A Rush of Blood

Seventeen

‘The brass neck these bastards have got,’ Detective Sergeant Lisa

McDermid exclaimed, shielding her eyes with a mitten-clad hand against the low sunshine of the crisp, clear early morning.

‘A crude technique, I’ll grant you,’ said DI George Regan, looking massive in the well-worn Crombie overcoat that he had inherited from an uncle a few weeks before, ‘but there’s nothing new about a ram raid.’

‘I’ve never seen one.’

‘Not even when you were in uniform?’

‘No.’

‘Simple but effective. Get a truck, an old Land Rover, any sort of chunky vehicle and stick it through the front door of the target premises. Entry achieved, you help yourself. This place is a classic target; a golf pro shop, nice big double doors, just one step up from ground level.’

‘But it’s alarmed. They were pretty reckless, trying it on.’

‘No; they were professional. That’s no deterrent to these characters. They’re in and out like a fiddler’s elbow, and in a rural area like this one. .’ He called to a uniformed sergeant, standing a few yards away. ‘Kenny, what was our response time? Do you know?’

‘Twenty-five minutes. Our nearest car was in Dunbar.’

‘There you are, then,’ Regan told the DS. ‘The owner of the business got here before we did, and he was in bed in Dirleton when this happened. The alarm company’s monitoring centre called him first, then us. Me, I like old-fashioned alarms, with bells or sirens that make lots of fucking noise and waken the neighbours. Remotely monitored things like this one don’t; those casings up there are empty, just for show. Sometimes they’ll put sirens on the inside, the thinking being that burglars will be scared off.’ He grunted. ‘Scared off, my arse. Waste of time and money.’

‘A siren wouldn’t have done much good here,’ McDermid pointed out. ‘Witches’ Hill Golf and Country Club; it’s not quite in the middle of nowhere, but isolated enough. There isn’t a house in sight. Besides, do we want neighbours having a go and getting their heads bashed in with baseball bats?’

‘Come on, Lisa,’ the DI retorted. ‘Not many people are actually that brave, but they do call us with vehicle descriptions, registration numbers and so on. The bastards who did this are clean away. The socos will take all the fucking fingerprints they like, but it won’t do us any good. This is a shop. Hundreds of people will have left their dabs all over it. I remember a break-in a few years ago in a store in Fountain-bridge, where they came up with prints that matched two well-known blaggers. Bingo, we thought. It took us a week to trace them, and no wonder; when the shop was done they’d been on holiday in Gran Canaria. They’d been in the place as legit customers. Our best chance here is if the stuff they’ve nicked shows up online, but they’ll not be daft enough to do that. Likely it’ll be sold privately, word of mouth, at a knock-down, but still for enough to make the job worthwhile.’

‘Do we know what’s been taken?’

As she spoke, a man, lean and white-haired, of medium height, stepped from the violated premises and stood in the shattered doorway. ‘We’re about to find out,’ Regan said. ‘What’s the damage, Mr Fairley?’

‘Clubs,’ the golf pro told him. ‘They’ve cleaned me out of all my high-end stock. The trade-ins and the cheaper starter sets are still there, but the Callaways, the Titleists, the Taylor-Mades, the Pings, they’re all gone; irons, woods, and all the putters and the specialist stuff, the rescue clubs and lob wedges. They’ve taken the best of the balls too.’

‘Any idea of the total value?’

Alasdair Fairley frowned. ‘Net?’ Regan nodded. ‘I can get you an exact figure off the computer, but with the stock I was holding, in the region of eighty thousand.’

‘And they’ll shift it for about twenty-five, if they sell direct, yes?’

‘You probably know more about it than me, but that sounds about right.’

‘But couldn’t we trace it in use?’ McDermid asked. ‘Through golf courses and the like.’

Fairley frowned at her. ‘You’re not suggesting that a PGA professional would handle stolen golf clubs, are you?’

‘No, not at all,’ she said, hastily, quelling his outrage. ‘I meant couldn’t we carry out spot checks on golfers to see what they’re using?’

The pro looked at Regan, one golfer to another, as if to say, ‘Will you tell her or will I?’

The DI picked up the prompt. ‘Lisa,’ he explained, ‘golf clubs don’t have bar codes, or serial numbers of anything permanent to identify an individual item. So once Mr Fairley’s own sticker has been removed, that’s it for tracing them. More than that, once a club’s been used, it’s changed in some small way. So even if we were to do anything as fascist as to walk on to every golf course in Scotland and ask players to show us their equipment, it wouldn’t do us a blind bit of good. But we’re not going to do that. Why not? Because the chief constable’s a golfer. So’s the deputy chief. So’s the chair of the local council. So are most of the judges on the Supreme Court bench, and so, for that matter, am I!’

‘So what are we going to do?’ she demanded.

‘You’re going to circulate the information nationally, and Mr Fairley here’s going to claim on his insurance.’

‘And maybe look at installing CCTV,’ said the victim.

‘That’s the cheap option,’ Regan told him. ‘You could do that, outside and in, but. . These people have had a look at this place before they did the job, as any good thief would do. If you’d had cameras, they’d have masked out number plates, worn masks and put the things out of commission as soon as they could. No, the only way you can improve security is by spending a hell of a lot of money on steel roller grilles to make this place impregnable.’

‘I only own the stock, not the shop itself. The Marquis of Kinture does; it’s his club. I doubt if he’d fork out for that.’

‘In that case, do what you can to make it difficult to get in, and hold less stock in future.’

‘I expect my insurer will limit my cover from now on, so I’ll have to do that anyway.’ He paused. ‘How long will it be before I can start clearing up the mess?’ he asked. ‘I’ll also need to arrange for the place to be made secure. Plus, I should be opening the shop now. I’ll have members turning up soon.’

‘When it’s this cold?’ McDermid exclaimed.

‘You really don’t know golf, Sergeant, do you?’ Alasdair Fairley smiled, for the first time.

‘You might as well start now,’ Regan told him. ‘I’ll tell our socos, when they get here, just to look for tyre and footprints, not to bother with fingerprints. We can get on our way once they arrive, Lisa. We’ve got no more to do here. Meantime, I might go and take a look at the course. I’ve never been here before, and I’ve heard it’s pretty good.’

‘Call me when you have a free day,’ said Fairley. ‘If we’re quiet you can play it, on the house.’

‘Thanks. I’ll take you up on that.’ He wandered away from the pro shop, towards the first tee. He was peering down the first fairway, through the thinning mist, when his mobile sounded. He checked the number, but it showed ‘Private’.

‘Yes?’ he answered cautiously.

‘George.’

‘Ah, it’s you, Fred.’

For some reason, Detective Chief Inspector Graham Leggatt, senior CID officer in East and Midlothian, was known to close colleagues and friends as ‘Fred’. He always had been, and it was rumoured that not even he knew why. ‘What have you got there?’ he asked.

‘I don’t want to be pessimistic,’ the DI replied, ‘but you can mark this one up for the unsolved column. It was a well-planned job, simple and well-executed. Eighty grand’s worth of untraceable gear’s disappeared into the black economy. I don’t remember anything as pro as this in the time I’ve been on this patch.’

‘There hasn’t been. I’ll tell you how well planned it was.’ There was a pause. Regan heard a slurping sound. Fred Leggatt was famous for drinking tea in industrial quantities. ‘We have three patrol cars in East Lothian through the night, best case. When this job was pulled, they were all en route to calls. Every one of them was false, and when we checked, we found that everyone was made on a different untraceable pay-and-go mobile. How about that for planning?’

‘Gallus bastards,’ Regan chuckled.

‘Indeed. Much as I dislike the idea of putting Mario McGuire off his breakfast, I’ll need to pass this up the line.’