‘Thanks for the warning,’ the man said coolly.
‘All part of the service,’ said Rebus with a smile. The clue had actually escaped him throughout. Not that he’d be admitting as much to Kenneth Leighton. No, he would tell the story as though he’d been Sherlock Holmes and Philip Marlowe rolled into one. Doubtless Leighton would be impressed. And one day, when Rebus was needing a favour from the taxman, he would know he could put Kenneth Leighton in the frame.
The Confession
‘It was Tony’s idea,’ he says, shifting in his seat. ‘Tony’s my brother, a couple of years younger than me, but he was always the brainy one. It was all his idea. I just went along with it.’
He’s still trying to get comfortable. It’s not easy to get comfortable in the interview room. The CID man could tell him that. He could tell him that the chair he’s wriggling in has been modified ever so slightly, a quarter-inch taken off its front legs. The chair isn’t designed with rest and relaxation in mind.
‘So Tony says to me one day, he says: “Ian, this is one plan that cannot fail.” And he tells me about it. We spend a bit of time bouncing it around, you know, me trying to pick holes in it. I have to admit, it looked pretty good. Well, that’s the problem really. That’s why I’m here. It was just too bloody good all round…’
He looks around again, studying the walls, as if expecting two-way mirrors, secret listening devices. The one thing he’s not been expecting is the quietness. It’s eleven-thirty on a weekday night. The police station is like a ghost town. He wants to see lots of activity, lots of uniforms. Yet again in his life, he’s being let down.
Tony had noticed the slip-road. He drove from Fife to Edinburgh most Saturday nights, taking a carful of friends. They went to pubs and clubs, danced, chatted up women. A late-night pizza and maybe a couple of espressos before home. Tony didn’t drink. He didn’t mind staying sober while everyone around him had a skinful. He always liked to be in control. On the A90 south of the Forth Road Bridge, he’d seen the signpost for the slip-road. He’d seen it before – must’ve passed it a hundred times – but this one night something about it bothered him. The next morning, he headed back. The sign said: Department of Transport Vehicle Check Area Only. He took the slip-road, found himself at a sort of roundabout in the middle of nowhere. He stopped his car and got out. There was grass growing in the middle of the road. He didn’t think the place got used much. A hut nearby, and a metal ramp that might have been a weigh-bridge. Another slip-road led back down on to the A90. He stood there for a while, listening to the rush of traffic below him, an idea slowly forming in his head.
‘See,’ Ian went on, ‘Tony had worked for a time as a security guard, and he still had a couple of uniforms hanging in his wardrobe. He’s always had the idea of robbing someplace, always knew those uniforms would come in handy. One of his pals, guy called Malc, he works – I should say worked – in a printing shop. So Tony brought Malc in, said we could trust him. Have you got a cigarette?’
The detective points to the No Smoking sign, but then relents, hands over a packet of ten and some matches.
‘Thanks. So you see,’ lighting up, exhaling noisily, ‘it was all Tony’s idea, and Malc had a certain expertise, too. I didn’t have anything. It was just that I was family, so Tony knew he could trust me. I haven’t worked in eight years. Used to be in heavy engineering up in Leven, got laid off in the slump. If somebody could do something about the manufacturing industry in this country, there’d be a lot less crime. Bit of advice there, free of charge.’ He flicks ash into the ashtray, brushes some stray flecks from his trousers. ‘I’m not saying I didn’t play a part. Obviously, I wouldn’t be here otherwise. I just want it on record that I wasn’t the brains of the operation.’
‘I think I can go along with that,’ the detective says. Ian asks him if he shouldn’t be taking notes or something. ‘We’re trained, lad. Elephant’s memory.’
So Ian nods, goes on with his story. The interview room is small and airless. It carries the aromas of every person who’s ever been through it, all of them telling their stories. A few of them even turning out to be true…
‘So we make a few recces, and never once do we see the place being used. We stopped the car on the slip-road a few nights. Plenty of lorries steaming past, but nobody so much as notices us or asks what we’re up to. This is what Tony wanted to know. We set the thing up for last Wednesday.’
‘Why a Wednesday?’ the detective asks.
Ian just shrugs. ‘Tony’s idea,’ he says. ‘All I did was go along with him. He was the mastermind: that’s the word I’ve been wanting. Mastermind.’ He shifts again in his chair, stares at the walls again, remembering Wednesday night.
Tony and Ian were dressed in the uniforms. Tony had a friend with a haulage truck. It had been easy to borrow it for the night. The story was, they were helping someone move house. Malc had come up with IDs for them: they’d had their photos taken at a passport booth, and the laminated cards, each in its own wallet, looked authentic. They took the truck up to the roundabout, left the car near the bottom of the slip-road. Malc was dressed in a leather jacket and baseball cap. He was supposed to be a truck driver. Tony would head back down the ramp and use a torch to signal a lorry on to the slip-road. Then he’d ask the driver to go to the test area, where Ian would be apparently interviewing another lorry-driver. This was so the real driver wouldn’t suspect anything.
‘It worked,’ Ian says. ‘That’s what’s so unbelievable. First lorry he stopped, the driver brought it up to the roundabout, stopped it and got out. Tony comes driving up, gets out of his car. Asks to see the delivery note, then says he wants to check the cargo.’
The detective has a question. ‘What if it turned out to be cabbages or fish or something?’
‘First thing Tony asked was what they were carrying. If it had been something we couldn’t sell, he’d have let them go. But we came up gold at the first attempt. Washing machines, two dozen of them at three hundred quid apiece. Only problem was, by the time we’d squeezed them into our own lorry, we’d no room for anything else, and we were cream-crackered anyway. Otherwise, I think we could have kept going all night.’ Ian pauses. ‘You’re wondering about the driver, aren’t you? There were three of us, remember. All we did was tie him up, leave him in his cab. We knew he’d get himself free eventually. Quiet up there, we didn’t want him starving to death. And off we went with the haul. We had about fifteen of the machines, and were already thinking of who we could sell them to. Storage was no problem. Tony had a couple of lock-ups. We left them there. There’s a local villain, name of Andy Horrigan. He runs a couple of pubs and cafés, so I thought maybe he’d be in the market. We were being careful, see. Once the news was out that someone had boosted a consignment of washer-dryers… well, we had to be careful who we sold to.’ He pauses. ‘Only, we’d already made that one fatal mistake…’
One mistake. He asks for another cigarette. His hand is shaking as he lights it. He can’t get it out of his head, the insane bad luck of it. Even before he’d had a chance to say anything to Andy Horrigan, Horrigan had something to ask him.
‘Here, Ian, heard anything about a heist? Washer-dryers, nicked from the back of a lorry?’
‘I didn’t see anything in the papers,’ Ian had replied. Quite honestly, too: it had surprised them, the way there had been nothing in the press or on the radio and TV. Ian could see Horrigan was bursting to tell him. He knew right away it couldn’t be good news, not coming from Horrigan.
‘It wasn’t in the papers, never will be neither.’