Blood, Salt, Water (26 page)

40

Late in the evening, in her car, Alex Morrow sat looking up at the Southern General Hospital, at small windows burning into the night. Members of the public came and went. Nurses pushed patients out to a smoking shelter in the car park and then went back for them. Minicabs arrived, picking up or dropping off and then they drove away again. Danny was up there, behind one of those windows.

It was nearly midnight. She wanted to go home but sat in the car, so sad she felt paralysed.

Iain Fraser was dead. She had watched them lift his body onto a stretcher in the interview room. A massive heart attack, they said. They hadn’t brought a body bag upstairs with them. The lead paramedic hoped that was OK? He could go and get one if she wanted? Morrow said no, it was fine. They could carry him downstairs and through the lobby and not pass anyone. No one came into police stations any more.

She was glad that there were cameras everywhere in the station, glad the surgeon who examined him was his own doctor, glad she had double-checked his medication. But still, when she watched the footage back and saw him half collapse on his way into the holding cell, she knew it would look bad. That was why she went to the hospital with the body. She needed to know it was a heart attack. She needed to know she wasn’t going to be on a death-in-custody charge first thing in the morning.

Superficially, Iain Fraser had died of a heart attack, the lab told her, but actually, look. Look at the fingers here, see that? On his fingernails?

She couldn’t see it but they were clubbed. She thought they said stubbed, but he repeated himself:
clubbed
. The tips of the fingernails were squared and swollen. Lung cancer. Untreated, advanced, his heart probably just gave out. He must have been in terrible pain.

Fraser was a lowlife, a career thug. She shouldn’t feel sad for him but she did and it bothered her. She shouldn’t have any feelings about him.

The arrest warrant for Abigail Gomez had gone through an hour too late. The party of three had made their connecting flight to Ecuador. She tried to rationalise the failure: international arrest warrants did take time. They did take time. She knew they did. But they didn’t have to. They didn’t always.

Whoever Abigail Gomez really was, she had a talent for identifying weakness. She had arrived in a tiny west coast Scottish town, swooping in like an omniscient being, posing as a returner with just enough information to make it work. She had found Police Scotland’s weakness too. But lack of funds was universal. It wasn’t a hard weakness to identify.

She had seen Iain Fraser’s weakness too. He was determined to take responsibility but he was just a cog. She’d seen that many times before. It was a belief often borne of a traumatic childhood, it was so much more manageable to believe himself bad than the world. It was people like Danny she had trouble with. People who blamed everyone else or thought injustice was the natural order of things.

Iain Fraser died begging. He slumped over the table, mumbling, rambling. Morrow didn’t know what he was begging for. He was pleading with her, Annie and her niece, tell them he did something, or didn’t do something. But then he was gone. She could watch the tapes back but didn’t think it would make it any clearer. She’d check his records in the morning and try to find Annie or the niece. She didn’t know what she could tell them though.

Morrow sighed. She should go home but she didn’t. She stayed there, looking up at the windows of Danny’s ward, asking herself questions that were far too big for midnight in a rainy hospital car park.

Danny was up there, in a bed with a respirator hissing next to him, having a good night. He’d felt no compunction about letting a civil war break out to make a point. She cursed him and phoned the ward.

A female nurse answered. She dropped the phone when Alex gave Danny’s name. Picking it up again, she sounded nervous and breathless, and said she would just get someone to talk to Alex, can you wait a wee minute? Would that be all right, pet? Morrow was crying before the doctor even picked up the receiver. He was very sorry. Alex said she was too, but she was lying. She hung up.

Iain Fraser was wrong. They didn’t make the world. They didn’t make all the lies and the crap in it. She shouldn’t lie about Danny: she wasn’t sad. She was crying with relief.

Weeping and exhausted, she turned on her headlights, let the handbrake off and drove the cherished journey home, to her warm house, to her good man, to her lovely children who were breathing and thriving.

41

In the bright early morning a two-car convoy crested a high hill. The sudden sight of the Irish Sea was broken only by Ailsa Craig, a bare stone island as round as a baby’s buttock, sticking out of the water.

Morrow had not been to bed. Arriving home three and a half hours before she had to leave again, she made a pint of coffee and sat in the dark kitchen with a packet of biscuits, holding a solitary wake for her brother. She sat in the gloom for three hours, inviting the sorrow to hit her. Nothing came. So she dredged up memories, tender moments they had shared, kindnesses, sadnesses. Nothing came. She couldn’t command grief any more than she could command the sea.

Prestwick Airport was a hangover from the Second World War. It was a cheap-flights airport and dressed the part. An advertising hoarding on the roundabout ordered drivers to fly to Rome for £9. The footbridges and outside wall of the train station advertised discounted airfares, car hire and hotels. Everything had a discount price on it. Prestwick Airport knew what it was selling.

They parked in short stay, a hundred yards from the entrance, and walked, hunched against a bitter wind, into the lobby. It was wide and tall and white and empty. Most of the flights came in or left early. It was part of the discount deal: holiday flights at business times, business flights on a holiday schedule. The arrivals board announced that the flight from Barcelona was expected at 7.15.

They had ten minutes to waste. Morrow ordered the DCs to sit down on the chairs and they did. McGrain sat with her. She had come team-handed in case Barratt had heavies with him.

It was quiet in the lobby. No one lingered. Most passengers hurried straight to security to meet their early morning flights.

Across the road a train arrived from Glasgow. The passengers crossed the footbridge and took the long escalator down, deposited luggage at the airline desk and scurried to the ordered queue for security. Within a few minutes, check-in printouts read, passports checked, they were swallowed by the security door and the lobby was clear again.

Morrow gradually became aware of a man in her peripheral vision. He was reading a copy of
The Times
, notable for not taking one of the plentiful empty chairs. She imagined he would be picking up a daughter, she guessed, back from gap year travels, playing at poverty but always with a nice house and her benign father’s credit card to fall back on if it didn’t work out. But then she noticed his red trousers. It was Frank Delahunt. McGrain had noticed them too.

‘Ma’am?’

‘Yeah, I know,’ she muttered. ‘Sit back.’

They waited, sitting still, doing nothing but sweating. Delahunt was behind them, he could spot them at any time. She thought he was there for Barratt but couldn’t be sure until she saw them together.

The arrivals board announced that the Barcelona flight had landed. Delahunt saw the announcement too and folded his paper carefully, tucking it under his arm. He wandered across their path to the double doors marked
No Entry or Re-entry
. He was tense.

They waited. Finally, the double doors opened and a lone woman came through. Dressed in peach cotton and silver strappy sandals, she was ready for dinner on a Spanish beach and looked tired and pissed off to be back. Behind her, through the closing swing doors, a throng of people gathered around the luggage carousel, adjusting their dress after a cramped two-hour flight.

Delahunt shifted his weight to see through the crack in the doors. He was nervous. He wasn’t expected and had come on his own initiative.

‘Let’s move,’ she muttered, waving her officers up and over to the building exit so that Barratt wouldn’t see them the moment he stepped through the doors. A man with his history would have an eye for polis, not that he’d need second sight to place the guys she had with her: even in plain clothes they all looked police. Too neat. Notably conformist.

They stood in a clump between the exits to the car park and the check-in desks. Morrow told two of them to face away and pretend they were checking their phones while she watched over their shoulders.

The Barcelona passengers began to trickle through the doors. Delahunt moved out of the way of the trolleys and the crowds.

And there he was. Mark Barratt came through the doors, small and broad-shouldered. His skin was white as dough, making him look as if he’d never left Scotland in his life. She realised that she’d half expected to see Danny, because Barratt had the same shaved head and tracksuit, but she felt nothing when it wasn’t him.

Barratt was pulling a small, wheeled suitcase. It was incongruously feminine, had a tapestry pattern of an Alsatian dog on the front.

He spotted Delahunt and stopped. Surprised and angry to see him, he walked over.

Delahunt spoke to Barratt’s shoulder. Barratt said two forceful words and walked away. Flustered, Delahunt pretended to look for someone else coming out of the doors.

Barratt thundered towards the exit, one of the wheels on his suitcase giving an intermittent shriek.

Morrow nodded the two DCs over to pick up Delahunt and she and McGrain walked over to the doors. ‘Mark Barratt?’

Barratt stopped. He looked at them and knew what they were. He said nothing.

‘Mr Barratt, we’d like to talk to you about events which occurred in your absence. Will you come with us, please, sir?’

‘Giving us a choice?’ His voice was a low rumble, a premonition of thunder.

‘I think we both know I’m not, Mr Barratt.’

Delahunt was brought over and protested his confusion. Barratt shut him up with a threatening scowl.

‘OK,’ said Morrow, ‘let’s get these two winners in the motors.’

Delahunt was in her car as they drove back to London Road. He would talk. Morrow could tell from the unevenness of his breathing, the way he’d pull a sharp intake and let it out. She didn’t speak to him. If he had anything to say she wanted it on tape.

At London Road, McGrain pulled the car through the back gate of the station. Delahunt sat, upright as an Irish setter, looking at everything, taking it in. The other car arrived and Barratt slid past in profile, expressionless.

They took them in through the back bar, left the desk sergeant, Mike, to do the paperwork, and took Delahunt straight upstairs to an interview room. Barratt’s lawyer was called and on his way. They booked him into another interview room but told him they would have to book his suitcase because it was too big.

As he was led away, Morrow watched Barratt’s eyes linger on the roll-on standing on its end behind the desk. She waited until Mike came back.

‘That,’ she said to the suitcase, ‘has got something in it.’

Mike stared at it. They couldn’t get into it without a warrant. To get a warrant they needed cause. To get cause they needed Barratt to say something, but he wouldn’t. They weren’t going to get into the suitcase. Mike looked at her.

‘I could do with a hand, ma’am. If you could put that in the storage area for me?’

Morrow didn’t know what he meant.

‘I mean you can give it a good
feel
, you know, like a Christmas present.’

He was clever, Mike, always had an eye for the limits of regulations.

Morrow crouched down and felt the outside of the suitcase. It was cloth-covered. The tapestry on the front was raised, green and yellow on a black background, but it was solid at the front and back. She tapped it with a knuckle. It felt as if it had been reinforced with solid plastic. The front sank, the tapestry became slightly flaccid. On the back it felt heavier, moved differently and there seemed to be a solidity to the base, as if there was a false bottom inside.

Mike lay the case on its back and tapped the bottom. Again, a heaviness that was too uniform to be explained by shampoo and sandals. They stood up and looked at it.

‘Where’s he coming from, ma’am?’

‘Just arrived from Barcelona.’

‘Cocaine?’

‘Dunno.’

‘He’s put his job down as “upholsterer”. Said he’s done an apprenticeship and everything. But would he bring it in himself?’

‘It’s the weakest point in the process, isn’t it? Risk averse and you get someone else, but that really creates more risk.’

They looked at the suitcase. Even if it was packed with coke they weren’t getting in.

‘Store it,’ said Morrow, pissed off, and went upstairs to interview Delahunt.

42

Delahunt was delighted to see her. He stood to shake her hand, his mouth hanging open, keen as chips to tell her the story he had made up in the car. She fitted the tapes, holding a hand up to stay Delahunt’s gallop before the tapes were notified of who was here and what was afoot.

‘OK, now, Francis Delahunt, can you tell me, in your own words, what you were doing at Prestwick airport this morning?’ She spoke slowly, trying to counter his excitement and make him slow down.

‘So, yes,’ he began, holding his breath and looking at the floor. ‘I was at the airport to wait for a friend when I happened to see Mark Barratt—’

‘Name?’

‘Name?’

‘Of your friend. We’ll check flight records for your friend.’

‘Ah,’ thinking on his feet, ‘see the thing is—’

‘FRANK.’

Delahunt looked at the table.

‘Frank,’ she said quietly, ‘we found Roxanna Fuentecilla dead. We found another dead woman in Loch Lomond. She was an ex-employee at Injury Claims. The man who killed her worked for Mark Barratt. This is really serious now. Do you understand?’

Shocked, he jerked a nod. ‘She’s dead?’

‘This is really serious. You’re looking at serious jail time here.’

‘Roxanna’s dead?’

‘Strangled with wire.’

He slumped in his chair, ‘Oh, God.’

‘I need you to tell me the truth.’

He nodded and his eyes pleaded with her to help him.

‘I can help you, but I need you to help me. It can’t all be one way. We need to help each other.’

He nodded still, he got that, he understood and whispered at both of them, ‘I’m just her contact in the town.’

‘For who?’

‘Roxanna. I’m just a conduit. I’m not doing anything
illegal
per se. I’m giving advice and putting people in contact with one another.’

‘What was Roxanna here for?’

Delahunt took a deep breath. ‘OK. It’s a system.’ He sucked his molars, thinking, possibly excising himself from the story. ‘Assets in a trading partnership. Partnership goes dormant,’ he looked up, ‘for
whatever
reason.’

‘Because she’s dead?’

‘No!’

‘Disappeared? Later declared—’

‘No! Arrested! Arrested. They wanted her to get arrested. That was
all
. The man, the father, he wanted the children back. They weren’t supposed to kill her. It shouldn’t have happened that way. No one wanted that but she realised.’ He shut his eyes, exasperated.

‘She realised what?’

Delahunt sighed. ‘One of the children told her that her father had called. He mentioned Maria Arias, so she realised that they knew each other.’

‘She went to London to confront her?’

‘Well,’ he shook his head in disbelief, ‘that was so stupid. These are not people you threaten, I told her that.’

‘Did you warn her when she called you from the field?’

As she watched him recall that morning he seemed to age. ‘I did. She said she’d been to see Maria. I told her to run. She wouldn’t because of the children. And I decided to go, to convince her.’ Delahunt blinked hard, as if he was trying to wipe something from his mind.

‘Was that all you did? Get dressed and drive out to “convince” her?’

He was ashamed. He couldn’t look at her.

‘Or did you call Maria Arias first and tell her where Roxanna was?’

He sat defensively straight. ‘Maria said I was not to go to the field. She’d told Roxanna to come back to Scotland, sit tight, it would be all right. She said I should just go back to sleep.’

‘But you went?’

‘I went and Roxanna was gone. And I hoped she had run. I kept hoping that.’

He looked up, needful of approval or at least understanding.

‘Well,’ said Morrow coldly, ‘she didn’t run. Who killed her?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it.’

‘You’ve been running this dormant company con up here for a while, haven’t you?’

He shrugged, ‘It’s not a “con”—’

‘Did you pitch the idea to the Arias couple?’

‘I don’t know them. Bob Ashe and I
discussed
it. We know each other from the Helensburgh Yacht Club. We just discussed it, that was all. You can’t charge people with discussing things.’

It was a lawyer’s excuse. ‘Who
paid
you? Mr Ashe?’

Delahunt smirked. ‘I wasn’t paid anything.’

‘Did Roxanna pay you?’

‘I told you, I wasn’t paid.’ He was pleased with himself. Morrow could feel a knee tap coming on.

‘They hadn’t paid you
yet
?’

‘No.’

They stared at each other for a moment.

‘Were you given,’ she spoke very carefully, ‘some consideration, in kind, for the services you provided?’

Delahunt smiled warmly. ‘No! You see, they didn’t pay me. The deal was that Injury Claims gave me a very favourable mortgage.’

‘On your house? I thought the housing market was about to collapse out there?’

‘The polls all predict a “no” vote. It’ll pick up again and my house has been in my family for four generations. The upkeep is very expensive and with the crash, I’m afraid I invested rather—’

‘And the mortgage came from Injury Claims 4 U?’

‘Yes,’ he said smugly. ‘It was just a straightforward mortgage on the house. And a condition of the contract was that when the partnership became dormant the mortgage would be vitiated.’

The Fraud would claw every penny back and that would include Delahunt’s house. Morrow didn’t tell him. She wanted to savour it.

‘OK. Frank, do you know Susan Grierson?’

His smile faded. ‘What?’ He couldn’t seem to follow what was going on suddenly.

‘Susan Grierson. Do you know her?’

He shook his head. ‘I
knew
her.’

‘When?’

He shook his head at the table. ‘When she was alive I knew her. Why are you asking me about
that
?’

‘Is Susan Grierson not alive?’

‘Susan died a year ago. She lived in America. She hadn’t been in Helensburgh for decades. Why
on earth
are you asking about Susan?’

‘How did she die?’

‘Breast cancer. She’d lived on Long Island for years, she married Walter Ashe, Bob’s son. They’ve got kids. When the cancer . . . They moved to Miami, for treatment. Walter and the kids are still there.’

‘Bob Ashe, who owned Injury Claims 4 U? Susan Grierson was his daughter-in-law?’

‘Yes, he retired there, actually. Did Susan’s name come up on something? A contract or something? What’s going on here?’

She thought of Susan Grierson’s husband and father-in-law, all the way across the ocean in balmy Miami, hurriedly briefing Abigail Gomez on the small town history, letting her pick her a patsy, describing his dead wife’s past to give her the perfect cover. He would have given her the keys to the house in Sutherland Crescent, Susan’s passport to get into the country. He’d have told her just enough about everyone so that she wasn’t a stranger in a small community, but a native daughter, coming back.

‘Why are you asking about Susan?’

‘Roxanna’s body was found in Susan Grierson’s house.’

‘Sutherland Crescent? Oh dear! That lovely house!’

It was so odd, his obsession with houses, that Morrow stumbled, ‘Yeah, well, it’s not a lovely house any more. It’s derelict.’

‘Yes, it’s been empty for years. Her mother hated Walter Ashe. She left Sutherland Crescent in trust to Susan and Walter’s children. She didn’t want Walter to have it.’

Morrow took the phone picture of Susan Grierson out of her folder and showed it to him. He shook his head. ‘Susan was short and fat, until the cancer. . .’

He watched her put the picture away. ‘Was that taken in the Victoria Halls? Who actually is that?’

‘Why did you go to meet Barratt at Prestwick?’

‘To warn him.’ He stopped himself, thinking perhaps he could have chosen a better word. ‘To tell him that Roxanna had disappeared. And about the—’ He caught himself. ‘Some other things.’

‘Other things being what?’

‘There was a fire. I thought he might not know what had happened . . .’

‘I’m guessing he knew all about it. How do you know Mark Barratt?’

His eyes lingered on the file. ‘It’s very small, Helensburgh. Everybody knows everybody.’

‘Does everybody come to meet everybody off the plane?’He didn’t answer. He was looking at the file and wondering.

‘Did Roxanna tell you she was having trouble with an ex-employee?’

Delahunt started a defensive lie but stalled. Morrow patted the file, implying that she would tell him who the woman in the picture was if he co-operated. She wouldn’t. He took a deep breath and stalled again, looking at the folder.

‘She either did tell you or she didn’t, Frank, it’s not a complicated question.’

‘She may have mentioned it.’

‘And you told Mark Barratt?’

‘I didn’t tell him. I merely
mentioned
that an employee had been difficult.’

‘Did you merely mention her home address in Clydebank?’

‘Look, I’m just a conduit—’

Morrow got up and left before she gave her superiors cause to send her on another anger management course.

Barratt’s lawyer was well briefed. He arrived at the station and immediately asked for the suitcase back. He put it in his car before he went to see his client in the interview room. They would not be allowed to question him. Barratt had been out of the country when Hettie was killed, when the fire killed two people, and they couldn’t prove a link to Roxanna. They had no cause to hold him any longer.

They watched from the office window as Barratt climbed into his lawyer’s silver Merc. The lawyer was smoking, sucking the smoke in so hard he looked as if he might swallow his own lips.