‘To cut it short, Mrs Archer told Mr Archer and he had Kane into his office. He confronted him with the sale order and told him the story about the Swiss account. Kane admitted the lot. He told him that he had fallen truly, madly, deeply in love with your sister, and that he had come up with this daft scheme because he knew his wife would cut the nuts off him financially. His idea was to leave her to it and to shoot the craw with Dawn and the nine hundred thou.
‘Archer reckoned that he was completely off his trolley. He told him to bail out while he thought up Plan A, but to leave an address where he could be contacted, and a telephone number. He did. Yours.’
Prim puffed up with indignation. ‘The cow! I let her use this place while I was away on the basis that I didn’t want any bloke’s shaving tackle in my bathroom.’
‘That’s the least of your worries. Those sheets of yours are definitely a goner, and I don’t think the mattress’ll be too clever either.’
She wrinkled her nose. ‘Ugh! Thanks, Oz. I was trying not to think about that.’ Wrinkled or not, as noses go it was a right wee cracker. It set her brown eyes off a treat, and didn’t bully her perfect mouth either. I realised that I was beginning to feel myself again.
‘So what happened next?’ she asked. ‘What brought you here?’
‘Archer sent me. He called me as soon as Kane was out of the office. By that time he was shitting himself about the good name of the firm. You know what a village Edinburgh is. One whiff of the unsavoury and his client list would disappear like snow off a dyke in August. He’d decided that the only thing for it was to get that nearly million back into the client’s account and to spin him a line about crystallising capital gains for him, or some such stuff like that.
‘He told me to go and see Kane, to get both halves of the fiver from him, then to get my arse over to Switzerland with some close-mouthed helper, and bring back the lolly. He promised me a five per cent success fee. To spare you the mental arithmetic, that’s forty-five grand. For me, more than a year’s wages in one hit.
‘I phoned your number last night. A woman answered; I guessed it must have been Dawn. She put me on to Kane, I told him what the score was and he said “Yes sir, very good, sir. Come here at ten tomorrow morning, and I’ll give you the bank-note.” That’s us up to date.
‘I’ve never seen Kane, not even a photograph, but I’m assuming that’s him through there on your bed. Unless your sister’s lying under it in the same condition, then it looks as if you’re in for a family scandal.’ Her face twisted in pain, and I bit my tongue, to punish it for running away with itself, like always.
‘That’s your theory, Mr Detective, is it?’
‘Prim,’ I said, ‘I’m a private enquiry agent, not a detective. I interview witnesses in court cases for lawyers, and that sort of stuff. I was a policeman for six months, once upon a time, and I turned it in because I couldn’t stand the Clever Bastards in the CID, and the bullying sergeants in uniform who’d spent the best part of their service sitting on their brains.
‘But what I said there, I’m sorry, but it’s the first thing they’ll think. No, it’s the only thing they’ll think. If these blokes see any easy answer, they don’t spend a hell of a lot of time looking for a difficult option. They’re not trained to be clever, they’re trained to be logical.’
The old tongue was really running away with itself now. I suppose I could have stopped it, but I wasn’t prepared to bite it that hard.
‘Look Prim, I find it difficult to believe that anyone could do something like that next door, especially someone with a sister as …’ I gulped, but I had run straight off the cliff, like Wiley E. Coyote, and all I could do was keep on running and hope that I didn’t hit the ground. ‘… as downright tasty as you, but the boys and girls from the Leith Polithe won’t dithmith the idea. And like it or not, we’re going to have to call them.’
She nodded. Her blonde hair was cut fairly short, and more than a bit untidy after her journey. Suddenly I found myself wanting to smooth it.
‘I know we are,’ she said, ‘but how about if we have a shooftie round to see if we can find that fiver before we do? Your clients would like that, wouldn’t they.’ Until that moment, I’d never grasped what ‘askance’ meant, but when I looked at Prim, I knew for sure. ‘Well,’ she said, picking up my expression. ‘If it’s there, all of it, it’ll mean that Dawn … and we don’t know for sure she was here … didn’t kill him for the money. Won’t it?’
I saw the sense in that. But I saw even more in the forty-five thousand good reasons I had for wanting to find the fiver too. ‘Aye, okay. Let’s look, at least.’
Policemen are like buses. When you need one, they’re nowhere to be found. But when you don’t …
I’ll never know why anyone could call a game ‘Postman’s Knock’. I mean, when it comes to knocking there’s no-one in the same league as a polisman. We had just stepped out of the kitchen when the thump on the door echoed around the hall. Prim’s flat was on the first floor of the tenement. I’ll swear that I heard at least three doors open as the sound swept through the building. She stepped up to the door and peered through the spy-hole.
‘It looks like a traffic warden,’ she said. ‘But his uniform …!’ The second knock sent her reeling backwards. ‘Okay,’ she shouted. ‘Keep your hair on.’ She swung the door open. The be-fouled traffic warden was there, all right, flanked on either side by two of Edinburgh’s finest. One of them, I recognised. When I did my probationer spell at Oxgangs he had been the senior constable and chief barrack-room lawyer at the station. He was one of those guys who was determined to see it out to pension time and sod all the rest. Wherever they go they infect the whole station, whingeing and bitching until they’ve pulled morale down to rock bottom. Eventually they’re rotated to start all over somewhere else. This one’s name was McArthur, but at Oxgangs everyone, from the Chief Inspector down, had called him McArse.
His sidekick could have been me seven years earlier. He was a fuzz-cheeked probationer, so spick that I guessed his Maw still did his laundry, and so span that I guessed she pressed his uniform for him as well. I shook my head at the thought of what could happen to the poor wee bugger on the beat in Leith.
McArse stared right over Prim’s head, straight at me. I could see something stirring behind his eyes, but his sort have trouble putting a name to their chief constable, let alone a short-serving wet-ear from almost a decade earlier. He gave up as soon as he started and went straight into Chapter One of the training manual, ‘The Policeman as a Public Servant’.
‘Hey, youse. Mister. What the fuck about this then?’ He thrust Exhibit A into the hall, with the evidence of the outrage drying on his cap and shoulders. ‘Another fine mess you’ve got yourself into, Oz,’ I thought.
When you’re as thick as McArse very few things will stem the tide of your aggression, far less rock you back on your heels. The only one I know that works every time is a counterblast from a small, furious woman. When the woman in question has just stepped off a transcontinental flight minus a night’s sleep, after twelve months in the middle of a genocidal African war, well it really is no contest.
From behind I could see her shoulders quiver as she surveyed the soiled public official before her. The warden stood there, wishing suddenly that, rather than stopping the first idiot he had encountered with flat feet and a black and white check band round his cap, he had made his way quietly back to his depot, to blame the incident on a large family of incontinent seagulls, attracted by the shine of a car he was booking.
‘Constable!’ hissed Prim. A good hiss is far more effective than a bellow, any time. ‘Get this apparition out of my flat, at once, and take a grip on your manners.’ McArse looked at her, noticing her for the first time. The ponderous wheels of his brain weighed up the situation for a few seconds, until without a word, he took the quailing warden by the collar and drew him backwards out on to the stairhead.