‘Dan!’ his DI hissed.
‘It’s all right, Lottie,’ I said. ‘His irreverence is part of his eccentric charm. You’ll be having it well done, I’d imagine, Sergeant.’
He nodded. ‘Absolutely. Anything else is too big a challenge for my teeth these days.’
As I mentioned, Provan and I are around the same age, although I like to believe that I look about ten years younger. Possibly that’s why he shows me less respect than most people do. Even when I was his chief constable it had taken the little toerag all his time to call me ‘Sir’. Clearly there was no chance now I was a civilian. ‘You should get a new set,’ I suggested. ‘The ones you’ve got look a bit yellowed; age and tobacco, I guess. When are you chucking it, Dan?’ I asked.
He nodded to his right, towards Mann. ‘When she does,’ he replied. ‘They cannae kick me out on age grounds now.’
No, I thought, but ‘they’ could make your life a misery if ‘they’ chose.
‘Not if you behave yourself,’ I agreed. ‘Which could be a problem for you.’
‘I know when to touch my forelock,’ he assured me.
‘You couldn’t find your fucking forelock,’ I laughed, not only at his malignant leprechaun act, but also at the obvious puzzlement of Pye and Haddock, neither of whom seemed to know what to make of him. By the way, you might wonder about my industrial language with a female officer present, but Lottie is more likely to be offended by its omission than its use.
The arrival of the waiter cut short the banter. Provan kept his word, ordering steak, ‘Burnt and covered wi’ onions.’ The Edinburgh side both ordered fish. I settled for a York ham salad and was more than a little surprised when Mann asked for the same.
‘Yesterday was a blip,’ she volunteered. ‘This is what I eat normally.’
‘So,’ Provan resumed as soon as the interruption was over, ‘since there’s been nothin’ on our bulletin board about you bein’ seconded to do CID team-building, gonnae tell us why we’re all here?’
He was right; it was time to get down to business. ‘There’s nothing about this on any bulletin board,’ I shot back, with a glance at Lottie. ‘You haven’t told him, then?’
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I thought I’d leave that to you.’
I knew that she’d had the same call from Mario that he’d made to Sammy Pye. It was one of the things we’d discussed when we’d spoken earlier, before I’d left Edinburgh.
‘Good shout,’ I agreed. ‘You’d have had him in your ear all the way here. Did you bring that stuff I asked for?’
She nodded and took two envelope folders from her briefcase, handing one to me and one to Sammy Pye.
‘This is a copy of the paperwork in the investigation into the murder of Jock Hodgson,’ I told him. ‘He’s the third link in our naval chain.’
‘The dead guy?’ Sauce Haddock asked.
I nodded. ‘The same. He’s dead because somebody shot him.’ I looked at Lottie. ‘Any joy from forensics?’
She smiled. ‘You knew there would be, didn’t you?’ she said.
I smiled back.
She looked across the table at Pye and Haddock. ‘The single bullet that killed Hodgson came from the same gun that accounted for your two victims in Edinburgh the other night.’
‘Which means,’ I declared ‘that you four are all investigating the same series of crimes. And they are all linked, to the matter I was hired to review: the theft of Eden Higgins’ multimillion-pound boat.’
‘How?’ Pye asked. ‘Why?’
‘I believe that the Princess Alison was stolen as an act of revenge, by Hector Mackail, who blamed Higgins for the collapse of his company, and his personal bankruptcy.’
‘And was Higgins responsible for that?’
‘He benefited from it,’ I said, ‘but that’s all I’ll say for now. It’s the consequence of the theft I want to focus on.’ I raised an eyebrow in Mann’s direction. ‘Did you get anything from Hodgson’s card activity?’
It was Dan Provan who replied. ‘There’s one thing that’s unusual. All his shopping was either done online or locally in Ayrshire; with one exception. We can put him in East Lothian, about six months ago. He filled up his car in a petrol station in Dunbar. The day before, he bought his groceries in Tesco in Kilmarnock. The day after, he bought a takeaway pizza in Largs. But that one day he was on the other side of the country.’
‘What was the date?’ Haddock asked. As he spoke he opened a tablet computer.
‘The twenty-second of August; a Saturday.’
The younger sergeant tapped the screen of his device a couple of times. As I looked at him a smile spread across his face. ‘You cracker,’ he murmured. ‘That same day, Hector Mackail paid for lunch in a restaurant called the Rocks, in Dunbar. I checked with the owner yesterday; he matched the payment to the bill. It showed three covers.’
‘Interesting,’ Pye murmured, ‘but he could have been there with Gloria and Hazel.’
‘Sure,’ I agreed, ‘but that’s not the way I’d bet. Mackail and Hodgson served together in Portsmouth for three years. In the last of those years, they overlapped with a sub-lieutenant called David Gates. Trust me on that,’ I added. ‘It’s kosher.’ It had taken Clyde Houseman half an hour to dig out their records.
‘I believe that what they were doing was planning the theft of the Princess Alison from her secure boathouse in the Gareloch. It was handy for Gates,’ I added. ‘The Trident submarine base at Faslane is only a couple of miles up the road. He and Mackail stole the damn boat, I’m certain.’
‘And Eden Higgins found out?’ Haddock exclaimed. ‘Is that what you reckon, boss?’
‘Although I hate to say so, that’s the way it’s pointing,’ I conceded. ‘We know . . . that is Lottie and Dan know . . . that Jock Hodgson was tortured for information before he was killed. You two discovered that shortly afterwards, Hector Mackail died in a hit-and-run. David Gates, however, is untouchable, because of what he does. So instead, this week, his wife was attacked and his daughter was taken, only things went tragically wrong. I believe that the intention was to exchange wee Zena for the Princess Alison.’
‘If she’s still afloat,’ Mann pointed out.
‘Yes, exactly, and that’s what we have to find out.’
‘How?’
‘That part of it is down to me,’ I told her. ‘After all, it’s what I was hired to do.’
I hadn’t worked my way through my agenda, but lunch arrived. It was well timed, giving my four companions the chance to absorb what they had learned about the others’ investigation, and to consider the bigger picture.
It gave me breathing space also, to come to terms with a seemingly inevitable conclusion, one I had fought against: Eden Higgins, my client, my friend, my one time ‘acting brother-in-law’ as he had described himself at a gathering in the dying years of the last century, was a murderer.
He had been assaulted by Hector Mackail; a man enraged and embittered after being cheated out of his business. His boat, his pride and joy, named after his lost sister, had been stolen. Frustrated by an incompetent police investigation that had got precisely nowhere, salt had been rubbed into the wound by his insurance company’s reluctance to settle his claim for the loss of his property.
Eden was a media hero; his PR people worked hard to maintain his image of a benevolent businessman. But nobody achieves what he had by being a soft touch. I knew that from my own experience, from the fact that he had employed private investigators to check me out when Alison and I had started getting serious, uncovering in the process a secret from my private past that I thought I’d buried beyond discovery.
If, as the evidence suggested, he had been offended by Mackail’s reluctance to sell out to Destry Glazing, a Higgins Holdings subsidiary, and had used his power and his influence to ruin the man, and virtually steal his business, well, I shouldn’t be too surprised.
And if, faced by the theft of five million quid’s worth of property, he had displayed the same ruthlessness in pursuing it, if he’d had a blowlamp held to Jock Hodgson’s foot until he screamed out the whole story in his secluded kitchen, signing Mackail’s virtual death warrant in the process, well, that shouldn’t astonish me either.