Hour Of Darkness

Fifteen

I’d taken a bit of a punt on the Barcelona hotel, but it paid off. Placa Reial is one of the city’s night-time highlights and our room overlooked it. As a bonus, the chef turned out to be Michelin class. We ate there on the Saturday night, had a couple of schnapps in the square outside, then slept like logs until the sun woke us next morning, in time for a leisurely breakfast and a day spent on the tourist trail. It ended with a visit to Camp Nou, the great amphitheatre that’s home to FC Barcelona. I’d neglected to tell Sarah that there was an early evening match on, but she took the news pretty well.

We found a taxi outside the ground more easily than I’d anticipated, and didn’t get caught up in the post-match traffic, so we made it back to the hotel in good time. I’d have been happy to give the chef another turn, had Sarah not seen a restaurant called Los Caracoles on a television food show. When she discovered that it was two minutes’ walk from our hotel and stayed open late, there was no holding her.

We even enjoyed the flight home next day, an anonymous couple on the world’s most controversial airline, if not its favourite. We’d gone budget for three reasons; the cost (once a Scot always a Scot), the fact that it was a direct flight and the greater chance that nobody would know us.

We could have gone through Heathrow or City, but I can’t board a flight to London these days without being hailed by someone or other, even people I barely know. With my marriage to Aileen having ended in a blaze of newspaper headlines, I wasn’t keen to be spotted on the shuttle with my other ex-wife, in case that found its way into the tabloids as well.

It wasn’t until mid-afternoon, when we were in an Edinburgh taxi, en route for Sarah’s place where I’d left my car, that I switched on my mobile. I’d called the office in Glasgow first thing in the morning, to let my exec know that I’d be out of touch during the day, and so I was expecting most of the voicemail calls that were there when I checked. Pure tedium, nearly all of them, issues that could have been dealt with further down the chain of command, but that’s what happens when you’re new in post as a chief constable: your subordinates don’t know you quite well enough to take a chance.

I’d barely finished sighing over the complex issue of the most efficient management of the available traffic cars in Argyll and Clyde, when the one I wasn’t expecting popped up.

I confess that I was having a hard time dealing with the emotional wrench of leaving Edinburgh. I had thought everything through before accepting the Strathclyde job, and I’d been satisfied that I was doing the right thing. The time had come to move on, I’d persuaded myself, to give my colleagues, protégés and friends the opportunity to get one more promotion on their dockets before the Scottish police forces were merged into one, so that they would be as well placed as possible in the shake-up that would follow.

I’d done what I’d been sure was the right thing, but that didn’t stop me being desperately homesick every time I walked through the door of HQ in Glasgow, missing my old office in one of the capital city’s ugliest buildings, missing the streets I’d stalked for so many years, missing everyone, up to and including Maisie, the waitress in the senior officers’ dining room, who’d served Sarah and me lunch on the day that we’d had the heart-to-heart that blew away the smoke that had been obscuring my view of her and led, very shortly afterwards, to us getting back together.

With all that emotional baggage, my stomach flipped a little when I heard Mario McGuire say, in his most serious professional tone, ‘Bob, can you call me, soon as possible. A name’s come up in what’s now officially the Bella Watson homicide investigation, and before I let anyone pursue it, I need to talk to you.’