Hour Of Darkness

Forty-Nine

The HR person was as good as her word; Max Allan’s file made it from her office to mine within five minutes. It extended to three folders, Max having enjoyed a long career that had ended in the carnage of the assassination of my predecessor in the Strathclyde chief’s chair a few weeks earlier.

‘Why the hell couldn’t all this have been computerised?’ I grumbled as I contemplated forty years’ worth of documents. ‘Then I could have entered “David Mackenzie” in the search window and pushed a button.’

But it hadn’t so there was nothing for it but to start the process. I decided to discard some of the material, since Mackenzie hadn’t been born when Max had joined the force, and so I skimmed through his career until I found his posting to Uddingston, in Lanarkshire, as a detective sergeant. The name rang a bell with me, and not only because Myra and her family had lived close by. Tom Donnelly had told me that was where the chip-pan incident had happened.

I went through the documents one by one, from that point on, and pretty soon I had a result. I hadn’t expected to find a report of the affair on Max’s file, as that would have been in CID records rather than personnel, but I did find a summary. It was attached to a note of an official commendation by the chief constable of the day, acknowledging Max’s exceptional performance in uncovering the abuse of the child and framing charges leading to a successful prosecution. The boy had been identified in the commendation document, but his name had been redacted.

I wondered about that; indeed I was curious enough to pick up the phone and ask the head of HR about it. ‘Would your department have done that automatically, thirty-odd years ago?’

‘No,’ she replied at once, ‘not then. Nowadays yes, but back then, in a confidential file, no. The published notice of commendation wouldn’t have included the attachment, you see.’

‘Was there ever a time when you’d have gone back and done it retrospectively?’

‘If we had the manpower to do that. .’ she began, leaving the rest unsaid.

‘Could ACC Allan have had access to his own file?’

‘In theory everyone has a right to see all information held about them but, Chief, when you’re an ACC, there isn’t a door in the building that’s closed to you. . apart from your office, perhaps.’

‘Mine? No, it isn’t, in fact.’

‘It hasn’t always been that way, I assure you.’

I laughed. ‘I’m sure. And who knows what the future will hold?’

I thanked her and got on with my self-imposed task, taking another step forward to the year in which Mackenzie had applied to join the force. By that time, Max was back in Glasgow, back in headquarters in Pitt Street. He was a chief super by then, and back in uniform, as he had been for most of his career, in a desk job supervising the traffic department. Nothing to do directly with staff recruitment; it was the responsibility of one of the ACCs of the day, but he reported to that guy, and he would have been on the same floor. If he’d wanted to. .

‘But why, Bob, why?’ I asked myself. ‘Why would Max want to smooth Mackenzie’s way into the force and remove anything that wouldn’t have pleased the recruitment panel?’

I went through the rest of the file looking for an answer, but I saw nothing. Why was I bothered? Because the man had denied knowledge of someone who was a fugitive and he had lied about it.

At that point I could have gone straight to him. I could even have extended the traditional invitation to Pitt Street, ‘to help with our inquiries’. But, like anyone skilled in cross-examination, I prefer to have the answers before I put the questions, and there were none in that file.

I decided on another tack, another, informal line of inquiry. I have a pal, a man who’s been useful to me on several occasions. His name is Jim Glossop; he used to be a civil servant but he retired at sixty and became a consultant genealogist. I found him on my contact list and selected his number.

‘Bob,’ he ventured, the mobile signal sounding a little other-worldly, ‘is that you? I thought you’d moved on to great things.’

‘You mean I wasn’t bloody great before, Jim?’

‘Right,’ he said firmly, then laughed. ‘Let me rephrase that.’

‘No, mate, it’s out there now. It’s a pretty good judgement, too.’

‘What can I do for you,’ he asked. ‘I don’t imagine this is a social call, not from a man who’s as busy as you must be.’

‘Not exactly,’ I admitted. ‘It’s not exactly a police matter either, not yet, at any rate. I want to know about a man named Maxwell Allan, parents’ names, wife’s maiden name, siblings, anything there is.’

‘He’s Scottish, I take it.’

‘Yes.’

‘You got a date of birth?’

I read it from the file.

‘It shouldn’t be a problem, then. I take it you need it yesterday.’

‘The day before if possible. And Jim, the bill comes to me, not the police service.’

‘What bill?’ He hung up.