Private Investigations (16 page)

‘Won’t that rub Andy’s nose in it?’

‘Not completely. The investigation was closed on Andy’s watch, but like I said, it began on mine. Both our noses will be up for rubbing.’

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Let’s say you do investigate actively. What powers will you have?’

‘Those of a private investigator, no more . . . and in effect they’re zero. I’ll have no powers of arrest beyond those of any citizen, and no powers to access documents, bank accounts, or anything like that.’

‘Won’t that constrain you?’

‘Of course it will,’ I agreed. ‘But I’ll have a very large organisation behind me; if I do need to go somewhere that’s closed to me, I’ll go to Mario McGuire. This whole thing is very flexible, love; there are all sorts of questions that I won’t be able to answer until I’ve read this file.’

She pointed at the folder. ‘So what are you waiting for? Go to it.’

‘I can’t be arsed,’ I admitted. ‘I’ve had enough for today.’

‘Of course you have,’ she sighed. ‘Your day had the worst possible start, didn’t it. Have you heard anything from Sammy Pye, or Sauce?’

‘They’re pretty sure they know who was driving the car,’ I replied. ‘They sent me a mugshot of the suspect, a lad from North Berwick, name of Francey. I couldn’t be a hundred per cent sure he’s the guy, but they seem to be. I’ve heard nothing more than that, but I don’t think he’ll be at liberty for too long.’

‘Good,’ she said, her tone harsh. ‘I saw Joe when he got back from the autopsy. He told me as much as he knew. The poor child died of an asthma attack. I just . . .’ Her face twisted, eyes screwed up in a mix of frustration and anger. ‘Here I stop being a pathologist and start being a parent; words fail me, Bob. What sort of an animal would do that to a child? To let her die, alone and terrified in the dark. It’s horrible. And she must have seen what happened to her mother.’

‘What did happen to her mother?’ I asked. ‘I know nothing of this.’

‘They’ve identified the child. She’s from Garvald. She was snatched on the way to school this morning. According to Joe, her mother was in surgery with severe head injuries.’

‘Eh?’ I gasped. ‘That’s weird. He attacks mum, kidnaps the child . . . What was her name? Do you know?’

‘Olivia Gates, known to her family as Zena. That delayed the identification by a couple of hours.’

‘Why the nickname?’

‘From what Sammy told Joe, Mum’s a fan of
The Urban Dictionary
.’

‘What about dad, Mr Gates?’

‘Naval officer is all I know.’

I winced. ‘Poor bastard to have to deal with this.’ I held up my beer. ‘You sure you wouldn’t like a drink, to help lighten the mood?’

She smiled and squeezed my hand. ‘On call, I told you. And then there’s the other thing,’ she added. She dug an elbow into my side, gently. ‘How has today made you feel?’ she asked.

It was a good question, one I had asked myself. ‘Alienated,’ I replied. ‘It’s the first time I’ve felt the faintest flash of regret over leaving the service. I wanted to take command this morning and to stay hands-on until the guy was caught. When Eden told me about his problem, I wanted to pick up the phone and yell at someone. But I couldn’t do either of those things, so yes, I felt excluded . . . maybe even a wee bit emasculated.’

‘In that case your balls were too big for the job,’ she countered. ‘Too much testosterone isn’t a good quality in any commander.’

That could have been the beginning of a long and interesting debate, if Sarah’s mobile hadn’t rung before I could respond to the challenge. She snatched it from the breast pocket of the casual shirt she’d put on while she was upstairs and took the call.

Her face darkened as I watched. ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, I know the location. It’s not far off the bypass so I’ll be there inside half an hour.’

She put the phone away, and pushed herself up from the couch. ‘That was Mary Chambers,’ she said. ‘It’s a double fatality; two people found in a burned-out car just off the Biggar Road.’

‘That must have been the major incident that Craig was talking about,’ I guessed, aloud. ‘Will you be okay? I’d come with you, if Trish was here.’

‘And I wouldn’t let you, suppose she was,’ Sarah retorted. ‘It isn’t your job any more, lover, and I don’t need a chauffeur. You stay here with our kids and your file.’

Twenty-Five

I did as I’d been told, not only because there wasn’t an option, but also because Sarah was right: it wasn’t my job any more. Instead I read Seonaid one last A. A. Milne poem before switching out her light (sleeping without a nightlight is a matter of honour with her) then checked that the boys were obeying standard bedtime operating procedures.

As I did so, all the time I found myself thinking about Sarah’s potential bombshell, and considering its practical consequences. Our family home had been built with five bedrooms and a self-contained flat for Trish above the garages. We had one spare en-suite room that Alex used whenever she decided to stay. Ignacio had taken no decision about where he would live when he was released, but I was determined that it would not be with his mother, who was, is and always will be bad news in my book. I’d made it clear that I hoped he’d move in with us and get to know the family he’d been denied for twenty years, and he hadn’t rejected the idea. With him and a new baby, space would be tight, even in our big villa.

In my younger days, in the job, when we were in the mire and things looked black, I was fond of telling my people, ‘There are no problems, only challenges and opportunities.’ My tongue was in my cheek then, but as I wished Mark goodnight and closed his bedroom door, I knew that my rapidly expanding family was giving me an accommodation challenge, big time.

In an attempt to drive it from my mind, I collected the
Princess Alison
file and took it into what I call my office these days, although Sarah still calls it ‘the panic room’, a sanctuary in those times when either of us really needs privacy.

Leaving the door ajar just in case of sounds from upstairs, I cued up some quiet music on the streaming system and settled down to read. The simple act of opening the file put me back mentally in my old office in Pitt Street, in Glasgow, a room that I’d never grown to love in the way that I’d cherished my accommodation in the command suite in the Edinburgh police HQ. I shoved that image to one side and concentrated on what was before me.

The first pages were a detailed description of the property that had been stolen and, in police-speak, of the way the crime had been committed. It was followed by a series of photographs; the first six were of the empty boathouse, with its massive door raised, then lowered.

A group of four followed; three showed the exterior and the channel of buoys that led into the Gareloch, while the fourth was a satellite image showing the location of Eden’s place, two-thirds along the road from Helensburgh and its suburb, Rhu, to the Faslane naval base.

Third and last was a series of images of the
Princess Alison
herself, external and internal. Eden had promised to email some to me, but I hadn’t opened my mailbox since then, and so the file gave me my first sight of the lost cruiser. She was a serious piece of kit; a billionaire’s toy and no mistake. I looked for anything in her lines that might remind me of the woman after whom she’d been named, but saw nothing. Alison Higgins was a robust, earthy, lusty woman; her image might have belonged on the bowsprit of a pirate ship, but never on a luxury cruiser.

One of the photographs showed a party in progress: men and women in light-coloured clothes, most of them brandishing champagne flutes. I extracted that from the file and studied it closely. As far as I was concerned at that stage, every person who had set foot on the missing
Princess
was a suspect, until they weren’t.

‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is a very fine principle, and it’s the foundation of our justice system, but any investigator worth his corn has to begin with the opposite viewpoint.

The rest of the folder was crap.

As I read on, I saw that the first thing DI McGarry had done was to report the theft to the Marine and Coastguard Agency, which doesn’t actually have a criminal investigation division. The second was to circulate a description of the missing vessel to all police forces with a coastline south of the Firth of Clyde, including the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and the Garda Siochana, the Irish force. The third was to secure the posting of a description and photograph on a website called stolenboats.org that appeared to be fed with information by the marine insurance industry and the police but to be independent of either.

There were a few notes in response, but all of them were negative, saying that there had been no reports of a boat matching the description of the
Princess Alison
. The conclusion of McGarry’s trawl was that she had simply vanished.

The man had done the basics at the site of the theft, but no more: a crime scene team had gone over all the accessible points in the boathouse, and had found nothing out of place, no unidentified fingerprints. The padlock on the sliding double doors through which the thieves had entered had been cut through its arch, then put back in place, helping to delay the discovery of the raid.

Their report solved one riddle that had been niggling me since Eden and Rory had told me the story. If the phone line that serviced the alarm system had been cut, why hadn’t the gardeners noticed it? The answer was that the cable was underground, terminating in a box on the wall of the boathouse, beside the door. The cover had been removed and then replaced.

Nothing else that McGarry had done showed a scrap of real initiative. He had taken a statement from Eden, and had interviewed the part-time crew of the
Princess
, Hurrell and Hodgson. At least he’d shown the nous to ask those two for their whereabouts at the time of the theft, 3 a.m. on 4 October. Hurrell had been driving Eden and Rachel home to Edinburgh after a dinner at Gleneagles Hotel, and Hodgson had been visiting his niece, in Rochdale.

Beyond that the file was bare. There were notes of visits to marinas in the Firth of Clyde, and of telephone calls to those in its islands, and more remote mainland areas. There had been a discussion with Eden’s insurer, but that amounted to nothing more than a lack of progress report.

The investigation had been founded on a very basic assumption, that the vessel had been stolen by persons unknown with the motive being simple profit. My problem was that it had never occurred to McGarry to look anywhere else. I’d told Eden and Rory, without even having seen the boathouse, that there had to have been inside knowledge in the planning of the operation, and yet that hadn’t dawned on an officer who’d reached detective inspector rank.

Unless . . .

I picked up my phone and called Mario McGuire, mobile to mobile. He must have been home, for in the background I could hear wee Eamon yelling for sustenance.

‘Hi, Bob,’ he said. ‘Got the report?’

‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Have I ever.’

‘Is it okay?’

‘Hah,’ I chuckled. ‘Obviously you haven’t looked at it yourself.’

‘No, I wasn’t in Glasgow today. I had it sent straight to you once it had been pulled from the archive. Is it dodgy?’

I gave him a brief rundown of the contents. As I finished I could hear him gasp. ‘And that’s it?’

‘Yup. That’s as far as it goes. It says several things to me. But the most immediate concern is that McGarry is either stupid, bone idle, or corrupt. In your shoes, I’d be having him investigated, very quietly, to rule out the latter. More than that, I’d be doing what I’d have done in Strathclyde if I’d known about this. I’d be rooting out his entire reporting chain, and looking over every closed investigation that division ever undertook.’

‘Bloody right!’ he snorted. ‘First thing tomorrow, that gets done.’ He paused. ‘Listen, you know the people through in the west better than I do. Short of bringing somebody in from another area, which would be noticed, is there anyone you can suggest to do the job discreetly?’

‘What’s Sandra Bulloch doing now?’ I asked. ‘She was my exec, but I don’t suppose that Andy kept her on in that role.’

‘She’s been promoted DCI, on major crimes,’ he replied. ‘I interviewed her and I can see why you rated her. I’ll put her on it. Will you want to talk to McGarry yourself?’

‘That would be pointless,’ I told him. ‘All that would happen would be me losing my rag. There’s nothing he could tell me that isn’t in his file, unless Sandra comes up with a link between him and anyone connected to the
Princess
. If she does, it would be good to know, but that’s all.’

‘Will do,’ Mario said, ‘although my money’s very much on stupidity or laziness.’ Then he paused. ‘How are you feeling after what we both saw this morning?’ he murmured.

‘It won’t go away,’ I admitted, ‘and believe me, I’m trying to block it out.’

‘Have you heard from the Menu lately?’

‘Not since this afternoon,’ I replied, ‘when they asked me if I could ID their prime suspect as the driver of the BMW. I did the best I could. They seemed pretty certain, though; I had the feeling I was just being asked out of politeness.’

‘They know for sure now,’ he growled, grimly.

Something in his tone made a piece of the day’s jigsaw click into place.

‘Are you going to tell me,’ I ventured, ‘that the double fatality that Sarah’s just been called to attend is . . .’

‘That I am. I’ve just had Pye on the phone. They’ve been sure from early on that Francey didn’t plan this thing all on his own. It seems that they were right and that he’s picked up the tab for failure, and his girlfriend alongside him. They’ll need dental or DNA identification, though. They were both burned to cinders. Don’t expect Sarah home in a hurry. She’s going to do both autopsies tonight.’

‘Oh God,’ I sighed, then shuddered. ‘What a job she’s gone to. Now I’m wishing she hadn’t had that tuna steak.’

Twenty-Six

Sarah called me from the scene of the call-out, fifteen minutes after my conversation with Mario, to confirm what he had told me, that she was heading to the mortuary from the crime scene.

‘I’ve just called Roshan,’ she said, ‘and he’s on the way there too. I have no idea how long it’ll take us to do both examinations, but you can set the alarm before you go to bed, because I won’t be home. I’ll get some sleep at my place when I’m done and go in to work from there tomorrow.’

‘They’re sure it’s the lad Francey?’ I asked.

‘It’s subject to DNA confirmation, but they seem to be. The number plates on the car are still recognisable. It’s bizarre, Bob; the fire crew leader says it’s his wife’s, and that the dead man’s his brother-in-law. As for the girl, if Sammy and Sauce are right about her identity, they know where she lives, so proving it won’t be difficult.’

‘Doesn’t sound like it,’ I agreed. ‘Mario says that the lads are treating the deaths as linked to the attack and abduction, but I suppose that’s a no-brainer.’

‘Literally,’ she replied, grimly. ‘She was shot in the head. It’s not so easy to tell by looking at what’s left of him but my expectation is that he was too.’

I’ve seen pathologists at work, Sarah among them, more often than I care to remember. It’s horrible, bloody, smelly work, and I knew how she’d look once she was finished. I’ve seen, on occasion, how long she’d spend in the shower after a particularly nasty one, ridding herself of the last possibility of contamination by her subject. I knew that if she changed her mind and came back to Gullane after dealing with Dean Francey and his girlfriend, even in the middle of the night she’d be reeking of expensive shampoo and Chanel Number Five.

‘Go to it, baby,’ I told her. ‘They couldn’t be in better hands.’

I hung up, but some images that I really didn’t want in my head lodged themselves there. In a bid to drive them away I went back to the police report and to the gaps that could be filled.

Eden had given me his mobile number, saying I could call him any time. I took him at his word; when he answered I could hear festive sounds.

‘It’s Rachel’s birthday party,’ he explained, his voice raised. ‘Hold on, while I go somewhere private.’

I waited as the music and chatter faded, then disappeared entirely with the sound of a closing door. ‘What can I do for you, Bob?’ he asked.

‘I’ve got the police report,’ I replied. ‘It’s not the most thorough I’ve ever seen,’ I added, diplomatically. I should explain that for all his failings, DI Randolph McGarry was nonetheless a serving police officer, and I was not about to excoriate him to a civilian.

‘As Mary Chambers told you, the inquiry got nowhere, neither in what used to be the Strathclyde area, nor with any of the other forces who were asked for input.’

‘So it’s a goner?’

‘Probably,’ I conceded, ‘but there are things I can still look at. For starters I want those lists of guests at your floating reception, and also, details of anyone else who was there in another capacity: caterers and their staff, I’d imagine. I’d like them annotated, with an explanation of who each guest is and why he or she is there.’

‘Can do,’ he said, crisply. ‘I’ll put Luisa on it first thing in the morning and have the stuff emailed to you as soon as it’s done.’

‘Thanks.’

‘What are the prospects of success?’

‘I have no idea. To be frank, Eden,’ I admitted, ‘in all my career I’ve never encountered a theft like this. Sure, things have been stolen from boats, and maybe even the odd dinghy or inflatable’s been taken, but in my experience this one’s unique.’

‘Mmm,’ he murmured. ‘Are you telling me you haven’t a clue where to start, Bob?’

‘Hell no,’ I exclaimed. ‘I’m going to start with the “why”. If I can establish a motive, other than the sheer value of the vessel, then the rest might well fall into place.’

I let him go back to his party. Rachel and I crossed paths a few times when I was with Alison, but we’d never really got to know each other until that lunch in Eden’s office. From the early times, though, my impression had always been that what she wanted, she got.

My chat with Eden had focused my attention on my lack of expertise in the task I’d undertaken. I wasn’t kidding when I told him that I’d never encountered the theft of a boat.

As it happens, there’s a guy I know from my Spanish trips who was in marine insurance until he retired. He’s called Bob too. On impulse, I gave him a call.

He was surprised but when I explained what I was after, he got right down to business. From what he told me, it seemed that the insurer had followed standard practice by sending in its own assessor. But, significantly he added that in all his career, he had never come across the theft of such a high-value yacht.

We chatted for a little longer about this and that, and promised to meet up next time our paths crossed in our Spanish town. By the time we had finished, so had my quiet music playlist. I was about to cue up some more when the door opened a little wider. My daughter stood there, her hair ruffled and her eyes bleary from interrupted sleep.

‘What’s up, love?’ I asked.

‘I had a funny dream,’ she mumbled. ‘About King John. Where’s Mummy?’ she asked.

‘Mummy’s had to go to work, sweetheart,’ I told her. I picked her up and carried her upstairs, back to her room.

‘Can I have another story?’ she asked, drowsily, as she slid back into bed.

I reached for
Now We Are Six
. ‘Okay. Let’s find one we haven’t had before.’

We may have finished the collection, but I can’t be sure; when I woke still sprawled across her bed at two in the morning, from a dream about a burned-out car that wasn’t at all funny, the book was still open on Seonaid’s pink duvet. She was deep in the sleep of the innocent, but I knew that mine was done for the night.