Vivian Crolla. Age forty-eight, single, chartered accountant by trade—not so much an adornment to her profession as a butt-nugget dangling from its arse-hairs. She has been investigated by the ACA disciplinary committee three times but escaped unscathed save for a reprimand on the first occasion (now timed-out). She’s been investigated by the Revenue twice (inconclusively). She has come to the attention of the Serious Fraud Office and escaped without receiving as much as a police caution. She’s so slippery, you could skin her and market the hide as a surface for frying pans. And that’s just her public persona.
What the Operation knows about Vivian is enough that if you were with the Polis, you’d be smacking your chops and writing her up for the Procurator Fiscal while mentally drafting the press release. When she was the Gorilla’s banker, she ran the most efficient money-laundering operation ever seen north of Hadrian’s Wall, and if it wasn’t for the ongoing deflationary spiral and a slightly embarrassing problem repatriating her overseas assets while under the nose of the Revenue, she’d be living in a castle in Fife with a helicopter and pilot for the weekly shopping trips to Jenners. As it is, you figure she’s only marking time until she retires in style, at which point she’ll leg it to Palermo, where they have retirement homes stacked to the ceiling with her type of merry widow.
The bus, when it comes, is empty. You hole up in what used to be the driver’s seat, and it moves off silently. It’s a great way to tour the Athens of the North, and you watch entranced as it rolls over the speed pillows and cobble-stones on its way south-east. You’ve bid a fiver for a route divert, and for a miracle there’s no other money-bags aboard to up the ante: It’s going to take you close to Vivian’s front door.
Now, this scene is one you haven’t rehearsed for, and so you’re going to have to play it with a certain delicacy. But it’s not rocket science. You’ve got a handle on Vivian and her history. She’s even worked for the Operation before—unwittingly, at a lower level, but nonetheless. There are strings to pull, but she’s an experienced player, predictable up to a point. That’s why you were leaving her for the second interview.
The bus whines as it crawls up the slope, then totters anaemically along Lothian Road, stopping to pick up and put down the usual losers along the way. You keep yourself buttoned up, avoiding eye contact. (Back home? It’d be a stretch limo with tinted windows all the way. But a start-up job in Scotland calls for the Peoples’ Car and plenty of warm bodies to get lost among.) It rolls slowly past your hotel, then the row of pompous fin-de-siècle bank frontages thrown up a couple of decades since and now half-boarded-over: Then at the big five-way intersection, it hangs a right, and your phone pleeps a set-down alert at you.
One hundred and twenty metres to destination. Fucking bus company. You start walking.
This part of town has an uneasy relationship with affluence. Besides the obligatory state-owned Tesco Local, there’s a weird mix of closed and barricaded shop-fronts, charity stores with windows stuffed full of last decade’s brown leather sofas, and imaginative little boutiques selling up-market tchotchkes. You pass a kebab shop and an Asian jewellery store before you reach the chocolatier and the usual anonymous black door beside it.
There is a buzzer. You mash your thumb on the button for flat 1F2 and wait. And wait. After a minute, you push it again and hold. Just your luck if Vivian’s chosen this lunch-time to go do her shopping. There’s no reply, but the door opens in your face; a young guy slithers past you, earbuds screwed in as tight as his closed face. You catch the door with your toe and a moment later you’re on your way upstairs.
The tenement stairwell is grey and dusty, worn flagstones and black-enamelled cast-iron handrails leading up into the gloom. On the first-floor landing you find three heavy-looking doorways. The tarnished brass name-plate saying CROLLA ASSOCIATES tells you all you need to know, and you push the doorbell beside it. There is, as you expected, no response. You stand, holding your breath.
Well, you’ve come all this way: Why stop here?
There’s a multifunction pen in your pocket. It doesn’t look like anything special, but there are five cartridges and a bunch of complicated springs inside that barrel. And there’s a wallet in your other pocket, and along with the phone and driving license, it contains a couple of other cards. One of which might have raised an eyebrow if the Polis had Dumpster-dived your pockets and thought to peel away the laminated stickers to reveal the intricately etched sheet of fullerene-reinforced plastic within. But even then, it’s not obvious what the etching is, and you’ve got an explanation for how you came by it that would get you off the hook under most circumstances. Except these.
You take thirty seconds to twist and warp some springy bits of steel-tough plastic free from the card, another twenty seconds to swap them in place of the ball-point cartridge, and ten seconds to bump the lock. Then you step inside Vivian Crolla’s apartment.
You let the door slip shut behind you, and in that very instant you realize that something is irrevocably awry.
It’s never entirely quiet in a Scottish tenement flat. The floorboard-creaking footfalls of upstairs’ unseen neighbours. The drone of a news channel on next door’s PC. If the windows look out over the front, there’s the interminable road noise of a major thoroughfare (muted, now, by last-century standards, but still present). The faint susurration of Arctic methane flowing through the pipe to the fuel celclass="underline" the whir of the refrigerator in the kitchen.
The windows face out back, the neighbours are at work, and you can’t hear the fridge. Is that all? There’s a faint hissing from somewhere.
You glance up. The illumination filtering into the rectangular central hall comes through open doorways, and it has the numinous tint of daylight. You take your picklock card and use its edge to delicately swipe the light switch, leaving no prints.
“Vivian?” you call quietly.
There’s a strong floral stink in the flat, as from one of those fucking air fresheners women like to put in the bathroom to make out that they shit roses.
“Vivian?” you ask again, walking towards the living room. “I got your email. Vivian…”
There’s a scrap of paper on the floor. You frown and bend to pick it up. It’s white, overprinted in mostly green ink (with faint yellow and pink tints), approximately six centimetres by twelve in size. You remember its like from your childhood: It’s a foreign bank-note. “The Royal Bank of Scotland plc PROMISE TO PAY THE BEARER ON DEMAND ONE POUND STERLING, At their head office here in Edinburgh, by order of the board, 30th March 1999.”
Dead words. Dead currency. Dead bank. Broken promise.
Inside the austerely furnished living room, there lies a mattress. It has been cocooned in shrink-wrap plastic, sealed against the elements. The fragile husk of Vivian Crolla forms a mound under the polythene integument, like a pupa bonded to the surface of a leaf. She’s barely one metre fifty in her stockinged feet, grey-haired and thin, as if all the juices of a life unlived have been sucked out of her. She’s neatly dressed in a dark suit and pearl necklace, all present and correct but for a missing shoe and a premature death. There is a rip in the side of the shrink-wrap, a deep gash that plunges into the interior of the mattress, from which irredeemable green-ink promises bleed halfway across the carpet.
(Damn her, why couldn’t she have stuffed her mattress with fifty-euro notes instead of unrecyclable toilet paper? a corner of you thinks irreverently.)
You bend close to her and touch her shoulder through the plastic. She’s cold and stiff. Someone obviously shrink-wrapped her onto the mattress while she was unconscious or already dead. But who, and why? Rising, you stalk through the kitchen, her office, the bathroom. The stink in the bathroom is chokingly thick, almost unbreathable: The electronic air freshener is farting away like a cow with irritable-bowel syndrome.