Private Investigations

Twenty-Five

I did as I’d been told, not only because there wasn’t an option, but also because Sarah was right: it wasn’t my job any more. Instead I read Seonaid one last A. A. Milne poem before switching out her light (sleeping without a nightlight is a matter of honour with her) then checked that the boys were obeying standard bedtime operating procedures.

As I did so, all the time I found myself thinking about Sarah’s potential bombshell, and considering its practical consequences. Our family home had been built with five bedrooms and a self-contained flat for Trish above the garages. We had one spare en-suite room that Alex used whenever she decided to stay. Ignacio had taken no decision about where he would live when he was released, but I was determined that it would not be with his mother, who was, is and always will be bad news in my book. I’d made it clear that I hoped he’d move in with us and get to know the family he’d been denied for twenty years, and he hadn’t rejected the idea. With him and a new baby, space would be tight, even in our big villa.

In my younger days, in the job, when we were in the mire and things looked black, I was fond of telling my people, ‘There are no problems, only challenges and opportunities.’ My tongue was in my cheek then, but as I wished Mark goodnight and closed his bedroom door, I knew that my rapidly expanding family was giving me an accommodation challenge, big time.

In an attempt to drive it from my mind, I collected the Princess Alison file and took it into what I call my office these days, although Sarah still calls it ‘the panic room’, a sanctuary in those times when either of us really needs privacy.

Leaving the door ajar just in case of sounds from upstairs, I cued up some quiet music on the streaming system and settled down to read. The simple act of opening the file put me back mentally in my old office in Pitt Street, in Glasgow, a room that I’d never grown to love in the way that I’d cherished my accommodation in the command suite in the Edinburgh police HQ. I shoved that image to one side and concentrated on what was before me.

The first pages were a detailed description of the property that had been stolen and, in police-speak, of the way the crime had been committed. It was followed by a series of photographs; the first six were of the empty boathouse, with its massive door raised, then lowered.

A group of four followed; three showed the exterior and the channel of buoys that led into the Gareloch, while the fourth was a satellite image showing the location of Eden’s place, two-thirds along the road from Helensburgh and its suburb, Rhu, to the Faslane naval base.

Third and last was a series of images of the Princess Alison herself, external and internal. Eden had promised to email some to me, but I hadn’t opened my mailbox since then, and so the file gave me my first sight of the lost cruiser. She was a serious piece of kit; a billionaire’s toy and no mistake. I looked for anything in her lines that might remind me of the woman after whom she’d been named, but saw nothing. Alison Higgins was a robust, earthy, lusty woman; her image might have belonged on the bowsprit of a pirate ship, but never on a luxury cruiser.

One of the photographs showed a party in progress: men and women in light-coloured clothes, most of them brandishing champagne flutes. I extracted that from the file and studied it closely. As far as I was concerned at that stage, every person who had set foot on the missing Princess was a suspect, until they weren’t.

‘Innocent until proven guilty’ is a very fine principle, and it’s the foundation of our justice system, but any investigator worth his corn has to begin with the opposite viewpoint.

The rest of the folder was crap.

As I read on, I saw that the first thing DI McGarry had done was to report the theft to the Marine and Coastguard Agency, which doesn’t actually have a criminal investigation division. The second was to circulate a description of the missing vessel to all police forces with a coastline south of the Firth of Clyde, including the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and the Garda Siochana, the Irish force. The third was to secure the posting of a description and photograph on a website called stolenboats.org that appeared to be fed with information by the marine insurance industry and the police but to be independent of either.

There were a few notes in response, but all of them were negative, saying that there had been no reports of a boat matching the description of the Princess Alison. The conclusion of McGarry’s trawl was that she had simply vanished.

The man had done the basics at the site of the theft, but no more: a crime scene team had gone over all the accessible points in the boathouse, and had found nothing out of place, no unidentified fingerprints. The padlock on the sliding double doors through which the thieves had entered had been cut through its arch, then put back in place, helping to delay the discovery of the raid.

Their report solved one riddle that had been niggling me since Eden and Rory had told me the story. If the phone line that serviced the alarm system had been cut, why hadn’t the gardeners noticed it? The answer was that the cable was underground, terminating in a box on the wall of the boathouse, beside the door. The cover had been removed and then replaced.

Nothing else that McGarry had done showed a scrap of real initiative. He had taken a statement from Eden, and had interviewed the part-time crew of the Princess, Hurrell and Hodgson. At least he’d shown the nous to ask those two for their whereabouts at the time of the theft, 3 a.m. on 4 October. Hurrell had been driving Eden and Rachel home to Edinburgh after a dinner at Gleneagles Hotel, and Hodgson had been visiting his niece, in Rochdale.

Beyond that the file was bare. There were notes of visits to marinas in the Firth of Clyde, and of telephone calls to those in its islands, and more remote mainland areas. There had been a discussion with Eden’s insurer, but that amounted to nothing more than a lack of progress report.

The investigation had been founded on a very basic assumption, that the vessel had been stolen by persons unknown with the motive being simple profit. My problem was that it had never occurred to McGarry to look anywhere else. I’d told Eden and Rory, without even having seen the boathouse, that there had to have been inside knowledge in the planning of the operation, and yet that hadn’t dawned on an officer who’d reached detective inspector rank.

Unless . . .

I picked up my phone and called Mario McGuire, mobile to mobile. He must have been home, for in the background I could hear wee Eamon yelling for sustenance.

‘Hi, Bob,’ he said. ‘Got the report?’

‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘Have I ever.’

‘Is it okay?’

‘Hah,’ I chuckled. ‘Obviously you haven’t looked at it yourself.’

‘No, I wasn’t in Glasgow today. I had it sent straight to you once it had been pulled from the archive. Is it dodgy?’

I gave him a brief rundown of the contents. As I finished I could hear him gasp. ‘And that’s it?’

‘Yup. That’s as far as it goes. It says several things to me. But the most immediate concern is that McGarry is either stupid, bone idle, or corrupt. In your shoes, I’d be having him investigated, very quietly, to rule out the latter. More than that, I’d be doing what I’d have done in Strathclyde if I’d known about this. I’d be rooting out his entire reporting chain, and looking over every closed investigation that division ever undertook.’

‘Bloody right!’ he snorted. ‘First thing tomorrow, that gets done.’ He paused. ‘Listen, you know the people through in the west better than I do. Short of bringing somebody in from another area, which would be noticed, is there anyone you can suggest to do the job discreetly?’

‘What’s Sandra Bulloch doing now?’ I asked. ‘She was my exec, but I don’t suppose that Andy kept her on in that role.’

‘She’s been promoted DCI, on major crimes,’ he replied. ‘I interviewed her and I can see why you rated her. I’ll put her on it. Will you want to talk to McGarry yourself?’

‘That would be pointless,’ I told him. ‘All that would happen would be me losing my rag. There’s nothing he could tell me that isn’t in his file, unless Sandra comes up with a link between him and anyone connected to the Princess. If she does, it would be good to know, but that’s all.’

‘Will do,’ Mario said, ‘although my money’s very much on stupidity or laziness.’ Then he paused. ‘How are you feeling after what we both saw this morning?’ he murmured.

‘It won’t go away,’ I admitted, ‘and believe me, I’m trying to block it out.’

‘Have you heard from the Menu lately?’

‘Not since this afternoon,’ I replied, ‘when they asked me if I could ID their prime suspect as the driver of the BMW. I did the best I could. They seemed pretty certain, though; I had the feeling I was just being asked out of politeness.’

‘They know for sure now,’ he growled, grimly.

Something in his tone made a piece of the day’s jigsaw click into place.

‘Are you going to tell me,’ I ventured, ‘that the double fatality that Sarah’s just been called to attend is . . .’

‘That I am. I’ve just had Pye on the phone. They’ve been sure from early on that Francey didn’t plan this thing all on his own. It seems that they were right and that he’s picked up the tab for failure, and his girlfriend alongside him. They’ll need dental or DNA identification, though. They were both burned to cinders. Don’t expect Sarah home in a hurry. She’s going to do both autopsies tonight.’

‘Oh God,’ I sighed, then shuddered. ‘What a job she’s gone to. Now I’m wishing she hadn’t had that tuna steak.’