when I was ready, ‘and I’m fit. I have my last police medical, eight months ago, as evidence. I have four children by three different women, plus one who’s adopted . . . Ray Charles had twelve by ten, so I’m nowhere near a record-breaker. My daughter is thirty, and my older son, the one I’ve only just learned about, is about to be twenty. The thought of all that should scramble my brain, but it doesn’t. I love all my children in different ways, but I love them all equally. Love isn’t something you can quantify. It isn’t something of which there is a finite supply in every person. It’s unlimited.’

  I took Sarah’s hand and looked her in the eye. ‘If you go ahead and have this baby, I will love him or her as I love all the others, no more no less, in the same special, individual way.’

  ‘Is that a yes?’ she asked, quietly.

  ‘It’s a statement of unqualified support for whatever you decide,’ I promised her.

  ‘In that case, it’s a yes.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘I’ve been certain since I saw the message on the tester. I’ve been doubting myself all day, trying to pin down how I feel, but when I saw that word in the window, it all went away.’

  ‘How pregnant are you?’

  ‘From the date of my last period, five weeks; I’ll be due some time in October.’

  ‘Around the time Ignacio’s due for release on parole. I’d better call the architect,’ I said. ‘We will definitely need to crack on with that extension.’

  ‘I’ll sell the Edinburgh house; that’ll pay for it.’

  ‘I can afford it,’ I protested.

  ‘We can afford it,’ she corrected me.

  ‘Can we afford a small wedding reception as well?’

  She dug me in the ribs, and looked up at me, sideways. ‘You sure about that?’

  ‘I have been for a while,’ I confessed. ‘I’ve been meaning to broach the subject.’

  She winked at me. ‘In that case, I accept.’

  ‘Champagne to celebrate?’ I suggested.

  ‘Not until the bombshell arrives,’ she said. ‘We should let Trish provide that,’ she laughed. ‘This keeps her in certain employment for the foreseeable future.’

  In the event we decided to postpone the announcement until the weekend, when Alex had promised to visit. Instead we had a normal family supper, with me wondering whether we’d need a bigger table as well.

  Thirty-Eight

  Next morning I had trouble refocusing on the job, but once Sarah had gone to work, and the kids to school, with an effort of will I managed it.

  I was slightly annoyed that Jock Hodgson hadn’t got back in touch, irked enough to call him again, and leave a slightly testier message on his phone. With that out of the way, I decided to pick up on my discussion with Walter Hurrell and on the leads that had come out of it.

  Before I got round to that, though, I made one more phone call.

  Clyde Houseman and I go back a long way, twenty years in fact, to the time when I was a detective super and he was a teenage gang-banger in the very roughest part of Edinburgh. These days, he credits me with pointing him in the right direction when we had our street encounter. If so that’s all I did; the journey and the hard labour it involved were all down to him.

  It led him to the Marines, to Special Forces and finally to the Security Service, where he is now, in its secretive Glasgow office. Its number is programmed into my phone, under the label ‘Chiropractor’.

  He was in when I called. ‘Sir,’ he said, his voice clipped, without accent. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m great,’ I replied.

  ‘Are you going to be joining us any time soon?’ he asked, boldly.

  ‘You never know,’ I replied. ‘If the director has a need for me, she knows she can call.’ In truth, Amanda Dennis, my friend and his boss, and I had talked around the idea, but only in the vaguest of terms.

  ‘But right now you have a need for us. Is that the case?’

  ‘More for you than for the service,’ I told him. ‘I’ve come across a man who claims to have been in your old outfit. By that I mean Special Forces, not the Marines. A naval petty officer; he’s called Walter Hurrell. I’d like to know about him.’

  ‘There’s something familiar about that name,’ Clyde said, ‘but I can’t pin it down. We weren’t big on surnames or ranks in the SBS. Let me make inquiries and come back to you. What’s the context?’

  ‘I’m doing a private job for a rich acquaintance who’s been robbed of a high-value item. Hurrell works for him and there’s a vibe coming off him. If he isn’t straight, I need to know.’

  ‘Okay. I’ll find out,’ Clyde promised.

  That done, I went back to the notes that I’d made after my session with Hurrell. He’d been adamant that the Princess Alison hadn’t been spirited away on a larger vessel and I was inclined to agree with him. He was almost as sure that she was still afloat, sold on to wealthy, wide-boy buyers, possibly, even, in the US.

  Thinking about her range and about possible routes, I struggled to see why anyone would have chosen the American option. Fuelled up, Iceland would be well within her range. But from there, the closest refuelling point would be Nuuk, in Greenland, or St John’s in Newfoundland. Either would be stretching it, and more; in winter it would be a cold and risky voyage. Why take the chance when you could go south and into the Mediterranean, where there would be potential buyers aplenty? Finally I decided to trust Hurrell and make that my first choice.

  Which would mean the part of criminal investigation that I have always hated the most: a desk job; just me, a computer and a phone. To find where the Princess had headed, I would have to find her first refuelling station.

  ‘There was enough fuel in the tank for them to get her to the west coast of Ireland,’ Hurrell had said. How many marine diesel fuel pumps were there within that range? I had no idea, and I didn’t have much of an idea of how to find out. It was another job I’d have been happy to delegate to Carrie McDaniels, but she was fully occupied. I could understand why Randolph bloody McGarry couldn’t be arsed to do it himself, even if I couldn’t excuse him his omission.

  I went on to my computer and eventually found a website called Marinas Online that gave me particulars of eighty-nine marinas in the UK. Fortunately they weren’t all coastal; once I had filtered out inland waterways I was left with a list of a dozen, dotted along the north-west coast of England and down into Wales. Manageable, I thought, until I moved on to Ireland and found another web page; that trebled the number of potential stopping places.

  My next problem was the lack of a specific date. I knew that the boat had been stolen on 4 October, but that was as precise as I could be. The only advantage I had was the sheer size of the beast. There couldn’t be too many seventy-five-foot motor cruisers around, surely.

  I picked up my list and went to work, haunted by the memory of my very first day as a detective constable, when old Alf Stein, who went on to become my mentor, gave me a desk, a phone and a list of bystander witnesses, made by two PCs who attended a near-fatal stabbing, and told me to get on with interviewing them.

  I did too; the fifth person I spoke to told a story that was so much at odds with the first four, who had all painted more or less the same picture, that I stopped what I was doing and dug a little deeper into his background. The ‘witness’ had professed no knowledge of the victim, and yet a simple check showed me that when he h
ad served six months in Saughton for assault, the two had been cellmates.

  I decided to look more deeply at the victim: I pulled his record and called the detective sergeant who was listed as his last arresting officer. He told me to fuck off if I knew what was good for me. I invited him to say that to my face, then went to Alf and told him what I had discovered.

  We pulled in the witness and sat him down in a windowless, airless room in Gayfield Square, my least favourite of all the Edinburgh police stations. His name was Thomas McGraw, and he went down in my personal history as my first ever CID collar. Ten minutes of Alf’s relentless, unblinking interrogation . . . from then on I modelled my own interview style on his . . . and he coughed the lot.

  The victim, one Scott Hancock, a recidivist criminal, had been on the payroll of Ernie Lewis, my detective sergeant acquaintance, as an informant, but that relationship had been tarnished when he confessed to McGraw in an unguarded moment in their cell that much of the information he had provided had come from a man called Dougie Terry, also known as the Comedian, and had been designed to incriminate his enemies while protecting his friends.

  McGraw had gone straight to Lewis, with a view to securing the DS’s favour, and had been told to prove himself by serving notice on Hancock with the weapon of his choice. It had all gone according to plan, until the two PCs arrived ahead of schedule, having heard the victim’s cries. With his escape route blocked, McGraw had mingled among the growing crowd of passers-by at the scene. When asked for his details he had been foolish enough to give his real name.

  Hancock survived, McGraw pleaded guilty to an assault charge rather than attempted murder and both men gave evidence against Ernie Lewis. By the time he came out I was a chief inspector. Alf let me charge McGraw, but he kept Lewis for himself, for he didn’t think it wise for a rookie DC to have another a cop on his arrest docket.

  My trawl of the coastal marinas of Britain and Ireland was nowhere near as successful. In fact it was a total bust, as I had feared from the outset. Most of the places told me they couldn’t handle a vessel of that size, and the rest said that if one had turned up, they would have recalled it, but couldn’t. For the sake of thoroughness I checked out the fuelling points at Inverkip and Oban, but had no joy at either.