As I looked at Roger McGrane through that glass wall, from my position of invisibility, his impatient, bored face was replaced by two visions of Tommy Coyle, leering at my tits in his office, and then lolling dead in Linton Baillie’s chair.
I backed away until my date was out of my line of vision, then turned and waved at the first taxi I saw. ‘He’s all yours, Mrs Harris,’ I murmured, as I climbed in.
On the way home, I called Sarah. She had brought the kids to her house in the Grange for the weekend, so I asked the driver to take me there instead. We had almost arrived when my phone sounded. The screen showed a number I didn’t recognise, but I guessed who it was: I bottled it and rejected the call.
Sarah . . . I call her my sometime stepmother . . . does the best corned beef hash in the world, and she never underestimates, so there was enough for me when I got there. I didn’t say much; I just played with Seonaid and let James and Andrew do the talking, until it was time for them all to go upstairs.
As soon as the field was clear, Sarah fetched two beers from the fridge, handed one to me and settled down beside me on the sofa. ‘Shitty day?’ she murmured. ‘Sorry, kid, but you look whacked.’
‘Shitty week. Completely fucking crazy. Even by your adventurous standards I’ll bet you’ve never had one like it.’
There are very few people I’ll allow to see me cry, but she’s one of them. I let myself go for a couple of minutes then when I was composed again, I took her through it, right to the end. By that time I was feeling a little guilt about Roger.
‘I left the poor guy sitting there like a lemon,’ I said, ‘after he’d come all the way through from Glasgow. He’ll be angry and I won’t blame him.’
I took my phone from my pocket and saw that I had one voicemail message. I played it back, on speaker. It was Roger, of course, but ‘angry’ had been an understatement. Pure, foul, threatening vitriol spewed out, until I couldn’t listen to any more and cut it off.
Sarah’s eyes were on fire. ‘Gimme,’ she growled, taking the mobile from my hand. She found recent calls and hit the number. She’d left it on broadcast, so I heard Roger when he picked up. ‘Yes?’ he crackled. He was on the road.
‘Dr McGrane,’ she began. ‘My name is Sarah Grace, associate professor of Pathology at Edinburgh University. I’m calling to tell you that after the message you’ve just left for my troubled stepdaughter, I am really looking forward to performing your autopsy, the sooner the better.’
‘Maybe I over-re—’ he began.
She cut him off in mid-word. ‘Too late, mister. Think on this as you drive home. The pathology work your lab gets comes directly from me, and people like me. There aren’t too many of us, and I know them all. You can start to plan for a life without that income stream.’
She hit the ‘End’ button and dropped the phone on the sofa.
‘Christ, Sarah,’ I exclaimed. ‘Now I really feel sorry for the man.’
‘Then don’t. There are two sorts of guy in this world. Them that are gentlemen, and them that are not.’
She took a swig of her beer. ‘I knew about Mr Coyle,’ she told me. ‘I opened him up this morning. Jack McGurk was there to witness, and he told me you’d found him.’
I nodded, dumbly.
‘This thing you’re doing for Bob,’ she continued. ‘Is it a threat to him?’
‘I dunno,’ I confessed. ‘There was a threat to Ignacio, potentially, but I dealt with that at the prison. I won’t be able to see the broader picture until I’ve looked at the contents of Baillie’s computer. I’ll do that when I go home.’
‘You’ll do it tomorrow,’ she countered, firmly. ‘You’re going to stay here tonight. You’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders. A major career change would be enough to carry on its own, without all the shit that’s been thrown at you this week. You need a good night’s sleep and I don’t trust you to get it at your place, so you are going to hit the pillows upstairs.’
I did, and I hit them hard. I turned in not long after ten, and was still sound when Seonaid wakened me next morning at eight fifteen. Sarah was taking her to meet Santa Claus that morning, and she couldn’t wait any longer to tell me about it.
After breakfast we tried to call Dad, but with no more success than the day before.
‘What do you think he’s up to?’ Sarah asked.
‘I have no idea,’ I told her truthfully, then laughed. ‘My only worry is whether this McDaniels girl, the one I told you about last night, might have pushed him too far and he might be in jail.’
She shook her head. ‘Nah, I don’t see that. Bob’s too fond of women to kill one of us. No, it’ll be something mundane that’s keeping him out of touch. You know how he is. He has a brilliant mind, but don’t ask him to pack his own suitcase.’
I went home from Sarah’s feeling a hell of a lot better. When I got in, there was a new message on my landline. It was from Roger, contrite and apologetic. I wasn’t surprised after the way Sarah had sunk the boot into him.
Rather than call him back, I wrote to him . . . yes, a real letter . . . saying that I was sorry for my no show, but explaining that it just hadn’t felt right, and that experience had taught me not to start anything I wasn’t prepared to finish. I found a stamp in a kitchen drawer, went out and dumped the missive in a postbox in the Canongate, then went back home to attend to the business I’d postponed from the previous evening.
I put the memory stick Jack had given me in a USB slot in my computer, powered it up then clicked the icon that appeared on the screen.
Whoever Linton Baillie was, he was organised. His computer management was clear, with his life set down in a series of folders, in alphabetical order.
They began with ‘Bank’. I’m sure that on his laptop it would have been password protected, but he hadn’t done that with his back-up disk. I clicked on it and got straight in, expecting to find account details, credit card statements and so on . . . but all I found was email correspondence, mostly incoming from First National Mutual and none of it meaningful.
I scrolled down the list; there was one called ‘House’, and another labelled ‘Travel’, but the others all appeared to relate to projects. A couple meant nothing to me, but ‘Glasgow’ and ‘MI5’ were in line with his list of publications.
The one that caught my eye, though, the one that hit me was headed ‘Skinner’.
I clicked on it and went straight in.
It was arranged in a series of sub-folders, headed ‘Carrie invoices’, ‘Carrie reports’, ‘pics’, ‘research’ and ‘manuscript’.
I opened the first. When my father called me, almost eight hours later, I hadn’t taken a break, and I was still reading.
Thirty
I left the message programme and dialled Alex’s number. As it began to ring, it occurred to me that she might not be in; then she picked it up and I was filled with a feeling of sadness that my daughter should be home alone on a Saturday night.
‘What’s happening, love?’ I asked, anxiously.
‘Pops,’ she exclaimed, ‘where have you been? I’ve been trying to raise you for ages. Why were you in Madrid anyway? Did it have to do with the McDaniels woman?’
It wasn’t the time to go into detail. ‘No,’ I assured her, ‘nothing at all. I had some business there and forgot to take my phone charger. I’m sorry if you’ve been worrying and sorry I wasn’t there when you needed me. Now what the hell is this about a homicide?’
‘It’s Linton Baillie’s agent,’ she blurted out. ‘I thought I was going to meet Baillie, but when I got there Tommy Coyle was waiting for me, and he was dead.’
My heart jumped into my mouth. ‘You found him?’ Talk about running in the family, I thought. Like father, like daughter.
‘Yes. And I ran for it, Pops. I did a complete girlie thing and got out of there as fast as my legs could carry me.’
‘That was exactly the right thing to do.’
‘Then I felt like a childish fool,’ she contin
ued, ‘so I went back.’
‘You did what!’ I shouted.
‘I went back in there,’ she repeated, ‘and I made sure that he really was dead and then I called the police, and waited for CID.’
‘Who took the call? Who’s the SIO in the investigation?’
‘Jack McGurk. It was his territory: Slateford.’
That calmed me down, immediately. McGurk had a spell as my executive officer; he’s a good detective, calm, methodical, efficient. (As a manager and a mentor, I’ve always tried to excise my own weaknesses from the people under my command and guidance.)
‘How did he die?’ I hoped Alex hadn’t been exposed to the things I’d seen that week.
‘He was strangled, with a leather thong, but it wasn’t left there. Sarah did the post-mortem; she told me she found fibres in the mark round his neck. Jack came to see me yesterday. He said that the Yale was unlatched . . . although I knew that . . . and that Coyle was probably taken completely by surprise. That was certainly how it looked to me,’ she added. ‘Very professional.’
‘Jesus, Alex,’ I sighed. ‘How close did you get?’
‘Close enough.’
‘I hope you didn’t screw things up for the CSI team.’
‘I was careful, Pops.’ She sounded hurt by the mere suggestion that she might have.
‘Do they have a result yet?’
‘Not a sniff, as of yesterday.’
‘Mmm.’ I couldn’t help it; satisfied that my daughter was okay, I was in full detective mode. ‘You went there expecting to find somebody else,’ I said. ‘I wonder if the Slateford Strangler did as well.’
‘That notion’s occurred to Jack and the team,’ she told me. ‘But it’s pure supposition as yet. However,’ she continued, ‘we are closer to Linton Baillie. Our friendly DI gave me a copy of a computer storage disk they found; I’ve been going through it all day, and Pops, it’s very interesting. You’re right; you’ve been under the spotlight.’
‘That I knew,’ I replied. ‘I’ve had a long talk with Ms McDaniels.’
‘Who’s been well paid for her time,’ she retorted. ‘I have copies of all the bills she submitted to her client. Better than that, I know what he looks like. Those images you sent me, the man on the beach: it’s him, identified by the neighbours.’
That didn’t surprise me too much, but what she said next came from out of nowhere and rocked me back on my heels.
‘Baillie lives in Portland Street all right, but the strange thing is, he doesn’t own it. I’ve been to the Land Register Office, and to Register House. The property belongs to a man named Ben McNeish; he appears to have inherited it four years ago, from his late father; his name was Gavin McNeish.’
That hit me harder than anything I’d experienced all week. I’d been emotionally detached from Battaglia and Jacob Ireland, but what Alex had told me was like a grenade being lobbed into my own front room.
‘I want to see all this stuff,’ I told her, ‘everything.’
‘It’ll be ready for you when you come home.’
‘No, love, I want to see it now: tonight. Email it to me, everything you’ve got, including your detective work on McNeish.’
‘I will do, Pops. But when are you coming home? I could use you being around right now.’
‘That’s understood, kid,’ I assured her, ‘and I promise you I’ll be back as soon as I can. I’ve done what I came here to do . . . and a hell of a lot more besides. Just send me that stuff now. Once I’ve dealt with it, I’ll be able to book a flight.’
I left her to do as I asked. While I was waiting, I opened my computer and opened the image files from Carrie’s SD card. I scrolled through them until I found the ones that had been taken on Gullane beach, in which the man had been captured.
As I’d expected from my earlier study, there was no full-face image; I chose the one that came closest to it, and set to work. Using an edit programme I cropped the face, eliminating the background, then enlarged it as much as I could without losing quality.
Putting on my reading glasses and leaning close to the screen, I studied it, trying to remember as many of Ben McNeish’s features as I could. Then I closed my eyes and tried mentally to strip away the beard from the man that I’d met on only one brief occasion.
When I opened them again, I wasn’t certain that they were one and the same, but eighty per cent was good enough for me to be confident that Xavi’s stepson was Linton Baillie.
A tone from the speakers told me that Alex’s email had arrived; in fact there were three of them, as the attachments were too big for a single transmission. I opened the first and saw a message that said, ‘Concentrate on this one. It’s the most relevant.’ I could see why she’d said that; the folder that it carried had my name as a label.
I downloaded it then clicked it open, to find four sub-folders. I ignored the first; Carrie McDaniels’ hourly rate wasn’t of interest to me, even if, as she’d boasted, it was higher than police officers’ pay. But her reports were: I opened that folder and saw that they were listed in date order.
As she said, she’d been on my case since early summer, and following me sporadically for seven months. The early reports were pretty bland; if I’d been keeping a daily journal myself, its entries would have looked much like they did, with a little more colour.
I couldn’t be arsed reading them all, and so I went straight to the date that was of most interest to me, that on which Ignacio had made his appearance in the High Court to plead guilty to culpable homicide. I opened it and read:
Significant development: as you instructed today I went to the High Court to photograph people going in and out. To my surprise, the subject arrived. He was hailed by a woman who was unknown to me. They spoke briefly on the pavement with no outward sign of affection.
They went into the court building and I did likewise. They went into the first courtroom and again I followed; it was busy but the woman took a seat on the bench reserved for family members, and the target found a place in the row behind. The accused was a teenage Spanish boy named Ignacio Centelleos, who pleaded guilty to the manslaughter (*Should that be womanslaughter?
It was revealed in court that Centelleos was arrested in L’Escala, Spain. You will be aware that the subject has a holiday home there. Monitoring reveals that he was likely to have been there at the time of the arrest, although not under our observation. Although she was not identified in court, I am certain that the woman is the boy’s mother, who was named in the proceedings as Mia Watson by the advocate depute.
*** Moreover, having been able to observe them both in the same room, it is beyond doubt that there is a strong physical resemblance between Centelleos and the subject. This may explain the subject’s unexpected private visit to the Forest Gate Laboratory in Glasgow, which I observed and photographed. Certainly I recommend a search of birth records in Spain. ***
When the hearing was over, Centelleos waved to the woman as he was taken out and called out something in Spanish which may have been ‘Adios, madre’. The woman and the subject left the courtroom separately, but met up again outside where I was able to photograph them. They went into Cafe Saint Giles and stayed for twenty minutes. As per your telephone instruction, when they left I followed the woman, rather than the subject. She went to a large house below Blackford Hill, where she used a keypad to open the security gate.
Relevant photographs are attached with this report.
I closed the file, admitting to myself that just maybe Carrie was better at her job than I thought. If she hadn’t been a bit unlucky in revealing herself to me in L’Escala, I might never have known she was tagging me.
I frowned. One thing still puzzled me. Carrie had assured me that she had never met her client, and I’d believed her. Was I wrong about the man in the photograph, or had she been lying?
I put that consideration to one side and opened the folder headed ‘pics’. I expected a show of thumbnails, but instead I found more sub-folder
s, headed ‘Associates’, ‘Career’, ‘Domestic’, and finally, ‘Women’. I chose the last, and clicked on it.
This time, the thumbnail images did appear. I sat bolt upright in my chair. Every woman in my life was there, Sarah, Alex, Myra, Aileen . . . even my mother. She was wearing evening dress, in a grainy black and white shot that must have come from the archives of The Motherwell Times, my local paper when I was a kid. As I looked at it, I remembered it, taken at a civic dinner she’d attended with my father, on one of their rare public outings together. Myra’s image was taken from a newspaper too; I had given it to a journalist when she was killed, to get him off my doorstep.
There were more: Maggie Steele featured, in her chief constable’s uniform.
Paula Viareggio McGuire, Mario’s wife, in a designer frock.
Alison Higgins; dead all these years, it still tugged at my heart to see her, in an informal shot that I remembered appearing in the Daily Record after her death.
Leona McGrath: Sarah and I adopted her son Mark after her death. I hoped that was the only connection between us that had been made.
Mia, of course; from the background I knew that it had been taken outside the High Court.
There was one other and she set the hair prickling at the back of my neck: Pamela Masters, my biggest ever mistake, of whom the least said the better.
I felt my face twist into a scowl as I closed the picture folder and opened ‘Research’. That proved to be a series of links to newspaper websites, and scanned images of stories in which I was involved, from the early stages of my career.
One of those was from the Courier, the Dundee-based daily; it dealt with the discovery of the body of my brother, Michael, in a house in Perth. It wasn’t my case to investigate, since it was in Tayside territory, but I was quoted, accurately. I said that Michael’s life had been troubled, and that he and I were estranged. I added that I was shocked and saddened by his death. The first might have been true; the second certainly wasn’t.
Along with the press stuff here were several documents titled ‘Questionnaire interview transcript’, each with a different set of initials as a suffix. I clicked on one with the letters ‘JC’; it was a record of a conversation with a man called Jackie Charles, courtesy of the Governor of Shotts Prison, which had been his home for several years.
Last Resort Page 31