‘You know smoking affects your insurance premiums?’ Alan Fleck said.
‘That’s why I always say I’ve never smoked. Sorry about tonight.’
‘It’s your job to rein in the numpties. That little pantomime in Newhaven was reckless.’
‘Nothing to do with me.’
‘Chris Agnew doesn’t have your brains. You need to control him.’
‘I do what I can, Sarge. You left a pair of pretty large shoes behind.’ Driscoll took another draw on his cigarette.
‘You need to dig deeper.’ Fleck prodded the younger man’s chest.
Driscoll nodded slowly. ‘You reckon our arses are covered, though?’
‘Like I said in there, you all need to clean up your phones and computers. It’s probably okay to send texts, but make sure and delete them after.’
‘Bit drastic.’
‘Malcolm Fox is a complete bastard, but he’s also forensic. If there’s something there to find, he’ll find it.’ Fleck watched as Driscoll studied the screen on his phone, as if evaluating its potential to become a grenade. ‘He’s not been in touch yet?’ he asked.
‘I was just about to check again.’
‘Don’t let me stop you.’
A moment later, a slow smile spread across Driscoll’s face. ‘We’re on,’ he said, turning the screen towards Fleck.
‘No where or when, though,’ Fleck commented, having read the curt message.
‘I reckon he won’t give much notice — less chance of me bringing a posse.’
‘Well done anyway. I’d buy you a drink if I hadn’t just had a skinful.’ A taxi with its orange light illuminated was approaching. Fleck lifted his hand towards it. ‘Treat you to a lift somewhere instead?’
‘My car’s around the corner.’
‘After the amount you’ve put away?’
‘I’m teetotal, though — says so on all those insurance forms.’
Fleck gestured towards Driscoll’s phone. ‘Sooner rather than later, eh, Rob? And if a carrot’s not going to tempt him...’
‘Don’t worry, I know how to wield a stick.’
Driscoll watched Alan Fleck climb into the back of the black cab, starting up some chat with the driver as the vehicle eased into the flow of traffic, just another businessman on his way home at shift’s end. He wondered if that might be his own future, too. Full pension, out of the job while still young enough, new vistas and experiences waiting. Fleck had even dropped a hint about a possible partnership. He hoisted his phone again, began composing a reply to his old comrade Francis Haggard. The smile was back on his face, though there was no trace of humour in his eyes.
Though he lived in Edinburgh, Malcolm Fox’s daily commute took him far to the west, to where the Scottish Crime Campus had been built on industrial land next to the village of Gartcosh. The place was a modern-day fortress styled as a college and housing everything from forensic labs to Inland Revenue fraud inspectors, Major Crimes to Anti-Terrorism. Fox’s remit was Specialist Crime, which gave him access to every database going, including Internal Affairs, known in his day as the Complaints.
The building around him emptied as Fox sat at the computer terminal in his glass box of an office. He had removed his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. A half-eaten cheese and ham baguette sat forgotten next to two emptied coffee beakers. He had already run checks on Francis Haggard and Alan Fleck, but had widened his search to include other officers currently serving at Tynecastle, as well as those who had retired in the past decade. Then there was John Rebus, though the paperwork on him was so voluminous that Fox almost lost heart at the prospect of wading into it.
Almost.
For now, though, as day turned to night, he was reading about Tony Barlow. Eight years back, Barlow had been the victim of a sustained and brutal beating on some parkland close to where he lived. He had been walking home from the pub when, as he had put it in his witness statement, ‘they came out of nowhere’. Four or five men, he believed, armed with pickaxe handles or metal bars.
‘Cops,’ he said. ‘I’d swear to it.’
Not that they’d been in uniform. Dark, unbranded hoodies, denims and trainers. But Tony Barlow had had enough dealings with the law to know police officers when he saw them, even if they were in mufti. He was a petty criminal with a lengthy string of convictions, and the immediate reaction of the investigating officers to his claims could best be described as healthy scepticism. Much more likely surely that this was the result of a falling out amongst thieves, Barlow too savvy to grass up his actual assailants while happy to point the police towards their own.
‘Said I was to stay away from kids,’ he told the investigators from his hospital bed. ‘Or else worse was coming. I told them I don’t have kids. “You know what we mean,” they said.’
A CID detective called Bobby Wilson had proposed a theory of mistaken identity. A paedophile ring had been operating in Edinburgh’s Old Town at the time. Police were on to them, but no arrests had yet been made, insufficient proof having been offered to the procurator fiscal. The notion that officers might have taken the law into their own hands was discussed, but nothing came of it.
But now Alan Fleck was hinting at Rebus’s involvement, and that interested Fox mightily.
Tony Barlow had spent weeks in hospital and many months afterwards undergoing physio to help him walk again without pain. Eventually he’d gone back to his regular source of income and been arrested and charged several more times. When pressed as to why he thought his attackers had been policemen, he’d said that they ‘spoke like the filth and smelled like the filth’.
Fox could understand why no great effort had gone into probing his accusation.
He’d found a phone number for Bobby Wilson — now himself retired — and had discussed the case with him. Wilson had no doubt that if it had indeed been a punishment beating, the most likely source was Tynecastle police station.
‘Alan Fleck wouldn’t have liked it,’ he’d told Fox, ‘if he thought a bunch of paedos were getting away with it.’
Fox’s brief conversation with Wilson had brought another name bubbling to the surface — Josephine Kilgour. He’d not thought about her for a while, and wondered if she was still at the same address. He jotted down her name as a reminder, then stared at his screen and tapped his pen — a chunky Montegrappa, a little treat to himself — against the pad. He could see how Tynecastle might well have been involved in the Barlow beating, but where did Rebus fit in? Was Fleck putting up a smokescreen? Any amount of time Fox spent taking the wrong road was time not used in pursuit of Fleck and the Crew.
He glanced at his Omega wristwatch, then stretched his spine, pulling back his shoulders. He hoped Francis Haggard would resurface soon. If he was in the mood to tell some stories, maybe Tony Barlow could become a significant chapter.
He shut down his computer and put his jacket back on. He was halfway down the stairs when he saw someone he knew coming up. Colette Newman worked for HMRC, fraud inquiries her speciality.
‘Working the late shift?’ he asked her.
‘Justice never sleeps, Malcolm,’ she replied with a smile. She was carrying a folder under one arm, which she patted with her free hand. ‘Furlough scams,’ she explained.