The Blood of Crows (38 page)

‘I wonder if he’d take me into hiding. Wyngate, do you have your car out there?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Call up Central Records, and go and collect the Marchetti files in person. Get a uniform from Partick to go with you, and tell them Howlett said. Come straight back here, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred pounds. Understand?’

Wyngate nodded.

‘So, why are you still standing there?’

‘I hear Costello found the boy’s remains,’ Mick Batten said, once Wyngate had gone. ‘Do we gather she was blindfolded and led there, but not hurt?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Typical gangland behaviour. It avoids untidy tip-offs. And they score Brownie points with you guys, while being seen to flex their muscles.’

Anderson scrolled through his emails, trying to ignore the psychologist.

Batten pulled his chair very close to Anderson, and the smell of cigarettes came with him. ‘Do you really know what we’re getting into? You seem to think you guys are handling this. You are not, Colin. All you’re doing is allowing yourself to be pulled along by them, every step of the way. You have to be careful.’

‘Look, what would you have me do, Mick? What do
you
want me to do? I’m trying to get ahead of the game, that’s
all. You might be able to sit about all day and ponder the nature of the criminal mind, but I, sitting here at this desk, have the rather more stressful job of dealing with what the criminal mind comes up with.’ He pointed at the whiteboard for emphasis. ‘Do you think I don’t know that I’m being played like a fish? But –’ he rammed his forefinger into his own chest ‘– it was
me
who was drugged, tied up and shot at, it was my colleague who was put down a hole, and my friend who was killed. And I take grave exception to all of it. I will get the people who did it. Do you see that?’

‘But you weren’t shot at in the same way that David was stabbed, or you wouldn’t be here,’ Batten said reasonably.

Anderson had to control a sudden rush of temper.

‘You were shot at in the same way that Costello was kidnapped last night. One was fatal, the other benign. I’d say you’re being helped along the way here. After all, that bullet found its mark, and it wasn’t you.’

10.30 A.M.

By ten thirty the bearded man swigging the Red Bull had been sitting at the computer for an hour, alternating hitting the keyboard and flicking his unruly ringlets back from his face. His eyes had never left the keyboard.

‘Who’s that? asked Anderson, getting absolutely no response from his cheery hello.

‘IT guy, can’t you tell?’ said Mulholland.

‘Has he cracked the code on the CD yet? Has he found anything?’

‘Only a lifelong friend in Wyngate, so far. He ran a Brute Force program; don’t ask, but it worked. He called an old colleague of Rosie’s, who was a bit of help – he knew what Rosie had been trained in. The document is coded but it looks simple. And it might be in Russian, so he says he will crack it and then we can decode it and read it.’

‘What have you been doing?’

‘This!’ said Mulholland, putting something down on Anderson’s desk. ‘It’s the tape of the Fairbairn interview. I’ve been going through it.’

‘Why, are you bored?’ Anderson was flicking through a set of A4 sheets, looking up all the places they had searched for Fairbairn. ‘Look, he’s gone to ground. Is that the action of an innocent man? What the fuck are we meant to do?’

Mulholland took the papers off him. ‘Colin – sir. This situation is not going to go away. Whether you like it or not, questions are going to be asked. And you need to have answers to them before it goes to an enquiry, or before we get him to court for Rusalka.’

Anderson tried to ignore him.

But Mulholland opened up McAlpine’s notes and stuck them under Anderson’s nose. ‘Here – there’s a break of twenty minutes when the tape isn’t running. There’s the time, recorded. McAlpine went out to speak to Lynda Osbourne and her dad, leaving you and the accused, Cameron Fairbairn, alone. An officer of your experience, alone with the accused? The same accused whose evidence you neglected to safeguard? Up to that precise minute Lynda Osbourne’s account was none too clear, to her mum, her dad, or to the nice police lady.
The bus driver bought her an ice cream. A big man took her into the trees and hurt her. Was the big man the bus driver? You can’t tell. Then suddenly, after talking to McAlpine, she’s absolutely sure. Yes, it was the bus driver. But during those twenty minutes Lynda only had her dad with her – no independent observer, no child protection officer. The interview was in a room with no observation window. There was no one to see that her dad was not coaching her or guiding her answers. Or that the cop was, for God’s sake! That was an unsupervised, uncorroborated interview with a minor. A six-year-old minor. That’s against the law.’

‘I don’t take kindly to suggestions of witness tampering, DC Mulholland.’

‘Nothing to what you’re going to be accused of at the appeal, when those two statements are produced, with your signature on them. And the buck will stop with you. McAlpine won’t be around to help you out – or say it was his idea to have you in one room, him in the other. Both those infractions … God, you’ll be out on your ear!’

Anderson ignored him and went back to his papers, a list of Fairbairn’s known recent haunts. There weren’t many; Skelpie had been living a quiet life since he’d got out of jail. Too quiet. Was he waiting for something?

Mulholland tried a different tack. ‘OK, look at it like this. You all knew he was a paedophile. The dad knew his daughter had been assaulted. McAlpine suggests to him – just suggests – that it was Fairbairn. He was at the scene, the girl had been seen with him, and the ice cream man identified him. Mr Osbourne gets Lynda to tell her story, just helping out with the bits he says Lynda had
told him before. The kid is traumatized and compliant, and probably just wants to be given some chocolate and go home; she goes to role-play and does exactly what you’d expect, given the injuries she’d sustained. But that does not point conclusively to Fairbairn. It could have been anybody. It was probably Biggart.’

‘You saw that film. We know Fairbairn was involved. So, get out my way!’

Anderson’s phone rang. He stood up and swung his jacket back round his shoulders. No matter who was on the phone, he was using it as an excuse to get out.

‘OK, go and talk to David Osbourne before you go any further. Then get back to me, if you still think you have to.’

11.00 A.M.

Matilda had been up all night, processing the root of a tooth so they could get a DNA sample and maybe a definite ID. But she had also been busy on the handcuffs. Standard police issue thirty years ago, they had a serial number showing that they had been issued to Strathclyde force. But in those days they had no designation to any particular officer. O’Hare was still trying to grapple with the idea that a Strathclyde officer had been involved.

Matilda came scuttling in efficiently, waving a white envelope. ‘Trace DNA from inside the clip of the handcuffs,’ she announced. ‘Guess who?’

‘Apart from Alessandro Marchetti? Tell me.’

‘It matches Wullie MacFadyean’s. I’ll do a chain reaction on it, and make sure, but the markers are there.’

O’Hare said carefully, ‘It means he touched them – so what?’

‘He was a working cop,’ Matilda persisted. ‘So, everybody and his dog’s DNA should have been on them.’

‘And you’re saying it wasn’t? You’re saying they were cleaned beforehand?’

Matilda shrugged. ‘Of the five who went hill-walking, five are dead. One of them was handling handcuffs found near the remains of the Marchetti boy. And he lived in hiding out near Glen Fruin Academy.’

11.30 A.M.

All the cops had gone. The last of them had left the car park of the Highland Glen Hotel at half seven that morning. The word was the hotel’s laundry van had been involved in some road traffic incident, but Skelpie knew different. The housekeeper and her staff had been interviewed. And now they were talking to anybody who had driven the van recently. It had been a tense few hours. But, technically, Skelpie’s room at the Highland Glen Hotel was unoccupied – the booking system had it marked as vacant – so as long as he stayed in here, they would not come looking.

He had no idea who was looking after him – Wee Archie O’Donnell had been vague in the Bar-L, talking almost in riddles, like a spy. Skelpie’d thought it strange that a player like O’Donnell would lower himself to speak to him, but maybe he himself was now a player too. Maybe Archie O’Donnell, with his life sentence, had chosen him, Cameron Fairbairn, to be the Daddy –
as a just reward for his loyalty in the Marchetti kidnap, and his loyalty to Biggart.

Outside, the heat was relentless, and the patchworked repairs on the tarmac car park were melting. Skelpie thought about going out for a fag but decided against it – too easy to run into a cop. He still had a red patch on his arm where his tattoo was gradually being erased. Another five treatments and it would just look like a burn. But an eagle-eyed cop with not enough to do might spot it for what it was, and wonder why he was getting rid of it – not worth it.

Lynda Osbourne. Lynda with a Y. Funny how you never forgot those things. She’d be ten or eleven now. Twice, he’d walked right past her. Fairbairn closed the Black Watch tartan curtains and the room fell instantly dark.

And Wee Archie’d promised him the chance to settle a score with DI Anderson. He wasn’t going to let that pass.

He jumped as the phone went. It was a female voice, husky, sexy-sounding. She called him Mr Fairbairn, as if she respected him. She knew his codeword, which meant she was legit. She said she had a list of instructions for him. He was to get the train to Helensburgh, and they would send a car to pick him up. The driver would be expecting Mr Fairbairn.

Mr Biggart had always been very grateful for his loyalty, the woman added – it wouldn’t go unrewarded.

12.00 P.M.

The offices of Napier Grey were on the second floor of five in an old building just off Otago Street. Outside, a few
black bin bags had spilled over. Their contents had been further decorated by kebab-ridden vomit and urine from the drunks coming out of the comedy club at the bottom of the street, and the heavy air hung on to the stench. Now the street, at midday on a Sunday, was deserted, devoid of traffic or parked cars apart from the police vehicles pulled up around Number 4.

As Anderson got out of his car, he subtly checked his phone. There was a text from Helena. Five words.
Call me when you can.

No
Love
, no
X.
Just
Call me when you can.
He deleted it.

Mulholland was on the door of the building, having taken refuge within range of the fresh pine disinfectant.

‘So, what do we have?’ asked Anderson.

Mulholland indicated that Anderson should go up the stairs first. ‘Cleaners got here before we did. The place was locked up as usual, except that the alarm hadn’t been set properly. They found Mr Grey with a head injury from the usual unidentified blunt instrument. He’s already been taken away in the ambulance.’

Anderson paused on the first flight and took a deep breath. Just what I need, he thought. ‘Any sign of Mrs Carruthers yet?’

‘No, just the solicitor.’

They went through the reception area, which was cluttered with SOCOs’ equipment. A SOCO handed them a couple of shoe covers each and said, ‘We haven’t collected any samples yet, so –’

‘I know. Touch nothing.’

As Anderson walked into the office, the tart chemical tang of adhesive hung in the air. A SOCO was videoing
the scene, panning slowly all the way round the room from a central point. Filing and paperwork lay everywhere. Grey was a successful family solicitor, and he had looked after the Carruthers since they were married.

‘I don’t think they wanted to get any info out of him – otherwise, he would look like the Bridge Boy.’

‘Richard,’ corrected Anderson.

‘Well, they just whacked this guy over the head.’

Anderson nodded and retreated. ‘Well, whoever killed Lambie did it for the diary. If he didn’t get what he was after then, he is still going to be looking for it. Sorry for stating the bloody obvious.’

‘Something on the missing pages? Sorry for also stating the obvious.’

‘Must be. The solicitor wouldn’t know anything – but what about Mary? Has anybody found a desk diary here, an appointment book? Do we know who was supposed to be here yesterday?’ Anderson squeezed past the SOCO and went back out to the reception area, where another SOCO was sitting at the desk. He pointed to the computer. ‘Can you get that thing up and running?’

‘No,’ the SOCO said. ‘We’ve tried but it’s not booting up, not doing anything at all.’

‘No wonder.’ Mulholland leaned over the computer and sniffed. ‘Smell that? Probably some sort of insulation foam – polyurethane. Like the stuff they use to take out speed cameras. I bet they’ve sprayed it in the guts of every machine here. Go round and have a sniff at them all.’

‘I’ve also looked for a desk diary, but there isn’t one.’

‘OK, but we know that Mary Carruthers had an appointment here yesterday. And we know it was about a
will, about that twenty grand. Thomas Carruthers will be the file name. Have you seen anything lying about?’

The SOCO shook his head. ‘Nothing.’

Mulholland spoke up. ‘I’ve phoned Grey’s secretary and she said it wasn’t like him to work on a Saturday morning. But he’d made an exception “due to the sensitive nature of the meeting”. Her words.’

‘And it was the cleaners who discovered him?’

‘Yes. I had them taken up to Partick Central.’

Anderson looked at a photo on the wall, of Grey and a fellow solicitor, taken possibly twenty years earlier. ‘Business partner?’

‘Napier. He’s on holiday. Haven’t contacted him yet.’

‘So, no sign that Mary actually made it here?’

Mulholland shook his head. ‘Do you think this was the same person who killed David?’

‘Well, I don’t think we have a homicidal pensioner running around in the shape of Mary Carruthers. The Russians? Well, we know one of them – Perky – is dead. I saw him shot right in front of me. It’s Mr Pinky we’d like to get our hands on.’ He patted his constable on the arm on his way past. ‘We
will
catch them, Mulholland. We won’t rest until we do. No sign of Mary at home?’