“Yes, sir,” he said, and I was glad he at least knew what I was talking about without having to ask for clarification. He motioned for me to follow him around the corner of the reception desk, where the security feed was pulled up on a computer monitor.
“Mr Reynolds here got it for me,” Fawkes explained, nodding to the security guard. The man gave me a tight smile and a nod of hello. “We were able to back it up and follow Mr Smyth out of the hospital.” Fawkes had obviously already backed the footage up to the right spot in preparation for my arrival because he simply hit play, pointing at one of the screens, where Smyth could be seen saying something to the male nurse. He turned around and began to walk quickly away, his arms swinging purposefully at his sides, though his shoulders were hunched with anxiety. He walked right out the main doors without anyone stopping him, and Fawkes flipped the feed so we could see the car park.
Smyth climbed into a small van. It was impossible to tell its colour through the black and white footage, and a few seconds later, it drove off, its windows tinted so we couldn’t see inside. Fawkes let the video play until the van disappeared from sight, and then he tapped the pause button.
“He--” Fawkes began, but I interrupted him.
“Back it up seven seconds?”
Fawkes hit the reverse button a couple of times, backing the video up in bursts until I told him to stop, and then I leaned forward until my nose was almost pressed right up against the screen, Fletcher mimicking the move to my left as she tried to spot what I’d seen.
“There,” I said, pointing to a spot on the monitor. “We’ve got a number plate.”
And even better, it was a full number plate, the image just clear enough for me to make out all the right letters and numbers if I squinted hard enough. I rooted around on the desk until I found a scrap of paper and a pen, then I jotted the sequence down in large block numbers. I snapped a picture of it and sent it to Martin along with a request that he run the vehicle down for me. He texted back almost immediately, promising he’d get back to me as soon as he could and that he was about to email me what little he’d dug up on Smyth.
“Thanks, Fawkes,” I said as I stepped back from the computer. He looked at me nervously, his hands clamped together in front of him, probably expecting a reprimand from me, but I wasn’t about to hit him with that. He hadn’t really done anything wrong. He had simply taken a couple of minutes to answer nature’s call while a nurse had eyes on Smyth. There’d been no real reason to expect Smyth to bolt at the time. It had just been bad luck.
“You did good,” I promised him. “You reacted quickly when you realised something had gone wrong, and you did everything I would do. Good work pulling up the security footage.”
“You’re not mad?” Fawkes asked nervously. “I mean, I let a suspect escape.”
But I shook my head. “No, you didn’t. Sure, Smyth got away, but it wasn’t your fault. We’ll find him again. There aren’t that many places in this city to hide.”
It was perfectly possible that Smyth’s guilt would keep him close as well. It certainly hadn’t been part of the plan to kill Barney Crane, and judging by the way he’d acted this morning, that guilt would no doubt eat away at him. It might even drive him to come forward and confess. Of course, we couldn’t bank on that fact. We had to put in the work to find him ourselves, but I felt like we had a bit of a safety bubble for our search.
“Thank you, sir,” Fawkes said with a deep sigh of relief. “That means a lot to me.”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “It’ll be okay. I promise. Why don’t you head back to the station? Fletcher and I can take it from here.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” Fawkes said, bobbing his head gratefully. He waved farewell, thanked the security guard one last time, and then scampered toward the door, screwing his hat firmly onto his head to protect himself from the rain.
“Thanks for your help,” I said to the nurse and the guard as Fletcher and I backed away from the reception desk, getting out of the hospital workers’ way.
The security guard tipped his hat at me. “Happy to. Hope you catch him.” He spun sharply on his heel and walked off down the hall behind us to get back to his rounds.
I turned to the nurse, whose scrubs didn’t quite fit his muscled frame right. “What did Smyth say to you?” I asked, gesturing back toward the computer monitor to indicate the conversation they had before Smyth walked out.
“Just that he was feeling much better, and he didn’t think he needed to get checked out,” the nurse replied. “I told him it wouldn’t take too long, and he should really wait until DC Fawkes got back before he left, but he just insisted he was fine and walked off before I could stop him. I would have gone after him, but we aren’t really supposed to do that, liability issues, so I didn’t know what to do.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Probably best that you didn’t. We don’t really know what kind of man Smyth is or how he would have reacted to that.”
The nurse breathed a sigh of relief and nodded his thanks at my assurance.
“We’ll leave you to it,” I continued. “I'm sure you’ve got a lot of work to get back to.”
“You can say that again.” The nurse let out a short laugh, and I raised a hand in goodbye as he turned around to follow the security guard deeper into the hospital.
“What now?” Fletcher asked me.
I moved us to an out of the way corner by a potted plant where we could discuss our next move. “Martin sent me a dossier on Smyth. I say we take a look before we go anywhere. Maybe we can figure out where he’s going before Martin’s even finished running the plate.”
Fletcher nodded and crowded in close so she could read over my shoulder as I opened up the email attachment Martin had sent over. It wasn’t very long, mostly consisting of his employee profile at the bank. Broderick Smyth had no arrests or anything suspicious on his record. There was a home address listed as well as a phone number, email, and an emergency contact, his sister, Nora.
“We’ll send a constable to go stake out his house,” I decided. “Though I doubt he’ll go back there.”
“He’d have to be very stupid,” Fletcher agreed.
I flicked my eyebrows toward my hairline in agreement. “In the meantime, let’s swing by his sister’s and have a chat with her. She might be able to tell us where he’d go. If she’s not helpful, we can always stop by his place ourselves and check it out.”
“Then, as soon as Martin gets a hit on the plate, we go after that lead,” Fletcher added, and I gave her two thumbs-up.
I tucked my phone away, and we left the hospital. It had started raining even harder, and I flipped up the collar of my overcoat to try to prevent the droplets from sliding down my neck, though I wasn’t entirely successful.
Luckily, we hadn’t parked far from the doors, so it wasn’t long before we were in Fletcher’s car with the heater on and the wipers thwapping against the windshield. I fed Fletcher Nora Smyth’s address, and then we were on our way, soft indie music pouring from the speakers.
“Why were you really late getting to the station?” Fletcher asked me, taking her eyes off the road just long enough to cast them my way.
“I told you. Traffic,” I answered as I kept my gaze pointed casually out the window.
“Uh-huh,” Fletcher said sceptically. “And is that the same traffic that makes you late in the morning and puts the dark bags under your eyes?”
“I haven’t been sleeping well,” I countered.
Fletcher glanced at me again. She clearly really, really wanted me to come out with the truth, but I stayed silent, trying to protect her, though she’d probably kick my arse if I told her that.
“If there’s something going on, you can tell me,” Fletcher pressed. The traffic in front of us began to slow for no discernible reason, and Fletcher rode pretty far up on the back of the next car before she finally came to a stop. “I know all that weird stuff with the underground laboratory rattled you, and I know that yo
u’re trying to hide the fact that you’re still investigating it, but I can help you with that. That’s what partners are for.”
“They threatened one of the women in my life. That could be you,” I pointed out. “Is that a chance you want to take?”
“Yes!” Fletcher cried, throwing one hand off the wheel and letting it fall back to the moulded leather with a muted thud. “There’s something weird and freaky going on, and more people could get hurt because of it. Are we really going to let these guys get away with this?”
“No, I suppose not,” I said slowly. I sighed and leant my head against a hand, my elbow propped up against the ledge of the window. Fletcher was right. I could use the help. And in the end, it was her decision to put herself in danger, not mine, and if she had all the facts, she’d be better prepared to face that danger. “Yes. I’ve been investigating the loch, trying to find other entrances. I haven’t gone back into the tunnels around Urquhart Castle yet. I’ve been too worried they’re watching the area.”
“But if we went together, you’d have someone to watch your back,” Fletcher said. The light turned green, and she zipped into the opposite lane to get around a car that was accelerating a little too slowly for her. “Those tunnels have to connect to other parts of the complex, if there are any. We should find some time to go down there.”
“But after the case,” I decided. “This can’t take precedence over our actual work, not yet, anyway. Not when we don’t have any solid leads.”
“Have you told Dunnel yet?” Fletcher asked, but I shook my head. “Are you going to?”
I shook my head again. “Probably not. At least until he needs to know.”
I could tell Fletcher didn’t quite agree with that plan as her brow furrowed and she bit at her lip, but she didn’t contradict me.
“Is there anything else I should know?” she said, glancing at me out of the corner of her eye once again.
I thought of the Kraken and the houseboat fire, of an unseen shooter somewhere atop a building, but all I said was, “That about covers it.”
I didn’t have a good reason for keeping that part to myself. I supposed I had promised the Kraken that I would keep our meeting between us without involving the police, but I also wasn’t entirely sure why I was protecting the strange, old hacker. The attack had also been so sudden and violent that it sometimes felt a little like a bad dream I had, and talking about it would make it more real, more tangible. I sort of thought it was better locked up inside my own head, where it couldn’t hurt anyone else, couldn’t hurt me again.
Fletcher nodded, but I couldn’t quite tell if she fully believed me by just looking at her profile. Either way, we fell silent for the rest of the drive, the cramped streets of Inverness scrolling out around us, widening bit by bit as we grew further from the city centre.
The GPS beeped at us, telling us to take our final turn, and we rolled onto a street full of tiny, newly developed homes that didn’t match the rest of the stone and brick city. They were ugly things, boxy and short, with hardly any space between them, built far enough outside the city proper that there were fewer rules and regulations to meet.
Fletcher parked in front of Nora’s place, and the two of us sat in the car for a second as we took a look around the neighbourhood. There was a single child out playing in the scrap of grass that passed as a front lawn, but there didn’t seem to be an adult supervising him, though I could see the curtains of the house behind him shifting slightly as someone moved past them. There was no sign of the van Smyth had gotten into.
“Looks clear,” I said to Fletcher.
She nodded in agreement, so we got out of the car. It had at least stopped raining, though the clouds still hung heavy and dark in the sky above us, promising a further deluge. I patted my pockets as we walked toward Nora’s door, making sure my PAVA canister was in easy reach, just in case we ran into trouble.
I rapped on the door and took my badge from my pocket so that I could show it off the moment the door swung open.
“Just a second!” a man’s voice called. I didn’t think it was Smyth, but I wasn’t entirely sure through the layer of plaster and drywall. Fletcher shifted into a loose, ready stance behind me, stepping to the slide slightly so that our bodies blocked the entire doorway.
The door swung open, an unfamiliar man standing on the threshold and squinting down at us suspiciously. He had a buzzcut and a face that was reddened and swollen from years of heavy drinking, his stomach a distinctive paunch beneath his buttoned shirt.
I held up my badge. “Hello, sir. I’m--”
I didn’t get any further than that.
As soon as the man saw the badge, he bolted back the way he came, slamming the door in my face. I barely managed to catch it before it could latch shut. I flung it open once more and ran into the tiny house, Fletcher hot on my heels.
A woman cried out in shock as we blasted past her, but she didn’t try to stop us. The man hit the back door and threw it out of his way, leaping down the two steps to the patchy grass beyond. Fletcher and I were only a couple of seconds behind him. A low stone wall separated the row of crummy houses from the street on the other side, though there was nothing to mark out the different properties. The man raced for the stone wall, and I dug my boots into the damp grass, forcing my legs to churn faster. The man slipped slightly as the mud gave way beneath his foot, but he caught his balance and ran on without ever glancing back at us.
He planted a hand on top of the waist-high wall and prepared to throw himself over it, but I caught the back of his shirt before he could and heaved him backwards with all my might. He stumbled, struggling to find his feet after the sudden change of trajectory, and Fletcher stuck out one leg, tripping him up so that he crashed to the ground, the damp earth squelching slightly under the impact.
“Enough!” I ordered, hoping he’d see sense and cut it out, but the man was already scrambling back to his feet and bringing his hands up to his face, which was carved into a deep scowl.
I sighed. It appeared he needed an extra show of force.
Fletcher was the trained martial artist in our partnership, but I was no slouch myself, and I waved her back as I stalked a couple of steps closer to the man who wound up a punch that a blind person could have seen from three miles away. It had been a rough couple of months. I wouldn’t mind hitting something a couple of times.
The man finally threw his punch. He tried to put so much power behind it that he overbalanced himself as I blocked the punch with a raised arm and then kicked out his knee, my heavy boot lending weight to the blow. His leg crumpled, and he let out a quiet cry of surprise as he fell, his other knee sinking into the wet dirt when it hit. I stepped behind him, put a hand on his neck and a knee in the small of his back, and bore him the rest of the way to the ground, trapping him beneath me. He flailed at me with one useless hand until I caught it and twisted it behind him, causing him to yelp in pain.
“I said that’s enough,” I growled in his ear. “Or do you want to keep making this worse for yourself?”
The man shook his head vehemently, grinding his cheek into his dirt as his face contorted into a grimace.
“Good,” I said. “Now we’re looking for Broderick Smyth. Have you seen him?”
“What do you want with my brother?” It wasn’t the man who spoke but the woman we’d blown past, standing on the threshold of the back door as she stared out at us with a mixture of shock and horror on her face. I glanced at her without releasing the man. I could see the family resemblance. They both had the same broad, slightly flat features and thick limbs, Nora’s hair dark and curly as it framed her face.
“We’re looking for him,” I answered. “I assume you’re hiding him here since this guy tried to run at the sight of us.”
“What? No,” the man gurgled, struggling to get the words out with my weight on top of him.
“Yeah? Then why’d you run?” Fletcher demanded. She stood just to the side of me with her arms folded as she glo
wered down at the man.
“I thought you’d come about the marijuana I’m growing!”
I blinked. That wasn’t exactly the answer I’d been expecting.
“Why would we care about your pot?” I asked, craning my neck around to look up at Fletcher, who shrugged.
“Because it’s illegal?” the man mewled.
“Like I could really care less about that,” I said. “I’ve got more important things on my plate right now.”
“Then could you let me up, please?” the man asked. He sounded more than a little pathetic.
“Right, yes.” I pushed off him and rose, and he sucked in a deep breath as soon as my weight lifted off his back. He took his time climbing back to his feet, bracing his hands and knees under him before he finally pushed up the rest of the way. He brushed some of the dirt off his front as he turned around to face Fletcher, although most of it had soaked into his shirt. He wiped some mud off as his shoulders heaved while he tried to catch his breath, and I gave him a minute to collect himself.
Nora descended into the garden, her arms still wrapped around herself as she cautiously approached us. She stopped about ten feet away like she was worried I’d go berserk on her, and the man moved to join her, glancing at us with each step to make sure we weren’t going to stop him.
“So your brother isn’t here?” I asked Nora.
She shook her head, her eyes wide. “I haven’t seen him in about a week. Why? What’s this about?”
How much did I want to tell her? Martin’s dossier hadn’t had any specifics about the nature of their relationship in it, but they had to at least be semi-close if she was his emergency contact. The real conundrum was whether or not she would warn him about our visit or come to us if she saw him again.
“Is he in trouble?” Nora pressed when I didn’t answer right away.
“Yes,” I said bluntly. “He’s got information about a murder that took place the other night, but he fled the hospital before we had the chance to get everything we needed from him. We came to ask if you’ve seen him or if you have any idea where he might go.”
Fatal Transaction: A DCI MacBain Scottish Crime Thriller Page 8