I waited for a little before I picked up the questioning again. ‘Let’s go back to your street corner meeting and to Alice telling you that Freddy Welsh was in trouble. Elaborate.’
‘She said that her boyfriend, Montell, had mentioned his name in connection with a job he’d been pulled into, close observation in a pub up in Slateford. And then,’ another pause, ‘and then she asked me if I’d call him and warn him.’
‘Which you did.’
‘No!’ We’d arrived at the point to which Mario and I had known we were heading. We’d even warned Alice about it, but neither of us had really believed in the possibility. ‘No, I did not,’ he declared, solemnly. ‘I refused point blank. I reminded her that she was a police officer and told her to behave responsibly. Then I left and went back to the station. I was pretty angry with her, as you can imagine.’
‘No, Jock,’ McGuire said, shaking his head. ‘I can’t imagine that at all. What I can imagine is you thanking her, when she phoned you to tip you off that a relation of your wife was in the spotlight. Then I can picture you digging out the phone book to find the Lafayette’s number, and going out to phone it from the call box up the road.’
‘No, sir,’ he replied, quietly, looking at the table.
‘Your prints are on the handset, man,’ he pointed out.
‘I’ve used it,’ Varley conceded. ‘I admit that. I don’t like calling in bets from the office, so when I have a flutter I use the phone box to ring my bookie.’
‘The bar person,’ he fired back, ‘who took the call in Lafayette’s, told DC Haddock that it was a male voice.’
‘Oh yes?’ the inspector challenged. ‘You know Alice, DCS McGuire, so you must realise that she has a deep voice. I’ve heard her sing; contralto, she is. If you heard her for the first time, on a phone line in a crowded pub, could you be sure it was a female calling?’
Mario hesitated, for only a second, but it was enough. ‘See? You wouldn’t,’ he exclaimed.
‘I suppose you realise,’ I murmured, ‘that DC Cowan’s, that Alice’s, story is the complete opposite of yours.’
He nodded, his mouth tight. ‘I suppose I do, but this is my story, and I’m sticking to it.’
‘Why didn’t you want a lawyer here?’ I challenged him. ‘Was it because you didn’t want to trot out that pack of lies in his presence?’
‘I don’t need a brief. I’ve given you my account of what happened, and if it’s at variance with Alice’s, then I’m sorry for her, but it’s her problem.’
McGuire smiled, and looked him in the eye. ‘No, Jock,’ he said ‘it’s still yours. You don’t know your niece as well as you think, if you imagine she’d go anywhere with a big bleb on her face. She’d sooner saw her fucking head off. There never was such a spot. If you’d come clean and told the truth, it might have gone better for you. As it is, I’m going to charge you with attempting to pervert the course of justice.’
Varley’s eyes hardened. ‘The Crown Office will laugh at you,’ he hissed. ‘You haven’t a chance of making it stick.’
‘Nevertheless, I’m going to try. Stand up.’ He rose to his feet. ‘John Varley. .’
When it was done, we released him on police bail, with orders to remain at home until the following Monday morning, when he was to report to the Sheriff Court for an initial hearing. Before he left we gave him one of the interview disks, signed by both of us.
When he had gone, we returned to the interview room. ‘Bastard,’ Mario growled, as he closed the door. ‘Can you imagine that? Trying to stitch his own niece up. What a ruthless. .’
‘Maybe, but he’s right, it is his story versus hers,’ I pointed out.
‘Aye, but he fell for the bleb trick, didn’t he? Well done, by the way; you rushed him into that.’
‘Sure, he fell for it,’ I conceded, ‘but a good defence counsel will blow that away in a trial. It’s not enough to send a man to jail, least of all a cop with twenty-five years’ more or less exemplary service. And you can bet that Alice, in the witness box, will be taken all the way back to that car park, with her legs in the air, screwing a married man. She’ll be shredded. No, big fella, all you’ve got is breathing space, and maybe not much of that, unless you can come up with something more to show the fiscal, something that ties Varley and Welsh together.’
‘In that case,’ he said, gloomily, ‘we’re in the hands of Mackenzie and the Strathclyde guy, Payne. That’s their job. A recovered alcoholic and the boss’s sister-in-law’s husband.’ He sighed. ‘I hope they’re up to it, otherwise, you’re right; Jock bloody Varley might just walk.’
Detective Inspector Becky Stallings
‘What the devil am I doing here?’
That’s what I ask myself sometimes, when I think of the world I left. Of course, Edinburgh has its attractions. It’s a much gentler city than London, and the pace of life is so much easier. From the job point of view there’s less serious crime, the body count is lower, and I never feel that I’m taking my life in my hands when I go to work of a morning.
But it’s about one-fifteenth the size of the capital (you can shove the nationalist nonsense: I’m British, we have one capital city and that’s London), and the force I left to move north is eighteen times larger than the one I joined, with promotion prospects commensurately better for a smart cop, and even better for a smart female cop — both of which boxes I tick — in this politically correct century. Plus, I liked being called ‘guv’nor’, not plain ‘boss’ which is all I get here, and that’s on a good day.
So what the devil am I doing here? Well, it’s Ray, innit? This flash Detective Sergeant Wilding pitches up in London in hot pursuit of some bad guys, I’m assigned to him and his mate, DI Steele, and the next thing I know he and I are staring at my bedroom ceiling and I’m in love with the guy. It might have stayed unrequited from then on if I hadn’t found myself loaned to his big boss for the duration of the investigation and impressed him enough to be offered a permanent transfer, but that’s how it played out.
The love thing hasn’t worn off, no, that’s gone from strength to strength, and there’s still enough about Edinburgh’s social life to interest me, but from time to time I miss the thrill and the pace of the job that I left. Not the mindless street violence side, oh no, that’s just sordid, but the pursuit of the unusual, of villains with a bit of class and imagination about them. Because, to be honest, your average Edinburgh criminal mastermind wouldn’t go halfway to meeting the Mensa IQ requirement. (That said, the only Mensa member I’ve ever known wound up shooting himself, so maybe a great big brain can be a curse as well as a blessing.)
Ray can read my occasional frustration, and bless him, the love’s even offered to put in for a transfer to London himself if I want to go back. We could probably have worked it too, on the coat-tails of Neil McIlhenney’s move down south, but Ray’s only just made DI and as a new boy down there he’d probably have been given the jobs that nobody wants, like cleaning up the mess that youth gangs leave, and investigating drive-by shootings. So we’re staying put, he and I, although we have discussed the possibility of me applying for a spot with the Serious Crimes Agency.
All that said, the job isn’t always boring; the oddest things can happen, and they don’t come any odder than a call-out to a grave site in the grounds of a crematorium. Funny, I take most things in my stride, but that one threw me right off kilter, especially when I saw the body, as it had been left. It gave me the creepiest feeling.
Every death is sad, and every homicide is positively tragic, but there was something about that one that I found unnerving. It even brought a couple of tears to my eyes, although I hid them from the rest of the team. And then the chief constable turned up, and said what I’d been thinking, that the burial was a thing of honour and respect, not violence and hate.
I couldn’t work out what had happened to the dead man, though. Like the rest of us, I had to wait for the pathologist to tell us. That pathologist; she’s a cool one. I had no idea about her back story with the chief until Jack McGurk filled me in, and I gather that Sauce hadn’t either. Not that I’d have dropped any clangers. She isn’t the sort of woman that you can dig in the ribs and whisper, ‘Hey, see the chief? I fancy him a bit.’