He started to shiver as a shrill blast of cold blew down the hallway. Niall cradled his chest in his arms, gripped at his elbows. Down the hall, beyond the stand where the coats hung, he saw the baseball bat but the weapon was cut from view when the door burst open. Another man, taller, younger, still in black leather but without hair stood in the open hall.
‘Who’re you?’ said Niall.
The man didn’t speak. He turned away, looked into the flat. ‘You on your own?’
‘I am now.’
‘Where’s the girl?’
‘Gone.’
‘Where to?’
Niall shrugged. ‘She never told me. She doesn’t tell me everything.’
‘And you expect me to believe that? What about Fin, the owner of this flat that you’re staying in, where’s he?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘You’re not sure?’
‘Not exactly. I mean, he’s moving about.’
The second man strolled through the door, hands in the pockets of his jacket. ‘What about my money, I take it that’s on the move with him?’
‘What money?’
The men stared at Niall, his thin shoulders white against the dark wall. He was still shivering. A small pool of water had gathered at his feet.
‘I hope you’re not going to play silly buggers with us, son.’
‘Tell me what you want.’
The two men looked at each other, then turned away without speaking.
The bald man closed the door, started to remove his jacket. ‘You’re going to tell us where Finnie and the money are but first I’m going to have a wee bit of fun finding out.’
26
Valentine eased open the door of the incident room and called out to DS McCormack. She was seated in front of a computer, staring at the screen as she wagged a pencil beside her ear. She looked deep in thought, but snapped out of it when she heard the DI’s voice.
‘Sylvia, grab your coat,’ said Valentine. ‘And can you grab mine for me too?’ He let the door swing closed and as he was turning, a rushing DI Harris halted in his stride and put out a hand. ‘How goes it, Bob?’
The detective’s expression, especially the glowering gaze, said it all. ‘Do you really want an answer to that, Eddy?’
‘Probably not, judging by the kip of you.’ He placed a palm flat on the wall, exposing a chunky gold watch. ‘Not got the building blocks down on the murder case, then?’
‘Not got the blocks delivered, yet.’
Harris drummed fingers on the wall, the watch rattled in accompaniment. ‘I was hoping to grab five minutes with you.’
‘Not now Eddy, I have the victim’s partner in Ayr Hospital just coming round after a hit and run.’
‘Oh, yeah, the scrambler on the High Street. Another daft wee boy racer who’s going to find himself in more grief than he bargained for.’
‘He’ll not be playing Kick Start in this town again, put it that way. Look, what were you after anyway?’ He glanced into the office, McCormack was picking up his jacket, folding it over her arm.
‘Norrie Leask, some very strange goings on with him at the moment.’
‘Really? Is there another kind of goings on with that nut-job?’
Harris eased away from the wall and smoothed the edges of his moustache, as if he was trying to affect a more serious look. ‘Even by Leask’s standards he’s hyper. You might say, jumpy.’
‘Go on.’
‘Has been rattling a lot of cages in the town, putting the big threat about here and there, which in itself isn’t unusual for Leask but nobody’s saying why, and that is unusual.’
Valentine listened to the DI but was puzzled why the normally cagey Harris was being so open with the details of his case. ‘There’s been a crime, a serious one. Nobody wants to be involved, that’s how it works,’ said Valentine; he retrieved his coat from McCormack as she appeared in the hallway.
‘Who are we talking about?’ said McCormack.
‘Norrie Leask. Local psycho-cum-club owner. Runs a place called the Meat Hangers.’
The DS’s expression altered, she pointed back to the incident room. ‘I’ve just been reading about that place on James Tulloch’s file.’
Harris switched his attention from Valentine to McCormack. ‘Isn’t Tulloch your victim?’
‘Yes, he’s ex-army,’ said McCormack, ‘but he was working as a jumped-up bouncer recently, some sort of nightclub security. I’m sure the file said he was employed at the Meat Hangers.’
Valentine pushed open the office door, stamped back towards the PC that McCormack had just been sitting at. He started to scroll down the screen. ‘Where did you see this, Sylvia?’
‘Just there!’ she pointed on the screen. ‘Yeah, there it is … Employer name, Leask, Meat Hangers nightclub.’
Harris had joined them. ‘Jesus …’
‘He’s not going to help Norrie Leask when I get hold of him.’
‘We should bring him in, sir,’ said McCormack. ‘See if he feels talkative.’
‘I know where he is,’ said Harris. ‘We’ve been keeping a shadow on him temporarily.’
‘Only temporary?’
‘You know how Dino is with budgets just now, Bob. We could only follow his movements in office hours, there’s no time-and-a-half going this weather, especially when we don’t have anything on him.’
Valentine shook his head. ‘We should ask the scroats just to commit crimes nine-to-five, that would make life so much easier for us.’
Harris turned away from the officers, headed back down the hall to his own office. ‘Look, I’ll bring Leask in. I’ll let you know when we have him and if you want to sit in that’s fine with me.’
‘Do that, Eddy. If Leask’s tied up in this I’ll have him on a platter.’
‘You’ll get in line behind me, mate, slight matter of the armed robbery to solve too.’
Valentine watched as DI Harris padded away from the incident room, but his thoughts were on the night of James Tulloch’s murder. A lot of money had gone missing from Leask’s club in the raid and that amount of cash was a strong motive for murder. If the two incidents were linked then perhaps the pieces of the puzzle would slide together more easily than he thought. Just why Flash Harris was being so helpful was more worrying. It wasn’t his style, unless there was something in it for him too.
‘What do you think, Sylvia?’ he said.
‘I think we’ve very little else to go on. Is Leask capable?’
‘That I don’t know. He’s a tin-pot hard man but murder would be stepping up a few leagues, even for him.’
‘If the money was the issue, well, a lot of heads have been turned for a few quid.’
‘But, presumably the money was Leask’s, it was from his club.’
‘He’d want it back, surely.’
‘So he’s angry enough to kill for it, maybe. I’d be more inclined to see Leask as a profiteer, but he’d certainly be daft enough to get involved in murder if his cut was big enough.’
‘But where does Tulloch come in, has he robbed his cut, sir?’ said McCormack.
‘There was no sign of money at the scene, only a victim’s corpse. Of course, if Tulloch copped it for the cash, there would be no sign of the cash or the killer.’
‘They’d both be long gone.’
Valentine slotted his arms into his pinstripe jacket. ‘It’s an interesting scenario.’
‘We should certainly kick over Leask’s skittles.’
‘Don’t worry about that, Eddy’s getting into his bovver boots as we speak. Meanwhile, nothing’s altered enough to derail us, we need to question Sandra Millar. If anyone’s likely to throw some light on Tulloch’s murder it’s her.’
‘Agnes Gilchrist puts her at the scene at just the right time, she knows something that’s for sure.’
Valentine started to descend the stairs. ‘Let’s hope she gives it up nicely. I’d hate to have to borrow Eddy’s boots myself.’
27