‘What did happen to her mother?’ I asked. ‘I know nothing of this.’
‘They’ve identified the child. She’s from Garvald. She was snatched on the way to school this morning. According to Joe, her mother was in surgery with severe head injuries.’
‘Eh?’ I gasped. ‘That’s weird. He attacks mum, kidnaps the child . . . What was her name? Do you know?’
‘Olivia Gates, known to her family as Zena. That delayed the identification by a couple of hours.’
‘Why the nickname?’
‘From what Sammy told Joe, Mum’s a fan of The Urban Dictionary.’
‘What about dad, Mr Gates?’
‘Naval officer is all I know.’
I winced. ‘Poor bastard to have to deal with this.’ I held up my beer. ‘You sure you wouldn’t like a drink, to help lighten the mood?’
She smiled and squeezed my hand. ‘On call, I told you. And then there’s the other thing,’ she added. She dug an elbow into my side, gently. ‘How has today made you feel?’ she asked.
It was a good question, one I had asked myself. ‘Alienated,’ I replied. ‘It’s the first time I’ve felt the faintest flash of regret over leaving the service. I wanted to take command this morning and to stay hands-on until the guy was caught. When Eden told me about his problem, I wanted to pick up the phone and yell at someone. But I couldn’t do either of those things, so yes, I felt excluded . . . maybe even a wee bit emasculated.’
‘In that case your balls were too big for the job,’ she countered. ‘Too much testosterone isn’t a good quality in any commander.’
That could have been the beginning of a long and interesting debate, if Sarah’s mobile hadn’t rung before I could respond to the challenge. She snatched it from the breast pocket of the casual shirt she’d put on while she was upstairs and took the call.
Her face darkened as I watched. ‘Yes,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, I know the location. It’s not far off the bypass so I’ll be there inside half an hour.’
She put the phone away, and pushed herself up from the couch. ‘That was Mary Chambers,’ she said. ‘It’s a double fatality; two people found in a burned-out car just off the Biggar Road.’
‘That must have been the major incident that Craig was talking about,’ I guessed, aloud. ‘Will you be okay? I’d come with you, if Trish was here.’
‘And I wouldn’t let you, suppose she was,’ Sarah retorted. ‘It isn’t your job any more, lover, and I don’t need a chauffeur. You stay here with our kids and your file.’
Twenty-Five
I did as I’d been told, not only because there wasn’t an option, but also because Sarah was right: it wasn’t my job any more. Instead I read Seonaid one last A. A. Milne poem before switching out her light (sleeping without a nightlight is a matter of honour with her) then checked that the boys were obeying standard bedtime operating procedures.
As I did so, all the time I found myself thinking about Sarah’s potential bombshell, and considering its practical consequences. Our family home had been built with five bedrooms and a self-contained flat for Trish above the garages. We had one spare en-suite room that Alex used whenever she decided to stay. Ignacio had taken no decision about where he would live when he was released, but I was determined that it would not be with his mother, who was, is and always will be bad news in my book. I’d made it clear that I hoped he’d move in with us and get to know the family he’d been denied for twenty years, and he hadn’t rejected the idea. With him and a new baby, space would be tight, even in our big villa.
In my younger days, in the job, when we were in the mire and things looked black, I was fond of telling my people, ‘There are no problems, only challenges and opportunities.’ My tongue was in my cheek then, but as I wished Mark goodnight and closed his bedroom door, I knew that my rapidly expanding family was giving me an accommodation challenge, big time.
In an attempt to drive it from my mind, I collected the Princess Alison file and took it into what I call my office these days, although Sarah still calls it ‘the panic room’, a sanctuary in those times when either of us really needs privacy.
Leaving the door ajar just in case of sounds from upstairs, I cued up some quiet music on the streaming system and settled down to read. The simple act of opening the file put me back mentally in my old office in Pitt Street, in Glasgow, a room that I’d never grown to love in the way that I’d cherished my accommodation in the command suite in the Edinburgh police HQ. I shoved that image to one side and concentrated on what was before me.
The first pages were a detailed description of the property that had been stolen and, in police-speak, of the way the crime had been committed. It was followed by a series of photographs; the first six were of the empty boathouse, with its massive door raised, then lowered.
A group of four followed; three showed the exterior and the channel of buoys that led into the Gareloch, while the fourth was a satellite image showing the location of Eden’s place, two-thirds along the road from Helensburgh and its suburb, Rhu, to the Faslane naval base.
Third and last was a series of images of the Princess Alison herself, external and internal. Eden had promised to email some to me, but I hadn’t opened my mailbox since then, and so the file gave me my first sight of the lost cruiser. She was a serious piece of kit; a billionaire’s toy and no mistake. I looked for anything in her lines that might remind me of the woman after whom she’d been named, but saw nothing. Alison Higgins was a robust, earthy, lusty woman; her image might have belonged on the bowsprit of a pirate ship, but never on a luxury cruiser.
One of the photographs showed a party in progress: men and women in light-coloured clothes, most of them brandishing champagne flutes. I extracted that from the file and studied it closely. As far as I was concerned at that stage, every person who had set foot on the missing Princess was a suspect, until they weren’t.
‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is a very fine principle, and it’s the foundation of our justice system, but any investigator worth his corn has to begin with the opposite viewpoint.
The rest of the folder was crap.
As I read on, I saw that the first thing DI McGarry had done was to report the theft to the Marine and Coastguard Agency, which doesn’t actually have a criminal investigation division. The second was to circulate a description of the missing vessel to all police forces with a coastline south of the Firth of Clyde, including the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and the Garda Siochana, the Irish force. The third was to secure the posting of a description and photograph on a website called stolenboats.org that appeared to be fed with information by the marine insurance industry and the police but to be independent of either.
There were a few notes in response, but all of them were negative, saying that there had been no reports of a boat matching the description of the Princess Alison. The conclusion of McGarry’s trawl was that she had simply vanished.
The man had done the basics at the site of the theft, but no more: a crime scene team had gone over all the accessible points in the boathouse, and had found nothing out of place, no unidentified fingerprints. The padlock on the sliding double doors through which the thieves had entered had been cut through its arch, then put back in place, helping to delay the discovery of the raid.
Their report solved one riddle that had been niggling me since Eden and Rory had told me the story. If the phone line that serviced the alarm system had been cut, why hadn’t the gardeners noticed it? The answer was that the cable was underground, terminating in a box on the wall of the boathouse, beside the door. The cover had been removed and then replaced.