The Reborn (9 page)

A flash of fear crossed Lisa’s face. Bill cursed his son silently for his thoughtlessness.

‘Is David a friend of yours?’

‘He’s in my maths class.’ A fairly non-committal answer.

Margaret threw Bill a warning look.

‘I’m glad you’re going back, Dad.’ Lisa gave him a wan smile.

‘So am I,’ he said and meant it.

The rest of the meal passed off without incident.

Once the kids went back upstairs, Margaret asked him outright if he would be handling the investigation.

‘DI Slater was there to cover for me. If the court case had gone the other way . . .’

‘He might have been permanent?’

‘They would probably have brought in someone new, or promoted someone.’

‘DS McNab would have made a good DI.’

‘Yes.’ Better than Slater, he thought. The team would have worked for McNab, not the badge.

‘It says in the paper that the dead girl went to Morvern.’

They had contemplated sending Lisa to the all girls’ school at one time, because of its reputation for producing doctors. Bill was glad now they hadn’t.

‘She’s OK, you know,’ said Margaret.

‘I’m not so sure.’

She rose and started stacking the dishes. ‘We’ve got to put it behind us,’ she said sharply.

His mobile rang before he could respond. He checked the screen. ‘I’ll take it in the hall.’

When he left the kitchen, she replenished her glass. Margaret, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, wasn’t a drinker. Not normally.

Her hand shook a little as she raised it to her mouth. That had gone well, she congratulated herself silently. She had been surprised. He’d given every indication that he planned to resign, or ask for early retirement. Part of her wanted him to do that, but one thing she knew: Bill would not survive without the job. The kids would be gone soon, university, then a life of their own away from the family home. That was to have been their time together after thirty-odd years of marriage. Just the two of them.

Except there might only be one.

10

Petersson recognised Rhona immediately, although he’d only seen her once before. It had been at Bill Wilson’s fiftieth birthday party at the Ultimate Jazz Club. By the time he’d spotted her, she was already being chatted up by Sean Maguire, Irish saxophonist and part owner of the club. He’d asked Bill to introduce him anyway. He remembered the quizzical look she’d given him at the mention of his name.
I’ve heard of you
.

It had pleased him that she’d known who he was. Then she’d left with the Irishman, dashing his hopes and squashing his ego.

But here she was again. And this time, alone.

He lifted two glasses of red wine from a passing tray and joined her in front of a modern painting that consisted of stripes in black, grey and white that rolled like waves across the canvas. He offered her a glass.

‘Makes me sea-sick.’

‘The painting or the wine?’

He took a sip and grimaced. ‘Both, I fear.’

She smiled.

‘You may not remember me . . .’

‘I do. Einar Petersson, the journalist.’

‘We met at . . .’

‘Bill’s party.’

‘You have a good memory.’

‘Yes, I do.’

‘What brings you here?’ He gestured at the groups of Glasgow art lovers who were scrutinising the offerings on show.

‘I bought a painting from this gallery. “Sunlight over the Cuillins on Skye” by Sharon Mitchell. I love it. It hangs above my fireplace to remind me of home. How about you – are you an art collector?’

‘I fancied a free drink before dinner. Plus my flat’s nearby,’ he lied.

‘I thought you were London based?’

‘I am. Most of the time.’

‘Then what brings you north?’

‘A visit to Iceland to see my parents, then a bit of nosing around in Glasgow.’

‘Something important?’

‘Might be.’

He could tell by her expression that his vagueness wasn’t holding her interest.

‘I was sorry to hear about DS McNab.’

Her face drained of colour and she almost dropped her glass. He reached out to steady her arm.

‘Hey, are you OK?’

‘I didn’t know you knew him.’

‘I didn’t, but I heard he got on the wrong side of the Russian contingent.’

She looked more angry than shocked now.

‘Nikolai Kalinin.’

‘You think Kalinin killed him?’

‘Him or someone ordered by him.’

‘Kalinin’s a hard man to track down.’

She looked up swiftly. ‘You’ve tried?’

‘I’m thinking about it.’ That too was a lie, but a necessary one. He wanted to find out what she knew, without giving anything away himself.

He could tell she was tempted, but cautious. After all, he was a newspaper man. It all depended on how keen she was to catch McNab’s killer.

‘Fancy going somewhere else? Preferably a place that provides better wine?’ They both knew there was nothing really wrong with the wine.

She gave him an inscrutable look.

‘Where did you have in mind, exactly?’

He mentioned a members only club not far from where they were. ‘They serve good champagne. The food’s excellent too, if you haven’t eaten.’

She took a moment to reply. ‘OK.’

He was relieved she hadn’t turned him down and hoped it didn’t show. He knew a fair bit about Dr Rhona MacLeod, and a pushover she wasn’t.

11

Rhona stared into the early morning darkness. Properly awake now, she reached out and checked the place beside her in the bed. It was warm but empty. She thought Petersson might have already left, then she heard the shower and realised he was in the bathroom. It looked as though he was planning to leave without telling her, but felt the need to shower first. Was he going home to someone who would smell her on his skin? Or was he naturally fastidious?

She decided she didn’t care either way.

She rose and went to the bathroom, pausing for a moment to survey his tall, muscular body through the shower glass. She couldn’t make out the long purple scar on the left hand side of his torso, though she remembered tracing the line of it beneath her fingers.

An argument with a knife
, he’d said.

The tattoos on his upper arms and chest were dark smudges, their intricate pattern blurred by watery streams. Last night she had simply registered their presence. She hadn’t been interested in why he chose to decorate his body or what designs he had chosen.

She opened the cubicle door and stepped inside. He’d turned the shower to massage and the sudden drum of the needles on her head made her gasp. He circled her body with his.

‘I didn’t want to wake you. I have to be somewhere.’

She didn’t ask where.

‘Something to do with what we discussed last night. Before we moved on to other things.’

He made to kiss her but she avoided him by stepping out and grabbing a towel. She had to play this carefully.

As she dried herself, she went over last night’s conversation. He’d drunk most of the second bottle of champagne, while she’d had very little. She’d wanted to be in control of what she said and did.

She felt a small twinge of guilt at her behaviour, then reminded herself it was no big deal. They had met socially and she’d brought him home for sex; something that had happened before with other men, and would no doubt happen again. But Einar Petersson’s attraction wasn’t his body or what he could offer her sexually. His attraction came from who and what he was, an investigative journalist who had successfully exposed a number of nefarious activities in high places.

Slater wasn’t up to the challenge of finding Nikolai Kalinin, let alone building a case against him. Bill, she suspected, was out of the picture. On her part, she was willing to do whatever was necessary to progress the case. In her own time and at her own expense. Professionally there was an element of risk involved in such a decision, but she was willing to take that chance.

Petersson was beside her, rubbing himself dry.

‘Perhaps we could meet up later?’ he suggested.

‘Why?’

He met her gaze. ‘Because we both want the same thing.’

When he left, she dressed, made herself coffee and settled at the kitchen table. At five a.m. the city still slept. The only sound in the room was the intermittent soft snore of the cat, who refused to be awake at such an hour. Rhona switched on her laptop. She had three hours before she left for the lab and planned to use the time to study more of Petersson’s investigative career.

Her thoughts had been focused on revenge ever since McNab’s death. Her dreams had taken on the same hue, one dream in particular returning time and time again. In it, she relived her meeting with Kalinin, sharing the meal with him as before, drinking his wine. This time when he made his move she went along with it, because that way she could get him in the bedroom alone, away from Solenik’s watchful eye. In there she had the chance to pay Kalinin back for what he had done to McNab.

For a while, reliving the dream had helped her focus her anger but her vengeful dreams were now no longer enough.

McNab’s murder was her ‘soul crime’. Unresolved, it would continue to haunt her, perhaps forever. It was a common enough occurrence among policemen. Some went to their graves still trying to get to the truth of such cases. Soul crimes hung about their owners like a bad smell. They forgot all the murders they’d solved, focusing only on those they hadn’t.

After the killing, feeling among McNab’s colleagues had run high. No one cared that the investigation into the Russian mafia that Slater had pursued so relentlessly had gone belly up. What they cared about was that it had taken McNab with it. Some even blamed DI Slater for his demise, which was unfair but understandable.

Her response had been to blame herself. She should have gone with McNab and Chrissy that night when he’d asked her to. If she had been there, she would have held him back in some way, just as she had done on numerous other occasions. She would have prevented his death. She’d replayed her alternative scenario a million times, often so vividly that for a few seconds it felt like the truth.

She and Chrissy had been the ones to process the crime scene. She’d had to fight for the privilege. Slater argued that she was in shock; she couldn’t be dispassionate; she might miss something. She’d listened in silence, then gone ahead anyway, knowing he wanted her out of there because her raw anger embarrassed him.

When the SOCO van had appeared that night, she’d donned a suit over her blood-splattered clothes and set to work. Chrissy had joined her. Wordlessly they’d searched, eventually finding what they were looking for. Ejected from the car window, the bullet casing had rolled down a nearby gutter. They’d sucked that gutter clean, bringing its contents to the lab, where they’d spent hours sifting through the mass of putrid gunge. Eventually they’d found it.

Retrieving a print from a casing had been well-nigh impossible until recently, when Dr John Bond, a scientific officer with Northampton Police, had developed a new forensic technique which relied on the subtle corrosion of metal surfaces by the chloride ions in human sweat. You could clean the metal surface, heat it to 600 degrees or paint over it. It made no difference. The corrosion remained. Dust the casing with fine conducting powder, pass 2500 volts through it and the pattern was visible. Not the print residue of the person who loaded the gun, but evidence of the physical changes their sweat had made to the metal itself.

Rhona had sent the casing south. It had taken time, but they’d eventually come back to her with a partial print, which found no match on any police database. That told her one thing. Since Kalinin had been lifted and printed, he hadn’t been the one to load the gun. But she was in no doubt he was the one to order the shooting.

Chrissy, the only eye witness, had seen the gun emerge from the window but had not had a clear view of the man who fired it. She was also sketchy on details of the car, a black limo with smoked windows. They’d caught it briefly on camera later in the city, then lost it completely. Since they hadn’t recorded it heading south, it might still be in Glasgow, hidden in a lock-up or garage. Every possible sighting had been followed up, but the probability was it had already been stripped down and given a revamp, plates and all.

Paddy Brogan, McNab’s contact and manager of the gambling club, had seemed genuinely shocked by his murder. After all, he’d invited McNab to play that night, to thank him for getting Kalinin off his back. According to his staff, Brogan had never left the building, so he was off the hook, for now.

All in all, the perfect crime.

Rhona hadn’t attended the post-mortem. No one close to McNab had; Superintendent Sutherland had made certain of that. Slater had been the only one to see McNab’s body on the slab, to see the effects of the bullet on his internal organs. Even that hadn’t spurred him on to find McNab’s killer. With Bill suspended, they had no one, it seemed, willing or able to progress the case.

Until Einar Petersson had appeared on the scene. Outside the law, with an axe of his own to grind where Kalinin was concerned, he could turn out to be exactly what she needed.

12

On arrival, Bill had been summoned into Sutherland’s office, where Slater was already waiting. They’d briefly acknowledged each other’s existence, then Sutherland had asked DI Slater to fill them in on what had happened so far. Slater had done so with an ill grace, but beneath it Bill suspected he wasn’t unhappy about his return. Working here after McNab’s murder couldn’t have been easy, especially since he’d brought the Kalinin case with him.

The official handover took half the morning. Afterwards Bill reclaimed his office and sat down in his favourite chair. If he was honest, he’d been afraid that Slater would have thrown the chair out. Now
that
would have upset him.