I’d called Ricky Ross before leaving Cannes. He was waiting for me at the general-aviation terminal and drove me straight to the police headquarters building at Fettes. Ricky still has a lot of clout with Lothian and Borders Police: he’d dropped a word and the case had been taken over by Special Branch.
We were met by a guy called Detective Chief Inspector Oliver Coffey; he looked familiar, but I couldn’t place him. He assumed that my interest was straightforward.
‘Have you got any idea why Raymond should do this?’ he asked me. ‘Mr January’s been divorced from his sister for ten years, and as far as I can gather they’ve had no contact since then. Is he just a nutter?’
‘He may well be, but it’s not as simple as that. I’d like you to do me a favour, and let me speak to him alone.’
Coffey whistled like a kettle coming to the boil. ‘I don’t know if I can do that, Oz. This guy’s dangerous.’
‘So am I,’ I told him. ‘After what he did to Harvey, and to a harmless wee actor up in Pitlochry last night, I’d just love him to have a go at me. But chain him to the floor if it makes you happy. I promise I won’t touch him.’
The DCI nodded. ‘Okay. Since you were once one of us, you can do it. Have you forgotten that you and I were at the police college together?’
I placed him then: Ollie Coffey had been on the same new entrants’ course as me at Tulliallan. A couple of years later he’d been selected for an accelerated promotion course and I’d been turned down. That was a close shave, I thought. If they’d picked me I might have wound up interviewing hoodlums in windowless rooms.
Trevor Raymond was around the same age as me, but about three inches shorter and quite a bit lighter. His hair was close-cropped, he had heavy dark eyebrows and a tattoo on each forearm. His left cheek was red and swollen. I guessed that he had resisted arrest, or that one of Harvey’s brother advocates had got in a good one.
They hadn’t chained him to the floor, but he was in a restraint belt and his ankles were shackled. As I stepped into the room, his eyes lit up with hatred and he tried to stand up.
‘I promised not to touch you,’ I told him. ‘I don’t advise you to make me break my word. You might be good but I’m better, you might be tough but I’m tougher, you might be strong but I’m stronger. Those aren’t boasts, they’re facts. Now, why the vendetta?’
He spat at me, a good-sized gob, but he wound it up so I was able to dodge it.
‘Man, they’re filming this, and they’re angry at you as it is. The police like Harvey; you’re lucky you’ve still got the same number of teeth you woke up with this morning. What did Maddy tell you?’
‘Fuck off.’
‘Hey, a response! When did she call you?’
‘Go and fuck yourself.’
‘Are you still in the army?’ He glared at me, but stayed silent this time. ‘Doesn’t matter, Coffey will have found out by now. Either way, you’re not any more. But you have had a call from her, yes?’
‘When I get out of here I’m going to fuck your wife.’
‘I don’t think so. One, the way you’re going your dick will be withered by the time you get out of here. Two, I employ a better soldier to protect my family than you’ve ever been. Three, you have got all this fundamentally wrong. Okay, I’m not going to ask you any more questions. I’m going to tell you stuff instead. The last time your sister was seen was on Monday, on an island called Dayang, which is, interestingly, and I will quote this fact to bored listeners for the rest of my life, not far from the island that they used as the fictional Bali Hai in my mother’s favourite movie, South Pacific.’ I’d clocked the camera by this time, top right corner facing me: I winked at it.
‘While she was there she killed a man called Sammy Goss. It’s technically not correct to say that Sammy was the last person to see her alive, because she shot him in the back of the head as soon as he stepped into the room, so he never saw her. Nobody will ever blame her for that, for Sammy was a very dangerous wee man. So dangerous, in fact, that he killed her boyfriend, Tony Lee, more or less right under my very nose.’ I could picture Coffey and Ross as they listened to this; I nodded towards the watching lens.
‘After killing him, she took the boat that he sailed in on, and that’s the last I knew of her, until you stuck your oar in. Now I know that she made it to the mainland and on from there. I know you’ve had a call from her, because last night you showed up in Pitlochry and gave her ex-boyfriend a gratuitous battering just because he admitted having spoken to me about her. Let’s say you spent half a day getting there. That tells me she probably called you yesterday morning. All I don’t know is where she was at that time. And I need to know, Trevor, because I am the only person who can save her life. I have no idea why she resents me, for I had agreed to give her a lot of money, but I don’t care about that. I just want to know where she is, or was yesterday morning.’
He glared back at me. ‘I don’t know where you dredged all that crap from,’ he hissed, ‘but the only thing I will ever tell you is. . fuck off!’ I was looking in his eyes as he shouted the last two words of advice, and I knew that he meant it.
I walked behind him and leaned close, then whispered something, so quietly that no mike would have picked it up unless one of us had been wearing it, keeping my face off camera so I couldn’t be lip-read. ‘A promise. If you ever go near any member of my family again, I’ll have you killed.’ He twitched; that was all, but it was enough to tell me that he believed me.
I straightened up and walked out of the room, waving goodbye as I closed the door behind me.
‘What was that all about?’ Coffey asked, when I rejoined him and Ricky.
‘The Triads are after Harvey’s ex, for reasons which to them seem pretty solid. Nobody outside this room needs to know that, though.’
‘What sort of a world are you living in these days, man?’ asked Ricky.
I looked at him. ‘Listen, I’m supposed to be on my holidays. These things just happen to me.’
‘He had a mobile on him when we brought him in,’ said Ollie Coffey, thinking like a real policeman. ‘If it needs a password we’ll never get it from him, but I can access the information on it, one way or another. You guys go for a pint somewhere; I’ll join you when I’ve got it.’
36
In fact we went to the Western General, to check up on Harvey’s condition. Ellen was with him when we got there, having left Jonny in charge at St Andrews. He wasn’t with anyone: he was awake but dazed, and sedated on top of that. When he spoke, it was nonsense.
At least he knew me when I walked into the small room they had given him. ‘Hello, brother-in-law,’ he said. ‘How are the fish?’
‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘I fed them before I left.’ That seemed to satisfy him, for he smiled and settled back into his mountain of pillows. I’d been right about the black eyes. They were well puffy already; in a couple of days they’d be prime shiners.
Our Ellie was less easy to placate. ‘What is this all about, Oz? Why should someone attack Harvey like that? He doesn’t have any clients with a grudge. And how could it happen in there?’
‘Parliament Hall is a public room,’ I told her. ‘And it wasn’t a disgruntled client. It was his first wife’s brother.’
‘What? Trevor the bloody soldier? What could Harvey possibly have done to upset him?’
I had hoped, against all hope, that Harvey had taken my advice and told Ellie the whole story. But clearly not: he might have faced up to some serious villains in the witness box, but my sister is a different story. He had bottled it and, in the process, put me right in the firing line. ‘Actually,’ I admitted, ‘it’s more me who’s upset him. He just took it out on Harvey. I’m just not sure why he’s gone off like that.’