‘No,’ he conceded, ‘I’m convinced. What’s your summary going to say?’
‘That we’ve interviewed all the neighbours on that stair. It seems that Miss Spreckley kept herself very much to herself. The only one who was on anything more than nodding terms was Mrs McConnochie, who lived below. If you met her you’d think it would be impossible to keep secrets from her, but Miss Spreckley managed, mostly. For example, she told the old dear she had a sister, and a niece, even though she hasn’t.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Tarvil checked this morning with the Registrar General’s office.’
‘On a Sunday?’
‘He’s got a cousin works there. He went in and ran a trace for him. Miss Spreckley had two brothers, but no sisters. She was visited, though, Mrs McConnachie could tell us that much.’
‘But not by whom? Could she tell you that?’
‘It was a young woman with a kid, she said. She called the victim “Auntie Bella” when Mrs M opened the street door for her and asked her who she wanted. There was a man too; he arrived later and he was definitely not to her taste. “Rough looking,” she said.’
‘Is that as detailed as she could get?’
‘I didn’t press her. Now we know for sure what we’re dealing with I can go back and try to get better descriptions of them both.’
‘You could get Tarvil to do it,’ Pye suggested.
‘I don’t think she’d be too comfortable with DC Singh. It’s got nothing to do with race,’ Karen explained. ‘She’s of a certain age, and I think she feels more comfortable with a woman than a man.’
‘Understood. You’ve just described Ruth’s granny.’
His wife frowned at him; they had been in the kitchen when his mobile had rung. ‘What’s my granny been up to?’ she murmured.
‘She got caught fire-bombing the mosque.’
‘Sammy!’
‘Joking, joking,’ he laughed. ‘It was only shoplifting.’
‘Sammy!’
‘It’s okay; she did a runner and they never caught her. Sorry, Karen,’ he said, into the mobile. ‘My wife’s very protective of the old biddy. As for your lady,’ he continued, ‘there’s something else she didn’t get out of Miss Spreckey, nor have you from her records. She didn’t have those kids out of wedlock. She was married and her husband’s name was Watson.’
‘How do you know that?’ Neville asked, puzzled.
‘ACC McGuire told me.’
‘He did? That explains a lot. He phoned me when I was at the scene yesterday, after Mr Mackenzie had briefed him. When I told them there was a picture on her mantelpiece, he asked me to copy it and send it to him. Are you saying he knew her?’
‘Not just him alone; Bob Skinner knew her as well, from quite a way back. Your ex did too, so big Mario said.’
‘Did he? Andy’s never mentioned anybody of that name that I recall. . either Spreckley or Watson.’
‘Like I said, it was a while ago. Before our time on the force.’
‘Then she must have been pretty special if they all still remember her.’
‘She was part of a special family, from what the boss said. But he didn’t volunteer anything. He said he’d brief me once the match was made. Were there any links to her past in the flat?’
‘Sammy,’ she replied, ‘there were hardly any links to her present. She kept official correspondence, pension, NHS stuff, but that was all. No,’ she said, contradicting herself immediately, ‘she did keep some Christmas cards. There were only three of them. One was signed “Susie”; that’s all, just “Susie”. Another was signed simply “Vicky, Patrick and baby Susan”, and the third said “Merry Christmas, Lennie”. Whoever he is, he’s really extravagant with words by comparison with the rest.’
‘There were no envelopes, I suppose.’
‘No, sorry.’
‘Are the cards bagged?’
‘Of course, but not dusted for prints, if that’s what you were going to ask next.’
‘It was,’ Pye conceded. ‘I’ll get moving on that. Maybe they’ll tell us who these people are. Every TV cop show hammers home to you at some point that nine times out of ten the victim knows the killer, but it’s bloody true in the real world as well.’ He sighed. ‘I’m not surprised you’re fine with me being SIO. So far we’ve got a real information vacuum; I’ll need to shake some loose, if I can. Maybe the ACC will have some thoughts for me. You got anything else?’
‘Only another knowledge gap, I’m afraid. Isabella was living rent-free, all bills paid, but I still don’t know who her benefactor was.’
‘Could it have been this mysterious non-sister, “Susie”, if that was her that sent the Christmas card?’
‘Possibly, but if we assume that Vicky’s the so-called niece and her daughter, surely she’d have known which flat it was that her mother owned. I’ll find out tomorrow, though. I have an appointment with the law firm that looks after it. They’ll be able to tell me straight away.’
‘Let’s hope so, otherwise Mario McGuire’s done me no favours by putting me in charge of this thing. It’s got high profile written all over it. Great if you get a result. A ticket back to uniform if you don’t.’
Fifteen
I’d taken a bit of a punt on the Barcelona hotel, but it paid off. Placa Reial is one of the city’s night-time highlights and our room overlooked it. As a bonus, the chef turned out to be Michelin class. We ate there on the Saturday night, had a couple of schnapps in the square outside, then slept like logs until the sun woke us next morning, in time for a leisurely breakfast and a day spent on the tourist trail. It ended with a visit to Camp Nou, the great amphitheatre that’s home to FC Barcelona. I’d neglected to tell Sarah that there was an early evening match on, but she took the news pretty well.
We found a taxi outside the ground more easily than I’d anticipated, and didn’t get caught up in the post-match traffic, so we made it back to the hotel in good time. I’d have been happy to give the chef another turn, had Sarah not seen a restaurant called Los Caracoles on a television food show. When she discovered that it was two minutes’ walk from our hotel and stayed open late, there was no holding her.
We even enjoyed the flight home next day, an anonymous couple on the world’s most controversial airline, if not its favourite. We’d gone budget for three reasons; the cost (once a Scot always a Scot), the fact that it was a direct flight and the greater chance that nobody would know us.
We could have gone through Heathrow or City, but I can’t board a flight to London these days without being hailed by someone or other, even people I barely know. With my marriage to Aileen having ended in a blaze of newspaper headlines, I wasn’t keen to be spotted on the shuttle with my other ex-wife, in case that found its way into the tabloids as well.
It wasn’t until mid-afternoon, when we were in an Edinburgh taxi, en route for Sarah’s place where I’d left my car, that I switched on my mobile. I’d called the office in Glasgow first thing in the morning, to let my exec know that I’d be out of touch during the day, and so I was expecting most of the voicemail calls that were there when I checked. Pure tedium, nearly all of them, issues that could have been dealt with further down the chain of command, but that’s what happens when you’re new in post as a chief constable: your subordinates don’t know you quite well enough to take a chance.
I’d barely finished sighing over the complex issue of the most efficient management of the available traffic cars in Argyll and Clyde, when the one I wasn’t expecting popped up.
I confess that I was having a hard time dealing with the emotional wrench of leaving Edinburgh. I had thought everything through before accepting the Strathclyde job, and I’d been satisfied that I was doing the right thing. The time had come to move on, I’d persuaded myself, to give my colleagues, protégés and friends the opportunity to get one more promotion on their dockets before the Scottish police forces were merged into one, so that they would be as well placed as possible in the shake-up that would follow.