I took another business card from my pocket and laid it on the kitchen table. “We’ll be in contact as soon as we learn anything else. I’ll arrange for a Family Liaison Officer to assist you, but also, here’s my card. Please don’t hesitate to call if you think of something or if you need anything at all from us in the meantime.”
Melanie bobbed her head a couple of times. “Okay. Thank you. I will.”
I nodded to her, and then Fletcher and I left her to her boiled water and her unspilt tears, making our careful and quiet way through her townhouse to let ourselves out the front door. It shut with a click as I eased it shut behind us, the light rain splattering the cobblestones all around us.
“That’s never going to get any easier, is it?” Fletcher asked. We walked toward our cars, heads bowed against the damp, and I shook my head with a sigh.
“It will not, no,” I replied. Sometimes, I hoped it would, but I also figured it might be a good thing that it remained hard. I didn’t want to become desensitised to the process, didn’t want my responses to become impersonal or even cold. It was not a task to be taken lightly.
“Meet you back at the station?” I said.
“See you there,” Fletcher agreed with a quick thumbs-up, and we parted ways to climb into our separate cars.
Fletcher zipped away first, ever the speed demon, but I followed more slowly, the neighbourhood silent and empty around me. The rain drummed against the windshield and the roof of my car, and the wipers whumped gently back and forth, a muffled accompaniment to the music pouring from the speakers.
I turned onto a busy main road and joined the flow of traffic, which crawled along more slowly than usual due to the rain. I glanced in the rearview mirror as I signalled and slowed to wait for a break in the oncoming traffic. A second later, a black car pulled up behind me, its driver invisible behind the sheet of water on the windshield. My heart immediately missed a beat, but then I forcibly smoothed the rhythm out and took a deep breath. That was just my paranoia overreacting. It was perfectly natural for another car to want to turn here, even if it was a bit of an odd junction. It didn’t mean anything that one had decided to do so just after me.
I made my turn during a questionably small gap, making the quick gear shift imperfectly so that the car juddered slightly around me, though it smoothed out as soon as I accelerated, swapping into second as soon as the engine whined at me to do so.
The black car turned with me without signalling.
That didn’t mean anything either, I thought before logic could run too far from me. We just happened to be heading in the same direction for the moment. The car would turn away, eventually.
Except it didn’t. The car stuck with me through three more turns. I thought about testing it by making a few more turns to see what it would do, but I wasn’t convinced I wanted to give up the fact that I knew what it was doing. Because I had to believe the car was following me now. It had simply been back there for far too long, and it seemed to tailgate me the whole time like it wanted to put me on edge.
I needed to think. Maybe my tail would give up when I got to the police station. I didn’t want to call anyone because they were probably part of the organisation that had taken my father, and if I called for help, I’d have to explain everything that had been going on. I could handle this myself. I just had to remain calm and not let my paranoia take over the reins.
I was drawing close to the station. If I were these people, and I was trying to do more than just rattle me, I’d set up an ambush somewhere along the predicted route. A secondary car to smash into me from the side, maybe, or a shooter hidden amongst the buildings somewhere. So I needed to change up my route, swap it up quickly and unpredictably enough that the other half of the team wouldn’t be able to get into place in time.
To that end, I picked an upcoming turn that would lead away from the station. I swapped lanes at the very last second and slipped across the oncoming traffic with barely a second to spare before the approaching car reached me, hoping the rush of vehicles would block my tail. I could see the face of the oncoming driver clearly through the windshield, features contorted with surprise and no small amount of anger at my stupid manoeuvre, though he didn’t even have to hit the brakes, so I didn’t know what he was all up in arms about.
I glanced into the rearview mirror as I shifted into third off the turn. The black car didn’t follow. It continued straight without a moment’s hesitation, and I breathed a long, slow sigh of relief. Maybe it had all been in my head after all. I really, really needed to get a grip on this paranoia. Sure, it would probably keep me alive, but it would also get me in trouble one of these days when I overreacted to something. But I knew it was only going to get worse until I took down this shadow organisation. It was just too bad that I still had no idea how to do that.
Five
I made it back to the police station without any further sign of the black car, and by the time I pulled into a space and parked, I’d convinced myself that it had been nothing more than the trick of an overactive imagination. I shut my car off and took a deep breath as silence swelled around me, my hands still wrapped around the wheel. I needed to seem perfectly calm and normal when I entered the station. I’d always been pretty good at tamping down my emotions, for better or worse, so it only took me a few seconds to collect myself, and then I climbed swiftly from the car and marched through the station’s front doors.
I didn’t see Fletcher at our desks, so I assumed she’d gone downstairs to the lab to connect with Adams and Martin. I spotted Reilly through the window of Dunnel’s office, but the two were deep enough in their conversation that they didn’t notice me as I made my way to the lift and rode it down to the lower levels.
“Fletcher?” I called as I pushed open the swinging doors that led into the laboratory. “You in here?”
“Over here,” she replied, poking her head out of the glass-walled conference room on the right side of the room. Adams and Martin were in there with her, though Benson was gone, maybe out on a lunch run since it was getting to be that time.
I hurried to join them, the wet soles of my boots squeaking slightly on the tile floor. I was glad I’d left my overcoat on as the lab was always colder than the upstairs, and from the amount of stuff spread across the table, I knew we were in for a long debrief.
“What took you so long?” Fletcher asked me as we sat down, side by side. “You were right behind me.”
“I was not. You drive like a mad person,” I replied, rolling my eyes. “I got caught in traffic. It felt like I hit literally all the red lights.”
Fletcher squinted at me. The problem with working with a partner was that they began to learn your tells after a while, and after Reilly, Fletcher was the second most likely person to catch me in a lie. She knew about the weird, secret lab beneath the lake. She even knew about the threat to one of the women in my life, but I’d let her think I’d dropped the matter, as the warning had instructed. She probably suspected I was still investigating. She knew me well enough to know I wouldn’t be able to help myself, but she hadn’t confronted me about it. Yet. It was only a matter of time.
For the moment, Adams and Martin interrupted her before she could press the matter any further. Adams clapped her hands to get our attention, and we dutifully spun our chairs to face where she stood at the head of the table in front of the projector screen.
“Right. We’ve got some more information for you,” she began. “Do you want the big thing first or some of the context?”
“Uh, big thing, obviously,” I said as Fletcher cracked a grin beside me.
“That’s what I thought you would say,” Adams said, and then she bent down to pick something up from a box under the table. She dropped it on the table with a dramatic flourish, and it hit with a heavy clank. “Ta-da!”
Fletcher and I leaned forward in unison to get a better look. The item was a long crowbar stretched diagonally through a plastic evidence bag. There was blood and a bit of hair on on
e end.
“Is this the murder weapon?” I asked, though I already knew that it was.
Adams nodded. “Yup. Blood and hair are both a match with Mr Crane.”
“Where did you find it?” Fletcher wondered. She stood up from her chair and rounded the edge of the table so she could lean over the crowbar and examine it more closely.
“Out in the alley by the door they used to get in,” Adams explained. “It’d been chucked in the bin.”
“Huh,” I said, a small frown furrowing my face.
Fletcher and Adams glanced over at me. “What is it?” Fletcher asked.
“All evidence points to this being a professional job,” I said as I leant back in my chair and rubbed at my chin. “The work with the security cameras, the way they got into the vault, the sheer level of planning, but then they just chuck the murder weapon into the bin right beside the bank instead of bringing it with them to dispose of later? That’s sloppy. Really sloppy.”
“It’s possible they panicked after killing Barney,” Fletcher said. “It seems like they definitely weren’t expecting to encounter anyone, except maybe the security guard. So they’re surprised by Barney, they kill him, and they panic, not wanting to bring the evidence with them.”
I hummed. It was a solid theory, but not one I felt really clicked with the rest of the evidence on the plate.
“There’s more,” Adams said. She picked a wireless keyboard up off the table and hit a few keys, waking up the projector behind her and pulling an image up onto the screen. A series of fingerprints took up most of the space, though there wasn’t any identifying information to accompany them. “We pulled fingerprints off the crowbar. Unfortunately, there’s no match in our system.”
“And they left it behind?” I said again, unable to believe these seemingly top-notch robbers would be capable of such an oversight.
Adams shrugged. “You’ll just have to ask them about it when you catch them.”
I certainly intended to do just that.
“What about you, Martin? Did you get anything off the security cameras?” I asked the lab tech.
He pushed his glasses higher up on his nose and rose from his chair to stand beside Adams near the head of the table. “Sadly, I wasn’t able to recover any of the lost footage. The cameras were completely cut, so there’s nothing to recover. I ran a diagnostic program on the system to see what we’re working with, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of tampering and hacking.”
“Like they were switched off from the inside?” Fletcher asked.
“Or the robbers knew the password somehow,” Martin added. “But yes. I think we’re looking at an inside job.”
“The security guard?” I suggested.
“He seems like the most logical choice,” Martin said. “But didn’t he say the robbers knocked him out?”
“We’re not entirely sure we believe him,” I said. “But I suppose we need to keep in mind that just because he’s the obvious choice doesn’t mean he’s actually the answer. The inside man could always be someone else trying to use him as an easy scapegoat.”
Fletcher sighed. “That means we need to interview all the bank employees, doesn't it?”
“Unfortunately, yes,” I said. I didn’t exactly relish the thought, either. “Martin, Adams, is there anything else we should know about?”
“Dr O’Neil determined that the time of death was between eleven o’clock and midnight,” Adams told us.
“That lines up with when the security cameras went out,” I said, nodding as I digested the information.
“When the robbers cut the wire in the security alarm, it definitely sent an alarm to the security booth,” Martin added. “But it looks like it was coded as an error before it had the chance to get sent to the bank’s security company.”
“Then I think it’s high time we had another chat with Mr Smyth before we do anything else,” I said. “He’s still at the hospital as far as we know?”
“I haven’t heard anything else,” Fletcher said with a shrug.
I stood up and shook out my overcoat, reaching into a pocket for my phone. “I’ll give Fawkes a call and let him know we’re coming. Tell him to make sure that Smyth stays put until we get there. Martin, can you pull up a profile on him while we’re gone? I want to know everything about this guy.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” Martin promised.
Fletcher and I swept out of the glass-walled room and hurried across the lab toward the exit while I scrolled through my contacts list until I found Fawkes’ number. I hit the call button just as Fletcher jammed her thumb down on the lift’s button, and I put the phone on speaker so we’d both be able to hear.
“DCI MacBain, thank God. I was just about to call you,” Fawkes exclaimed, picking up after only two rings. He sounded flustered, maybe even a little frightened, and my spin immediately stiffened as a small jolt of adrenaline shot through me.
“What happened?” I demanded.
“It’s Mr Smyth,” Fawkes said. “He’s gone.”
The lift doors finally opened to admit us, and Fletcher and I hopped inside. I hit the button for the ground floor and then jammed my finger against the switch to close the doors up until they finally agreed to slide shut.
“What do you mean, gone?” I said.
“It took us a while to get in to see the doctor. I guess A&E is pretty busy today or something. I stepped away to use the toilet just as the nurse came to get him, and when I got back, they told me he’d bailed. I’m so sorry, DCI MacBain. I swear I was only gone for a few minutes.”
“It’s fine, Fawkes,” I assured him, although I wasn’t sure it actually was. Smyth was our best link to the robbers, and if he decided to disappear, it would be a major blow to the case. “How long ago was this?”
“Five minutes, maybe,” Fawkes answered as the lift opened on the ground floor, and Fletcher and I immediately began to rush for the door. “I looked around for him, and then I was getting ready to call you.”
“So he can’t have gone far. We’ll be right there. Fawkes, I want you to work with the staff to pull any security footage that might be available. Have it ready by the time we get there.”
“Yes, sir,” Fawkes replied promptly, and I hung up on him, not wanting to waste any time on goodbyes.
Fletcher and I rushed for the doors, but before we could get there, Reilly came jogging toward us from the small kitchen, holding out a hand to get us to wait.
“Callum, hold up a second. I just heard--”
“Now’s really not a good time, Reilly, sorry,” I interrupted. “We have to run. Can it wait?”
Reilly’s brow furrowed as he slowed to a stop. “I guess so…”
“Great,” I said as I shoved the door open, and Fletcher and I moved out into the rain. I felt bad blowing Reilly off like that, but he was a former inspector. He understood better than anyone the demands of the case.
“You drive,” I said to Fletcher, and we immediately adjusted our course to head for her zippy Renault. I almost always preferred to drive. It was a control thing, but Fletcher’s car was definitely more manoeuvrable than mine, and she had far fewer qualms about darting dangerously through traffic than I did.
Fletcher yanked her keys from her pocket and unlocked the car while we were still ten feet away. Fletcher activated the blue strobe lights in the grill, and the moment they started to flash, we squealed out of the station’s parking lot.
Just before we hit the street, I activated the siren, red light pouring out of the bulb on top of the car. The other drivers immediately got out of our way, leaving our path to the hospital unobstructed. Fletcher drove with a lead foot, barely slowing as she cut around each corner, and I gripped the emergency handle on the roof.
“Plan?” she asked as she blew through a yellow light, the angry honk from the other lane switching off quickly when the driver saw the flashing siren on our roof.
“If he’s smart, he’ll get out of town,” I said. “I’m not e
ntirely sure he is smart, but we’ll need to act under the assumption that he is. Hopefully, Fawkes will have pulled that security footage for us, and hopefully, we’ll be able to spot the car Smyth got into. He doesn’t have much of a head start, but we still need to track him down and get some answers out of him about the robbery.”
Fletcher nodded in agreement and laid on the accelerator a little heavier. We made it to the hospital in record time, all the traffic parting before us like water around a blockage. When we hit the car park, Fletcher headed straight to A&E and parked by the doors just outside of the ambulance zone. It definitely wasn’t a real parking spot, but neither of us really cared at that moment, more concerned with getting inside and finding our man.
The doors opened just as we reached them, but two nurses came out pushing wheelchairs in front of them, leaving us with no choice but to step out of the way and let them pass first. Though it was only a couple of seconds’ delay, I still gritted my teeth and shifted back and forth from foot to foot, desperate to move on. As soon as there was space, I pushed onward into the emergency room, Fletcher close behind me.
I spotted Fawkes by the reception desk, speaking with a male nurse and one of the hospital security guards. The other patients and people sitting around the lobby eyed the three of them curiously, clearly trying to figure out what drama was going on, and the air of intrigue only grew as Fletcher and I marched over to meet them.
“Did you get it?” I asked Fawkes as soon as I stood beside the trio, not bothering with any sort of hello or other pleasantries.
Fawkes jumped. He’d been so absorbed in his conversation that he hadn’t noticed my approach, and the part of me that wasn’t totally focused on the case was a little amused that I’d managed to startle him so badly.
Fatal Transaction: A DCI MacBain Scottish Crime Thriller Page 7