Lawless (26 page)

‘How?’ McBride pressed.

‘You’re the investigative reporter.’

‘And you’re the detective inspector,’ McBride said, exasperation overtaking him.

‘Yes and we’re both screwed,’ she said, ringing off.

He sat behind the wheel staring at a signed Vettriano print in Alessandro’s window but not seeing it. An avalanche of thoughts roared through the mind which, minutes earlier, had been wiped blank. None of them made any sense. Except one. The only certainty was that whoever killed Lynne Ireland, it was not Bryan Gilzean.
Is that the message?
he asked himself.
Is someone trying to prove he’s an innocent man? Or is that just what we’re supposed to think? Are we being informed or tormented? Or both?

McBride was still wrestling with his thoughts when his mobile ran again. The caller did not identify herself. She did not have to. McBride instantly recognised the even voice that gave no hint of its geographical origins. Anneke Meyer was relaxed, playful – and inviting. She would be working out at Next Generation in a couple of hours. Was he free? Would he like to meet?

McBride told her he was tied up.

‘That sounds interesting,’ she teased. ‘Feet or hands?’

He explained about Lynne Ireland – the story he needed to write about her murder for the next day’s national paper he was freelancing for.

She reminded him of where she worked, told him she was aware of the tragedy, felt sick at the details.

McBride brightened. ‘You’ll have inside information, then,’ he said. ‘Maybe I should take down your particulars, after all?’

‘My lips are sealed,’ she said, sounding serious for the first time. ‘But I imagine you know more than me. Petra will be keeping you informed.’ She managed to make the comment sound like a question.

He did not oblige. ‘Her lips are tighter than yours,’ he said lightly.

‘No comment – but maybe she needs more practice,’ Anneke said, starting to laugh.

She allowed McBride to finish the call only after extracting a promise from him that he would be in touch within the next few days.

The mobile sounded once more. Petra said she was phoning because she knew he would suddenly remember to remind her of something she had remembered anyway.

‘I’m confused,’ McBride said. ‘Remind me.’

‘OK. We’ve staked out the Central Library. Same team. More cameras.’

He started to laugh. ‘Not a chance in hell,’ he said. ‘There’s more likelihood of Dundee United winning the European Cup than there is of our man showing up there. But do it anyway.’

Nobody buys newspapers for the good news. They don’t know it and wouldn’t admit it even if they did but people read papers to learn of the misfortune of others. If something ghastly has happened to someone else, it makes their own injustices seem more bearable. Life isn’t so bad if it’s worse for your neighbour. Death sells best of all. Not a hundred people perishing in an earthquake on the other side of the world but the last breath of a person you can identify with. It’s even better when it has taken place in your home town and if the extinction of life has not been through natural causes.

On the day following the discovery of Lynne Ireland’s corpse,
The Courier
was in danger of selling out. The morning daily carried words and pictures on the front and on two pages inside. Richard Richardson and Kate Nightingale might not have filled much of their notebooks at the obligatory but largely pointless police press conference but they had more than compensated in the background stories they had rapidly put together.

Double Dick was at his most eloquent and informed and he had painted a picture of Lynne Ireland with such deft strokes he could have known her all his life instead of them being complete strangers. Nightingale, hard-nosed but caring, was as elegant with her words as she was with some of her sexual practices. She had knocked out 750 words on the paradox of being able to live within the heart of a tight community yet still be a stranger in its midst. It was an impressive performance by both reporters.

McBride reread the articles for the second time then folded the paper and put it in his jacket pocket. He knew he would refer to it if the London news desk he was dealing with wanted a significant follow-up piece, which was probable if the story kept its legs. He did not doubt that it would.

Broughty Ferry still swarmed with police, uniformed and plain clothes, but the place was also starting to fill up with the rubbernecks who had made the short journey down from Dundee for no other reason than to gaze at the otherwise anonymous house where a young woman had died.

The
Big Issue
sellers, sensing a booming trade, had followed them out of the city centre and into the douce suburb. One of them, a female with a pinched face that stared dully out at McBride from underneath a low baseball cap, had taken up a pitch outside Woolworth’s. She was probably about twenty but looked half as much again. She had been good-looking once but the decaying front teeth and acne spoiled any chance she had of making it on to the front cover of
Hello!
magazine. McBride looked at her with sadness as he passed by. Females like her stood on corners all over the country. Most of them were doing it to feed a habit. At least they were selling magazines and not their bodies. He fished into his back pocket and pressed a five-pound note into her hand, waving away the copy of her wares she offered him.

‘Thank you, sir,’ she said. The voice was unexpectedly cultured, like the well-cared-for hands. The politeness genuine. McBride had forgotten that addictions didn’t only afflict those unlucky enough to be born into deprivation.

Luck
, he thought.
Most folk would have said Lynne Ireland was lucky – until yesterday
.

He resisted the temptation to engage the magazine seller in conversation, to tell her life could be even worse if she fell in with the wrong people. She already had and they were waiting to take his fiver off her in exchange for some chemicals.

He walked on, feeling foolish. Not just because he had helped put money in some dealer’s pocket but because he was killing time while he waited for the person who caused the temporary increase in Broughty Ferry’s population to make his next move. He was convinced that would happen sooner rather than later. He sensed an acceleration in the events that were unfolding around him and cursed his impotence to do anything about it.

His thoughts could not extend beyond two subjects – both named Gilzean. The young man held in a prison twenty-two miles away whose hairs had been found on a tie used to strangle Alison Brown and again on the inside of the police hat which had been used so violently to propel a broken nose bone into the brain of Lynne Ireland. And his father, Adam Gilzean, who had seemed to set a whole chain of events in motion from the moment he had approached McBride in the High Street bookstore.

It was Adam Gilzean’s most recent visit to him which troubled him most.
Christ sake
, McBride muttered silently.
He was practically forecasting another murder. Then it happens the same night. And a few hundred yards from where they’d spoken. It made no sense. But it made all the sense in the world if you were trying to make a point – and were prepared to kill to prove it
.

He needed to speak to Petra. Needed her input. Wanted to know where the police investigation had reached. He called her but was diverted to her voicemail. He left a message but did not say what was in his mind – just left an invitation to stop off at his apartment on her way home.

She did not arrive until 10 p.m. – fourteen hours after her day had begun. McBride did not need to ask if it had been a good day at the office – her face gave him the answer. The small amount of make-up she ever wore had disappeared, her mouth was taut and her hair was as untidy as his own. Even her fitted black jacket was creased. Only two things were familiar – the newly applied perfume and the fact that she still looked stunning.

She did not speak but took off her jacket, stepped out of her shoes, walked to the window overlooking the river and sat in the seat he had occupied for the last hour. She put her feet up on the window-ledge and uttered only two words, ‘Wine, red.’

They were three-quarters of the way through the bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape before she started to give him a rundown on the day’s events. Once she began, Detective Inspector Petra Novak paused only to have her glass topped up.

Much had happened, she told McBride. Operation Tribune was no longer a tolerated but ignored concept – it was in full throttle and a briefing room at headquarters had been cleared to accommodate the joint team of officers drafted in from Fife and Grampian to support the Dundee murder squad. No one was in any doubt now that a multiple killer was being sought – or that there was a high probability he would strike again.

‘The brass admit to “probability”,’ she said wearily. ‘I make it certainty.’

McBride nodded firmly. ‘You can put money on it – as much as you’ve got. This is a game that isn’t over.’

She looked at him earnestly. ‘I’ve been asked to make a special plea to you,’ Petra said. ‘They’re desperate that none of the joint operation details get out. If the public get the idea that a triple or quadruple killer is on the loose, it will create nightmares for us. They’re also well aware that you hold some kind of fascination for the person responsible. They need your co-operation both ways – to keep them informed of any developments at your end and not to let the public in on any of it. Deal?’

McBride burst out laughing. ‘Here we go again!’ he exclaimed. ‘Cheeky bastards. You use the rhubarb principle on the press – keep us in the dark and throw the occasional bucket of shit over us – then, when you’re stuck, it’s grovel, grovel.’ He laughed louder. ‘I suppose the request came from your superintendent, the “helpful” Mr Hackett? And I bet DCI Brewster from Aberdeen was backing him to the hilt? Two wankers.’

Petra nodded twice, looking apologetic. ‘You can understand …’ She didn’t finish the sentence.

‘Aye, I can understand. It’s a one-way street until the police find themselves in another cul-de-sac.’ McBride was enjoying himself but decided to put her out of her misery. ‘OK,’ he said eventually, ‘tell them they have a deal. But the bargain is that, if this thing ever gets wrapped up, I get a day’s start on the rest of the hack-pack with all the stuff you know but I don’t. Deal?’

‘No problem – I can guarantee it,’ Petra said, her face brightening for the first time.

McBride had waited all night to discuss the subject that was starting to obsess him. He introduced it cautiously, anxious not to look foolish. ‘Adam Gilzean …’ he said slowly, ‘any thoughts?’ He was not sure what reaction he expected – curiosity, probably. It was not what he received.

‘A few,’ she said at once. ‘As a matter of fact, I spent two hours with him this afternoon.’

McBride could not conceal his surprise. He raised his eyebrows but said nothing, mainly because he couldn’t think of an appropriate response.

‘We had him in,’ Petra said simply. ‘We needed to speak to him about the hair from the hat – his son’s.’

‘And?’ McBride asked.

‘And he didn’t have a clue – not the faintest. He was staggered, to put it mildly.’

‘You believed him?’

‘Yes,’ Petra said, nodding her head slowly. ‘If he was putting it on, he should be nominated for an Oscar. It would be the performance of a lifetime.’

She looked at McBride, noting his disbelief. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she said. ‘I did too – for a spell. You know – that he might have killed Lynne Ireland and planted the hair so his son would look innocent.’

McBride recounted the visit Adam Gilzean had made to him in The Fort and the direction their conversation had taken. ‘Lynne Ireland lived – and died – a few hundred yards from The Fort,’ he told Petra. ‘Adam Gilzean was in the area at the time, he had a warped motive and he was in the position to have had one of his son’s hairs to plant as some kind of evidence of his son’s innocence. What if Bryan Gilzean did murder Alison Brown and all this is some sort of elaborate killing spree to get him out of prison?’ McBride demanded.

‘Oh, sure! And what if the Pope’s really a Muslim? Even for the fertile mind of a journalist, that’s pretty far-fetched.’

McBride was about to protest when she raised a hand, turning the palm towards him as a silencer. ‘Besides,’ she said, a note of triumph rising in her throat, ‘he’s alibied, solidly. Lynne Ireland was seen alive and well by a neighbour at 9.20 p.m. Adam Gilzean reported for duty at 9 p.m.’

‘For duty?’ McBride asked, astonishment spreading over his face.

‘Yes – as a Samaritan. He was on a night shift that evening and his whereabouts can be vouched for – every minute from nine o’clock until the next morning – long after Lynne died.’

‘Samaritan?’ McBride was still incredulous.

‘Been one for a year or two. Giving something back, he said. He’s an alcoholic and hasn’t touched a drop for years. No chance of him sharing a glass of wine with Lynne Ireland – or anyone else. Not unless he wanted to topple head first off the wagon. And there’s been no hint of that.’

McBride fell silent, absorbing what he’d heard. Petra drained her glass but waved away his offer to open a fresh bottle. McBride remained thoughtful for several more moments. Finally he said, ‘So how come he seemed to think a policeman might be involved in an unsolved murder?’ He started to explain the thrust of the conversation Adam Gilzean had had with him in The Fort.

Petra lifted her hand once more. ‘He told us about that too,’ she said. ‘Your friend Richard Richardson had apparently been to see him and planted that seed in him. Don’t ask me how he knew but he’s obviously been ferreting around.’

It had not been a good night, so far, for McBride so, when Petra rose from her seat to reach for her shoes and jacket, he decided against pushing his luck.

She asked for the phone number of the nearest cab company and, after a little hesitation, he gave it to her.

McBride woke early – even before his normal seven o’clock. It was becoming a habit he did not like but could do nothing about. He ran for an hour and, by 8 a.m., he had showered, breakfasted and worked his way through most of the morning papers.