Say You're Sorry: A Gripping Crime Thriller (A DCI Campbell McKenzie Detective Conspiracy Thriller No 1)

by IAN C. P. IRVINE

If not more.

  And Anand was determined that he would get it.

  However, there was also a new question beginning to niggle at Anand.

  When he had started all this, his sole intention was to get McNunn to apologise for what he had done to Jonathan.

  What happened if McNunn actually did say he was sorry?

  Would that be enough?

  Would Anand just accept the apology on behalf of Jonathan, accept the absolution that the apology would grant him... and then stop everything else?

  Would Anand just walk away, go back to his own life and leave McNunn alone?

  Deep down, Anand already knew the answer.

  Chapter 38

  Room 86

  The Holiday Inn

  Picardy Place

  Edinburgh

  Thursday

  3:55 a.m. G.M.T.

  "Boss?" Fraser whispered into his phone, kneeling on the floor at the entrance to the bathroom.

  "What have you found?" McNunn demanded to know, answering the phone immediately. It was obvious he'd been waiting for the call.

  "You're not going to like this Boss."

  "What is it?"

  "A condom. And it's full." Fraser replied, saying nothing more and letting the words sink in.

  At the other end of the phone, McNunn bit his lip. He had really been hoping that Fraser would not find anything. The fact that he had found a used condom meant that it was definitely over between himself and Caroline. The bitch had deliberately slept with McKenzie but made no effort to follow his instructions. She'd fucked McKenzie, but not collected the DNA that McNunn had requested.

  "Where was it?" McNunn replied, calmly, trying not to let the rage, the hurt or the disappointment show in his voice.

  "In the toilet in the waste bin."

  "Is there anything else?"

  "Some used tissues. And some hairs, probably hers, on the bed and the pillow."

  "Good. Collect it all and take it to the Casino in Costorphine. Wrap them in some toilet paper and don't let anyone touch them. And DON'T let the sperm out of the condom. Bring them to the Casino. I'll meet you there in half-an-hour. As soon as you get to the Casino, put them in individual plastic bags and stick them in the freezer compartment of the fridge in the bar on the second floor. Don't let anyone see what you're doing. Do you understand?"

  "Got it, Boss." Fraser paused. "Boss, can I ask? What are you going to do with the semen? It just feels like a little weird..."

  Tommy thought about whether he should answer the question, and then decided there was no reason not to. Fraser was one of his top men, and he would be one of the crew that might help Tommy carry out the plan for tomorrow night. A plan which, due to recent events, was coming together quickly in Tommy's head.

  "You keep this to yourself, okay, and don't breathe a word of it to another soul, but tomorrow night you and I are going get rid of McKenzie once and for all."

  "Are we going kill him?"

  "No. We're going get him put in prison for murder. We’ll let the police do our dirty work for us. We'll let them clean up their own filth."

  "How?" the ever more curious Fraser enquired.

  "We kill a prostitute, stick McKenzie's semen inside her vagina, and then call the police, pretending to be a law-abiding member of the public who heard screaming and then saw McKenzie come out of a hotel room where the slut's body will be found. I haven't worked all the details out yet, but I'm getting there. But focussing back on the time being, you need to get out of there and don't get seen or caught. There's a fire escape on the ground floor. Slip out of there. Don't go back past the reception in case some twat sees you."

  "Okay, Boss."

  "And Fraser....? You did well. Very well."

  Fraser smiled for the first time that day.

  -------------------------

  Hillside Farm

  Threipmuir Reservoir

  The Pentland Hills

  Edinburgh

  Thursday

  4.00 a.m. G.M.T.

  Tommy was livid. Anger, frustration and hate flooded through his veins. That wasn't all, however. He was feeling a curious mixture of emotions, some of which he knew were related to weakness. His weakness for Caroline. The bitch.

  Closing his eyes, he forced himself to blot out his feelings for her. She was just an asset. An asset.

  "An asset with a nice ass," he heard himself saying aloud before he could catch himself. Yet the truth was that she was far more to him than that. Much more.

  Tommy had affairs constantly with many women. The women who worked in his bars and Casinos, even those who worked on the streets - they all effectively belonged to him, and he could, and did, do with them as he wished, whenever he wished.

  Tommy was realising now that the biggest mistake he had made recently was to allow himself to feel more for Caroline than he ever should have.

  "Shit!" he swore for the hundredth time that night: the past twenty four hours were, without doubt, the worst he could ever remember.

  Just then, almost as if someone somewhere could read his thoughts, his phone vibrated.

  Tommy looked at the screen.

  "Say you're sorry!"

  A wave of anger surged through him.

  "Shit, no! I NEVER say I'm sorry!" and he immediately hit the orange button on the left which had appeared underneath the large white text on the screen.

  Almost instantaneously he realised he had made a mistake.

  From what he had learned earlier tonight, Petrovsky was not behind any of this. So, who was?

  Tommy realised then that the only way to find out who was behind it all, was probably to hit the button on the right, the one that said:

  "I'm sorry. Please forgive me."

  In future, he had to control his anger. The next time the message appeared, he had to hit the button on the right. Even though he would never, ever agree to saying sorry, he had to find out what happened when he hit that button, and who was behind this whole thing.

  He had to find out.

  And then he had to kill him. Quickly.

  Before the man - or woman - made any more of his life disappear.

  -------------------------

  Andheri

  Near Mumbai, Maharashtra

  India

  Thursday

  09.05 a.m. India Standard Time (IST)

  Anand opened his eyes again.

  He'd been drifting in and out of sleep since he had woken up. Earlier on, he'd managed to present McNunn with another screen on his phone giving him the option to apologise, but apart from doing that, he had not been able to stay awake long enough to follow the thread of any of the conversations that McNunn had been having over his phone.

  Luckily it was all recorded, and Anand promised himself that once he'd had a few hours more sleep, he'd listen to it all.

  Having decided that he was in no fit state to go into work, he took the laptop and crawled back into his bed, pulling the mosquito net closed behind him.

  Almost instantly, he was back sound asleep.

  For now at least, McNunn was reprieved from any further actions against him.

  -------------------------

  St Leonards Police Station

  Edinburgh

  Thursday

  Later that day

  DCI McKenzies Office

  3.30 p.m. G.M.T.

  DCI McKenzie stood at his window looking out towards the Crags.

  For him the Queen's Park had always been a magical place, and Salisbury Crags had always held a certain wonder for Campbell. Rising at an almost perfect forty-five-degree angle out towards the city, and towering above the Police Station below, the Crags automatically drew the attention of everyone who passed by within a mile of their sheer vertical cliffs.

  Since a child, he had been drawn to them, and now, as an adult, almost his every waking thought for the past month had centred around trying to discover what really happened there that night.

  The news from the morning ha
d been both excellent, but also devastating for McKenzie.

  He had sent the entire team working on Operations Queens out to scour the Park, with each team of two sent to walk around defined areas of its perimeter and to scour for ways that a group of men could have entered the park in darkness, whilst possibly forcing one of the team to move under duress, and make their way to the top of the Crags unseen.

  Within an hour one enthusiastic team had called in, announcing that they had a theory: the gang had snuck undetected into the Park along the length of the forgotten and disused underground Innocent Railway tunnel by entering it through the Bawsinch Nature Reserve near Duddingston. However, after later climbing through some undergrowth and walking along the disused railway line - now a cycle path- the police team had emerged in a housing estate close to St Leonards police station. What had started out as a real possibility had quickly turned into nothing. Sadly, there had been no way out halfway along the tunnel into the Park itself.

  Then about eleven o'clock, Detective Sergeant McCrae called in with what then turned out to be a very plausible solution, and probably the answer they had been looking for.

  They had walked the length of the large stone wall which had been built around the east side of the Park. It started near St Margaret's Loch and rose steadily along the side of the Park, contouring it up the hill towards the base of Arthur's Seat, the 'mountain' that dominated the view of Edinburgh, before falling back down towards the village of Duddingston.

  Half-way up, McRae and his partner had realised that there was a gate in the wall through which people could easily access the Park in the dark at night, from the top of a road called Ulster Crescent. Once inside the Park, a group of men could easily cross the then now closed and empty Queen's Drive, the private road that ran around the inside of the Park, and then climb up and across Whinny Hill. They would then descend the other side of the hill towards the ruins of St. Anthony's Chapel and make their way into Hunter's Bog, the large basin on the other side of Salisbury Crags. From there they could climb up the back of the Crags, until they reached the cliff at the Cat's Nick, the spot from which Urqhart would fall to his death. Once Urqhart had been dispatched, it would have been a simple matter to retrace their steps.

  It made perfect sense.

  At that time of the night, that route through the Park would be almost deserted, and anyone walking a dog or crossing the Park themselves in the dark would be hard pressed to see anyone else who was keen to avoid detection.

  Also, McNunn could have parked his car in Ulster Crescent, a private residential street, and no one would have noticed or suspected anything.

  It then quickly turned out that there were no CCTV cameras for miles. The nearest ones were on the main road, over a mile away.

  Evidence that they were perhaps onto something good, then quickly materialised an hour later when a new search of the ANPR Automatic Number Plate Recognition records showed a listing for the number plate of one of McNunn's cars heading south along the London Road about an hour before the estimated time of death for Urqhart.

  If the car had contained McNunn, some of his men, and Urqhart, it could have driven further down the main road from the city centre towards Portobello, turned right at the Jock's Lodge intersection, carried on along towards the crossing at Duddingston, and then turned up the hill into Ulster Crescent.

  After this however, the news had not been good.

  There was no available footage showing anyone inside the car.

  This was also the car that had been found burned out in the forest in the Borders with the bodies of McNunn's men in it.

  Which was very convenient for McNunn. If the police had been able to get hold of that car, they would have had reason to impound it and search the boot and its inside for any signs of DNA from Urqhart. Perhaps they would have found a trace of something.

  The fact that that particular car was the one destroyed with both his men in it, made McKenzie even more suspicious that McNunn had once again outwitted him.

  Upon further discussion and consideration, the team had all quickly conceded that the hypothesis proposed by McRae was totally plausible. In fact, it was very possible.

  However, and the 'but' was a very big but, there was no way to ever prove it, and even though it could be true, it didn't give them anything. At all.

  The realisation that after all the weeks of knowing, KNOWING, that McNunn was behind it all, but discovering that even though they almost definitely now knew how he did it, that there was nothing to be gained from it, really depressed McKenzie.

  He had promised his team that if the morning's search brought nothing, - and it turned out that nothing else was discovered by the time lunchtime came - , then Campbell would accept everything else and give up on his quest to pin it on McNunn.

  Now he had no choice but to do just that, and with a heavy heart he had called the search off, and announced his acceptance of the situation.

  The sense of acute failure, coupled with an extremely guilty conscience because of the night before, had driven him to his office where he had locked the door, and sought only to be alone.

  Unfortunately, the fates had not yet done with him.

  At 3 p.m. there had been a knock upon his door, and McKenzie had turned around to find a CID officer from Costorphine waiting outside his office to see him.

  As he opened his door to let him in, McKenzie had no inkling of how much the next hour would affect his life.

  If things had been going from bad to worse, they were just about to rapidly descend into hell.

  And at the centre of it, as usual, was Tommy McNunn.

  Chapter 39

  Tommy McNunn's House

  Edinburgh

  Thursday

  3:45 p.m. G.M.T.

  Tommy McNunn had had a terrible day.

  The bed in the Casino was too hard, and too small, and when he did make it there, he had slept badly.

  Normally he only ever slept in it alone when he worked late in the Casino or drank too much and didn't want to go home. Probably more frequently than he would like to admit, when he did sleep over at the Casino, he often slept with one of the younger women who worked for him there. They didn't really have much choice in the matter, but the point was that generally they were smaller than Mrs McNunn and took up less space.

  Plus, he was rather more inclined to sleep closer to them than he was with Mrs McNunn, who although still beautiful, was always the same, day in and day out.

  The truth was that sleeping with Mrs McNunn had got a little boring.

  Which is why he was now rather inclined to avoid it whenever he could.

  Plus, as he often liked to joke with the thugs who worked for him, 'you're only ever as old as you feel,' which was why he surrounded himself with younger women whom he could 'feel' anytime he wanted.

  Joking aside, when McNunn got up out of the bed today after only several hours' 'rest', Mrs McNunn carried on sleeping and McNunn was glad that she did. It was either that or be faced with a barrage of questioning and nagging.

  He left the Casino early and went for breakfast at a hotel and tried to read the papers.

  He couldn't concentrate though. His mind kept wandering back to Caroline, her treachery with McKenzie, and the predicament he was now in. Had she not slept with McKenzie, McNunn might have been forced to admit to himself that he missed her. As it was, however, he now hated her.

  Also, he couldn't avoid the truth any longer.

  Someone somewhere was dismantling his life step by step. He now had no bank accounts, no water, electricity, cars, driving licence, club memberships... everywhere he went and anything he touched - aspects of his life seemed to be vaporising in front of him. He was becoming a 'non-person'. It seemed that in the modern world, almost every part of your life was controlled by a computer, and some bastard somewhere was erasing all the records of McNunn on all the servers and computers everywhere.

  Now he knew it was not Petrovsky's work, the big question was 'w
ho was doing this?'

  Putting the papers down and sitting there by himself -albeit guarded by his men who sat and stood nearby - McNunn racked his brains as to who could be responsible.

  Who?

  And who was sending him the message 'Say You're Sorry!'?

  The words echoed round and around in his mind.

  'Say you're sorry!', 'Say you're sorry!'

  Surely, he had heard that before somewhere. Someone had said it to him. But when? And who?

  Then, in a flash, it was there.

  That silly little man who had stopped his car in front of him, forcing McNunn to drive into the back of him. It was him! He had demanded an apology. Several times, in fact.

  The bastard. It was him!

  McNunn stood up from his table in the restaurant.

  "Come on, boys. We're leaving." He announced.

  Now he had remembered who had said it, McNunn was going to find the little old man and kill him.

  He remembered writing his number down on a piece of paper after the accident. Luckily, McNunn was not the tidiest of creatures. If he hadn't thrown it out, there was a fair chance it might still be on his desk in his office at home, and if he still had the number, this whole affair would be over by the evening.

  Then he could concentrate on his plans for Caroline and McKenzie.

  Fifteen minutes later, the car McNunn was being driven in turned into his street and drove up the road towards his house.

  Turning into his driveway, McNunn's jaw dropped.

  "What the f..." he started to say, but the words failed to come out properly.

  The men in the front seat of his car turned to him, the expressions on their faces just as confused as McNunn's.

  As soon as the car stopped moving, Tommy opened the rear door, got out, and walked back towards the large ‘For Sale’ sign that was stuck on the side of the entrance to his driveway.

  "For Sale, Boss?" the clever one asked, demonstrating that he could read.

  "I didn't know you were selling up, Boss," the other one said.