Skinner's Rules (31 page)

‘Let’s get the fuck out of here, now,’ he said. They stepped out into the driveway and looked about. There was no one in sight.

In the lane, McGuire made towards the street, but Maggie held him back. ‘No, we’ve got to get that rug.’

They went back to their sand dune and picked it up. Then they walked away from the house towards the end of the beach, from which rose a grassy outcrop, with an ancient ruin as its main landmark. They left the sand behind and circled back towards the Metro: just another couple out for an early morning stroll.

They had not spoken since they left the driveway. In the car, Maggie turned to McGuire. He was shaking. ‘Mario, are you all right? Tell me what was in there.’

‘The Harveys. Shot to fucking bits. Let’s get out of here now, and call Andy Martin on the move.’

‘But shouldn’t we tell the Fife police?’

‘Yes, Sergeant, we should. But we’re not going to. Think about it. If we call the local bobbies, we’re blown, in a big way. We do what Andy Martin tells us, nothing else.’

She thought about it for a moment. ‘There’s no chance they’re still alive?’

‘Maggie, their brains are all over the floor.’

She looked for a moment as if she might be sick. ‘All right, let’s go.’

As Maggie drove away from Elie, heading further east towards St Monans and Anstruther, anywhere, just to put distance between them and the cottage of death, McGuire called Martin. He described the scene in detail.

‘The guy must have been in the house all the time we were watching it. He could have been there for a while. Judging by those groceries, he could have been planning to stay a while longer.

‘Something must have happened for him to panic badly enough to kill them and run for it.’

‘If it’s who I think it is,’ said Martin, ‘he’s twigged us. He’s spotted you on the beach, or they’ve told him about my visit. If it makes you feel better, I think that’s more likely.

‘Look, I want you to stop at the first phone-box you see on the way back to Edinburgh and call in a 999. Anonymously. Then get back to Fettes Avenue. I’ll tell the boss, and we’ll meet you there.’

Skinner was at home catching up on paperwork when Martin called. ‘Boss, something’s happened in Fife. We need to see you in the office. Can you come in, now?’

‘Give me forty-five minutes, Andy, and I’ll be with you.’ He and Sarah left Alex to lock up the cottage when she returned to Glasgow that evening for the start of term.

‘Bye, Pops. Bye, Sarah.’ Alex saw them off from the front door. ‘Oh, Dad, I nearly forgot. There’s something I was going to ask you. Call me when you get a chance.’

‘Okay, Baby.’ He kissed her quickly on the cheek and climbed into his car. Just over half an hour later, he strode into Martin’s office. ‘What’s the panic, Andy? Have our people been spotted?’

‘If they have, it’s by the wrong man. The Harveys are dead in their holiday place in Elie. It seems they had a house guest. Maggie and McGuire saw their car go flying out of the drive and off like a bat out of hell. They called in, and I told them to take a look. The Harveys were in the kitchen, dead. Finished off with close-range head shots, Mario said.’

‘They didn’t hear gunfire?’

‘No, and it was quiet there. He must have used a silencer. Maggie and McGuire are on their way back, and the other two are waiting for them downstairs.’

‘Did anyone else see them?’

‘No. Not as far as they know. All the houses seem to be owned by weekenders, and they all looked empty. Apart from the Harveys’.’

‘Did they call the locals?’

‘Yes. An anonymous shout once they got clear. If they’d called in on the record, we’d have blown the enquiry and had some awkward questions from the Fife Chief Constable. I did what I thought was best.’

There was a knock on the door. ‘Come in,’ Martin shouted, and Maggie and McGuire entered, followed by Mackie and McIlhenney, looking tired and dishevelled.

‘Hello, you lot,’ said Skinner. ‘An eventful weekend, I hear. Sit down and tell me about it.’ He noticed that Maggie and McGuire were still pale-faced, and he took in the dark stain on the knee of the detective constable’s slacks.

McGuire caught the glance. ‘The kitchen was like a knacker’s yard, sir. There was blood and stuff all over the place.’

Skinner looked at Maggie Rose. ‘Did you get any sort of a sight of the guy when he got away?’

‘None at all, sir. It all happened very fast, and that car has tinted-glass windows. We watched the place in daylight and darkness; occasionally the Harveys would appear at the window, but no one else. We saw them, or at least Mario did, in the hotel bar last night. There was no one with them.’

Skinner sat silent for several seconds. Eventually he swung round in his chair. ‘So where does that leave us? Without a warm lead, for a start, and with our killer on the run and probably safe again by now.

‘So who was it in the house? It could have been Fazal Mahmoud. He’s missing from the Lebanese Embassy. He’s either running scared because someone zapped his two advocates, or he did it himself, and now he’s tying up loose ends. On the other hand, he could be Ali Tarfaz, alias Rashoun Hadid, another old university type. He’s dropped out of sight too.

‘On balance, based on Andy’s interview with the Harveys, I think it’s Mahmoud. But I’m sure of one thing. Our man did the Harveys because he thought they’d been rumbled. If he was lying there waiting to get them, he’d have done them as soon as they arrived yesterday.’

He picked up a pencil from the desk and spun it between his fingers.

‘Alongside all this activity, we’ve got this Syrian visit on our hands, next Friday, Mahmoud’s boss, for Christ’s sake. We have to consider the chance of a connection between that visit, these murders, and our two wandering Arabs, and whether there could, in it all, be a threat to the President.’ He looked around the room. ‘Any thoughts on that?’

McGuire spoke up. ‘Only this, sir. If our guy is after the Syrian, then he isn’t going to run far.

‘He’s lost his safe house, so he’ll need to find somewhere to lay his head for the next five nights. He’s not going to hang on to that Toyota for long either. Where he dumps it could give us a clue to where he’s heading.’

Skinner nodded. ‘Let’s just assume that he’ll head for Edinburgh, if he isn’t here already. We check now, and again and again if we have to, every hotel and guest house in the city. Start with the wee ones first. Andy, you allocate lists.

‘Mario, get on to communications and pick up a couple of radios. Fife will figure out that the Harveys’ car is missing. They’ll put out a description. Monitor radio traffic till you hear they’ve found it. We could keep track of him by following a trail of car thefts.’

He turned to Mackie and McIlhenney. ‘Brian, Neil, on you go home and catch up on your sleep. We can start the guest-house check in the morning. That’s all, folks. Be back in this office at 9.00 a.m. tomorrow.’

As the four left, Skinner said to Martin, ‘Andy, has McGuire passed his Sergeant’s exams?’

‘Yes, boss. He’s in the queue for a job.’

‘I think I’ll put him into Gayfield when this is over. They could use another good DS there.

‘Oh yes, and split Maggie and Mario up in future.’

He walked over to the window, where a radio sat on a small cabinet and tuned in to Radio Scotland. The news jingle came up after a few minutes.

The first report concerned the deaths of three children in a house fire in Glasgow. The second described the aftermath of violence following the defeat of Celtic by St Johnstone in a Premier League match. The third followed up on a Sunday newspaper story on the latest argument over the Scottish Parliament. Finally, the announcer paused, and his voice took on a graver tone. ‘We are just getting reports that detectives in Fife have gone to a house in Earlsferry following an anonymous telephone call. Earlsferry is a popular holiday resort, and the house is believed to be one of many owned by families from the West of Scotland.’

The bulletin had barely finished when the telephone rang. Martin picked it up, listened, grunted, nodded, said ‘Quick work,’ and replaced the receiver.

‘That was Mario. They’ve found the Toyota abandoned in Cupar, near the bus station. And there have been no other thefts reported anywhere in Fife since Friday night.’

Skinner picked up the telephone. ‘Where was he calling from?’

‘CID room, I think.’

Skinner dialled an extension number.

‘McGuire, is Sergeant Rose with you. Good. Put her on. Maggie, I want you two to go down to the bus station and watch all buses arriving from Fife. If you see anyone of Arab origins, carrying luggage, tail him to his final destination, but do not arrest him. You’d better be armed, just in case. Come up here and we’ll give you SB firearms.’

Maggie and McGuire spent three hours in the Metro watching buses pour in from all over the UK. Three of them were from Fife, but none of the passengers looked even remotely Arab. Eventually, they were ordered to stand down.

When they returned their pistols, Martin told them that they would be in different locations for the Syrian visit. Maggie would be at the hotel with Neil McIlhenney, McGuire with Skinner, Martin and Mackie at the MacEwan Graduating Hall.

Maggie made a show of indignation. ‘Why is that, sir? Mario and I work well together.’

‘The boss says so. End of story.’

McGuire smiled. ‘Have to make the best of it, then. Come on, Sergeant, and I’ll treat you to the best spaghetti in town.’

As they left the headquarters building, Maggie was still frowning. ‘Where is the best spaghetti in town anyway?’ she asked grumpily.

The Italian in McGuire smiled again. ‘My place. Where else?’

Skinner was about to leave the office, when he remembered that Alex had asked him to call. He dialled the Gullane number. The sound of his daughter’s voice always gave him a lift.

‘Hi, Babe. What was it that you forgot to ask me this morning?’

‘It’s probably nothing, but remember you said this morning at breakfast that, on some case or other, your guys had to check an Amstrad like mine. You said that all the disks looked more or less empty.’

‘Yes, so what?’

‘Well, did whoever did the checking know about the limbo files?’

‘What the hell are limbo files?’

‘I thought not! It’s a software oddity. When you erase a document, you don’t can it completely, at least not at first. All you do is take it off the menu. As it fills up with live files, the disk makes room by jettisoning the dead ones. But until that happens, they can still be recovered.’

‘So you’re saying that if someone had tried to wipe a disk, he might still have left something on it?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Clever girl. How do you check them?’

‘As I remember, you press the option key. Then you press another, F5 I think, and it lets you bring the limbo files back, ready for reading, printing, editing, anything you like.’

‘Alex, that’s great. I’ll have them re-checked. If we find anything I’ll put you up for an OBE or something.’

‘A law degree will be just fine. I must go now. Love you, Pops. Take care.’

Martin rang Kenny Duff at 8.45 next morning to arrange for another look at Mortimer’s word processor. ‘You’re just in time,’ he said. ‘The family asked me to give some things to the Social Work Department, or to charities, and that will be one of them.’

The team all arrived promptly. Mackie and McIlhenney looked refreshed; Maggie and McGuire looked even more tired than they had the day before.

Martin told Mackie to begin with Yellow Pages, and to split the hotel and guest-house entries into groups. ‘Then pick up a copy of the B-and-B list from the local tourist office and allocate that too. Do everything by telephone at first. We’ll never get through them all otherwise. Let’s keep the story simple. We can only check one name, and that’ll be Fazal Mahmoud, Lebanese. We say that he is a freelance journalist, touring in Scotland. We need to speak to him because there’s been bad news at home. We tell people to call us at once if the man checks in, but not to mention our call. This is because we don’t want him to panic before we have a chance to break the news. Happy with that?’

Mackie nodded in agreement.

‘Well, go to it, and good luck.’

The weather had broken when Skinner and Martin arrived at Mortimer’s flat. It was cold and depressing, dead like its owner. Skinner switched on the computer, and loaded the software. Eventually, the menu appeared on the green screen.

He loaded the first data disk, and followed the procedure which Alex had explained to him. He pressed F5. The screen changed, and additional files appeared, each with the word ‘limbo’ after its title. He performed the recovery drill, then chose a document and pressed E for Edit followed by Enter. The file related to a holiday booking.

‘This could take a long time,’ he said to Martin. He had no great expectations. But it was part of the search, and it had to be done, even if it meant a long, boring day staring at a computer screen.

As superstition would have it, his third choice was the lucky one. He slid the thin plastic wafer into the drive slot and pressed the disk change button. The menu appeared on the screen. ‘Not much on this one,’ he muttered to himself. There were only three small files on the menu, each titled by a surname, month and year. He guessed that they probably related to criminal trials.

He pressed F5. The choice of options was displayed. He told the machine to ‘show limbo files’ and pressed the Enter key.

Seven new files flashed up before him, each one styled ‘Limbo’. Each was named ‘Israel’, and was followed in sequence by a number from one to seven.

Skinner sensed Martin tense, then stand bolt upright beside him. Carefully, making certain not to press the wrong button and erase them forever, he recovered the documents.