Hour Of Darkness (30 page)

Sixty

Karen Neville was still more than puzzled by the news from Missing Persons as she drove into Stockbridge. So much so that she had almost called her former husband once again, only staying her hand when she realised that he would probably be with Alex Skinner, not wanting to be suspected of phoning him at any excuse.

Mary Chambers was waiting on the pavement when she pulled up outside her partner’s flat. The whole force knew that the DCS was involved with the sister of Griff Montell, a fellow Edinburgh cop. He had taken the news badly when he had found out, but a transfer to Special Branch, which operated outside the CID network, had been the diplomatic solution.

‘It’s called Oakmount,’ Chambers said as she buckled herself into the passenger seat, ‘and it’s in the Grange. I’ve got the location on my phone. Head for the area and I’ll find it when we get there.’

Neville obeyed, staying silent for a while as she concentrated on navigating her way through three sets of the temporary traffic lights which had become a curse of the city. The head of CID left her to it, uninterrupted, until they had crossed the Meadows, and were heading up Kilgraston Road.

‘What’s this boy like, Karen?’ she asked.

‘I found him okay,’ she replied, ‘but what Jack and I told him changed his whole lifetime thinking about his father, and made him part of a family he never knew existed. When Mr Partridge said he seemed disturbed, that was enough for me.’

‘Me too. I’ve got a car up there, with orders to stop anyone other than family from getting to McGrew. Mind you, from what I heard from DI Pye, we’re only postponing the inevitable by keeping him safe.’

‘More than that, ma’am,’ Neville said. ‘I’ve got some questions to ask him.’ She told the DCS about the latest finding from the DNA trawl of the Caledonian Crescent flat.

‘Was he, by God?’ she hissed. ‘But we were told he’s physically harmless.’

‘Himself, perhaps,’ the DS conceded, ‘but he might not have been alone. There’s so much DNA he could have had a platoon of known heavies there without us finding them. The only questionable thing is, the DNA was found in the living room; that wasn’t affected by the burst pipe from above, so it wasn’t redecorated. He could have been there at any time and not just in that short window between the workmen finishing and Watson being killed.’

‘Then we do need to have a serious chat with Hastie; maybe he was meeting the folk in the Spanish van.’

‘There’s a thought,’ Neville murmured as she stopped for a red light, and as Chambers’ phone rang.

As the head of CID took the call, she seemed to straighten up in her seat as she listened to what she was being told. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said, and her sergeant knew at once who the caller was. ‘As soon I’ve wrapped up the urgent matter I’m on at the moment, I’ll be there. Allowing for the weekend traffic, I should be at Gayfield in an hour.’

She whistled as she took the mobile from her ear. ‘Fucking hell!’ she exclaimed. ‘That was the chief. If this here gets complicated I might need to haul in Haddock to join you. I’ve just been ordered to meet ACC McGuire at Gayfield, to do a formal interview with Cheryl Mackenzie. Ray Wilding’s just arrested her for murdering her husband.’

The bombshell was still reverberating in Neville’s mind when her boss called out, ‘Take a right here,’ as she approached a junction. ‘Second on the left next,’ she continued as they made the turn, into a quiet suburban street, in which only a single pedestrian could be seen, ‘and we should be there.’

She had barely finished speaking before her driver slammed on the brakes. ‘That’s him,’ Karen shouted, as she freed herself from her seat belt and jumped from the car. ‘Marlon Hicks.’

By the time Chambers’ feet hit the pavement the DS had pinned the lightly built youth against the wall of the house he had been passing. ‘Don’t run, Marlon,’ Karen warned him. ‘There’s no point and there’s no need. We want to talk to you, that’s all.’

‘What about?’ he retorted. ‘I ain’t done nothin’.’

‘That’s true, and we want to make sure that you don’t. What are you doing here?’

‘Just walkin’, lady, that’s all. I got a right.’

As he spoke she patted him down. Her hand came upon something in a pocket of his hoodie; she reached in and withdrew a kitchen knife.

‘You don’t have a right to carry that,’ the head of CID said, as she reached them. ‘Give us some sensible answers, son, or we’ll arrest you.’

‘We know where you were going, Marlon,’ Neville told him. ‘And I don’t like the fact that you were going there with a knife in your pocket.’ She dropped her hands to her sides, freeing him, but ready to stop him instantly if he tried to run again.

‘I wasn’t going to use it,’ he murmured. ‘I only brought it to scare him.’

‘I don’t think it would,’ she replied, fingering the blade. ‘You could barely cut butter with this thing. Why did you want to frighten him?’

‘I wanted to make him tell me why they killed my father. They took him from me before I was even born, those people.’

‘Didn’t the newspaper stories explain it?’ the DS asked. ‘Your father was murdered because the man he worked for was having an affair with Hastie McGrew’s sister Alafair.’

‘They killed him for that?’

‘They did. McGrew’s father paid the men who did it; he was a ruthless and evil man, and his son’s no better. When the police looked like tracing them, Hastie killed them to keep them quiet. That’s who you were on your way to try and frighten with a blunt potato peeler. I don’t think it would have worked, Marlon.’

Tears filled the young man’s eyes. ‘Why did my mum and Duane keep it from me?’ he moaned. ‘I grew up hating my father.’

‘I’d imagine they did it to stop you from growing up to fuck up your life by doing something as bloody stupid as this,’ Chambers replied. ‘Fortunately you didn’t, so this is what’s going to happen. You’re going to buy a kitchen knife to replace that one, because we’re keeping it, then you’re going to pack in your job with the McGrews’ company and you’re going to move in with your granny. I’m told she’s a good woman. Is all that agreed?’

Marlon nodded. ‘Yes, lady.’

‘Good. I shouldn’t need to say this but I will, just in case you take another daft turn. If you come anywhere near the Oakmount Nursing Home again, you’ll be lifted and I’ll charge you with the first thing that comes into my head. Now go on, son, and think yourself lucky that DS Neville saw you when she did.’

They watched him as he walked away, until he reached the junction and passed out of sight.

‘Do you think he’ll behave himself?’ the head of CID asked the DS as they returned to their car.

‘I’m pretty sure he will. He’s a nice kid at heart. I wouldn’t like to have a shock like he’s had.’

She drove on, taking the second turning on the left as she had been instructed, and seeing the nursing home immediately, a modern three-storey building taking up half the street on which it stood. She swung into the car park and slid into a bay next to a police patrol car. Its occupants, two constables, were waiting for them in the home’s reception hall.

‘You can stand down,’ the DCS told them. ‘The panic’s over. But wait for me; I’m going to need a lift to Gayfield Square. Do you happen to know which floor McGrew’s on?’

‘He’s in room one eleven,’ the older officer told her, ‘first floor. Not that we went up there: I heard a woman asking for him at reception a few minutes ago. She said she was his sister. There was a guy with her, a baldy fella. He’d a walking stick; looked as if he belonged in here himself.’

‘That’s handy,’ Chambers observed. ‘It might save us a second visit.’

The two detectives took the stairs up to the first floor. ‘The baldy guy will be the husband, Derek Drysalter,’ Neville said.

‘Mmm,’ her boss murmured. ‘I saw him play for Scotland once. He had hair then. And speak of the devil . . .’

Drysalter was standing in the corridor, outside room one hundred and eleven. He frowned as they approached him, warrant cards in hand. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he exclaimed. ‘At a time like this? What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Visiting the sick,’ Chambers replied, sharply. ‘We need to talk to your brother-in-law.’

‘You’ll have a job,’ Drysalter snapped, trembling with anger and tension. ‘He went into a coma two hours ago; my wife and I have just seen his doctor. She says he’ll probably not come out of it. Tough shit, eh. He does nearly twenty years and then gets only a few months on the outside.’

‘Life’s a bitch and then you die,’ the DCS said. ‘Look at it this way: in another era, they’d have dropped him through the floor with a rope round his neck. Anyway, a man can do a lot in a few months; possibly even enough to earn him another twenty years, him and anyone involved with him.’

‘Listen,’ the former footballer protested, ‘I know nothing about any of that stuff, any of it. I didn’t join the family firm when I married Alafair.’

‘In which case we’ll need to talk to her. You know,’ Chambers told him, as she moved past him, ‘I used to have a Scotland shirt with your name on the back. Pity about the hair, by the way.’

There was music playing in Hastie McGrew’s room, just loudly enough for Alafair Drysalter, who was standing at the end of her brother’s bed, not to hear the detectives as they entered. When Neville coughed, she gave a little jump and spun round.

‘Who the . . .’ she began, stopping short as she saw the cards. ‘Oh no,’ she sighed. ‘Do you people never stop?’

‘We tend not to,’ the DS said. ‘We came here to interview your brother, but it looks like we’re going to have to talk to you instead.’

‘About what this time? Are you still on about my father’s death?’

‘No, it’s not about that, for now at any rate. The situation is that we can put your brother in Bella Watson’s flat. So far your DNA hasn’t shown up there, but it won’t surprise me if it does.’

‘Look,’ she exclaimed, ‘Hastie couldn’t have killed the bloody woman. I thought you’d established that.’

‘But he knows people who could.’

‘In which case he’d have been bloody silly to go with them while they did the job, and silly, Hastie is not. And by the way, you can stop looking for me there, because I wasn’t.’

She nodded towards the still, pale, hairless figure on the bed. ‘As for my brother, look at him. What’s the point in pursuing this any further?’

‘Because a woman’s been murdered,’ Chambers replied. ‘She might not have been a very nice woman, a monster in fact, and she might have been involved in the drugs trade, but she was still murdered, and whether we can be arsed or not, it’s our job to find out who did it. So, why was your brother in Bella’s flat? Was it because he was involved in the methamphetamine racket with her?’

‘No!’ Alafair snapped. ‘It’s because he wasn’t. That’s all I’m prepared to say.’

‘In that case we’ll be charging you with obstructing justice. You don’t want that, Mrs Drysalter, do you? Up to now you’re the clean one of your family. My officers tell me you have a child at Mary Erskine. How’s she going to take that?’

‘Are you threatening me?’

‘Are you really that naive?’ Karen Neville laughed. ‘Of course we’re threatening you. And we’ll follow through on it unless you tell us what the bloody hell’s been going on here.’

‘Okay,’ she sighed in defeat. ‘The fact is that Hastie was approached almost as soon as he got out of prison and offered a deal to import and sell methamphetamines. He told me about it and said it looked pretty foolproof. The quantities would be very profitable but there would never be silly amounts in circulation.

‘He reckoned it could stay under the radar for quite some time if it was handled properly. Well, I went bat-shit, let me tell you. I said that I’d done my last prison visit, and I forbade him to have anything to do with it. Believe it or not he does listen to me. He said okay, if I was that set against it he’d pass it on to somebody else.’

‘To Bella Watson?’

‘Yes. He told me he’d found out by accident from a guy in the jail that she was living somewhere in Edinburgh, and that he’d been able to track her down. He went to see her and offered her the deal; he told her it was compensation for what happened to her boy. Hastie always did think Dad went too far with that,’ she offered in explanation. ‘That’s why he was in Bella’s flat, to set up the drug route. The old cow went for it, but for security, Hastie didn’t tell her who the supplier was.’

‘Not ever?’

‘Not that I know of. I told him never to mention it to me again.’

‘Who approached him? Who was the supplier?’

‘He never told me that, and frankly I didn’t want to know.’

‘Is that the truth, Mrs Drysalter?’ Chambers asked.

‘Yes it is. There’s no point in holding anything back. What can you do to my brother now?’

Sixty-One

When Karen Neville walked back into the Leith CID room she was surprised to see that the DI’s cubicle was illuminated by the faint glow of a computer monitor. She opened the door to find Sammy Pye seated behind his desk.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘has it suddenly stopped being Saturday?’

‘It has for me. I called Jackie for another update; when she told me everything that had happened, I couldn’t sit on my arse at home any longer. Have you traced Marlon Hicks?’

‘Yes. He isn’t a threat any longer . . . not that he ever was really. The way it is now with Hastie McGrew, the only threat to him will come from the angry souls waiting for him on the other side.’

She explained that the man had been comatose when they had arrived at his nursing home, and that no bets were being placed on him seeing out the weekend.

‘Bugger!’ Pye moaned. ‘I’d been hoping . . .’

‘. . . that he’d wrap up the murder investigation for you? Come on, Sammy, that was never going to happen. The visit wasn’t a total loss, though. We couldn’t talk to Hastie, but we did find his sister there. She’s still nervous about being implicated in her father’s death, so she was very frank with us.’

Neville related Alafair Drysalter’s account of how the methamphetamine had found its way into Edinburgh and how her brother had involved Bella Watson in its distribution.

‘Do you really think he gave her the deal because he had a guilty conscience?’ Pye asked sceptically.

‘Let’s say I’m not convinced,’ the DS replied. ‘I think it’s more likely that he didn’t want to be hands-on himself . . . his father never was, from what we’re told . . . and that he took it to Bella because having been away since the mid-nineties, she was the only person he knew from those days who was still around.’

‘I’ll buy into that. But Alafair wouldn’t tell you who it was approached Hastie?’

‘No, she said she didn’t know.’

‘Did you believe that.?’

‘Not for a second, but it doesn’t matter. We think we know anyway. Did Jackie tell you about the name of the owner of the Spanish van?’

‘Yes.’ Pye grinned. ‘Nice one. Maria Centelleos, equals Sparkles, Mia Watson’s old radio name.’

‘And more than that. Andy’s people have established, subject to chemical testing, that the methamphetamine was made in a place owned by her.’

‘Wow. That really does land it at her door. Has she been arrested?’ he asked, hopefully.

‘No.’ She explained that the bodega had been destroyed, and that the Centelleos mother and son had vanished.

‘There’s a son?’

‘Yes. So, unless there are other young Watsons scattered around Edinburgh, we now know whose DNA we’ve found in Bella’s flat.’

‘But I’m investigating a murder, not a family reunion,’ the DI pointed out.

‘Forget the murder for now,’ Karen told him, ‘focus on the drugs.’

‘Okay, I will. What you’re suggesting is that Maria Centelleos made them. But why would she, of all people, approach Hastie McGrew with a drug deal? That’s what I don’t understand.’

‘Neither did I but I do now. The DCS had to leave, but I stayed on and the pair of us went for a coffee, leaving Derek to watch over his brother-in-law in case he decided to croak.

‘I had something else to ask Alafair, something I only discovered today. After Mia Sparkles disappeared, Alafair filed a formal missing person report and in it she claimed to be her sister.’

‘Did she?’ Pye’s eyebrows rose. ‘Are you sure about that? I mean why the hell would she? We know who their parents were, both of them.’

‘She did, though, and my first thought was that it was a simple matter of the last of the Holmes family wanting to eliminate the last of the Watsons. I guess the same must have occurred to Bob Skinner, for he had the report flagged up for him to be notified as soon as Mia was traced. But we were wrong. Alafair told me that the two of them were brought up together for a few years.’

‘They were what? How the hell did that happen? In their day, those two families were the local equivalent of the Hatfields and the McCoys.’

Karen contradicted him. ‘Not always. If you go far enough back, Bella’s brother Gavin used to work for the Holmeses. He was their dealer in his housing scheme, one that’s long gone, thank God. Alafair told me that dear old Gavin, before he came to a sticky end, pimped his niece Mia, then well underage, to her Uncle Alasdair, who was notorious for liking them young. Bella knew about it and wasn’t bothered. But when Perry Holmes found out about it, he was; he was very bothered indeed.

‘He took Mia away from Alasdair, and from Edinburgh altogether, and installed her with his own kids, in Hamilton, where they lived with their mother, Miss McGrew. He looked after Mia all the way through university. So you see, to all intents and purposes, a Watson became a Holmes.’

‘Ele-fucking-mentary,’ Pye murmured. ‘But why should she vanish? Did Alafair tell you that?’

‘She doesn’t know, but back then she feared the worst, that Mia might have been murdered too. So she filed her formal missing person report, in the hope that her disappearance would be investigated.’ She frowned. ‘Now that I think about it, Bob Skinner couldn’t have thought she was dead, since he had that note put on it. Leaving that aside though,’ she continued, ‘that makes sense to me, Sammy. It explains why Hastie didn’t tell Bella who was the source of the crystal meth and how the route was set up so that the two of them never met. Remember, Patrick Booth always collected and dealt the stuff; Bella always handled the money.

‘I’ve spoken to our drugs squad leader,’ she added, ‘to pass on what Alafair told me. Booth’s given them the rest of it, how the money thing worked; he got his cut then she’d take hers, and send the rest to the supplier, to Mia.’

‘How? Did he tell the squad that? Did he even know?’

‘Yes, he did. He said she used a money broker to transfer it to a Euro account in Gibraltar.’

‘Could there be someone else involved? Could this Mia woman be a front for someone?’

‘There’s no trace of anyone else. Her van was seen approaching her mother’s flat, her son’s DNA was in the place.’

‘So why did it all blow up?’ the DI asked. ‘What brought them over here . . . assuming it was her driving the van, and that she didn’t let the lad come on his own?’

‘There’s only one person can tell us, and that’s her,’ the DS pointed out. ‘When it comes to finding her, it looks as if we’re in the hands of the Spanish. Once they do, though, we’ve cracked it.’

‘Not quite,’ Pye pointed out. ‘Proving she was in the flat . . . and we haven’t done that yet . . . that’s one thing; linking her to the murder, that’s another. Before she can even become a viable suspect, we need to tie her, evidentially, to the body. If we can do that, we’ll be in business.’

‘Yes,’ Neville agreed; then she smiled. ‘It’s too bad you’ll miss out on the glory.’

‘That’s not why I’m in the job,’ he insisted, ‘but what do you mean?’

‘If I were you,’ she advised him, ‘I’d get Mary Chambers’ okay to have a press conference today. No, we haven’t made an arrest for Bella Watson’s murder, but you can tell the media that we’ve got a strong suspect, and we’ve broken a drugs ring in the process.’

‘Why should I rush it?’ Pye asked, intrigued. ‘The investigation’s been going on for weeks.’

‘Maybe so,’ Karen said, ‘but I think you’ll find that a story is going to break very soon that’s going to blow it right off the front page.’