The sergeant’s questions laid heavy stress on the gun. I didn’t tell him much more than I had told his boss; small, black thing, didn’t appear to have a revolver chamber so I guessed that it was an automatic. Mind you, I could have told him that it was a Walther. I’ve had one of those pointed at me, not once but twice, and when you’ve looked down the barrel of a gun you can almost remember its serial number. I kept that detail to myself, though; those were incidents which I definitely did not want to discuss with the police.
Instead, I asked him, ‘Why do you need to know?’
‘We pass it on to police intelligence.’ I bit my lip; it wasn’t the time for the old gag about contradictions in terms. ‘They can sometimes give us a steer about other crimes where that type of gun’s been used. We’re still looking for the bullet, of course; once we find that it might tell us whether that specific weapon’s been used in another incident.
‘It’s a bugger not havin’ it.’ He sighed in a way which hinted that, sod it, his life would have been much easier if they’d been able to dig a slug out of Noosh or me, or one of the extras.
I let it pass and waved them goodbye, then took a taxi out to the address in the west of the city which Noosh had given me. I wouldn’t have felt right if I had left without checking that her protection was in place.
Detective Superintendent Francey had been as good as his word. There was a car parked just across the street from her small granite bungalow; two guys were sat in it, and I guessed that they weren’t looking for unlicensed television sets. I gave them a cheery wave as I opened the garden gate, before they could start worrying about me. I don’t suppose many hitmen arrive by taxi, but I didn’t want anyone to get nervous.
In a way, stepping into that living room was like a trip into the past. I recognised the sofa, the two recliner armchairs, upholstered in soft grey fabric, and the low coffee table. They had all been in the flat in Castle Terrace, in Edinburgh, which she and Jan had shared. Noosh’s manner, too, was the same as it had been then; not unfriendly, but cool and appraising.
‘You all right?’ I asked her.
‘I’ve been better. I have a sore bum, for one thing.’ She smiled. ‘But at least it doesn’t have a bullet in it.’
‘You’re safe now, anyway. Those guys across the road are pretty obvious.’ I looked around the room. ‘Do you live alone?’
‘Oh yes.’ She nodded, pausing for a moment. ‘I don’t think I’ll live with anyone again,’ she ventured. ‘Too dangerous. There can be too much hurt involved.’
Suddenly she looked vulnerable, and I thought of her in a way I never had before. ‘Noosh,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I never meant for that to happen.’
‘I know you didn’t, Oz. Nor did Jan. But the two of you, you didn’t really know what you were doing then. You were afraid of commitment, both of you; it was as if you had decided that there were wild oats you had to sow before then.’ She chuckled, sadly. ‘I guess that I was the field; and so was Primavera.’ With her faintly European accent she pronounced the ‘v’ softly, almost as an ‘f’.
‘When you came to Castle Terrace with her that day, looking for help, at first I thought, “This is great. He’s getting out of Jan’s life at last.” That lasted for a few minutes, until I realised that it would have the opposite effect. There was something in the way you and Jan looked at each other that day, that told me how it would end.’
‘You might have told me, then.’ The words burst from me; I couldn’t keep the bitterness from my voice.
Her hand flew to her mouth. ‘Oh Oz, my dear, I didn’t mean that. I could tell that you had to be together, that’s all. Even when you went off, all lusty for Primavera, I knew better than you did.’
‘You’ve changed a lot, you know. You were just a boy then, an irresponsible, crazy boy. But now you’ve grown up.’ She smiled at me again, as she never had before. ‘Now you’re a crazy man.
‘Seriously, after all that’s happened, I’m glad that things have worked out for you and Primavera. Like I said, she and I had something in common back then; we were both ditched. She must have loved you all along.
‘Just you two be lucky from now on.’
‘If you only knew the half of it, Anoushka. The way it’s been lately, lucky’s my middle name.’ I glanced out of the window, at my waiting taxi.
‘Look,’ I told her, ‘I’m dining with the gang tonight, so’ll need to be going.’ I took a card from my wallet and handed it to her. ‘There are all my numbers, home, office, mobile and e-mail. The boys outside will look after you, I’ve no doubt, but if you have any more trouble, or threats - or even if you just feel a bit nervous - get in touch with me any time.’
She walked me to her front door. Holding the round brass handle, she raised herself up on her toes and kissed me lightly on the lips. ‘Be good,’ she whispered. ‘I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you. Luck doesn’t last for ever; but then, I suppose you know that more than most.’
Chapter 20
‘Did the Grampian guys say anything to you? Did they tell you whether they had any leads at all?’
‘They told us bugger all, Mike. They just asked questions, that was all.’ Dylan had a day off, so he and I were in the Horseshoe for a Thursday lunchtime pint, pie and beans.
I had said nothing at all to Prim about my Aberdeen adventure, after making sure that the press hadn’t blown it up. There had been some local coverage, in the Evening Express and on NorthSound about the police being called to the scene, but the force press office had written it off as a false alarm. Kiki Eldon, Miles’ unit publicist, had done a good job too, spreading a few tenners around among the extras just to emphasise the point, as it were.
I had told her about meeting Noosh, on the off-chance that she did phone, or send me an e-mail. She had been interested, and pleased that there were no hard feelings, but that had been that.
Nevertheless, I was still suffering after-effects from the incident - like waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat - so when Dylan had called proposing a Horseshoe session I had jumped at the chance; not because I’m a great lunchtime boozer, but because I needed to talk to someone.
He had sat there quite calmly as I told him the story. I was a bit huffed; I had expected him to be more impressed.
‘They would ask questions, Oz,’ he mumbled, indistinctly, through a mouthful of pie. ‘It’s their job; I just wondered whether they’d told you what they were thinking.’
‘I got the impression that they weren’t thinking too hard. All they really did was ask us what we thought.’
Dylan nodded. ‘Standard procedure; more often than not the victims will tell you who did it, even if they don’t know themselves, or if they do but are trying to protect someone. See you, Oz, you’re a romantic when it comes to criminal investigation. You think the answer always comes in a flash of brilliance, like a revelation from God, or your Uncle Bob, or somebody.’
‘You mean that isn’t what happens?’ I asked him innocently. ‘That’s how it’s always worked for me.’
‘Sure,’ my friend countered, ‘after you’ve picked your way through a pile of casualties. Your blinding light always strikes you too late.’ A flash of uncertainty in his eyes told me that he knew he’d dropped a clanger, but he decided, rightly, that the best way to deal with it was to blunder on to the next outrage. ‘I’m a detective, pal,’ he continued. ‘You’re a chancer.’
I couldn’t let that one past. ‘Is that right, Detective Inspector? In that case, which of us has the better clear-up rate?’
‘Clear-up rate? You, what have you cleared up, except the empties from the night before and the Durex from under the bed?’
‘Well,’ I countered, feeling my eyes narrow a bit, ‘for a start there was the guy two years ago. I got him, didn’t I.’
‘He was barking mad, Oz. Christ, he was banging your enormous pal’s wife; that’s how nuts he was.’
‘Nonetheless, I got him; you lot didn’t.’
‘We might have, if your pal had reported it as a crime long before he did.’
‘There were reasons for that. And that business with the painting out in Spain that Prim and I were involved in. We got a result there too; and what a result.’
‘The way you tell the story, the guy confessed to you.’
‘Sure, but we’d worked it out by then. Anyway, what about the wee stockbroker in Edinburgh, the one who was found dead in Prim’s flat? That’s still on the unsolved list, is it not, despite you and ex-Superintendent Ross being hot on the trail?’
Dylan frowned. He always does when I bring that one up. ‘We reckoned the wife did it; you know that. The Crown Office wouldn’t prosecute, that was all.’
‘That’s balls, Michael, and you know it. Your boss Ricky thought that Dawn did it. He even had me in the frame at one point; or so you told me. As for Linda Kane, no way did she do it.’
‘You still let us arrest her, though.’
‘Well? The cow did try to kill Dawn, Prim and me. Too effing right we let you arrest her.’
‘You know, Blackstone,’ Mike growled; he only calls me by my surname when he’s on a fishing trip. ‘I think you’re hinting that you got a result there too.’
‘We got a large reward for the money we recovered.’
‘That’s not what I mean. I think you know who killed Kane. What if I was to pull you in - you and Prim - and ask you that, under caution?’
I laughed. ‘A rubber hose job?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Greg McPhillips would have us out of there in two minutes, and you know it.’
‘Aye, I suppose so. But come on, Oz, give us a clue, between friends. That one’s always niggled at me.’
I looked at him for a while. Then I put part of my life in his hands. ‘You can close the book on it, Mike. The guy who killed Willie Kane is dead himself.’
‘Accident?’ he asked, quietly. ‘Natural causes? Or did someone do him?’
‘Accident. Sudden, bloody and very, very fatal.’
‘Not in Geneva, by any chance?’
My eyes, formerly narrowed, widened suddenly, giving him his answer.
‘I wondered about him when I heard about the accident report from Switzerland. I even had a look at it. At the time the Swiss police were a bit puzzled by the fact that the guy had two bullets in his chest and he was as high as a kite on heroin, but a street full of witnesses saw him run right in front of the bus, so that was that.’
I left him staring at the table while I went up to the bar for another round of pints.
‘Dawn wasn’t involved, was she?’ he asked, when I returned.
‘No way.’
‘That’s all right then. Now, back to your bother in Aberdeen. I’ll ask my SB colleague up there if he can find out anything for me. I’ll check the network too, just in case there’s been an alert about Russian gangsters coming into Britain.
‘Mind you, that sounds like clutching at straws to me.’
‘What way?’
‘Ach, you’ve always had a taste for the exotic, but in the real world, where we’re faced with an alleged crime like this, the first thing we do is look for a domestic solution. We usually find it too.’
I shook my head as I sipped my pint; no mean feat, that. ‘You won’t find it here. I promise you.’
‘Oh no? You mean it couldn’t have been a jealous boyfriend, because of Ms Turkel’s preferences?’
‘Something like that.’
‘So who says it was a man on the bike? What was the rider wearing?’
I described the biker’s outfit, in detail.
‘And was his cock hanging out of his leathers?’
‘No. Mind you, it was cold that morning, so if it was it’d have been pretty shrivelled up, and I might not have noticed it.’
‘Somebody would have. I can see the headline now: “Motorcycle flasher in Union Street gun drama”. No, Oz, for all you know your gunman could have been a gun person, a hellishly furious, scorned, et cetera, former woman friend of the lesbian lawyer. Tell me different, go on.’
I couldn’t.
‘That’s if there was a gun person at all. Are you dead sure of what you saw?’
‘Of course.’
‘Who else saw the gun?’
‘Only me. The rider was coming right in behind her, but I was in the line of fire. Noosh heard it, but only I saw it.’
‘She could have heard a backfire from the bike. You could have seen something else; the biker could have slowed down because his mobile phone rang. Maybe that was it.’
I leaned across the table. ‘Michael,’ I asked him, straight-faced. ‘Do you remember your first shag?’
He looked at me as if I was daft. ‘Of course; everyone does.’
‘Well, having a gun pointed in your general direction is just as unforgettable, and you don’t just remember the first time.’
‘Maybe so, but I suspect that my colleagues up in Furry-boots City are a bit sceptical, nonetheless.’
‘They’re giving Noosh protection.’
‘Of course they are. She asked for it, and she’s a lawyer, so they’re playing it by the book. Let’s see how long it lasts, though. Like I said, I’ll ask some questions tomorrow, and find out what their thinking is.’
For the next few minutes we ate in silence, doing justice to the Horseshoe pies. When we were finished, and the last bean scooped up, I looked at Dylan again. ‘Any progress on your own stalker?’ I asked him.
To my surprise, he beamed back at me. ‘I was saving that. We got a result off the wire-tap on Tuesday. Mrs Donn had a call from her baby boy; we managed to trace it all the way to a call-box in Amsterdam. Bugger’s in Holland.’
‘Did he say anything significant?’
‘Not as far as I could see from the transcript. He was just asking after her, that was all. She asked where he was, but all he said was “Moving about”. She asked when she’d be seeing him again, but he was vague about that too.
‘Still, at least it gives us something to go on, we can keep an eye out for the boy coming in on the Schiphol flights and the ferries.’ He paused. ‘Of course there’s a problem with that. We don’t actually know what Stephen Donn looks like. Susie’s given me a general description, but we don’t have a photograph of him, for the people at the airports. The thing is, we don’t want to tip our hand here, so I’ll probably just give them a photof it.’
‘Why don’t you pull Prim and me back on to the case. We’ll get you a photo.’
He gave me his best sarcastic look. ‘How will you do that? Break into his mother’s house while she’s at college?’
‘I suppose we might. But no, that’d be too risky; there are too many retired people in the block she lives in. No, I thought we’d just go back to Uncle Joe.’
I knew that I didn’t have to make the offer, but what else could I do? Mike was going to check out Aberdeen for me to make sure that Noosh was okay; he was good at extracting one favour for another.
‘Okay,’ he agreed. ‘See if you can do it tomorrow morning.’
I waved my empty glass at him. ‘In that case,’ I suggested, ‘on balance, the last pint’s on you.’
Chapter 21
This time, there was no need to pull a stunt to get to see Joe Donn. Prim called him and asked if we could visit him again. He must have taken a shine to her, for he agreed without a murmur.
We took the Z3 out to Motherwell; it’s a bit of a toy, that car. How many times in Scotland would anyone actually want to drive one with the top down? Very few indeed, but that Friday was one of them; as I drove along the M74, past Strathclyde Country Park with its fun fair and its rowing course, the wind sent Prim’s hair flying out behind her and tried to find its way inside my wrap-round shades.
Mr Donn was polishing the Jaguar when we drew up in front of his house. He looked at our car, nodding approval. I repositioned the electric hood, locked it and the car - okay, it was a good neighbourhood, but you can’
t be too careful when you drive a flash motor like ours - and followed him into the big brick house.
He was as well-dressed as he had been before; still casual, but Calvin Klein, this time, from head to foot as far as I could see.
‘So what is it this time?’ he asked as he showed us into his study. ‘Will I save you the trouble by confessing now?’ I stared at him.
‘Okay, I admit it,’ he chuckled. ‘I once went to a conference, met a woman and charged her dinner to the firm on my expenses. There you are, you can shop me to Susie; then I suppose I’ll have a visit from her polisman boyfriend.’
‘No, Mr Donn,’ said Prim. ‘That won’t happen. Everyone fiddles their expenses a bit - even Oz.’ That wasn’t true, but I let it pass.
‘Last time we were here,’ she continued, ‘we told you that someone had been threatening Susie. It’s a bit more serious now; there’s been an attempt on her life.’
In a second, Joe Donn’s face seemed to turn as grey as his hair. ‘You what . . .?’ he gasped.
‘Someone torched her car,’ I said. ‘She was meant to be in it at the time, but by pure chance, no one was.’
‘Do the police know who did it?’
‘The police wrote it off as an accident,’ I lied, technically. ‘We’re still handling this thing, and we’re still looking for your nephew. Have you seen him since we were here last?’
He shook his head. ‘No. Nor, as I said, do I expect to. Stephen’s a bad lot. I had hopes for him, but he’s let me down all along the line. My last words to him were something about not darkening my door again.’ He glanced at Prim. ‘Only I didn’t quite put it like that.’
‘Do you have a photograph of him?’ she asked.
Donn nodded. Some of his colour had returned, I noticed, but he was still pale. ‘I should have. Hold on a minute; I keep my photographs upstairs.’ He hurried from the room.
We wandered into the conservatory as we waited, admiring his big, immaculate garden, amused by the practice golf net in the far corner. ‘Nice place this,’ Prim murmured. ‘D’you think we should buy something like it?’
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