‘To be honest, I got the impression that if Alafair ever knew of Bella’s existence, she’d forgotten about her, and the same may well have been true of Hastie. Which reminds me, did the hospital confirm his condition?’
‘I spoke to his probation officer,’ Sauce replied, ‘and she was able to fill me in. She’s entitled to know, since he’s a lifer on parole. She’s been advised by the hospital that he has not one, but two brain tumours, and that surgery isn’t an option. Nothing’s an option really; they could try radiation but he’d almost certainly wind up like his father, and even then not for long. As it is, the probation officer says he has motor difficulties and his speech is starting to go. They’re about to move him into a specialist nursing home.’
‘Poor bastard.’
‘Huh!’ Haddock snorted. ‘That poor bastard murdered two men in Edinburgh, and there were three more in Tyneside that the CPS knew he did but never charged him with because there was a one in four chance of an acquittal. If ever there’s a case of poetic justice, it’s him.’
‘Would you feel that way if it was Cheeky’s grandpa with the tumour?’ Pye asked, quietly.
‘Probably, but I’d keep it to myself.’ Sauce paused. ‘In a roundabout way that leads me back to Perry Holmes. What are we going to do about his death and Gayle’s evidence, that Alafair paid him to go away?’
‘Us? We’re going to report it to the fiscal’s office and that’s all. I spoke to the DCS and that’s what she says.’
‘What if they kick it back to us?’
‘She won’t let them. She’ll send it to the cold case unit. But it won’t come to that, Sauce; we’re pretty sure what happened, but pretty soon, when Hastie goes, Alafair will be the only one of them left alive. There’s nobody to incriminate her; even the fiscal will work that one out.’ He frowned. ‘Let’s not get sidetracked on that any longer. Mary Chambers is keen to know how we’re getting on with her bright idea, looking for Spanish plated vans near Caledonian Crescent around the time of the murder.’
‘I was afraid she would be,’ Haddock said. ‘I’ve got the City Council’s monitoring department on to it. You can guess how pleased they were when I asked them. So far, nothing; I’ll stir them if you like, but they know already that it comes from the boss.’
‘It’s all right, I’ll tell her. It was a shot in the dark and Mary knows it.’ He was in the act of reaching for his phone when it rang.
‘DI Pye,’ a bright female voice sang on the other end of the line, ‘this is Anna Jacobowski from the Forensic Service. I’ve got something rather intriguing for you on your murder inquiry.’
‘Just intriguing? Not case-breaking?’
‘That’s down to you guys, isn’t it?’ she chuckled. ‘We’ve just analysed one of the dozens of DNA samples from Caledonian Crescent. It’s different from all the rest; it demonstrates a second generation familial relationship with the dead woman.’
‘What does that mean, in plain Scottish?’
‘It means it’s her grandson.’
‘Her grandson?’ Pye repeated, switching the phone to speaker mode. ‘You’re on broadcast, Anna. DS Haddock is with me.’
‘That’s very interesting,’ Sauce remarked. ‘Jack McGurk and Karen Neville interviewed Marlon Junior yesterday and he denied even knowing that he had a Granny Watson. I think you and I need to talk to this lad ourselves, boss.’
‘Maybe you do,’ the scientist intervened, ‘but I haven’t got to the really interesting part yet. I’ve tested the Marlon Hicks swab that I received from your two colleagues, and from the very first analysis I can tell you that the other one isn’t his. Bella Watson had two grandsons, gentlemen. . at least two.’
‘How?’ Pye gasped.
‘How many ways are there, Inspector?’ Jacobowski laughed. ‘I’ll send you a written report by email.’
‘There’s IVF,’ Haddock observed, as she hung up, ‘but somehow I can’t see Marlon Senior leaving any frozen sperm behind him.’
Pye frowned, looking up from his chair at the ceiling. ‘Could Lulu and Marlon have had another son, one we never knew about?’
‘No. If they were brothers, Anna would have said.’
‘Of course, but Bella had another son, remember. He died when he was fifteen, but I suppose, in theory. .’
‘I’ll get on to the General Registers Office; see if Ryan is named on any birth record. . other than his own. Any son of his would be pushing thirty by now, so I’ll know where to look.’
‘Get Jackie to do that, Sauce, I’ve got another task for us. We know from Marlon Hicks that Lulu’s mother’s still around. Let’s find her, and ask her how much she knows about the Watson family.’
Forty-Nine
The HR person was as good as her word; Max Allan’s file made it from her office to mine within five minutes. It extended to three folders, Max having enjoyed a long career that had ended in the carnage of the assassination of my predecessor in the Strathclyde chief’s chair a few weeks earlier.
‘Why the hell couldn’t all this have been computerised?’ I grumbled as I contemplated forty years’ worth of documents. ‘Then I could have entered “David Mackenzie” in the search window and pushed a button.’
But it hadn’t so there was nothing for it but to start the process. I decided to discard some of the material, since Mackenzie hadn’t been born when Max had joined the force, and so I skimmed through his career until I found his posting to Uddingston, in Lanarkshire, as a detective sergeant. The name rang a bell with me, and not only because Myra and her family had lived close by. Tom Donnelly had told me that was where the chip-pan incident had happened.
I went through the documents one by one, from that point on, and pretty soon I had a result. I hadn’t expected to find a report of the affair on Max’s file, as that would have been in CID records rather than personnel, but I did find a summary. It was attached to a note of an official commendation by the chief constable of the day, acknowledging Max’s exceptional performance in uncovering the abuse of the child and framing charges leading to a successful prosecution. The boy had been identified in the commendation document, but his name had been redacted.
I wondered about that; indeed I was curious enough to pick up the phone and ask the head of HR about it. ‘Would your department have done that automatically, thirty-odd years ago?’
‘No,’ she replied at once, ‘not then. Nowadays yes, but back then, in a confidential file, no. The published notice of commendation wouldn’t have included the attachment, you see.’
‘Was there ever a time when you’d have gone back and done it retrospectively?’
‘If we had the manpower to do that. .’ she began, leaving the rest unsaid.
‘Could ACC Allan have had access to his own file?’
‘In theory everyone has a right to see all information held about them but, Chief, when you’re an ACC, there isn’t a door in the building that’s closed to you. . apart from your office, perhaps.’
‘Mine? No, it isn’t, in fact.’
‘It hasn’t always been that way, I assure you.’
I laughed. ‘I’m sure. And who knows what the future will hold?’
I thanked her and got on with my self-imposed task, taking another step forward to the year in which Mackenzie had applied to join the force. By that time, Max was back in Glasgow, back in headquarters in Pitt Street. He was a chief super by then, and back in uniform, as he had been for most of his career, in a desk job supervising the traffic department. Nothing to do directly with staff recruitment; it was the responsibility of one of the ACCs of the day, but he reported to that guy, and he would have been on the same floor. If he’d wanted to. .
‘But why, Bob, why?’ I asked myself. ‘Why would Max want to smooth Mackenzie’s way into the force and remove anything that wouldn’t have pleased the recruitment panel?’
I went through the rest of the file looking for an answer, but I saw nothing. Why was I bothered? Because the man had denied knowledge of someone who was a fugitive and he had lied about it.