‘Except,’ Haddock, keen to re-establish some authority, interrupted, ‘Destry wasn’t a problem as long as it paid its bills on time.’
‘You’ve got it: which Destry didn’t. It wasn’t that it couldn’t, for it was cash positive; no, it was the widow Stewart’s policy to keep her suppliers waiting. Eventually that proved fatal for Mackail Extrusions. By that stage the company’s viability was on a knife-edge; it was operating on a big overdraft with a usurious interest rate.’
‘And the See You Next Tuesday pulled the plug?’ Pye asked.
‘Precisely. He knew the debt was out there, but he refused to extend further credit. Hector Mackail had run out of cash, even though by that stage he’d re-mortgaged his house to stay afloat. He couldn’t pay his own creditors and he couldn’t pay his employees’ wages. He had no choice but to call in the receiver.’
‘He wasn’t completely innocent,’ Haddock said. ‘While his business was effectively down the tubes he ran up a bill with a design company, trying to generate new orders by rebranding it.’
‘I didn’t know that,’ the journalist admitted. ‘It doesn’t surprise me, though. Mackail wasn’t the brightest; he should have gone legal with Destry Glazing at an early stage, but he didn’t.’
‘Why didn’t he?’
‘Because it was owned by Eden Higgins, that’s why not. Scotland’s business angel is not a man people like to cross.’
‘I thought he was squeaky clean,’ Pye observed.
‘He is, but that’s because nothing ever sticks to him.’
‘There’s mud to throw?’
Macy contemplated her second drink. ‘I’m starving,’ she said, looking at Haddock, who took the hint and went to the bar, returning with a pie on a plate.
‘Beef chilli.’
She flashed her eyes at him. ‘Darling, you remembered.’
‘How could I forget? You used to put those away two at a time.’
‘Of course I did, when you were paying. You’re lucky I’m on a diet just now.’ She took a bite of the pie. ‘Tasty,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, Eden Higgins. Guess what happened to the leavings of Mackail Extrusions?’
‘We feed you and we have to play guessing games?’ Haddock exclaimed.
‘Fair enough. The liquidator put the bite on Destry Glazing. It paid up without a murmur, and then it bought the assets of the failed company for a song, those assets being all its plant and equipment. By the time the bank was paid, and the liquidator himself, of course, the other creditors were left with something like fifteen pence in the pound. Effectively, Destry Glazing Solutions bought itself an in-house extrusion facility for little more than zero, right at the moment when the construction industry’s coming out of hibernation.’
‘That’s a hell of a story, Macy,’ Pye remarked. ‘I read the business press, so how come I’ve never seen it anywhere?’
‘You don’t watch Bloomberg, since you’d never heard of it before tonight.’
‘You ran it?’
‘I ran a piece about the role of the bank. When I put it together I called Destry Glazing’s PR people and asked for a comment. They promised to get back to me, but they never did. Instead I had a call from Eden Higgins’ lawyers, threatening me with an action for defamation if his name was even hinted at in my report.’
She renewed her attack on the pie. ‘Nobody else in Edinburgh touched it,’ she mumbled. ‘So I guess that my colleagues in the printed media were all warned off.’ She leaned forward. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘how does all that relate to the dead child?’
‘It doesn’t, not really,’ Haddock confessed. ‘The designer that Mackail ran up the bill with, she was the mother. She was attacked as well, but that never made the press. We’ve been looking for a connection, but I don’t see one.’
‘Oh no?’ Macy murmured. ‘There’s a PS to the story. I heard it a month or two back, from a bloke I know on the Daily Record business staff. Yes, it’s a red-top but it does have a business reporter. His girlfriend had just chucked him, and, well, I consoled him.’ She beamed at Haddock. ‘I always was good at consoling, Harry, wasn’t I?’
‘No comment,’ ‘Harry’ muttered.
‘Anyway,’ her second drink had disappeared without either detective noticing its demise, ‘in the aftermath, when we were wondering what the hell to say to each other, he came out with a story that the ex had told him in confidence.’
‘Under similar circumstances no doubt.’
‘Probably. Her name’s Luisa, and she’s Eden Higgins’s PA. The tale was that after the liquidator had done his worst, Hector Mackail turned up unannounced at Eden’s office up on the Mound. He accused him of being in cahoots with the See You Next Tuesday at the bank . . . in which Higgins has a substantial stake, did I forget to mention that? . . . and of masterminding the whole thing.
‘Eden told him to go away, or words to that effect, and Mackail lost it. He banjoed him and knocked him down a flight of stairs, buggering his ankle in the process. Luisa was going to call your lot, but Eden told her to do no more than chuck Mackail out. He wanted no police involvement, no exposure of the story. He walked about with a cast on his ankle for five weeks and never told anyone why.’
‘I can see why he’d want to keep that quiet,’ Pye said. ‘Did you think about running it?’
‘No, and neither did my one-night stand. The fight would have been denied, Luisa would have been fired and nobody would ever have proved any collusion between Eden and See You Next Tuesday.’
Macy finished the pie and stood up, abruptly. ‘I hope that was all worthwhile, guys. I’ve got to go now; Goldman Sachs is having a champagne reception in the Balmoral Hotel. There will be food.’
She leaned over and kissed Haddock on the cheek, leaving a lipstick impression. ‘Bye, Sauce, your secret is totally unsafe with me.’
‘Fuck me!’ Sammy Pye gasped as she left. ‘Now I understand why you wanted a minder.’
Forty-Seven
‘It’s a hell of a story, boys,’ Mario McGuire said, ‘but how does it relate to your inquiry? Your target is the person who killed Francey and the Polish girl, because it’s almost certain that he paid them to kidnap Zena. The other thing, this corporate skulduggery, there’s no way that it relates.’ The DCC scratched his chin. ‘Mind you,’ he mused, ‘I’m interested, for other reasons, that Eden Higgins is caught up in it.’
Sammy Pye had called him the previous evening, almost as soon as the doors in Bert’s Bar had stopped swinging after Macy Robertson’s departure, to ask for a review meeting on the investigation. McGuire had been on his way south from Inverness at the time, and had been only too eager to grab an excuse for avoiding the chief constable’s routine morning meetings with his deputies and assistants. He would admit it to nobody but his wife, but he was becoming irked by the micromanagement of the new force at the very top level and the spread of that culture downwards.
‘Surely Bob Skinner was a classic micromanager?’ Paula had argued, when he had voiced his concerns, over dinner.
‘Bob was an interfering so-and-so at times,’ he had replied, ‘on the criminal investigation side, but when he did stick his nose in, it was always to support the people on the ground, never to second-guess them. Andy Martin is trying to keep a grip on everything that’s going on, rather than trusting people to do the job he’s given them. Today he came down on me like a ton of bricks because Sammy Pye took a decision that he saw as questioning his judgement. I never told Sammy, but he ordered me to take him off the case and replace him with Lowell Payne.’
‘Who’s Lowell Payne?’
‘He was a Strathclyde man, the head of organised crime and counter-terrorism; what we used to call Special Branch. Bob appointed him, and I’d have kept him in post, but Andy told me to move him out and replace him with Renee Simpson from the old Grampian force. So now Payne’s a detective superintendent without portfolio.’