A Rush of Blood

Nineteen

‘Twin,’ Mario McGuire asked. ‘Are you free?’

‘Sure,’ said Neil McIlhenney, and hung up. He was certain that more people within the force, and maybe across Edinburgh, thought of them as the original Glimmer Twins than there were those who recognised it as the nickname adopted by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards more than forty years earlier. It had been bestowed upon them, by Paula Viareggio, one night in the Café Royal bar, when they were in the first half of their twenties, when he had been engaged to Olive Clarey, and when the torch that Paula carried for her cousin Mario was still hidden in her handbag.

He left his office and walked the few yards to the one with ‘Head of CID’ on the door. ‘Whassup?’ he asked as he slumped into a seat. ‘Are you narked because the report on Tomas Zaliukas isn’t signed off yet?’

‘No, not especially. If the chief constable wants us to dig deeper, so be it. No, this is something else. There was a burglary overnight at the pro shop at Witches’ Hill golf club. A ram raid; they took out the main door with a vehicle then helped themselves to eighty grand’s worth of golf gear.’

‘Witches’ Hill? That’s in East Lothian, isn’t it, up behind Aberlady? Outside Edinburgh; not my area.’

‘Maybe not, but you’re my de facto deputy, and I want to bounce this off you. This isn’t the only job of this sort that’s been pulled recently. Two weeks ago the shop at the Mayfield course in Broxburn was done in exactly the same way. Then and now, they were long gone and out of town before uniform could respond to the alarm call. The places were well chosen. They’re isolated, and they could get their wheels right up to the premises. We’re nowhere near catching anyone for Broxburn and Fred Leggatt isn’t holding out any hope of a result for today’s either.’

‘I suppose we have to assume it’s the same team,’ McIlhenney murmured.

‘We might even be able to prove it is, if they’ve left tyre marks, but there’s something else. On each occasion our responses were hindered. All our available cars in each area were heading for calls that turned out to be bogus. We’ve traced the originating numbers and in each case, the calls were made from a cheap, disposable mobile.’

‘Bought where?’

‘Dunno yet. That’s our only line of inquiry for now, but there’s every fuckin’ chance that they were stolen too.’

‘How many cars are we talking about?’

‘In East Lothian, three, in West Lothian, five; all diverted to places far away from the crime scenes.’

The superintendent frowned. ‘That isn’t a hell of a lot, is it, when you spell it out.’

‘Tell me about it,’ McGuire snorted. ‘Remember that exchange I had with NYPD? One of the stats I picked up is that they have over three thousand patrol vehicles in a smaller geographical area.’

‘And ten times the tax-paying population to fund them, and a hell of a lot more I’ll bet than ten times the number of incident reports. The world is as it is, Mario; we all have to live within our means.’

‘But how do we do that? For I know for certain that this team will not stop at two jobs. And how long will it take for other clever bastards to get in on the idea? We’ve got the potential for a significant crime wave here.’

‘Then we’ll have to nail them as fast as we can,’ McIlhenney responded, ‘before the media catch on and they start to build a criminal fan club. But this isn’t just a CID job.’

‘I know. That’s why I’m going to raise it at the boss’s daily meeting. .’ he glanced at his watch, ‘. . in ten minutes. I’ve got a fair idea how that’ll develop, so I’d like you to keep yourself handy for a follow-up session with me and Mags, later on this morning.’