Fatal Last Words

Seventy-three

‘Has our cigar salesman finished with the artist?’ Pye called through the open door of his cubicle as Wilding walked back into the CID office.

‘Just.’ The sergeant waved a printout at him. He stepped into the room and laid it on the inspector’s desk. ‘There you are,’ he said. ‘McBain reckons that’s spot on.’ The image could almost have been a photograph, it was so detailed. ‘What do we do with it now?’

‘We do two things. I’ve just had my instructions from the chief constable himself. He called me from his car to ask whether we’d heard from Mario in Australia, then hit the roof when I gave him my news. He and Neil McIlhenney have been away on a trip. He didn’t tell me where, but he did say it’s given them a clue to who the man might be. You’ve got the likeness on computer, yes?’

‘Of course.’

‘Good. I want you to send it to Andy Martin’s email, up in Dundee. Call him, warn him it’s there, wait till he opens it and ask him to confirm that it’s the man who called on him. The other task, I’ll handle; he wants the photofit faxed to a guy in London, who might be able to fill in some blanks on the guy.’

‘MI5?’

‘One number up from that.’

Wilding’s eyes widened. ‘Jesus, this is serious. Big boy’s games.’

‘We can play them too.’

As the sergeant left, Pye turned to his computer and keyed in a note, as dictated earlier by Skinner. ‘For the attention of Mr Frame. There follows verified likeness of the man calling himself Coben, seen in Edinburgh Monday last week. Chief Constable Skinner requests your assistance in determining any links between him and the person of the same name, believed killed seven years ago in Serbia.’ He sent it to the unit’s printer; by the time he had crossed the office, it had emerged. He signed it, keyed a number that Skinner had given him in a second call from his car into the fax machine, then fed it in, followed by the photofit.

‘You’re right, Ray,’ he whispered to himself as he walked back to his tiny glass-walled room, ‘this is heavy-duty.’

He had barely resumed his seat before his phone rang. He snatched it up, thinking that it might be Skinner, checking that his orders had been followed. But the voice in his ear was female, and English. ‘Sammy? Becky. I bet you thought I’d given up on you and gone back to checking stolen cars.’

‘You want to know the truth?’ Pye asked, then confessed, unprompted. ‘I’ve been so busy chasing other leads and angles that I’d forgotten about you.’

‘Then let me remind you. I’m the colleague who’s been letting crime run rampant through west Edinburgh while she tries to crack the mysteries of a computer you and her boyfriend dumped on her.’

‘Yes, I know, I’m sorry. But this investigation has had me chasing fugitive former secretaries of state, banging up dukes’ daughters with huge heroin habits, and now, when I thought I had only one mystifying homicide to clear up, I find that I’ve got two. That might seem like just another week at the office to a veteran of the Sweeney, but to us provincial hicks. .’

‘Stop it!’ Stallings chuckled. ‘I get enough grief from ’im indoors without hearing it from you too. He called me this morning to tell me that Mount is now officially on your caseload as well.’

‘Are you going to help us with it?’

‘To be honest wiff yer, as that annoying bastard always says on the football commentaries, I don’t know. However, I am going to make your fucking hair stand on end, as my beloved would put it. I have finally got into the boy sllinco’s box on his girlfriend’s computer. I’m sorry it’s taken so long, but sometimes you crack a password easily, sometimes the obvious takes forever; in this case, the latter. I won’t bore you with all the names and combinations I tried, but finally I recalled which paper Mr Collins works for and used that. No joy first up, so I reversed it, tried eritlas. . sounds like a place in Middle Earth, doesn’t it. . and bingo.’

‘Well done, Becky. What did you find?’

‘He didn’t use it much; only for one purpose as far as I can see, to communicate with someone using the screen name neboc@redmail.com.’

Pye gulped. ‘Spell that, please,’ he asked, quietly.

‘All of it?’

‘No, just the front end.’ He noted the letters as she read them out, then reversed them. ‘Fuck,’ he whispered.

‘Pardon?’

‘Sorry, go on. What was in his files? I need the text of all the messages he sent.’

‘Apart from one message, he didn’t send text, just images.’

‘That word-message. What did it say? When was it sent?’

‘Sunday afternoon, just; ten past twelve. It said, “Got it. Left as arranged.” Whatever that may mean.’

The inspector considered the words. ‘I think I might be able to guess: the disk drive from Glover’s computer, and his back-up. He must have done a dead drop. What about the images?’

‘They’re stored within his mailbox facility,’ she told him, ‘so they don’t show up on Carol’s hard disk, but I accessed them no problem. They’re dated, and they go back for a few months.’

‘What are they?’

‘That’s the strange thing. I’d say they’re surveillance photos. They’re all of one bloke, and they’re all really boring, just day-to-day stuff: him at work, him with wife and kid, and so on. And then you get to last Sunday morning. Boy, was he busy on Sunday, being photographed through an open window giving a very athletically built young lady a real seeing-to.’ She paused. ‘Is your hair standing on end yet?’ she asked.

‘You’re getting there,’ Pye replied, holding down his impatience. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, here’s the clincher. I’ve seen the bloke, when he did an inquiry at Fettes a couple of months back. He’s the Tayside DCC, Andy Martin. I don’t know who the girl is, but it is definitely not his wife. The images were sent to neboc on Sunday, at half past ten, a few hours before the text message. How’s the hair?’

‘Erect.’

‘Mmm. And how does that relate to your inquiry?’

‘It takes us well along the road. Becky, I’ll tell Ray he owes you a large one.’

‘A large what?’ she murmured archly.

‘A large whatever you fucking like. Got to go.’

He hung up, and looked out into the CID room, where Haddock and Cowan were both at their desks. ‘Who was checking on Ed Collins being at that play on Saturday?’ he shouted.

The female officer jumped to her feet and crossed the office. ‘I was, sir. The people who were on the box office don’t remember him, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. The lighting isn’t great, they said; they don’t see faces, just people. But I do know one thing: he definitely didn’t get to Deacon Brodie’s until after half twelve. I found a staff member who was having a fag at the door and saw him come in; he recognised him from his picture in the paper. It appears with his reports apparently.’

‘OK. Ray,’ he called to Wilding, but saw that he had his phone to his ear. He waited until he had finished. ‘Andy Martin?’ he asked, as he hung up.

‘Yes. Our Coben and his are one and the same.’

‘Then he should definitely not have upset him. The guy got even big time, with the help of Ed Collins. Come on, we’re off to the Saltire offices to lift their ace sports reporter.’