They climbed to the second floor of the old sandstone building. It had been renovated, like most of the property in the area, and the stairwell was brightly lit, and carpeted. The front door was larger than usual, but the six-foot-eight-inch sergeant still had to watch his head as he stepped inside.
He stood in the hallway as Lisanne moved from room to room; when she reappeared she was smiling. ‘It’s tidier than I left it,’ she told him, ‘and I’m not kidding.’
‘That’s good. I must get them in to do my place.’ He turned and ducked under the door. ‘Good night, then.’
‘Jack.’
He paused.
‘Would you think I was pushy if I asked if I could see you again?’ she asked.
He frowned, until his eyes gave him away. ‘I was going to give it a couple of days,’ he replied, ‘then call you. What are you doing on Friday night?’
‘Whatever you like.’
‘A meal and a couple of pubs? Pick you up about seven?’
‘Sounds good. See you then.’
He was half-way downstairs when she called after him: ‘Hang on!’
They met on the first-floor landing. ‘There’s something else,’ she said, removing, as she spoke, the necklace charm he had been admiring all evening. It was silver, like its chain, but he had been unable to see what it was meant to be. ‘I forgot I had this on. Would you put it with the rest of Theo’s stuff? He gave it to me that last Friday he was here. I want no part of it now.’
‘No problem.’ He held out his hand and she dropped it on to his palm. He looked at it in the bright light of the stairwell and felt his heart jump. The charm was small, about half the normal size, but it was, unmistakably, a representation of a cube of sugar.
Thirty-eight
‘You’re looking good,’ said Andy Martin.
‘But different, sir, yes?’
‘That can’t be denied. The uniform suits you, though.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Chief Inspector David Mackenzie snapped his heels together and gave a small mock bow. ‘It’s taken some getting used to, I admit, but the alternative was losing it, leaving the force altogether, and I didn’t need that. I may have said so, when I was at my blackest, but the job’s important to me.’
The two men had met before, on a drugs operation in Edinburgh. It had been successful, but it had started a chain of events that had proved disastrous for Mackenzie, plunging him into depression and a bout of near-alcoholism.
‘I’m different in a few ways,’ he said. ‘For a start, nobody calls me Bandit any more. That persona’s gone for good: when it came to the test, I didn’t have the nuts to live up to it.’
‘That’s not what I’ve heard. It was a bad scene, and you went into it.’
‘Then froze solid, sir. You can’t do that: if you do, you’re putting the lives of colleagues in danger.’
‘That’s true,’ Martin conceded, ‘but, David, you didn’t go to work that morning expecting to go into armed action. You weren’t part of a specialist unit, you just happened to be there at the time. I was told that you volunteered, and that once you were in you went as far as you could. That’s all any of us can do. You’re a damn good officer, and I’m happy to be working with you.’
‘It’s good of you to say so, sir.’
‘Ask around and you’ll find that I never say things I don’t mean. Now, let’s get on with this task. You know what I’ve been asked to do?’
‘Yes, sir. The chief constable gave me a full briefing.’
‘Good. Before we get started, though, that’s five “sirs” in as many minutes. I’ve never been one for formality, among senior officers at any rate, so when it’s just you and me, it’s Andy. Fair enough?’
Mackenzie nodded.
Martin moved behind Bob Skinner’s desk, settled into his chair, and glanced out of the window, across to the deserted Broughton High School, its pupils turned loose to holiday with their parents, or to roam the city’s streets. ‘Right,’ he continued. ‘I’ve been doing some thinking about this overnight and I’ve decided how I want to proceed. The investigation shouldn’t take more than a couple of days, but for its purpose I must be formal, from start to finish. I’m going to be interviewing people I know, guys I used to go to the pub with when I was here. So we’ll do it in uniform, both of us, and we’ll record every word said.’ He smiled. ‘From what I’ve been told, that’s going to cause the Crown Agent a lot of grief, but I haven’t been brought down here to massage his ego.’
‘How do you want to begin?’ asked Mackenzie.
‘I’m going to spend this morning reading the files relating to all the investigations, including the Sugar Dean inquiry. While I’m doing that I want you to speak to DCS McGuire and Detective Superintendent McIlhenney and have them help you compile a list of all the people in this force who had access to those details of the Ballester murders that were kept from the media. Before that, though, I want you to phone the Crown Agent and have him do the same thing, list the people in his office that we need to interview. That’s where we’ll begin, this afternoon. And I want Joe Dowley himself to be our first appointment. There’s something about his whole attitude that I don’t understand, and I’m going to find out what it is.’
Thirty-nine
Becky Stallings glanced at her watch as McGurk stepped into the incident room, transferred from the golf club to divisional headquarters at Torphichen Place.
‘Sorry, boss,’ he said. ‘I had a call to make before I came in.’
‘Ah,’ said the inspector. ‘I was beginning to think you’d had an unexpectedly late night.’
He smiled ingenuously. ‘Don’t know what you mean.’
‘Nice meal?’
‘Yes, it was. I kept the receipt, though.’
‘God!’ Stallings gasped. ‘I put you in the way of a date with a nice girl and you want to put in on exes. You Scots guys, you’re amazing.’
‘That’s often said, Becky. Any developments?’
She nodded. ‘Some. The boys at the lab have been putting in overtime. They found a hair on Weekes’s jacket that’s a match for the victim.’
‘Have you charged him yet?’
‘It’s not as easy as that. That jacket’s three years old. Sauce checked the bar code with River Island and they confirmed it. He could have picked up that sample a while ago, so it doesn’t help us place him at the crime scene.’
‘What about the DNA traces that were found there? Does he match any of them?’
‘No, that’s a blank.’
‘So what’s our next move?’
‘We’re going to re-interview him, but he’s got a solicitor on the case now, and she’s insisting on being present. Her name’s Frances Birtles. Do you know her?’
‘Frankie Birtles? Also known as Frankie Bristles. Oh, yes, we all know her. She’s a hard case.’
‘I was afraid of that. That’s how she struck me, and it’s why I’m not getting excited about the jacket. We could try and bluff him, hit him with it, hard, but we wouldn’t get far: she’d be on to us straight away.’
‘We could lean on his behaviour,’ McGurk suggested, ‘his admission of stalking Lisanne and Sugar, and the threat Mae heard him make. Female lawyer: even Frankie might not be too impressed by that.’
‘He’s already backed off that. His brief’s already told me that any statements made at his first interview were under duress and are withdrawn.’
‘Duress, my arse.’ The sergeant laughed.
‘She’s saying more than that, though. She’s claiming he felt under career pressure, and that he was telling us what he thought we wanted to hear, to protect his job. No, Jack, we’ll interview him, but then we’ll have to turn him loose, maybe even return him to duty if she pushes it.’
‘I don’t think that’s going to happen.’ McGurk was still smiling.
‘What’s with you?’ said Stallings. ‘You didn’t score, did you?’
‘In a manner of speaking.’ He reached into his pocket, took out a small, clear evidence capsule and laid it on the inspector’s desk. ‘Lisanne gave me that last night,’ he said. ‘It was a present from Theo, on the day that Sugar was murdered. I’ve just been to see John Dean. He confirmed that his daughter had an identical necklace to that one. It was a Christmas present from Weekes, when they were going out. She liked it: after they broke up it was the only thing from their relationship that she kept. She wore it all the time, and she had it on the last time her father saw her, when she left for work on the day she was murdered.’