The tools. That had to be it. ‘Socket sets usually have a moulded plastic tray that lifts out. Whatever it is could be underneath. Plenty of room to hide something there,’ I said.
‘Like what?’ Joanna asked, highlighting the second most obvious problem. ‘At least if you were searching for a needle in a haystack you’d know what to look for.’
She was right. I had no idea what Billy Paris was supposed to have left me that would prove the sabotage of the helicopter.
‘We’re both lawyers. Let’s look at this logically,’ I said.
My dad gave a short derisory snort. I was aware he’d been eavesdropping, but up until then he’d maintained a most welcome, if abnormal, silence, sitting in his armchair by the fire, either concentrating on his crossword or more likely still in the huff that I’d declared Tina fit to travel.
I ignored him and continued. ‘For Billy to be so sure of himself, the evidence would have to be conclusive. Video or photos would be my guess.’
‘Might not be,’ Joanna said. ‘We’re lawyers, but he wasn’t. His idea of evidence could be way out, the name of a witness or something someone told him. Who knows?’
Tina, bored with our conversation, had started to squirm.
‘If there was something in the box, no matter how small and well hidden, the cops would have found it,’ my dad said.
‘He could have hidden a note in the box or scratched it into the metal lid of the socket set.’
‘And you don’t think highly trained officers of the law would have found that?’
My dad was right. And yet why would Christchurch have wanted to interview Billy Paris if he already had the proof? He hadn’t so much as mentioned the box during the interview.
Joanna began tickling Tina who rolled around, giggling helplessly. Then suddenly the tickles and giggles stopped. Tina pointed at the TV. ‘Look, Dad. It’s you.’
I didn’t immediately grasp what she was saying, and when I did, my eyes had only a moment to focus before the image on the screen had disappeared. What I did catch a glimpse of was some stock footage of myself walking into the Sheriff Court. I recognised it from a year or so back when I’d been acting for a bogus workman in a trial that had received some brief media attention. Hard to believe it was before I discovered I had a daughter. How quickly things changed. Apart from my suit. That was still in regular service.
We were all sitting up straight now. Even my dad had cast his crossword aside.
A familiar face appeared in close-up. Cherry Lovell. ‘Tonight on Night News, at ten thirty, we ask - who killed Jeremy Thorn?’
The picture faded to a supermarket Christmas ad that had been playing regularly since bonfire night.
‘Rewind, dad,’ I said. He was already on the job, thumb on the remote, shunting back to the start of the clip that opened with Cherry Lovell standing on the same rocky outcrop where I’d presented Homer with my fishing seminar.
‘Somewhere out there lie the bodies of Jeremy Thorn and his fiancée, Madeleine Moreau.’
Cut to a mugshot of Billy Paris, Army uniform, shaved head, looking like he was about to start three fun-filled years in the Glasshouse.
‘What is the link between their deaths, the death of this man and...’
Smash cut to Kirkton Perch on a runway beside one hundred and twenty-five million pounds’ worth of Eurofighter Typhoon, and from there to election night and Ayr Town Hall, where, with a blue rosette in his lapel and waving to his supporters, Perch stood bookend-ed by men and women with dejected expressions and rosettes of different hues.
‘The Secretary of State for Scotland? Night News believes this man holds the answer…’
Cue the clip of me walking into court.
And back to Cherry again. ‘Tonight on Night News, at ten thirty, we ask — who killed Jeremy Thorn?’
‘Why are you on telly, Dad?’ Tina asked. ‘Did you see Pyxie Girl?’
The subject of Pyxie Girl was one never brought up by any adult of the Munro household in the hope that the youngest member might forget all about her. Fat chance. The super-heroine was my daughter’s main topic of TV conversation.
‘No, I think Pyxie Girl has gone away on her holidays,’ I said, and there then followed a brief discussion as to where PG might holiday, during which I cunningly slipped in the fact that I didn’t expect her to be back for Christmas, but maybe sometime early in the New Year.
Tina was impervious to such tactics. ‘I can’t wait for Christmas,’ she told Joanna. ‘I asked Santa for a Pyxie Girl and Gramps says he knows Santa and Santa always gets wee girls the toys they want if they’ve been good and I’ve been good, haven’t I Gramps?’ Tina climbed onto Joanna’s lap. ‘I wish the real Pyxie Girl could come and live with us.’
As she blabbered on about Pyxie Girl, I zoned out. How could Cherry Lovell do such a thing? I knew that discussions with the press were never off the record, despite what journalists might say. I also knew that single malt whisky was a long recognised tongue lubricant. Surely I hadn’t suggested I knew who’d brought down the helicopter? I didn’t even know if it had been brought down. So far as I was aware, helicopters were quite capable of crashing themselves without any help from outside agencies. I’d met with Cherry before my meeting with Billy’s ex-partner. It was wee Maureen who’d told me that Billy had left me the evidence for safe-keeping. The most I could possibly have told Cherry was that Billy knew who was responsible. From that she must have extrapolated, with journalistic licence at full stretch, that, since I was his lawyer, he would have confided in me. Now I was going to feature on TV as the man withholding information on a double murder.
‘You know, the cardboard box could be a decoy,’ my dad said, looking up from the folded newspaper on his lap, tapping his teeth with a pen. ‘I mean, if you think about it properly, logically. If this man Paris did leave the stuff with you, and the only time he was in your office was the day he brought you the box, and if what you’re looking for is not in the box, then it must still be somewhere in your office.’
The way my dad talked you would have thought he’d been an ace detective and not uniformed sergeant Alex Munro, whose idea of policing had depended less on finding evidence and more on not leaving bruises.
‘Seems obvious to me,’ he said, returning to his crossword puzzle. ‘But what do I know about solving crime? I only served thirty years on the Force, nicking criminals. I wasn’t a lawyer trying to get them off.’
I hated it when he was right. Billy must have hidden whatever it was somewhere in my office. I racked my brain. What had taken place that Friday afternoon? Billy had brought the box. I remembered that much. He’d also given me two hundred pounds. I definitely remembered that, even if the taxman was unaware. What else had happened? It was all a blur now. Think. It had been less than two weeks since his Friday afternoon appointment.
‘Time for me to go,’ Joanna said, lifting Tina off her lap and rising to her feet.
‘I’m going on a hairy-plane tomorrow,’ Tina said. Arms out wide, she swooped around the room, bumping into my dad’s old brass floor lamp by the light of which he was studying his next clue.
‘Watch it!’ He stretched one hand out to steady the lamp, another to try and collar his granddaughter.
Tina danced away, shrieking with laughter. Joanna captured her as she flitted by. ‘I think it’s time your dad brushed your teeth and hair and tucked you into bed. Isn’t that right, Robbie?’
I didn’t answer, too busy watching the floor lamp, its glass shade wobbling and casting crazy shadows on the wall above the fireplace.
‘I said: isn’t that right, Robbie?’
Now I remembered. I lifted Tina up, gave her a peck on the cheek. ‘See you in the morning, Sweetheart. Gramps is going to brush your teeth and read you a story.’ I plumped my daughter on top of the old man’s newspaper, grabbed Joanna’s hand and pulled her towards the door.
29
‘This place looks a lot better in the dark,’ Joanna said.
‘This could probably have waited until the morning,’ Joanna said, angling my rickety angle-poise upwards.
I disagreed. At half past ten there was to be a documentary in which, if the trailer had been anything to go by, I would be shown as the man who knew who killed Jeremy Thorn and his girlfriend. If Billy Paris had left the evidence where I thought he had, by then it might actually be true.
Joanna switched on the angle-poise lamp that sat on the corner of my table, swung it around and tilted it up at the fluorescent light strip above my desk. ‘And this is definitely more than just one of your hunches?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s a hunch all right, but an educated one.’
The Friday Billy had come to my office with the cardboard box was the same afternoon that Grace-Mary had told me about the problem with the SLAB compliance officer. I’d spoken to her in the hall. When I’d gone back to my room, Billy had been standing on my desk sorting the fluorescent light above it. He’d said something about fixing the starter with a piece of silver paper from a chewing gum wrapper. I was no electrician, but even I knew there was a hole in the light fixture where the starter went. He could easily have stuffed something small in there. The cardboard box was a red herring. Something to divert the attention of the cops if they came looking. He’d never asked me about the box because he didn’t care. He’d always assumed I’d either hand it over or have it taken from me. He had only ever intended for the box to be one thing: a stalling tactic.
‘Hold it steady,’ I said, reaching up and twisting the little white cylinder a quarter-turn to the left and gently easing it out. I pushed my index finger into the hole. It only went in as far as the second joint. I would have tried my pinky if I’d been a contortionist. ‘You’ll have to give it a try, Joanna, my fingers are too thick.’ I stepped down from desk to chair to floor.
‘I’m not sticking my finger in there,’ Joanna said. ‘What if there’s a live wire? Are you sure this has been properly risk-assessed?’
‘It’s switched off at the wall.’
That wasn’t good enough. It was okay for me to go wiggling my finger around in the circuitry, but not Joanna. She wanted precautions taken. I was too keen to find out if my guess was right to waste time arguing. Two minutes later I had switched the power off at the mains and Joanna was standing on tiptoe on my desk, me shining the torch app on my mobile phone up at the ceiling to guide her slim fingers in the direction of the hole in the side of the light fitting. No sooner had one gone in than she pulled it out again, quickly. ‘I felt something there.’
‘Good.’
‘No, not good. It felt like a spider.’
A spider. I hadn’t thought of that. Thank goodness for fat fingers. ‘Don’t be daft. Spiders wouldn’t live in there. They’d be fried by the heat of the light-strip.’
It took a bit of persuasion for Joanna to insert her finger in the hole again. After some tentative groping around she announced there was nothing there.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
‘I’m sure. There is definitely nothing in there except a wire running the length of the fitting and some frazzled arachnids.’ Joanna stepped daintily down from desk to chair. On the way to the floor she snagged her heel on a wooden spar and stumbled. I leapt forward, caught her and lowered her to the ground. Our faces were close. Her hair fell across me. Realising that I was holding on rather longer than was strictly necessary purely for steadying purposes, I let her go, stepped back quickly, turned and left the room in the direction of the fuse box, hoping she hadn’t noticed.
‘Have you thought of looking in your desk drawers?’ Joanna called through to me while I was turning the electricity on again. ‘Who knows what’s in there?’
For the next ten minutes we pulled everything out of my desk and found nothing remotely pertaining to a helicopter crash.
After that we had a cursory glance around my office.
‘Sorry for wasting your time,’ I said, as we were preparing for departure. ‘I was so sure.’
Joanna smiled. ‘Quite all right. It’s a mistake any idiot could have made.’
My mobile phone buzzed as we were leaving the door onto the street. I didn’t recognise the number on the screen, though I knew the voice when I heard it.
‘Robbie, is that you? Don’t say anything. To anyone. Meet me tomorrow morning, ten o’clock—’
‘I can’t.’
‘When then?’
‘It’ll need to be afternoon.’
‘Okay, three o’clock. The Commonwealth Pool. Bring your trunks.’
‘Why?’
‘Because they won’t let you in the pool with your clothes on.’
‘Who was that?’ Joanna asked.
‘That,’ I said, ‘I’m not at liberty to divulge.’
30
Normally I spent Friday afternoons in the office. Court usually finished early as Sheriffs found ever new and innovative ways to be unable to sit on past three o’clock. Procurators Fiscal weren’t averse to an early bath either, clocking out at four thirty. Accordingly, I found the optimum time for phoning the Crown with a view to agreeing soft pleas was sometime around the back of four on a Friday afternoon. It was amazing how those deputes, so surly and unyielding of a Monday morning, could be so cheerfully flexible when the untrammelled vista of the weekend stretched before them.
On this particular Friday, I had to leave such pre-weekend negotiations to Joanna. Having waved Tina, her Gran, aunt and three cousins off on the two o’clock Paris-bound hairy-plane from Edinburgh, I had to drive across town to the Commonwealth Pool, where at three o’clock on the dot I was wading through the shallow end in a pair of swim-shorts. Next to me was the portly figure of Edward Bradley, Regius Professor of Forensic Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, sporting an ancient pair of Speedos that may once have fitted, but were now probably a contravention of the Sexual Offences Act.
‘Saw you on television last night,’ he said after, in the interests of decency, I’d persuaded him to wade out a little deeper so that the water came up over his waist. ‘Nice bit of publicity. If that’s the sort of publicity you want.’
I usually held to the view that there was no such thing as bad publicity, but, while I’d secretly enjoyed seeing myself on screen, I hadn’t liked the idea that I was being used as Cherry Lovell’s political pawn. She was clearly gunning for Kirkton Perch. Some of her comments about him must have given the TV station’s legal adviser a sleepless night as they verged on the defamatory.
Not that the Secretary of State’s reputation suggested he was someone who’d go crying to his mum because of some bad press. An ace pilot of fixed and rotary wing aircraft, Kirkton Perch had flown combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’d trained members of the Royal Family during stints in the RAF, before they retired to a life touring factories and cutting ribbons at equestrian centres. Following a distinguished service to the country he’d entered politics and been re-routed to Scotland, where there were no safe seats for Tories, only ejector seats.
Given the daunting task of capturing Ayrshire, Perch had needed something special to put to the electorate, a vote winner, and so had centred his campaign on bringing a spaceport to Prestwick. On that platform he’d won the by-election and been all set to deliver on his promise, until Jeremy Thorn came along with a proposal that more than fitted the criteria set down by the Civil Aviation Authority, all as spelled out to me during my non-date with Cherry Lovell.
‘So, tell me, Robbie. Is it true? Do you know who killed Philip Thorn’s boy?’
‘Haven’t a clue,’ I said, falling back and circling him in a clumsy backstroke.
‘Well, it seems to me that some people think you do. And I’m not just talking about TV people. I mean some rea
l, very serious people.’
That brought my backstroke to a halt. ‘How serious?’
‘We found something on the body of your client. Well, not actually on his body.’
‘In it?’
‘No, not in it either.’
Now I was confused. The man was a pathologist, if he hadn’t found something in or on my client, where had he found whatever it was?
‘It was on his clothing. One of my assistants was cutting the shirt from the body when she heard something fall onto the post-mortem table. It was only because the table is made of steel that it made any noise at all, the thing was so tiny.’
Tina loved to swim. I’d taken her to various leisure pools since her arrival. On those occasions, in the company of my daughter, I’d never felt at all uneasy amongst all the other mums and dads and their aquatic children. Today I was decidedly uncomfortable being one of only two men standing in the centre of the pool while shoals of non-school-age kids squealed and splashed all around us.
Thinking it best to continue our conversation in the safety of the deep end, I broke into a gentle breaststroke, thinking the Professor would do likewise. He didn’t. I duck-dived and swam back. ‘I think it might look… less odd, if we did some actual swimming while we are in the swimming pool.’ I made to push off again, but the Professor showed no sign of drawing alongside. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘What’s wrong is that I can’t swim,’ he said.
‘What do you mean, you can’t swim? You’ve got a yacht moored at Port Edgar. What if you’re out sailing and it capsizes? How can you be a sailor and not swim?’
‘How many pilots do you know who can fly?’ To placate me the Professor made some circular motions with his arms, almost whacking a kid floating nearby in orange armbands.
‘Okay,’ I said, ‘so this thing that fell out onto the table, what was it?’
‘Following your call, I had mentioned that whoever did the autopsy should keep an eye out for—’
‘Anything not quite right?’
‘Precisely. That’s why it was brought to my attention. I hadn’t the foggiest what it was until I’d had a good look at the thing under a magnifying glass.’
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