‘Has the doctor seen you, Mrs Gillespie?’ Davidson asked.
‘He gave me pills to help me sleep. Ridiculous to think I could sleep.’
‘But you’re all right?’
‘I’m …’ She sought the words expected of her. ‘I’m coping, thank you.’
‘Do you feel up to answering a few more questions?’
She nodded, and Davidson relaxed a little. He brought out his notebook and consulted it.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘you said last night that your husband had gone out to visit a constituent — that was what he told you?’
‘Yes.’
‘But he didn’t say where he was meeting this constituent?’
‘No.’
‘Or the constituent’s name?’
‘No.’
‘Or what they were going to discuss?’
She shrugged, remembering. ‘We ate dinner at eight as usual — I’d done chicken casserole, Tom’s favourite. He had two helpings. After that, I thought he’d either work in his office — he always has work to do — or else read the paper. Instead, he said he had to go out.’
‘You’re surprised he ended up in Dalry?’
‘Very. We don’t know anyone in that part of town. Why would he lie to me?’
‘Well,’ Rebus put in, ‘he was hiding things from you, wasn’t he?’
‘What do you mean?’
Davidson gave Rebus a warning look, and Rebus softened his voice a little.
‘I mean, the day I came here you were busy shredding documents — sackfuls of them — in a shredder your husband hired specially.’
‘Yes, I remember. Tom said he was running out of space in the office. They were ancient history. As you can see, it’s pretty cramped with all the paperwork.’ She waved a hand around the room.
‘Mrs Gillespie,’ Rebus persisted, ‘your husband headed the Industrial Planning Committee — did the documents have anything to do with that?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘If they were ancient history, why bother to shred them, why not just chuck them out?’
Audrey Gillespie got up and walked to the fireplace. Davidson gave Rebus an angry look.
‘Tom said they could fall into the wrong hands. Journalists, people like that. He said it was to do with confidentiality.’
‘Did you look at the files at all?’
‘I … I don’t remember.’ She was frantic now, her wet eyes everywhere but on the two policemen.
‘You weren’t curious?’
‘Look, I don’t see what any of this has to do with anything.’
Rebus walked over to her and took her hands in his. ‘It might have everything to do with your husband’s murder, Mrs Gillespie.’
‘Now, John,’ Davidson complained, ‘we don’t know …’
But Audrey Gillespie looked into Rebus’s eyes, and saw something there she could trust. She blinked away the tears. ‘He was very secretive,’ she said quietly, forcing herself to be calm. ‘I mean, about whatever it was he’d been working on. He’d been at it for months — for the best part of a year, actually. I used to curse the hours he put in. He told me it would be worth it, he said we should always focus on the long view. By that he meant he would one day be an MP, it was what he lived for.’
‘You’ve no inkling what this project of his was?’
She shook her head. ‘It was something he’d discovered while serving on the committee, and I know it was to do with accounting. I could work that much out from the kinds of things he was reading — balance sheets, profit-and-loss accounts … I trained as an accountant, something Tom sometimes forgot. I run a string of shops now, but I still handle the books. I could have helped him, but he always had to do everything for himself.’ She paused. ‘You know, the only reason he really needed me was my money. I’m sorry if that sounds heartless.’
‘Not at all,’ Davidson said.
‘Were these company accounts, Mrs Gillespie?’ Rebus persisted.
‘I think they must have been, the numbers involved: hundreds of millions of pounds.’
‘Hundreds of millions?’
So it wasn’t just Mensung, or even Charters’ empire. It was much bigger. Rebus thought of PanoTech, and then recalled that someone else had used the phrase ‘hundreds of millions’ … Rory McAllister, or someone like him.
‘Mrs Gillespie, could these figures have been to do with the SDA?’
‘I don’t know!’ She slumped back on to the sofa.
‘OK, John,’ Davidson said, ‘you’ve had your say.’
But Davidson might as well not have been there.
‘You see, Mrs Gillespie,’ Rebus said, sitting down beside her, ‘the thing is, someone tried to scare your husband, and it worked. They paid a man called McAnally to put the fear of God into him. I don’t know if they knew how far McAnally would go. McAnally confronted your husband, and I think gave him a message, a warning of some kind. Then McAnally killed himself, just to force the warning home. He was dying anyway, and he’d been paid handsomely. Your husband got scared, rightly so, and rented that shredder so he could destroy everything he’d been working on, all the evidence.’
‘Evidence of what?’ she asked.
‘Of something very big. Now, McAnally slipped up, he died too spectacularly, and that got me curious. I don’t think I’ve discovered even half what your husband knew, but that’s not the point. The point is, these people suspect either that your husband was helping me — maybe he’d given me his notes — or that he would talk to me eventually. Either way, they decided he was beyond scaring. They had to go a bit further.’
‘What you’re saying is that, if you’d left well alone, Tom might still be alive.’
Rebus bowed his head. ‘I accept what you’re saying, but I didn’t kill your husband.’ He paused. ‘I’d like to find out who did.’
‘What can I do to help?’
Rebus glanced towards Davidson. ‘You can start by telling us anything you think might help. And you could go through your husband’s papers; there might be some clue there.’
She thought for a moment. ‘Will I be in danger, too?’
Rebus laid a hand on hers. ‘Not at all, Mrs Gillespie. Look, is there no one Tom might have confided in?’
She started to shake her head. ‘No, wait … there is someone.’ Then she got up and left the room. Davidson was staring grimly at Rebus.
‘See,’ Rebus told him, ‘you’re great with the hearts and flowers, but weakness is there to be exploited.’
Davidson didn’t say a word.
Audrey Gillespie carried a desk diary into the room. ‘This is last year’s,’ she said, sitting down next to Rebus. ‘Tom began all this cloak-and-dagger stuff back in May, but it only really took off in October and November.’ She flipped to the pages for those months. Each day had its fill of meetings and engagements.
‘See?’ Mrs Gillespie said, pointing to a page. ‘These meetings here. Two this week ’ she flipped a couple of pages — ‘two the next ’ two more pages — ‘then three more.’
The meetings were just a series of times, plus the same two letters — CK. ‘Cameron Kennedy,’ Rebus said.
‘Yes.’
‘Who?’ Davidson asked. He’d come over to the sofa to look at the diary.
‘The Lord Provost,’ Mrs Gillespie explained. ‘They kept meeting for lunch. I remember because Tom had to have his suits dry cleaned; he had to look his smartest for the Lord Provost.’
‘He didn’t tell you why they were meeting so often?’ Rebus had taken the diary from her and was flipping through it. There were no meetings with ‘CK’ until October, after which they took place once a week at least.
‘Tom hinted there might be a good job in it come reorganisation. He’s in the same political party as the Lord Provost.’
‘This is interesting,’ Rebus said, sitting back, the better to peruse the diary.
Davidson had some questions to ask — the usual ones — so Rebus excused himself. He found Helena Profitt seated at the kitchen table, tugging at a lace handkerchief.
‘Terrible thing,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Rebus, sitting down opposite her. He thought of Charters’ ‘subtlety’, and the way Davidson had confronted the widow, and still he couldn’t find an easy way to ask what he wanted to ask. ‘Miss Profitt, this may not be the time …’ She looked at him. ‘But I was wondering if you knew … that is, if you had any suspicion that Mrs Gillespie and her husband …?’