Hour Of Darkness

Thirty-Eight

‘Please tell me you’re going to have something positive for me, DI Mann.’ In all his life, Ray Wilding had never come as close to begging. ‘I’ve got my top floor watching me on this, and I’ve never felt so exposed.’

‘No positive leads yourself then?’ Lottie asked.

‘None. Mackenzie’s vanished off the face of the earth.’

‘Does anyone outside our circle have a sniff of it yet?’

‘I don’t believe so. The official line is that he’s having time off to deal with personal issues. That’s holding, not least because he’s just had a run-in with the ACC; most people within CID believe that he’s been benched till he cools off. They’ll be benching me if I don’t come up with something soon. What have you got?’

‘I don’t know. My nee’bur and I …’

‘Your what?’

Mann laughed. ‘Ah sorry; that’s a Glasgow term. I meant, my colleague and I have just spoken to his priest, out in the arse end of Argyllshire. We left him ten minutes ago and now we’re sitting in a hotel car park, getting ready for the long road home.’

‘I didn’t know Mackenzie was a religious man,’ Wilding said. ‘He’s never given me that impression.’

‘I don’t know how religious he is, but the man we’ve spoken to has been a major influence in his life. How much have they told you about him?’

‘I’ve seen his service record, and had a very quick look at his HR file, that’s all. I’ve also spoken as discreetly as I could to some of his neighbours. . his real neighbours, that is, not the Weegie kind, and it seems he never mixed with them. The upshot is that still I know very little personal about him. I would have spoken to his friends within the force, the problem being that he doesn’t have any.’

‘The same was true when he was a Strathclyde officer,’ Mann told him. ‘I never worked with him, but Dan Provan, my sergeant, did. He says there was something about him that grated on everyone; he was arrogant, a glory-hunter, and he was anti-authority, when authority wasn’t listening, that is. Dan describes him as a Ned with a warrant card, a bandit with a sheriff’s badge. But he got results, very good results, and he got promotion.’

‘He sounds like the original mystery man,’ Wilding observed. ‘He’s certainly been an outsider here, a boss’s man when Bob Skinner was around, but without a patron since he’s been gone.’

‘We can unravel some of the mystery, thanks to the man we’ve just left.’

‘The priest?’

‘Yes.’ She explained who Father Thomas Donnelly was, and how he had come into the troubled life of the young David Mackenzie. ‘He took him under his wing, and to paraphrase his words, he put him on the right pathway.’

‘A pathway that led him into the police force.’

‘Yes. But something from his childhood wouldn’t necessarily have kept him out.’

‘Granted, but it happened, and I’m just gobsmacked that you and I are hearing about it for the first time from a priest up in Auchna-wherever-it-is. We’ve been fearing something bad, but not really wanting to believe it. Now, it looks as if we might have to.’

‘Not according to Father Donnelly,’ Lottie Mann said.

‘Why not?’

‘Well, when we talked to him we got round to asking him whether or not Mackenzie was capable of murder.’

‘Was that not a bit risky?’

‘No, we were on his boat. Clearly, he’s at his most comfortable there; he regards it as a sort of confessional. He didn’t laugh off our question, not quite, but he did say that for all they might have squabbled like any other couple, Mackenzie cares for Cheryl, and he dismissed any thought that he might have harmed her. He was emphatic about it.’

‘That’s why you’ll never find a priest on a jury,’ DI Wilding retorted.

Provan chuckled. ‘That’s gey cynical, chum. Sounds to me that you’ve been hanging around Bob Skinner for too long.’