The Red Road (10 page)

She reminded herself of the questions: how could someone get prints into a scene or how could a database mismatch prints.

Morrow opened the door and walked into the lobby. The moment she saw McGregor she knew this would go very badly indeed.

Clare McGregor was furious. She leaned on the front bar, legs wound around each other, arms crossed, cheek-chewing. In her mid-twenties, she was slim, pretty and dressed in comfortable trousers, a grey silk shirt and high-heeled boots. McGregor had never been in uniform, she was a civilian and wasn’t dressed like someone who needed to stay dry while working for twenty hours, be able to run, and/or sit in a car for four hours.

‘I’m DI Alex Morrow.’ She held her hand out. ‘Are you all right?’

McGregor uncrossed her arms but refused to shake Morrow’s hand. She muttered a stark ‘yes’ as if they were in the middle of an argument.

‘Is there a problem here?’ asked Morrow.

‘No,’ said McGregor. ‘I’m the InfoTech. You
asked
me to come.’

Morrow held her hand out insistently and McGregor gave in, pinching Morrow’s fingertips in response.

It was clear to Morrow that Clare McGregor was having strong feelings about her and wanted them acknowledged. She was late, angry. She had probably rehearsed arguments, articulating her objections to Morrow all the way here. She wanted to be heard.

In compensation for missing the boys’ bath, Morrow allowed herself the luxury of not asking. ‘Please come through.’ She turned and led the way to her office.

Showing McGregor in, she pointed her to one of the two seats facing the computer screen. While Morrow had been waiting for her to arrive she had checked out her pay grade to see how susceptible someone in her position would be to bribery. She was making thirteen grand more than Morrow, and her qualifications were transferable.

‘OK.’ She took the neighbouring chair. ‘I’ve asked you here to talk me through something.’ Morrow flicked her mouse to waken the screen and the IDENT1 fingerprint database appeared suddenly.

‘We’ve got a problem with a case: we found fingerprints in a place they couldn’t possibly be. I need you tell me how the database could make a mistaken match—’

‘It can’t,’ said McGregor.

Morrow looked at her. McGregor stared at the screen, mouth pinched tight.

McGregor was wrong. They both knew she was wrong. They sat in silence for almost a minute. It was too early in the conversation for Morrow to stand up and chase her out.

Morrow took a deep breath. ‘There are some grey areas to explore: prints could be complex marks or wrongly identified as not complex, isn’t that right?’

‘Complex marks’ was a technical term for crap fingerprints. It carried with it a different set of obligations. Three examiners had to look at the prints independently. They had to submit reports with their conclusions to show their working. With non-complex marks a superficial match on the database could be followed up with just one examiner and a standard report.

McGregor stared sullenly at the screen as if she was watching a boring TV show.

‘Clare, couldn’t there be grey areas in identification? It’s not an absolute science, is it?’

McGregor was finding it hard to be wrong. Morrow thought that she must have been quite good at her job or they wouldn’t have sent her over. Either that or she was a nutcase and they wanted her out of the office. She gave a sharp little nod at the computer, as if she wanted to head-butt it. ‘Grey areas ... Yes.’

‘Could someone access the database and change an accused person’s ten-prints?’

‘Yes, if digits have been lost or scarred, you can change them. But you need a high level of clearance and it would be traceable. Every time a file is accessed it’s traceable. Here ...’ She flicked through a couple of screens and drew up the file history detailing who had been in there, what their ID number was and when they were there.

Morrow watched carefully. ‘What about scene of crime prints? Can you go into the database and change them?’

‘No.’

Morrow knew they could change them.

‘Are you sure?’

McGregor blinked. She was wrong and she knew it. ‘Not any more,’ she conceded.

‘
Any more?
’

‘Used to be able to if you were working on a partial and you got a better set, for example, but they changed that seven years ago. It’s all traceable now.’

Morrow sat back. ‘So, you
can
but it’s traceable?’

‘Yes.’ McGregor clicked through three screens. ‘See there?’

Up on the right-hand corner in vivid blinking red was a notification of the date of when an entry had been changed and the IT officer’s number.

‘OK.’

They could be changed. Michael Brown could have found a bent IT officer to change his prints and give a match.

‘Could you hack in and alter them remotely?’

‘No. You’d need access to the building, to the servers that are capable of accessing the database ...’

She didn’t believe McGregor now, because she’d bullshitted before. Morrow made a mental note to ask someone else and tuned out as McGregor talked her through access codes and passwords, who changed them and when.

As a final test Morrow asked an obvious yes prompt: ‘Could someone have put in the wrong prints in the first place?’

‘No,’ said McGregor.

Morrow sat still, letting the idiotic ‘no’ echo around the room. They sat there, together, until the untouched page on the screen dulled for a moment like a sleepy eye half shutting. Then it went off.

Morrow stood up. ‘That’s all I need from you.’

McGregor got to her feet, shoving the chair back noisily. ‘Cousin used to work in this division.’

This was the pre-rehearsed argument. Morrow asked, ‘Who’s that then?’

‘DC Harris. He used to work here.’

Harris was as close as Morrow had ever come to a friend on the force. He’d been done for taking bribes and was currently in prison. Morrow was so disappointed in him that she had punched him and broken his nose. She regretted it. She missed him.

McGregor was so angry she was losing her breath. ‘And
you
’ – she said, bubbling at the nose and mouth – ‘are just the sort of ...’

But again Morrow wasn’t listening. She was blinded by visions of Harris standing in a dark street taking a punch and letting her punch him again, because he knew what he had done was low and shameful.

‘Harris pleaded guilty.’

‘Your brother’s Danny McGrath.’

Morrow found herself shouting. ‘If you can’t function in the service because of your family history you should leave and get another job.’

She opened the door and held it as the other woman slunk through it. McGregor’s was a good job, an easy job, and they both knew it. She could see McGregor was worried Morrow would report her, make up an allegation and she’d lose her position.

McGregor looked back at her. She didn’t look anything like Harris but Glasgow was a small city and the service was even smaller.

‘Tell Harris I was asking after him.’

McGregor responded automatically, ‘Will do.’

Morrow slammed the door. Everyone knew about Danny now. It came up all the time and even when it didn’t she felt the shadow of that association hanging over her, tainting her moral authority.

McGregor would go home and sob. She’d worry about her job for the next few months, but eventually she’d forget that it ever happened. Morrow wouldn’t forget it. She missed Harris every day.

Thoughts of what she missed made her check her watch: she was too late for the bath but if she hurried she could still get them to bed.

She opened the door and called DS McCarthy over.

‘McCarthy, you trained to use a Mobile fingerprint ID?’

‘Yes.’

‘Get one and bring it to the high court at nine thirty tomorrow morning.’

McCarthy was surprised. ‘We’re taking his prints
again
?’

‘If he’ll let us.’ She turned away to get her coat and bag. ‘I suspect he’ll be very keen to.’

7

The moment Rose Wilson heard the buzzer she knew it was the police. It was typical of Margery to be so deep in denial that she’d call the cops in when Robert ran away. Francine wouldn’t do that. Still, Rose reminded herself that was normal, that’s what people did when someone went missing. The cops might even get a handle on where Robert was. She’d checked his credit card online. He hadn’t paid for anything in the past two days. She’d checked his ‘find my iPhone’. But he had turned it off. At least no one else would be able to track him that way.

She looked at the video phone screen. Two men in cheap suits at the gate, both of them slightly fat. One had thinning dark hair and spoke into the camera, telling her they were Strathclyde Police, could they come in for a moment? The other cop looked at the house, mild puzzlement on his face. She knew what he meant. The house didn’t work.

She pressed the button for the gate and opened the front door for the officers.

The security gate was low and leapable. The drive was shallow. Realistically, the householder could look out of the window and get better definition and a clearer idea of who was out there. But the gate and camera were cheap copies of actual security. The developers knew that anyone paying a million pounds for a house would look for certain features, like security gates, sauna, double garage, so they had crammed them in. Sometimes, if she got up in the night or approached the house from the wrong angle in the street, she saw it all afresh, a chaotic jumble of pointless totems.

The cops looked over the building, their eyes confused by the small, ill-matched windows on different levels, some cutting across the floors to create minstrels’ galleries. A grey, overhanging roof dominated the white façade, the entrance portico had too many columns.

The house looked outside how the family felt from the inside: disjointed, over-embellished, nervous and busy.

‘Hello,’ she said, as the two men approached the front step. The bald cop smiled at her.

‘Strathclyde Police,’ he said, smiling again, showing her his ID. ‘We’re here about Mr McMillan?’

‘Please come in.’ She opened the door.

They stepped into the hallway, looking around awkwardly, trying hard not to gawp.

It was a big hall, wide but low. A pine staircase lurched up the wall and veered away awkwardly. The ceiling was too low for the eighteen halogen downlighters punched into it. They hit the eye like consecutive searchlights. She offered to take their coats. They demurred politely but Rose’s attention was drawn by the whispers of children on the upper landing.

They weren’t supposed to be playing up there. Angus had a bad tumble down the stairs once and she’d told them not to play there.

She shut the front door and stood tall. ‘Hamish! Angus! Not there.’

Two small faces peeked around the head of the stairs, Angus smirking behind his brother who was too interested in the police to mind being in trouble.

‘I said not there, Hamish.’

Hamish raised a finger. ‘Who are they?’

‘Don’t point at people,’ she said.

The bald policeman smiled up at the children and said ‘hello’.

‘Who are they?’ smiled Angus, still shielding himself behind Hamish.

‘Hamish, what do you say?’

The boys paused for a moment and ran through all the things she nagged them to say. Hamish hit the jackpot with an obligation ‘hello’ but Angus said ‘thank you’.

‘These men are policemen.’

‘Are they here about Daddy?’ asked Angus.

She didn’t want to look at them. ‘Yes,’ she said, hearing the hiss in her voice reverberate around the cold hall. ‘You two go upstairs to the playroom. You can play on the Wii for twenty minutes.’

They bolted off upstairs as Rose held out a hand towards the kitchen door. ‘Would you like to come through?’

The cops walked through to the back of the house and she followed them.

The kitchen was narrow with tottery stools around a breakfast bar. The dining room had a big table and chairs but she didn’t want them to be comfortable, to linger. She offered the cops a seat, watching as they climbed up, gracelessly yanking their jackets out from under their bottoms. They settled and looked at her, as if expecting praise for getting up there.

‘Can I get you tea or coffee?’

‘No,’ said the bald one, ‘no thanks.’ He put a nasty plastic briefcase on the clean worktop. A greasy sheen on the handle caught the light. Rose thought she could see crumbs, possibly from biscuits, caught in the zip. It looked disgusting. She imagined licking it, felt sick at the thought of it and forced herself to look away.

‘I’ll get Mrs McMillan for you. She’s lying down.’

‘Hang on,’ the dark-haired one spoke for the first time, ‘you’re not Mrs McMillan?’

‘No, I’m the nanny. I’ll get her.’

She had already turned away when he said, ‘Sorry, what’s your name?’

Rose knew that tone. The tone denoted interest, suppositions about complications. He’d be wondering about Robert, about affairs and unreciprocated crushes, about fumblings in the middle of the night. She heard the tone from Robert’s friends, from Francine’s occasional forays into the world of other mothers, from workmen who came to the house. She wasn’t offended by it, not any more. Most people couldn’t even begin to understand the closeness between her and Robert. He was her brother. Her naïve older brother.

She turned back. ‘Rose Wilson.’

The cops exchanged glances. ‘Maybe we could interview you first, Rose?’

Rose didn’t want to but it would look strange. She turned back and sat down on a stool, hands clasped in front of her on the table, facing the cops.

‘Sorry. It’s been a heavy day. Family funeral.’

The dark-haired one unzipped his briefcase and pulled out a form. ‘Julius McMillan’s funeral? Was it this morning?’

‘Still going, I’m sure.’

‘I met McMillan once,’ said the baldy one. He waited then, open mouthed, for a prompt.

Exhausted, Rose gave it to him. ‘Did you?’

‘Yeah.’ He smiled at the table. ‘When I was a young cop I arrested some care-home kids and McMillan was their defence counsel. Even back then, and that was ten years ago, you could tell he’d been brilliant and here he was defending a wee—’ He looked up, remembered where he was. ‘You know. Well, you know how he did those defence cases.’