‘You didn’t want to come in?’ she asked him.
‘Better if people don’t start joining the dots.’
‘You’re making progress on Ellis Meikle?’
‘There’s a bit of expertise I’m lacking, Christine. I’ve looked at all the social media stuff, but it’s really only Ellis’s and Kristen’s. I wouldn’t mind knowing what was being said among their various friends — before the murder and after.’
‘Just friends, or family members too?’
‘The more the merrier.’
She puffed out her cheeks and expelled some air. ‘It’s a big ask.’
‘Complicated, you mean?’
‘Time-consuming,’ she corrected him. ‘In a perfect world, I’d maybe start a few fake accounts, friend all and sundry, wait for them to friend back, chat with them...’ She looked at him. ‘It’s weird, but people online will share stuff with strangers that they wouldn’t say to their nearest and dearest.’
‘Sounds like that might take a while.’
‘It definitely would — weeks, maybe a lot longer.’
‘So if that’s not an option...?’
‘I’d just trawl where I can, butt into threads, add my tuppence worth. Might end up blocked or muted here and there, though. Plus a lot of kids use Snapchat, and those messages get wiped. And bear in mind they’ll keep things private if they think it’s sensitive...’ She paused, eyes still on him. ‘Whereabouts in all of that did I start to lose you?’
‘A sentence or two back.’
She smiled again. ‘The good news is, this is something I can be doing in my free time. But it’d help if you gave me what you’ve got — accounts and user names for killer and victim; names of their various friends and family members...’
‘I can email you all of that.’
‘Not to my official account.’ She took out her phone. ‘I’m sending you my email address.’ They waited until his own phone buzzed. ‘Job done.’
‘Thanks, Christine. Drinks on me when this is finished.’
She nodded slowly, her face darkening a little. ‘We all worked damned hard on that case, John. We got the right result.’
‘I don’t doubt it.’
‘Yet here you are looking for holes the family can take to an appeal. If you find any, there’s omelette all over our faces.’ She paused. ‘On the other hand, I saw how ugly everything got between Siobhan and ACU. It’s just funny that to get at them, we end up messy too.’
‘I’ll help you clean up the kitchen after.’
‘Oh aye? Bit of a speciality of yours?’
‘I get the feeling someone’s been talking.’
‘Spilling the beans, you might say,’ Esson commented, pushing open the door of the Saab and getting out.
26
All the way to the police station, Ness had asked what was going on. They’d been waiting for him outside the main entrance to Locke Ness Productions. In the car, they’d let him phone his PA. He’d said simply that he was held up and might not be in until the afternoon. Then he’d asked the two detectives again: what was going on?
‘You got a solicitor?’ Reid had answered. ‘If not, one will be provided for you.’
They’d left him to stew in the interview room while his lawyer was summoned. Emily Crowther had taken him a weak cup of tea.
‘Still thinks I could be in films,’ she reported back. Sutherland meantime was as good as his word. Despite pleading looks from Clarke and Callum Reid, it was George Gamble who accompanied him into the interview room once the solicitor turned up. Phil Yeats had fetched the A/V equipment.
‘Won’t be new to you, Mr Ness,’ he had commented.
‘I’m happier on the other side of a camera, son,’ Ness had replied. The room was stuffy, the heating having been turned up to maximum. Ness’s jacket was over the back of his chair, and he had loosened an extra button on his shirt. The lawyer, Kelvin Brodie, was wise to such strategies, however, and asked them to either turn the radiator down or leave the door open.
‘Don’t want to abandon the interview over health and safety concerns, do we?’
Clarke knew Brodie from court appearances. She had expected Ness’s solicitor to be the sort that specialised in business contracts, but Brodie was criminal law through and through. She was about to alert Sutherland to this when the door was closed from within, leaving her in the corridor along with the rest of the team.
Nothing much to do after that but wait.
Crowther had dug up a little more background on the DP and sound recordist, so they put their heads together in preparation for the following day. Fox and Leighton were in their own little empire, appearing in the MIT room only for coffee and tea top-ups.
‘Heard from the Chuggabugs?’ Clarke asked Fox when he approached her desk.
‘No.’
‘Going to tell them about the fingerprint?’
‘I doubt I’ll need to — they don’t seem to lack sources.’
‘Which is precisely why you should get in first. That way, you look keen. As you say, they’ll find out sooner or later anyway.’
Fox nodded at the sense of this and went out to make the call while Clarke checked her own phone. Rebus had texted her to ask for an update, but she was ignoring him. Same went for Laura Smith, who was, in her own words, ‘hearing jungle drums’. Which meant someone at the forensic lab had to have blabbed. Or maybe the fiscal’s office. Or DCS Mollison had started spreading the news at Fettes or St Leonard’s. No point really speculating, except that these days by the time a whisper reached the internet it had become an ill-intentioned and half-formed yelp, a yelp capable of spreading like the most virulent flu bug.
She thought of the pile of paper on Rebus’s dining table, the one comprising social media messages to and from Ellis Meikle’s various accounts, filled with young men’s bravado. She knew there were porn clips and GIFs mixed in with it all, and demeaning commentary about local girls and their mothers. One of Ellis’s friends had let Ellis know his mother Seona was ‘pure MILF’, leading others to chip in with thumbs up and thumbs down. How toxic would this culture eventually become? Clarke hoped she’d never find out, but as a detective, she feared she probably would.
Dallas Meikle’s anonymous phone calls and graffiti had been innocent by comparison with some of the online abuse she had encountered. She wondered about that. Dallas could have sent anything to her mobile: images, texts, the lot. She reckoned he had known, however, that these would involve either a computer or a mobile phone on his part, and that those could always be traced back to their source. Maybe Steele and Edwards had given him the benefit of their wisdom.
‘Wouldn’t put it past them,’ she muttered to herself.
After an hour and a half, Sutherland and Gamble emerged from the interview room and headed for the kettle, followed by the MIT team. Sutherland asked Yeats to go do guard duty outside the interview room door. Not that it was needed, but it would keep Ness on edge.
‘He’s having a confab with his lawyer,’ Sutherland explained. ‘And he’s admitting nothing, says he’s no idea how his print could have got on the cuffs, never seen them before.’
‘Brodie meantime,’ Gamble added, spooning coffee into a mug, ‘wants to know how reliable the print can be after all this time. He went straight for the car and the fact Ness has never hidden that he was given a lift in it. So we’d expect to find his prints there for a start. His line is: Ness could have reached a hand down the side of his seat and touched the cuffs without realising.’
‘He also,’ Sutherland broke in, ‘wants to know why we’ve kept an innocent man’s prints on the database all these years.’