Ricky’s Alfa pulled up outside the club in less than ten minutes. He looked as grim as he’d sounded, and that made me feel no better. ‘Where’s the fire?’ I asked him. He answered with a savage grunt. ‘Ah, I see,’ I muttered. ‘It’s at your house.’
He headed up towards the city centre, swung round Picardy Place, and then along York Place. When he didn’t stop outside Alison’s office, I began to feel a bit easier. He didn’t say a word as he drove along Queen Street, then out across the Dean Bridge towards the west of the city.
‘I don’t know why I’m taking you here,’ he muttered, eventually. ‘But you’ve been arriving at disaster scenes since you got back to Edinburgh, so you might as well pitch up at another.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see.’
We drove, in renewed silence, out through Blackhall, until he took a right turn just past the library. I still hadn’t a clue where we were going, until, after another couple of twists and turns, he swung in to Gamekeeper’s Road and into the driveway of one of the big villas that line it.
Three police cars and an ambulance were lined up in front of the house. The doors of the ambulance were open, but no one was hurrying; I knew what that meant.
I still hadn’t a bloody clue. Then I looked at the garage to the side of the sandstone mansion. The wide door was open and I could read the personalised plates on the Roller and the Mercedes that were parked inside.
‘James Torrent,’ I heard myself gasp. ‘This is James Torrent’s place?’
‘Was,’ said Ricky, tersely. ‘Now it belongs to his estate.’ My head went all over the place again, as I realised what he had said. ‘Very sad,’ I managed, ‘but why are we here?’
‘Ronnie Morrow didn’t know I’d been fired as security consultant. He phoned me.’
He’d filled that gap in his knowledge, though. He was standing in the doorway as we crunched up the drive; he was dressed in a white crime-scene tunic.
‘You might have told me, sir,’ he said, reproachfully. ‘I found this on his desk.’
I peered at the copy letter as he held it up by a corner; I couldn’t read it all, but I could see that it was addressed to Ross Security and I could guess what it said.
‘As far as I’m concerned we still have a contract,’ Ricky snapped back.
‘Okay.’ He nodded to me. ‘But why bring him?’
‘He was with me when you called. I didn’t have time to drop him off. What happened?’
‘Come and have a look.’ He gave us each a tunic like his, from a pile by the door, and waited till we put them on. Then he led us into the house and up a big wide staircase; it reminded me of the place in Spain that I was in the process of selling to Scott Steele. At the top we turned left; a heavy panelled door lay open and we could see the people bustling inside.
We could also see James Torrent. He was behind a big wooden desk, in a chair that looked like the twin of the one in his penthouse office. He was reclining, his little piggy eyes staring at the ceiling, his great mouth hanging open, slackly.
‘Don’t go beyond the doorway,’ said Morrow. ‘You can see enough from here.’
‘How?’ asked Ricky.
‘Stabbed. Right through the heart.’
‘When?’
‘Just after midnight, the ME reckoned.’
‘Weapon?’
From one of the cavernous pockets of his tunic, Morrow produced a knife, encased in a clear plastic evidence envelope. A sound like a police siren went off in my head. I recognised it; when we were together, I’d once given Alison a fancy desk set for her office. It had included a paper knife with a long thin gilt blade and a fancy tooled handle, just like the one Morrow was holding. Okay, it wasn’t a one-off piece, but after the last couple of weeks. .
‘We’re going to have to speak to Alison Goodchild again,’ the detective sergeant announced, as if he’d been reading my thoughts.
‘Why?’ I blurted out; I was startled and couldn’t disguise it.
‘When he was killed, Mr Torrent appears to have been signing his day’s correspondence. The letter I showed Mr Ross was at the top of the pile he’d done, but there was another folder in his briefcase with more, not signed yet. One of them was to her, terminating her contract.’
‘Aw come on, Ronnie,’ Ricky protested. ‘You might as well list me as a suspect!’
‘Don’t take it like that, sir. You and she aren’t the only people getting bad news in those letters. We’ll have to talk to everybody; you know that.’
Ross was mollified. ‘I suppose so.’
I tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Listen, I need to go. I have to be on set at eleven-thirty and it’s five past now.’
‘Okay. I’ll take you.’
Morrow led the way back to the front door; we stripped off the tunics and dumped them on a pile of discard just outside, in the pathway.
‘I won’t bother to interview you, sir,’ said the sergeant.
‘Thanks for the courtesy,’ Ross shot back, as we walked towards his car.
‘You might have told me you’d such a tight deadline,’ he grumbled as we climbed in.
‘I don’t.’ I told him about the knife.
‘Oh fuck,’ he whispered, when I was finished.
‘But it’s a plant. You know that.’
‘Sure.’
‘And she’s got an alibi, hasn’t she?’
‘Sure. She was in my bed. And I’ve got a grudge against Torrent as well as her! Some alibi. That knife’ll have her prints on it. Sure, I’ll say she was with me, that we’re in a relationship. All of a sudden she’s got an accomplice. Do you know what? They’ll wind up arresting us both.
‘Worse than that; they’ll assume we’ve been having it off since before her fiance was murdered. Chances are they’ll do us both for that as well.’
Chapter 48
I’d never seen Ricky Ross panic before; it was not a pretty sight. It was all I could do to stop him picking up Alison and making a run for it. He saw sense at last, though, on the drive back to the city centre.
‘We have got to concentrate on what we started on Sunday, man,’ I told him. ‘We have to find the killer before it goes pear-shaped for us all.’
‘You think it isn’t already?’ he retorted, as we drove across the George IV Bridge. ‘But you’re right. We’ve got some time yet; even if Alison’s prints are on that knife, it’ll take them a while to lift them and match them. If she goes away on a business trip, even if it’s only for a couple of days, that’ll buy us more.’
‘So how are you getting on checking the lists you took from Torrent?’
He swung the car round, past Bristo Square, into George Street, and stopped on a yellow line. ‘I’ve been through them all; wee Anna was efficient. Everyone who came into that building printed and signed their name.’
He chuckled. ‘All the well-known ones signed her own wee book, too. . even you, flash bastard that you are. Must have been a great job for an autograph hunter; they came to her. Every signature in there matched a signature on the list, bar one.’
‘Whose was that?’
‘Haven’t a fucking clue. The thing was completely illegible; just a straight line with squiggles in it, that’s all.’
‘I know the one. Like an ECG chart?’
‘That’s it. It’s nowhere on the Health and Safety lists. Some pop star probably; she’ll have taken it with her to a concert.’
‘So where does it take us?’
He threw me a gloomy look. ‘Nowhere, pal. If you were making a western here I’d say I could hear the sound of the sheriff’s posse closing in on me. As it is, I can almost feel Mr Skinner’s hand on my collar.’
I could see that his earlier panic was still pretty close to the surface. I’d never imagined him like this before, never thought it possible that he, super-cop, super-Mason, super-connected, could lose it. If he was scared surely I should be too, I told myself. And then, as if in answer, a strange feeling of certainty swept over me; it told me, beyond doubt, that everything would be all right.