Watching Billie, he saw a girl who was relaxed and bright, and who had made friends. He thought of her father’s words back in their kitchen: Best thing I ever did was ask if she wanted to come live with me. Her old school was rubbish, grades dropping... Yes, if your kid was unhappy, you’d want to change it. If their grades were falling and they were becoming sullen and withdrawn. Hard to imagine Billie like that now. She seemed almost to glow. They all did.
Having seen enough, Rebus picked up his phone and called Cafferty.
‘You again,’ Cafferty said.
‘Me again,’ Rebus confirmed.
‘It was Christie, wasn’t it? He’s the one who gave you Larry Huston?’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘I hear I’ve become a bit of an obsession. Plus, Christie’s just been moved to Saughton, and that was Huston’s home from home. Lot of chat goes on in prisons, Rebus.’
‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘Yes you fucking would. I hear you went to Saughton yourself. To see Ellis Meikle, I’m guessing. But along the way you had a little one-to-one with Mr Darryl Christie. If he can’t get to me, he wants you to have a go. Fucking good luck with that.’
‘I hope you’re not threatening Larry Huston. Anything happens to him, there’d be no one but you in the frame.’
‘Huston’s a nobody. There was no break-in — go ask Sir Adrian.’
‘You know damned fine that’s already been done. Tell me this then: whatever happened to Gram?’
‘Gram?’
Rebus spelled it for him. ‘He was a drug dealer, so there’s a better than even chance he was one of yours or on your radar.’
‘I’m drawing a blank.’
‘He sold to Jackie Ness’s crew. I thought you visited the set?’
‘Nobody was doing drugs while I was there.’
‘No?’
‘I think I’d have noticed. Got a description for this Gram?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Could you have heard wrong? Maybe Graeme with an e?’
‘Spill.’
It took Cafferty all of ten seconds to make his mind up. ‘The kid who OD’d, I looked into it. The name I kept hearing was Graeme. Used to deal a bit in places like Rogues. Made himself scarce after the kid died.’
‘Where was he sourcing the stuff?’
‘Aberdeen maybe.’
‘I remember you trying that line with us at the time so we’d go after the Bartollis for you.’
‘Aberdeen, Glasgow... wherever he got the stuff, it wasn’t from me.’
‘Didn’t really matter, did it? It cost you Conor Maloney’s friendship anyway.’
‘How come you always know where to stick your pins in me?’
‘Oh aye, you’re hurting.’
There was a chuckle on the other end of the phone. Then it went dead.
46
Late afternoon in Leith. The MIT office had made room for two visitors. Aubrey Hamilton had brought the soil specialist from the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen. The specialist’s name was Professor Lee-Anne Inglis. She was in her early forties, with long brown hair, parted and tucked behind one ear. She had come armed with data. There were charts and the results of chemical analyses. She explained to the room about ‘soil fingerprints’ and the records she had compiled from hundreds upon hundreds of samples. A few crumbs on the sole of a shoe or embedded in a tyre could pinpoint where that shoe or tyre had recently been. Soil, vegetation, pollen — all were crucial. Something the size of a grain of rice could be as unique as a fingerprint.
‘I used cross-matching first,’ she explained, holding up one of her charts. ‘Then gas chromatography and other tests.’
Chairs for her and Hamilton had been placed in the centre of the room, so that they were ringed by the MIT officers. Fox, with the rapt attention of a school swot, was studying the stapled sheets that had been handed out. Gamble, in contrast, had barely glanced at his before scratching his head and shrugging his shoulders in Phil Yeats’s direction.
Graham Sutherland was perched on one corner of his desk, Callum Reid on another, while Leighton and Crowther stayed behind their own desks and Siobhan Clarke stood by the map on the far wall, arms folded, listening intently. Ness and Brodie were long gone. The initial spotting of the two extras had been the only one. She didn’t know why the lawyer had looked so furious — he was bound to be billing Ness by the hour.
‘You’ve got us a location for the car?’ Sutherland nudged.
‘Not a precise one, no,’ Inglis intoned. ‘That was why I was keen to give you the information in person. It’s not for lack of effort.’ She held up her own copy of the handout in support of this. ‘But what I can say is that before it was in those woods, the car was on farmland of some kind.’
‘Farmland?’
‘The deposits show straw and animal manure below the loam and nettles picked up when it rolled down into the gully, the loam itself a good deal fresher. I’d say the car sat where you found it for no more than three years, and before that was in a field or a farm or a byre — the faecal matter is bovine. The soil type is from the Scottish lowlands, probably east coast rather than west. The sample was at least ten years old, maybe more.’
Clarke studied the map. ‘So all you’re asking us to do is search every farm in lowland Scotland?’
‘For a car that’s no longer even there,’ Sutherland added.
‘I’d suggest,’ Inglis went on, ignoring their tone, ‘the car was driven from the farmland to the woods. The tyres had picked up bits of grit and stone found on tarmacked roads, but without the earlier deposits becoming dislodged.’
‘Driven rather than transported there on the back of a flatbed?’ Yeats asked. He looked around the room. ‘Say it sat in a field for nine or ten years — battery would be flat; tyres, too. Oil, spark plugs...’ He shrugged.
‘Someone from a garage would have had to get it going,’ Gamble agreed.
‘Someone with a bit of know-how anyway,’ Yeats said.
Inglis had risen from her seat and approached the map, standing the other side of it from Clarke so they could all see. She found Poretoun Woods with her forefinger. ‘Maybe a twenty-mile radius. A longer drive would have dislodged the deposits.’
‘We can probably discount Edinburgh,’ Clarke mused.
‘I wouldn’t,’ Aubrey Hamilton piped up. ‘Plenty green belt around the edges of the city, meaning farmland.’
‘Am I allowed to say it’s needle-in-a-haystack stuff?’ George Gamble announced gruffly. ‘What does it matter if the car was stuck in a field all those years?’
‘Think that could happen without someone knowing?’ Clarke enquired. ‘We find where the car was kept, we’ve got ourselves someone who can tell us who put it there and who moved it again.’ She looked to Sutherland for confirmation. He was nodding to himself slowly as he sifted through the handout.
‘This is very useful, very useful,’ he intoned quietly. To Clarke’s ears, it sounded as if he was trying to convince himself.
By 5.50 p.m. they were back in what had become their usual bar, minus Reid and Yeats, who had appointments elsewhere. Between the departure of the two professors and knocking-off time, they had managed, by dint of an internet search, to find the name and phone number of the person they needed at the National Farmers’ Union Scotland. But that person had gone home for the day, as had everyone else in the office.