Death's Door

Thirteen

‘Hey, before I forget,’ Stevie Steele exclaimed, ‘did you call that guy from the Royal?’

‘Yes,’ Maggie replied. ‘It was a mistake: his secretary had mixed up my notes with someone else’s. It wasn’t me he wanted at all.’

‘Jesus! Makes you think, doesn’t it? People go on about the dangers of computerisation, but you can’t beat good old-fashioned human error when it comes to fucking things up.’

‘Indeed. Speaking of which, how’s your investigation unfolding?’

‘Thank you very much, my darling.’ He chuckled. ‘I love you too. We’ve established for sure that the same gun was used in both shootings: no surprise there. Thanks to Neil McIlhenney, or rather his wife, we’ve turned up the possibility that he might be a trophy-taker. But we still don’t know who the second victim is. She isn’t a local: I’m certain of that much.’

‘If that’s as far as you’ve got, Inspector, what the hell are you doing phoning me?’

‘I’m keeping tabs on my wife, like I do every day. Where are you, anyway? I can hear traffic noise. Are you out of the office?’

‘The window’s open,’ she replied circumspectly, pushing the one-touch button on the driver’s door to close it.

‘Ah, okay. I really do have to go, love. Look after yourself, and I’ll see you tonight.’

‘Okay. Be lucky.’

‘I need some. ’Bye.’

He flipped his mobile closed, and slipped it back into his pocket, then picked up the phone on the desk. He consulted a Post-it note, with a direct number he had used earlier, and dialled it again. ‘Dorward,’ a familiar voice announced in his ear.

‘Arthur, this is Stevie. Any joy on that ballistic search of the PNC?’

He heard a sigh. ‘Son, there’s a queue, even for you. Computers are supposed to be instantaneous, but when you have human interface. .’

‘Funny,’ said Steele. ‘I’ve just had this conversation with my wife.’

‘One day I’ll have direct access, but until then, it can get frustrating.’

‘Okay, I’m sorry I rattled your cage.’

‘Apology accepted, but actually I was rattling yours. I’ve just had a call back: your gun’s a virgin, at least it was when it killed the Gavin girl. There’s no record of it being used in any other crime. I can tell you a couple of things about it, though. I had some very specific research done on it.’

‘Such as?’

‘It’s a very special gun; a SIG Sauer automatic, popular with competition shooters. We ran the ballistic-test results past the manufacturers, and they confirmed it. The current model would cost you going on for two grand, if you could buy it in the shops, that is. It’s a state-of-the-art nine-millimetre automatic, nineteen-shot magazine, single-action trigger, low-profile adjustable sight, eight point eight inches long, weight when fully loaded, just under three pounds. When you come across it, be very careful, especially if it’s in the possession of its owner. Anyone who has a gun like this will know how to use it: he’ll be able to take your eye out from fifty yards away, and do the other one before you hit the ground.’

‘So far he’s only used it close up. Maybe that’s his limit.’

‘No chance. This guy’s a marksman: the gun says so. I’ll bet my pension on it.’

‘Who would have a weapon like that?’

‘A criminal, maybe, Stevie?’ Dorward grunted.

‘Funny guy. If he was the sort of criminal you’re talking about, he’d have left a trail behind him, surely. This is a guy stalking young women and killing them, point-blank. That doesn’t make him an ace marksman.’

‘You’re forgetting the third victim.’

‘What?’

‘Rusty, Stacey Gavin’s Westie: he hit that on the run.’

‘How do you know?’

‘From the doggie autopsy. The poor wee thing was shot more or less right up the arse and through the heart. The examining vet was thorough. He called in a human pathologist, and between them they traced the angle of the wound and worked out that Rusty had been at least thirty feet away from the shooter, maybe forty.’

‘Do you have any conclusions about him?’

‘He must have been a smart wee dog: he knew enough to leg it.’

‘Arthur, for fuck’s sake,’ Steele exclaimed. ‘The shooter. Any ideas?’

‘Okay, I’ll be serious. I’d be looking for someone with a military or law-enforcement background, maybe a gun-club member who keeps his hand in using air weapons. I’d suspect that he acquired the weapon abroad, because very few of these weapons are supplied in this country, absolutely none these days to private owners, and the theft of one of them from a police or military store would attract a hell of a lot of attention. Your man won’t just be cuddling this weapon, he’ll be practising with it, covertly. He uses a silencer: we know that from markings on the bullets we recovered. He could be shooting at targets in his garage, or in a cellar, or taking it out on wildlife in the country. If you want to try a long shot, so to speak, you might put the word out among rural officers to keep an eye out for birds, rabbits or foxes that are found blown to fuck. He uses soft-nosed bullets and they’d make a hell of a mess of an animal: Rusty’s insides were all chewed up, apparently.’

‘I’ll do that.’

‘Discreetly, mind: you don’t want anything leaking out.’

‘Teach me, DI Dorward.’

‘Sorry, I get carried away sometimes. There’s one other thing, though. When you find him, and you take the weapon from him, handle it very carefully, especially the silencer. We’ll want to take a look at it: when these things are used at close range it’s possible that they’ll pick up minute tissue traces from the victim.’

‘I’ll remember that, when the time comes. Soon, I hope.’

Steele hung up, checked his watch, then looked across at Singh. ‘Tarvil,’ he said, ‘get on to Sergeant McNee, from Haddington: he’s in charge of the people down at the beach. Tell him to split his troops into two groups and send the first lot to the Mallard Hotel for lunch: it’s soup, sandwiches and coffee in their function room.’

‘Can I go too, boss?’

‘No, you wait till later. There’ll be no bloody sandwiches left for the rest if you’re in the first batch. And ask the sergeant to come and see me when he’s on his break. I need to talk to him about getting door-to-door interviews under way.’

The detective constable had barely picked up the phone before the door opened and Ray Wilding burst into the room. Steele looked up, and saw that he was smiling. ‘Did you get a result at the Thai?’ he asked.

‘Indirectly. There’s still work to do, though. When I contacted the owner, he told me that they close on Mondays, and that they were quiet the night before. Anyway, he’d seen the photo in the News, and he was sure he’d never seen the girl. But he told me that there’s another Thai restaurant in North Berwick, that doubles as a coffee shop during the day. So I took myself along there, and got lucky. The victim ate there on Monday night.’

‘On her own?’

‘No, she was with a guy, but she paid: with a credit card.’

‘Yes!’ the inspector exclaimed.

‘There’s only one problem.’

‘Ah, shit. There’s always one problem. Spit it out.’

‘The waitress in the restaurant couldn’t remember which card slip was hers.’ He tossed an A4 envelope on to the table. ‘So we’ll have to find out the hard way. These are all the slips they took on Monday evening.’

Steele emptied the envelope on to the desk: he counted twenty-seven slips. ‘They were busy.’

‘They do takeaways.’

‘But our victim ate in?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you get a description of the guy who was with her?’

‘Of a sort: the woman said that he was in his early to mid-twenties, dark hair, a bit unruly, casually dressed, needed a shave.’

‘That’s a start, I suppose. We’ll go back and ask her to do us an e-fit. Did you ask her about the woman?’

Wilding nodded. ‘Yeah. She seemed to be a very lively, vivacious type. From what the waitress recalled, she did most of the talking; he mainly listened. She didn’t detect any tension between them, though. I asked her that specifically, and she said that they seemed very happy. She also said that the guy, when he did speak, was very polite.’

‘Accents?’

‘She couldn’t place them, but she was Thai, so it could have been difficult for her to distinguish. Not local: that was as far as she could go.’

‘Better than nothing.’

‘And there’s something else: it looks like they caught the bus. They were quite late in, the last customers in fact, apart from a couple of takeaways. They finished about half ten, and the place closed then. But the staff cleared up so it was going on eleven before the waitress knocked off. She was going along the high street with the chef, who’s the owner, when she saw the couple waiting at the bus stop in Church Street. The victim waved to her.’

‘Score! Who’s the bus operator?’

‘Out here it’s First Bus. I checked the timetable on the bus stop when I was in North Berwick. They leave at ten past the hour from there in the evenings: our two were waiting for the last one.’

Steele looked across at Singh, who was listening intently. ‘Tarvil, get on to their operations centre, wherever it is; find out who the driver was, and get him interviewed.’

‘Should I talk to him myself, boss?’

‘Find out where he is first. If he’s on duty, find out where his current run ends. If not, find out where he lives. Either way, if it’s close to here you do it. If it’s in Edinburgh, tell Montell to track him down. If it’s outside our area, let me know and I’ll brief the local CID. Whoever talks to him, we need to know if they both got on the bus, whether they got off together, and where.’

He turned back to Wilding, who was standing beside his desk, sorting through the card slips he had picked up from the restaurant. ‘This is going to be easier than I thought,’ the sergeant told him. ‘This chip-and-pin technology’s magic. The transaction records all show the name of the cardholder, and most of them have the gender as well, so I’ve knocked out all the ones that are “Mr” something. That leaves just five possibles.’

‘Are they timed?’ asked Steele.

Wilding picked up a slip and peered at it. ‘Oh, Christ, yes. I never noticed that: timed and dated. This one says twenty forty-two, way too early.’ Quickly he sorted through the other four. ‘This has to be her,’ he said, excited, waving another piece of paper in the air. ‘It’s the only one after ten.’

‘Bag it, before you do anything else,’ said the inspector. ‘We’d better print it. . if you and the shop people haven’t destroyed any traces that were there.’

‘She won’t have touched this one,’ the sergeant told him. ‘This is the trader copy.’

‘Okay, what does it tell us?’

‘Her name’s Z. Boras, Miss. It’s a Visa card, expiry date next February.’

‘Z. Boras?’

‘That’s what it says here.’

‘What sort of a Christian name begins with a Z?’

‘Who says she’s Christian?’ Wilding pointed out.

‘True. What’s the issuing bank?’

‘It doesn’t say on any of the slips.’

‘The first four digits of the card number should tell us.’

‘Four, three, one, nine.’

‘How do we track it down?’

‘There’s a Visa centre in Fife. Get on the phone and see what help they can give you. Meanwhile I’ll call DCS McGuire, to let him know we’re making progress at last.’