Dead And Buried

Seventy-nine

James Proud sat in his armchair and closed his eyes. In his mind he went over every step of his investigation looking for a loose end that had not been tied off. He had been thinking about it for most of the afternoon, and now, well into the evening.

As he did, a feeling grew within him, a sense that there was something he was overlooking, something glaringly obvious, that a real detective would have picked up in an instant. A real detective, sure, not a pen-pusher cop like him. He made pictures of every scene, every meeting, every phone call, but nothing stood out; he could follow Bothwell’s trail to bloody Kirkliston, but no further; nobody knew where he and Montserrat had lived in Edinburgh after that. Nobody.

He sat bolt upright in his chair. ‘You bloody fool, Proud!’ he roared, as he sprang to his feet. ‘Chrissie, I’m going out for a while,’ he told his wife, as he paced out into the hall, not realising that she was in the kitchen and could not hear a word he said.

Snatching his coat from its hook he rushed out of the front door, without looking back, and stepped into his car. He knew where he was going; he knew exactly where he was going, and why the hell had it taken him so long to work it out? He swore that he would never criticise a detective officer again.

It was a long trip, across the city; the consolation was that when he arrived at his destination there were few cars parked in the narrow street, and so he was able to pull up immediately outside. He strode up the path to the front door and pressed the bell, hard. It took a while for the man inside to answer, but Proud had expected that: he was very old.

‘James,’ he said, as he saw him standing there. ‘How good to see you again.’

‘I’m glad I caught you in, Mr Goddard. I was afraid that you’d be out on your bike.’

‘The road’s a little too slippery for that, and anyway, I tend not to cycle after dark. You can’t trust drivers these days, you know. Come on in. Will you have tea?’

The chief constable followed his one-time teacher into his comfortable old house. ‘I’m in a bit of a rush, I’m afraid,’ he replied. ‘There’s something I need to ask you about old Adolf.’

Goddard’s eyebrows rose. ‘Indeed! I’ve been reading about him in the newspapers. What a remarkable turn of events. To think that he was on my staff for all those years, and instructing children, after doing that: it’s appalling. And you think he killed both his other wives as well?’

‘We’re certain. It’s about Montserrat that I need to ask you. When we spoke last, you told me that you went to look for him after he failed to return to school.’

‘Yes.’

‘Can you remember where? The only address we have for him in Edinburgh is out of date.’

‘That’s easy. He lived in the very next street. In fact he lived in the very same house that awful man was killed in, number twenty-two Swansea Street.’