Private Investigations

Thirty-Eight

Next morning I had trouble refocusing on the job, but once Sarah had gone to work, and the kids to school, with an effort of will I managed it.

I was slightly annoyed that Jock Hodgson hadn’t got back in touch, irked enough to call him again, and leave a slightly testier message on his phone. With that out of the way, I decided to pick up on my discussion with Walter Hurrell and on the leads that had come out of it.

Before I got round to that, though, I made one more phone call.

Clyde Houseman and I go back a long way, twenty years in fact, to the time when I was a detective super and he was a teenage gang-banger in the very roughest part of Edinburgh. These days, he credits me with pointing him in the right direction when we had our street encounter. If so that’s all I did; the journey and the hard labour it involved were all down to him.

It led him to the Marines, to Special Forces and finally to the Security Service, where he is now, in its secretive Glasgow office. Its number is programmed into my phone, under the label ‘Chiropractor’.

He was in when I called. ‘Sir,’ he said, his voice clipped, without accent. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m great,’ I replied.

‘Are you going to be joining us any time soon?’ he asked, boldly.

‘You never know,’ I replied. ‘If the director has a need for me, she knows she can call.’ In truth, Amanda Dennis, my friend and his boss, and I had talked around the idea, but only in the vaguest of terms.

‘But right now you have a need for us. Is that the case?’

‘More for you than for the service,’ I told him. ‘I’ve come across a man who claims to have been in your old outfit. By that I mean Special Forces, not the Marines. A naval petty officer; he’s called Walter Hurrell. I’d like to know about him.’

‘There’s something familiar about that name,’ Clyde said, ‘but I can’t pin it down. We weren’t big on surnames or ranks in the SBS. Let me make inquiries and come back to you. What’s the context?’

‘I’m doing a private job for a rich acquaintance who’s been robbed of a high-value item. Hurrell works for him and there’s a vibe coming off him. If he isn’t straight, I need to know.’

‘Okay. I’ll find out,’ Clyde promised.

That done, I went back to the notes that I’d made after my session with Hurrell. He’d been adamant that the Princess Alison hadn’t been spirited away on a larger vessel and I was inclined to agree with him. He was almost as sure that she was still afloat, sold on to wealthy, wide-boy buyers, possibly, even, in the US.

Thinking about her range and about possible routes, I struggled to see why anyone would have chosen the American option. Fuelled up, Iceland would be well within her range. But from there, the closest refuelling point would be Nuuk, in Greenland, or St John’s in Newfoundland. Either would be stretching it, and more; in winter it would be a cold and risky voyage. Why take the chance when you could go south and into the Mediterranean, where there would be potential buyers aplenty? Finally I decided to trust Hurrell and make that my first choice.

Which would mean the part of criminal investigation that I have always hated the most: a desk job; just me, a computer and a phone. To find where the Princess had headed, I would have to find her first refuelling station.

‘There was enough fuel in the tank for them to get her to the west coast of Ireland,’ Hurrell had said. How many marine diesel fuel pumps were there within that range? I had no idea, and I didn’t have much of an idea of how to find out. It was another job I’d have been happy to delegate to Carrie McDaniels, but she was fully occupied. I could understand why Randolph bloody McGarry couldn’t be arsed to do it himself, even if I couldn’t excuse him his omission.

I went on to my computer and eventually found a website called Marinas Online that gave me particulars of eighty-nine marinas in the UK. Fortunately they weren’t all coastal; once I had filtered out inland waterways I was left with a list of a dozen, dotted along the north-west coast of England and down into Wales. Manageable, I thought, until I moved on to Ireland and found another web page; that trebled the number of potential stopping places.

My next problem was the lack of a specific date. I knew that the boat had been stolen on 4 October, but that was as precise as I could be. The only advantage I had was the sheer size of the beast. There couldn’t be too many seventy-five-foot motor cruisers around, surely.

I picked up my list and went to work, haunted by the memory of my very first day as a detective constable, when old Alf Stein, who went on to become my mentor, gave me a desk, a phone and a list of bystander witnesses, made by two PCs who attended a near-fatal stabbing, and told me to get on with interviewing them.

I did too; the fifth person I spoke to told a story that was so much at odds with the first four, who had all painted more or less the same picture, that I stopped what I was doing and dug a little deeper into his background. The ‘witness’ had professed no knowledge of the victim, and yet a simple check showed me that when he had served six months in Saughton for assault, the two had been cellmates.

I decided to look more deeply at the victim: I pulled his record and called the detective sergeant who was listed as his last arresting officer. He told me to fuck off if I knew what was good for me. I invited him to say that to my face, then went to Alf and told him what I had discovered.

We pulled in the witness and sat him down in a windowless, airless room in Gayfield Square, my least favourite of all the Edinburgh police stations. His name was Thomas McGraw, and he went down in my personal history as my first ever CID collar. Ten minutes of Alf’s relentless, unblinking interrogation . . . from then on I modelled my own interview style on his . . . and he coughed the lot.

The victim, one Scott Hancock, a recidivist criminal, had been on the payroll of Ernie Lewis, my detective sergeant acquaintance, as an informant, but that relationship had been tarnished when he confessed to McGraw in an unguarded moment in their cell that much of the information he had provided had come from a man called Dougie Terry, also known as the Comedian, and had been designed to incriminate his enemies while protecting his friends.

McGraw had gone straight to Lewis, with a view to securing the DS’s favour, and had been told to prove himself by serving notice on Hancock with the weapon of his choice. It had all gone according to plan, until the two PCs arrived ahead of schedule, having heard the victim’s cries. With his escape route blocked, McGraw had mingled among the growing crowd of passers-by at the scene. When asked for his details he had been foolish enough to give his real name.

Hancock survived, McGraw pleaded guilty to an assault charge rather than attempted murder and both men gave evidence against Ernie Lewis. By the time he came out I was a chief inspector. Alf let me charge McGraw, but he kept Lewis for himself, for he didn’t think it wise for a rookie DC to have another a cop on his arrest docket.

My trawl of the coastal marinas of Britain and Ireland was nowhere near as successful. In fact it was a total bust, as I had feared from the outset. Most of the places told me they couldn’t handle a vessel of that size, and the rest said that if one had turned up, they would have recalled it, but couldn’t. For the sake of thoroughness I checked out the fuelling points at Inverkip and Oban, but had no joy at either.

The only credit I could give myself was for doing something that McGarry hadn’t, but that was offset by the truth that his slackness had actually saved police time.

For the sake of thoroughness, I called the managers of the stolen boats website, but they had no fresh information, and nothing waiting to be added. The Princess Alison was gone, and if Walter Hurrell was right, gone for good.

I was pretty certain that before the week was out I would be reporting back to Eden, recommending that he negotiate the best settlement he could with his insurers, but I still had one place left to go.

Jock Hodgson still hadn’t got back to me. I tried him again, with no more success than before, then I called Luisa McCracken.

‘Jock does other things as well as crewing the Princess, ’ she told me. ‘We have first call on his time, but he does quite a bit of engine maintenance work.’

‘Could he be on holiday?’ I asked.

‘That’s unlikely; being single, he hardly ever takes any. When he does he always gives us plenty of notice. Hold on.’

I did, for a couple of minutes.

‘I have a folder on him,’ Luisa said when she returned. ‘There are no notes about holidays, just timesheets.’

‘When did you hear from him last?’

‘Last October. Walter told him that the boat had been stolen, then I called him to arrange a meeting with the insurance underwriters. There’s an understanding that when the boat’s recovered or replaced, we’ll get in touch with him.’

‘Do you have an address?’ I asked. ‘I won’t be ignored; if he won’t call me back, I’ll go and bang on his door.’

‘I thought you’d want that,’ she said. ‘I have it here; it’s Ailsa View, Dunglas Avenue, Wemyss Bay. It’s a long drive, mind.’

‘Nah, I can do it in a couple of hours.’

It was just after midday; I fixed myself an early lunch, ham slices and coleslaw in a couple of wholemeal pitta breads, then grabbed a Snickers bar and a bottle of water for the journey, and headed off in my still-wounded car, after making a mental note to dump the repair in the hands of my insurers, and let them fight it out with the owner of the BMW, whoever he might be.

Gullane to Wemyss Bay is a coast-to-coast drive, Firth of Forth to the Firth of Clyde, round Edinburgh and through Glasgow, motorway for all but the first ten miles and the last fifteen. I made good time; it was two fifteen and I was on the outskirts of Greenock, when my phone sounded.

‘Mr Skinner?’ It was Clyde Houseman.

‘Yes,’ I replied. ‘I’m on the road and I’m alone. You can speak.’

‘Good. I have feedback for you on the man you asked about. It wasn’t easy to get, and I can understand why. I told you that the name rang a bell with me; it should have been an alarm bell. Yes, Petty Officer Hurrell was operational in the Special Boat Service, but not for long. He served in Iraq, in a different zone from me, up in the north of the country, chasing a cadre of Saddam’s old Revolutionary Guard who were taking revenge on civilians in and around his home town. He was part of a three-man team, who caught up with some of them in a house near Tikrit. By that time they weren’t much of a threat; there were only five of them left and they’d hardly any ammo. Hurrell’s unit was under the command of a Marine sergeant, a lad I knew. He was under orders to take prisoners back for interrogation, so he gave them the chance of surrender.

‘They took it. They threw their weapons out of the window and came out in a line, hands on head. One of them twitched; he scratched his ear, my friend told me. Whatever he did, it spooked Hurrell. He mowed the fucking lot of them down.’

‘Was he court-martialled?’ I asked.

‘In another unit he might have been, but not in Special Forces. He was kicked out, unceremoniously. They sent him back to his minesweeper. Six months later, he left the service and went to work for your man Higgins. His CO knew nothing about the Iraq incident, and wrote him an excellent reference. It’s still on file.’

‘The reference,’ I said. ‘Does it square with the rest of his service record?’

‘It does,’ Houseman replied. ‘His reports show him to have been an exemplary sailor.’

‘Apart from killing five unarmed men in cold blood,’ I chuckled.

‘We all have our off days, sir.’

I thanked Houseman and drove on, letting my navigation system guide me for the rest of the journey. One big difference between the Firths of Forth and Clyde is that ferries still run in the latter. Wemyss Bay is one of the terminals; a rail service from Glasgow delivers Rothesay-bound passengers all year round. My dad took the family there on holiday when I was six. God bless him, it was his idea of a good time.

Satnav took me straight to Dunglas Avenue, but Hodgson’s house wasn’t so easy to find. The street was a short cul-de-sac, and none of the dozen bungalows had numbers, only names. I looked at them all, one by one, but couldn’t see Ailsa View anywhere. Puzzled, I thought about calling Luisa to recheck the address, but before I could do that, I was hailed by a white-haired lady in a tweed skirt and heavy purple jumper, standing in the doorway of a little dwelling called Barrhead.

‘Excuse me,’ she called out. ‘You look lost. Can I help you?’

‘Possibly,’ I replied, walking to the end of her short garden path. ‘I’m trying to locate a house called Ailsa View and a man named Hodgson. I was told it was in this street, but I can’t see any sign of it.’

‘Not surprising,’ she said. ‘It’s pretty well hidden. If you go to the end of the street, there’s a house called Lindisfarne. It looks as if it has a double driveway, but in fact half of it leads to Ailsa View. It’s hidden behind it. Hodgson,’ she repeated. ‘That’s the chap’s name, is it? Funny, isn’t it, that you can live in a street as short as this one for twenty-five years, and still you don’t know all your neighbours. No wonder they call him the Hermit.’ She laughed. ‘Maybe he should change the name to “The Hermitage”. More appropriate than “Ailsa View”. You don’t get a glimpse of the Ailsa Craig from here.’

I thanked her and followed her direction. She was right; at first glance I’d taken the gravel driveway as leading into Lindisfarne. It was only when I was close to it that I saw the bifurcation and the curve beyond it.

I followed it, the stones crunching beneath my feet, until Hodgson’s place came into view, facing at ninety degrees to the one in front. It wasn’t much of a house, smaller than any other in the street; it had a garden, or rather a grassy area in front that didn’t come close to resembling a proper lawn. I wondered if the owner of Lindisfarne had cashed in on half of his plot, but the place looked as old as any of its neighbours and in a poorer state of repair. Whoever developed the land had jammed it into maximise profit, I decided.

Its name was on a small plaque, wall mounted, to the right of brown wooden double doors that looked in want of a coat of varnish, and above a white plastic bell stud. I pressed it, leaning hard for five or six seconds, then waited: in vain.

I tried the storm doors, but they were locked. I rattled the letter box, in case the bell wasn’t sounding indoors. I took out my mobile and called Hodgson’s number. From within I could hear it ring out seven times, then go silent as it switched to auto answer.

‘Bugger,’ I muttered.

There was a square bay window to the left of the entrance and a smaller single pane to the right. I peered in each, but they were screened by Venetian blinds, closed tightly enough to deny me any more than the narrowest glimpse of the rooms inside.

Sure as hell, I hadn’t driven all that way to turn around and go home without having a bloody good look around. I walked round to the back of the house, checking the window of each room as I went, but none of them offered any better view than the two in front, other than the kitchen, at the back.

I peered through the dirty glass. There was a milk carton on the work surface and a packet of biscuits, but nothing else in sight other than a few lazy flies.

Jock Hodgson’s garage was at the end of the driveway, in the rear left-hand corner of the plot. It had an up-and-over door that was locked, and another to the side that wasn’t.

I opened it and stepped inside.

I hadn’t seen a Ford Escort in years, not one from the late sixties with what they called the Coke bottle body style, but Jock Hodgson had one, F registration in the old number style. Unlike his house, it was immaculate. The body shell looked as new, and the paint was brilliant white, beneath a coating of dust. The bumpers were shiny without a speck of rust to be seen. I opened the driver’s door and leaned inside; even the blue imitation leather seats were pristine. The only thing about it that wasn’t original was a Samsung mobile phone lying in the footwell on the driver’s side. I knew for sure that if I raised the hood, I’d find that the cylinder head was polished. It was a collector’s car, an engineer’s car, a show car.

And the key was in the ignition. And the side door to the garage was unlocked.

I don’t know much about collectable cars; these days I buy mine new and trade them in before they’re old enough to need an MOT. But looking at that Escort, which was nearly as old as me, I guessed it had to be worth close on ten grand. Clearly, the man Hodgson loved that vehicle, yet anyone could have gone in there, raised the up-and-over from the inside and driven off with it.

That was the point when my instincts told me that something was very wrong. I knew I should have twigged it earlier, that something else should have rung my alarm bell, but I couldn’t pin it down. While I thought about it, I turned the key in the ignition . . . and all I heard was the clunk of a stone dead battery. I tried the lights; the dashboard panel barely flickered. I gripped the steering wheel and my hand became enmeshed in a spider’s web that I hadn’t noticed before.

And that’s when I realised what had been out of place: those flies in the kitchen. How many flies do you expect to find in a cold house in the first week in February?

There were three other keys on the ring that fed the ignition. I pulled it out and examined them. One was long and thin, and had to be for the up-and-over, another was a Yale, and I suspected that it matched the lock I’d noticed on the side door.

The third was for a mortice lock. I returned to the back door, looking into the kitchen again as I passed the window. There were quite a few of those damn flies, especially if I counted the dead ones that lay at the foot of the pane. I tried the key; it turned, I opened the door, stepped into the kitchen . . . and that was when the smell hit me.

The geeks who post on lurid online forums say the odour of decomposing human flesh is unique; they’re wrong. In my experience, the smell of death is more subtle than that. There’s an underlying, cloying sweetness to it, but it varies with the stage of decomposition and with the shape and bulk of the person before life became extinct. The one thing that is universally accepted is that it’s horrible and you don’t want to be breathing in the molecules that create it.

I’ve asked Sarah how she copes with it; all she says is ‘mental conditioning’, and yet the same woman has repeating deodorant sprays in every bathroom in our house.

I grabbed a towel that was hanging from a hook on a cupboard door, held it over my nose and mouth and went in search of the source. All I had to do was follow the flies; the closer I got the thicker they swarmed.

I found him in the living room. Jock Hodgson had been tied to a chair; his wrists and left ankle were secured by some form of restraint that I couldn’t see properly because they were so swollen. His face was black, and his head lolled on his left shoulder; his body was distended, and his clothes stretched, by gases. He looked ready to burst; I hoped he would contain himself, literally, until I was gone.

The swelling was most obvious in his feet, for he wore neither shoes nor socks. They had been removed and lay beside him. I could guess the reason.

I backed out of there. I didn’t want to contaminate the scene, nor did I want the scene to contaminate me, any more than it had already. In the garden I drew deep breath after deep breath, and blew my nose hard, on the handkerchief from my breast pocket, yet the stink of the dead Hodgson was still with me. My suit wasn’t going to the dry cleaner, that I knew; it was bound for the incinerator.

I took my phone from its pocket inside my jacket and thumbed through my directory until I reached ‘M’. A few months before I’d probably have stopped at ‘Martin’, but in the new situation there was no guarantee that my call would be accepted. Instead I carried on to ‘McGuire’.

‘Bob,’ my friend answered on the first ring. ‘What’s up? Have you decided you need to speak to McGarry?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got somebody else in mind, two people in fact. My assignment for Eden Higgins has just become very complicated and very smelly. You need to send a CSI team to Dunglas Avenue, in Wemyss Bay; that and the best matched CID pair you’ve got.’ I told him who they were.

‘They’ll all be on their way inside ten minutes,’ Mario promised. ‘And I won’t be far behind them. I’ve hung around you too long, chum: I can’t stay away from a juicy crime scene either.’