Fire in the Blood (Scott Cullen Mysteries) (3 page)

"So what do you think?" asked Cullen.

"Hold on," said Bain, pointing over Cullen's shoulder, back towards the buildings. "Don't want to spend all fuckin' afternoon repeating myself to DCs."

Cullen frowned and thought back to the conversation he'd had with Sharon at lunchtime. He was becoming too cynical to think that Bain might be referring to making him an Acting DS, so he turned around and spotted DC Stuart Murray walking over - a Volvo from the Haddington pool headed off out of the car park.

Murray was a local CID officer based in Haddington - they had all worked with him before in January, along with PC Watson and they had got on well enough. Murray grinned at Cullen and Caldwell as he caught up with them. Protocol dictated that local DCs and DSs would be allocated to the Senior Investigating Officer - Bain in this case - but Cullen reckoned that Bain was getting a DC and a PC and that would be his lot.

"How's it going?" asked Cullen.

"Nice to see you pair," said Murray, nodding at Cullen and Caldwell.

"What about me?" asked Bain.

"The pleasure's mine," said Murray.

Bain scowled. "What took you so fuckin' long, McLean?"

Murray grinned at Bain. "It's Murray," he said. "I've just left McLean to head back to base. We've been looking into an assault in Gullane, some boy got battered on the way home from the pub."

"And Lamb's got two DCs lookin' into that?" asked Bain.

DS Bill Lamb was Murray's boss, and a recent addition to the catalogue of enemies that Bain had accumulated over the years. Cullen got on well with him. He was beginning to harbour suspicions about some sort of romantic involvement between Lamb and Caldwell -
Mrs
Angela Caldwell - hence his cheeky comment to her earlier.

Murray shrugged. "It's as close as we get to a proper case without you being involved," he said.

Caldwell burst out laughing.

Bain scowled at them all.
 

"Come to think about it," said Murray, "how come you're out here and it's not us local boys?"

Bain ignored him. Cullen knew the real answer - Turnbull was both playing for control of a wider remit and trying to find something to occupy the time of one of his more useless DIs.

"Right," he said, rubbing his hands together. "This is looking like a fuckin' puzzle. First things first, I want to know who the fuckin' body in that barrel is. They seem to be jumping to conclusions a bit too soon for my likin'."
 

"Who's they?" asked Murray.

Bain rubbed at his moustache - Cullen hadn't seen Bain for a few days and noticed a red rash on the top lip. "The fuckin' distillery owner," he said. "Fuck sake." He took a deep breath. "Just found out that Jimmy Deeley is out in Bathgate at a murder scene, so he won't fuckin' be out here till later to identify the body and work his usual magic."

Deeley was the Edinburgh Coroner who performed the function of Medical Examiner on cases like this, but Cullen knew that the department was inundated due to a freak onslaught of deaths with suspicious circumstances.

"What about Sweeney?" asked Cullen. Katherine Sweeney was Deeley's Deputy - under Scots Law, all of his postmortems had to be attended by Sweeney to ensure corroboration. Cullen had only met her once and that was just recently - he'd often wondered if Deeley even had a deputy, other than the male assistant that lurked in the basement of the Leith Walk police station's mortuary. When he finally met Sweeney, he recognised her face from the station canteen.

"You know as well as I do how often she leaves the lab, Sundance," said Bain.

"I don't think we need to wait for someone to declare the body dead," said Caldwell.

Cullen and Murray laughed.

"Less of that, Batgirl," said Bain. "At some point," he said, "Deeley will get the body out of the barrel and we can compare it against MisPer reports. This barrel was filled 18 years ago." He looked at Caldwell. "Can you get us a list of disappearances from then?"

"Will do," she said. "I'll dig up any case files that are still open. IC1 males, right?"

"Put a few months around either way, aye?" asked Bain.

"Obviously," she said.

Bain looked at Murray. "Can you look into this Paddy Kavanagh boy that Crombie mentioned?" he asked.

"I'll need to have a word with him, of course, but aye," said Murray.

"We'll chin when we get back upstairs." Bain eyed Cullen. "Now, Sundance, I want you to look into this barrel," he said. "Who filled it? How did the body get in there?"

"I get all the great jobs," said Cullen.

"Sundance," said Bain, his eyes screwed up, "if you want to wash my car, I've got a bucket and a sponge in the boot - I'm sure they can give you some water and soap in there."

"Sorry, sir," said Cullen, closing his eyes, "I'll see what I can find out."

"I want you to get as much out of these boys regarding that barrel and the whisky," said Bain. "And check that the body hasn't been chucked in there recently."

"Isn't Anderson supposed to be doing that?" asked Cullen.

Bain smiled, though there was no warmth in it. "Aye, well, I want you to make sure that he's fuckin' doin' it properly. As you well know, half our fuckin' time is spent checkin' other people are doin' their jobs properly."

"Fine," said Cullen. He took a deep breath. "Crombie seems like such a nice man."

Bain laughed. "Aye, well, I've got suspicions about him already, put it that way."

"Would those suspicions be allayed by a bottle of whisky?" asked Cullen.

"Watch it, Sundance."

Cullen smiled. He was finding it easier and easier to wind Bain up - time was he would have shat himself at the merest mention of his name, but now winding Bain up felt like shooting fish in a barrel. "Are we going to get any more help?" he asked.

"I've asked," said Bain. "We'll see what happens. As it stands, it's just us four and that plonker Watson." He looked at each of them in turn. "Right, it's just before two now. I want progress updates from each of you by four."

Cullen sat with Fraser Crombie and Doug Strachan in the stock room, located just off the main office. It was a small dusty room with no natural light. Several sets of shelves lined the walls, filled with paperwork in various styles of ring binder. They sat around a fairly old computer, the grey case on the old CRT monitor had long since yellowed. Cullen thought he recognised Windows 95 - he would be surprised if the machine could even go on the internet.

Fraser was trawling through the computer records, tracing the barrels' stock record history through an old database package that Cullen imagined should have long since been integrated into something newer, faster and which worked without a PhD in Computer Science. Fraser had been swearing under his breath continually - Cullen knew from personal experience that having someone looking over your shoulder when using a computer was seriously off-putting, but he imagined that the antiquity of the software wasn't exactly helping. That said, he was keeping a close eye on what was going on in case there was any funny business attempted.

Cullen checked his watch. "Okay," he said, "that's half an hour that you've been at this. What can you tell me about this barrel?"

"As young Fraser's father mentioned earlier," said Strachan, cutting in, "this pair are an 18 Year Old edition - one sherry and one oak cask - which we blend together to get the correct texture, colour and flavour for the single malt. We barrelled them on twelfth June 1994, exactly 18 years ago to the day."

Cullen scribbled the date down. "I wasn't aware that you would pre-mark a Special Edition like that," he said.

Strachan frowned. "Normally we don't," he said.

"How do you know at the time that it's going to be special?"

"We have learnt to recognise a special harvest," said Strachan. "We normally do a fourteen year edition, otherwise an eighteen, but I would suggest that Fraser's father was thinking ahead to the centenary when these were pre-marked."

"So was 1994 particularly special?" asked Cullen.

"You're going back quite a while," said Fraser in his deep syrupy voice. "I think it was a decent year - the fourteen year old editions we did in 2008 were pretty good if I recall correctly. And these are for the distillery's centenary. My father is nothing if not forward-thinking."

"Has the distillery always been based here?" asked Cullen, wondering if they could have been moved.

"It has," said Fraser. "Our family had an illicit still in Gullane for years before my great-grandfather set this place up."

Cullen noticed that he used the much-maligned pronunciation of
Gillen
rather than the more common
Gullen
- it showed which side of the tracks you were from in the town.

"Don't worry," said Cullen, "I don't think we'll prosecute you on that illicit still."

Fraser didn't respond to the joke. "It was pretty successful," he said, "and by the 30s he was doing fourteen year editions, so him and his son - my grandfather - bought this place off the landowner. It took a while until we started using it fully, but we're at a comfortable size now."

Strachan had been nodding vigorously throughout.

"So, these barrels," said Cullen, keen to distract them from the potted history of Dunpender Distillery.

Fraser slowly turned around to look at Cullen. "What we can tell you is just from our memories, I'm afraid," he said with a frown. "When we computerised the stock system in 1997, we didn't have any paperwork on them."

Cullen turned to Strachan. "I thought you said these were filled eighteen years ago?"

"We
think
so," said Strachan.

"Hang on," said Cullen, "are you saying that you
found
these barrels?"

"Yes," said Strachan.

"So really, you know nothing about these barrels?"

Strachan just shrugged. "We assumed when we found them that they were part of a private stash for Alec, or maybe Fraser's brother, so we added them to the records."

"My father was always taking his own private malts," said Fraser.

"Wouldn't they be recorded?" asked Cullen.

Fraser and Strachan shared a look. "Sometimes they weren't," said Strachan.

"Do I need to get some agents from Revenue and Customs in here?" asked Cullen.

Both of them stared at the floor.

"Is your brother around?" asked Cullen.

Fraser looked away. "Iain went missing a few years ago," he said. "He was presumed dead ten years ago."

"Sorry to hear that," said Cullen. He gestured at the PC. "Do you know who filled them?" he asked.

Fraser tapped at the screen. "No, the field is blank for these barrels," he said.

"It
might
be in the paper ledger," said Strachan, "but the paper trail on these is pretty sketchy, to say the least."

"Do you still have the original ledgers?" asked Cullen.

"They're in Dad's attic," said Fraser. "He stored them at the house when we computerised it all."

"I wouldn't mind having a look at them," said Cullen.

Fraser raised his eyebrows. "You'd need to arrange that with my father."

Cullen scribbled it down on his notebook.

"I've been scratching my head trying to remember what happened," said Strachan, butting in again. He thumbed in Fraser's general direction. "If memory serves, it was young Fraser here that found these barrels when we were doing a stock check just as we were computerising the records. We had some discrepancies, as you can imagine in this place, but finding two extra barrels wasn't exactly what we'd expected."

"Who would have been working here at the time?" asked Cullen.

"We both were," said Strachan. "I was Chief Cooper at the time. Fraser was just commencing his training in the art."

"Would there have been anyone else?" asked Cullen.

Strachan thought it through for a few moments. "Just the two of us."

Cullen nodded. "So if these barrels were found in 1997 and you don't know where they've come from," he said, "was there any whisky unaccounted for?"

Strachan tapped away at the computer. "Can't find anything," he said after a few moments. "Might be better checking the original paper ledgers."

Cullen closed his eyes - their inept stock management system wasn't making his life any easier. "Can I have a look at the barrel, then?"

The barrel room that contained the particular cask that Strachan had found the body in was located downstairs. It occupied half of the cellar of the building, the other half filled with another barrel room - Strachan had mentioned something about the cooperage being in an extension to the basement.

The large room was roughly thirty metres square and was filled with rows of barrels mounted on stands three high. Stout pillars were dotted around the cavernous space, holding up both the ceiling and the building above it. A row of naked light bulbs hung from the ceiling, giving a harsh glow to the place and casting ominous shadows in the darkened corners of the room. There was an elaborate winch system at one side - like a dumb waiter in an old hotel, though it appeared to be several orders of magnitude stronger.

At the front of the room, one cask was mounted on a stand and lying on its back, while another barrel stood upright and looked like it had been carefully opened.

The room was swarming with Scene of Crime Officers. James Anderson - one of the lead SOCOs - wore a white coverall and stood examining the barrel. Another officer stood beside him, completely covered in overall and face mask except for her eyes, which were presently obscured by a sizeable digital SLR camera. She was clicking away at everything, making sure that every action Anderson took was captured and documented.

Cullen told Strachan and Fraser to wait at the entrance. He marched over to Anderson and the barrel.

"Found anything?" asked Cullen.

Anderson pulled down his mask, revealing his thick goatee beard covering every square millimetre of skin and which just tucked under this chin. He looked over at Fraser Crombie and Strachan before answering. "Just found an annoying DC," he said, his voice low.