Private Investigations

Forty-Six

‘We’ve got to stop these late finishes or our other halves will get suspicious,’ Haddock laughed, leaning against the high back of the booth.

‘I thought I was here to stop yours being suspicious,’ Pye retorted.

‘Not quite, gaffer. Okay, Macy and I did have a wee thing for a while, after we left school . . .’

‘Were there any girls in your class that you didn’t shag?’ the DCI asked, casually.

‘Most of them, and only the one while I was still there. Macy was a couple of years later, when we were students.’

‘And of course you told Cheeky about her, in the spirit of full disclosure.’

‘Of course.’

‘And you’re worried about her finding out that the two of you have met up.’

‘I told her!’ Haddock insisted.

‘And she said, “Oh yes, Sauce, that’s nice.”’

‘She did. And then she said, “Can I come too, I’d like to meet her,” and I said, “No, it’s business,” and she went a bit quiet. So I said, “It’s all right, Sammy’s coming too.” And here you are.’

‘Very convenient,’ Pye murmured. ‘Now you won’t have to worry about getting on the wrong side of her gangster grandpa.’

‘I’ve never worried about that. Did I tell you we’ve been invited to his wedding?’

‘No, you didn’t. That’s a surprise, isn’t it?’ Pye exclaimed ‘There’s a lady as brave as you, to be marrying into the Dundonian criminal family from hell.’

‘Yes, and you know her. Remember the woman we nearly locked up last year, in the Cramond Island business?’

The DCI’s orange juice stopped halfway to his mouth. ‘What? Mia Watson? Bob Skinner’s . . .’

‘The same; the big man’s fling from the nineties, his teenage boy’s mother.’

‘So that means,’ Pye gasped, ‘that Grandpa McCullough, the notorious Grandpa McCullough, is going to be Bob’s son’s stepfather?’

Haddock beamed. ‘Exactly: the son who’s doing time for culpable homicide. How will he go when he gets out? Will Bob train him as a Jedi, or will the Dark Side of the Force get him?’

‘See you guys and your Star Wars analogies!’ Pye spluttered. ‘I’m still looking for whoever it was christened me Luke Skywalker.’

‘Don’t look too hard,’ the DS chuckled. ‘Everybody knows it was Mario McGuire. Anyway, you love it, admit it.’

‘It gets a laugh, I’ll grant you.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Where is this girl?’

‘She’ll be here, worry not.’

Two minutes later she was: the double doors of Bert’s Bar swung open and a stocky red-haired woman stepped in from William Street. She was wrapped up against the cold, in a thick woollen coat, a snood and a Cossack hat, and she wore boots that were as black as her long skirt.

‘Macy!’ the DS called as she looked around. He stood and eased himself out of the confines of the booth. ‘What are you having?’

‘Gin and tonic, large, ice, no lemon,’ she said, her eyes on the other man, who was still seated.

‘My boss,’ Haddock explained. ‘Sammy Pye, Detective Chief Inspector.’

‘I know who he is,’ Macy Robertson replied. ‘I’ve seen him on TV a couple of times this week. Is that what this is about? The child murder?’

Pye nodded. ‘In a way. But it’s not a murder. It’ll be a suspicious death until the Crown Office makes up its mind what box to fit it into. There’s no rush about that, since the perpetrator’s dead. So tell me, Ms Robertson, who do you work for?’

‘Didn’t Harry say?’

‘Harry?’ the DCI repeated ‘The entire Scottish police service and everyone attached to it knows him as Sauce.’

Macy’s eyes widened as did her smile. ‘Really? That’s wonderful. That’ll be round all my Facebook friends before the night’s out.’

‘Have fun with it. Now, who do you work for?’ Pye repeated, as his colleague returned with the gin and tonic.

‘Bloomberg.’

‘What?’

‘Bloomberg,’ she repeated. ‘It’s a business-based American TV channel, on satellite and cable. It has an Edinburgh office, although not too many know about it. So, what do you want to pick my brains about,’ she paused, and winked, ‘Sauce?’

Haddock scowled across the table. ‘Thanks, pal,’ he muttered. ‘The last group of people that still used my proper name, and you’ve blown it.’ He glanced to his right. ‘We’re looking for background on a company called Mackail Extrusions. Oh aye,’ he added, ‘and we’re looking for it off the record.’

‘What if a real story develops?’ she asked.

‘A head start on it,’ Pye promised. ‘Does it stir any recollections?’

She smiled, slowly. ‘As a matter of fact it does; very vivid ones. I’m glad I came already.’ She sipped her G and T. ‘You know what the company did, yes?’

‘As we understand it, it made UPVC window frames for the double-glazing industry.’

‘Spot on,’ she confirmed. ‘I don’t have to tell you that when the recession hit and the housing market, which hadn’t seen it coming, died in its sleep, life became very difficult for that sector. Mackail Extrusions was hit as hard as anyone else, but it was a well-managed, family-owned company with a decent cash base, since Hector Mackail didn’t overpay himself or stuff his pension fund, as happens in all too many self-managed enterprises.’

She sipped again, and Haddock realised that her glass was almost empty. She raised it, an unspoken suggestion that it might be refilled. ‘In a minute,’ he said.

‘I’ve got to earn it, have I?’ Macy chuckled. ‘Okay. The company traded on through the tough times; it pared itself right down, and focused on the home improvement market where there was still a certain amount happening. It lost money, but it wasn’t immediately calamitous, for as I said, it had gone into it with a strong balance sheet. It had an underlying weakness, though. No, sorry, two. The first was that it was heavily dependent on a single customer. The second was that its banker was, not to beat about any bushes, a real See You Next Tuesday.’

‘You haven’t lost your command of the language, Mace,’ Haddock remarked.

‘No . . . Sauce,’ she giggled, ‘I’ve got more subtle with age, that’s all. Anyway, this is how the story developed; I got this from Hector Mackail, personally. I can tell you that now he’s dead, poor sod. Basically, the customer saw off most of its rivals, by landing a couple of big contracts when central government started to pump money into public sector projects, and by securing work from other companies within its group.’

‘What group?’ Pye asked.

‘I’ll get to that,’ the journalist replied, ‘as soon as you get me another large G and T.’

The DCI muttered something mildly obscene, but headed for the bar.

‘So how’s it with you and the chica, Harry?’

‘She’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me,’ Haddock said.

‘And the richest, from what I hear. Pity about her mother being in jail.’

‘We don’t talk about that across the dinner table. But you’re out of date,’ he added. ‘She’s on parole.’

‘There.’ The returning Pye placed a fresh drink before her, and a second pint before his sergeant. ‘Get singing.’

‘Certainly. The customer was called Destry Glazing Solutions. For the last several years it’s been a subsidiary of Higgins Holdings, the umbrella company of Eden Higgins, the squillionare. Although he owns it, he doesn’t run it. Day-to-day management is in the hands of the widow of the company’s founder. His name was James Stewart, obviously a man with a droll sense of humour.’

‘In what way?’ Haddock asked.

‘I can tell you that,’ his boss said, drily. ‘In the movie Destry Rides Again, guess who played Tom Destry, the hero?’

‘Who?’

‘Jesus! James bloody Stewart, that’s who! Remind me never to have you in my pub quiz team. Go on, Macy.’

‘He was never any use on film questions,’ she laughed, ‘if it involved real actors. Walt Disney was his limit. So, there’s Mackail Extrusions, kept going purely by its orders from Destry Glazing, the problem I identified earlier.’

‘Except,’ Haddock, keen to re-establish some authority, interrupted, ‘Destry wasn’t a problem as long as it paid its bills on time.’

‘You’ve got it: which Destry didn’t. It wasn’t that it couldn’t, for it was cash positive; no, it was the widow Stewart’s policy to keep her suppliers waiting. Eventually that proved fatal for Mackail Extrusions. By that stage the company’s viability was on a knife-edge; it was operating on a big overdraft with a usurious interest rate.’

‘And the See You Next Tuesday pulled the plug?’ Pye asked.

‘Precisely. He knew the debt was out there, but he refused to extend further credit. Hector Mackail had run out of cash, even though by that stage he’d re-mortgaged his house to stay afloat. He couldn’t pay his own creditors and he couldn’t pay his employees’ wages. He had no choice but to call in the receiver.’

‘He wasn’t completely innocent,’ Haddock said. ‘While his business was effectively down the tubes he ran up a bill with a design company, trying to generate new orders by rebranding it.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ the journalist admitted. ‘It doesn’t surprise me, though. Mackail wasn’t the brightest; he should have gone legal with Destry Glazing at an early stage, but he didn’t.’

‘Why didn’t he?’

‘Because it was owned by Eden Higgins, that’s why not. Scotland’s business angel is not a man people like to cross.’

‘I thought he was squeaky clean,’ Pye observed.

‘He is, but that’s because nothing ever sticks to him.’

‘There’s mud to throw?’

Macy contemplated her second drink. ‘I’m starving,’ she said, looking at Haddock, who took the hint and went to the bar, returning with a pie on a plate.

‘Beef chilli.’

She flashed her eyes at him. ‘Darling, you remembered.’

‘How could I forget? You used to put those away two at a time.’

‘Of course I did, when you were paying. You’re lucky I’m on a diet just now.’ She took a bite of the pie. ‘Tasty,’ she murmured. ‘Yes, Eden Higgins. Guess what happened to the leavings of Mackail Extrusions?’

‘We feed you and we have to play guessing games?’ Haddock exclaimed.

‘Fair enough. The liquidator put the bite on Destry Glazing. It paid up without a murmur, and then it bought the assets of the failed company for a song, those assets being all its plant and equipment. By the time the bank was paid, and the liquidator himself, of course, the other creditors were left with something like fifteen pence in the pound. Effectively, Destry Glazing Solutions bought itself an in-house extrusion facility for little more than zero, right at the moment when the construction industry’s coming out of hibernation.’

‘That’s a hell of a story, Macy,’ Pye remarked. ‘I read the business press, so how come I’ve never seen it anywhere?’

‘You don’t watch Bloomberg, since you’d never heard of it before tonight.’

‘You ran it?’

‘I ran a piece about the role of the bank. When I put it together I called Destry Glazing’s PR people and asked for a comment. They promised to get back to me, but they never did. Instead I had a call from Eden Higgins’ lawyers, threatening me with an action for defamation if his name was even hinted at in my report.’

She renewed her attack on the pie. ‘Nobody else in Edinburgh touched it,’ she mumbled. ‘So I guess that my colleagues in the printed media were all warned off.’ She leaned forward. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘how does all that relate to the dead child?’

‘It doesn’t, not really,’ Haddock confessed. ‘The designer that Mackail ran up the bill with, she was the mother. She was attacked as well, but that never made the press. We’ve been looking for a connection, but I don’t see one.’

‘Oh no?’ Macy murmured. ‘There’s a PS to the story. I heard it a month or two back, from a bloke I know on the Daily Record business staff. Yes, it’s a red-top but it does have a business reporter. His girlfriend had just chucked him, and, well, I consoled him.’ She beamed at Haddock. ‘I always was good at consoling, Harry, wasn’t I?’

‘No comment,’ ‘Harry’ muttered.

‘Anyway,’ her second drink had disappeared without either detective noticing its demise, ‘in the aftermath, when we were wondering what the hell to say to each other, he came out with a story that the ex had told him in confidence.’

‘Under similar circumstances no doubt.’

‘Probably. Her name’s Luisa, and she’s Eden Higgins’s PA. The tale was that after the liquidator had done his worst, Hector Mackail turned up unannounced at Eden’s office up on the Mound. He accused him of being in cahoots with the See You Next Tuesday at the bank . . . in which Higgins has a substantial stake, did I forget to mention that? . . . and of masterminding the whole thing.

‘Eden told him to go away, or words to that effect, and Mackail lost it. He banjoed him and knocked him down a flight of stairs, buggering his ankle in the process. Luisa was going to call your lot, but Eden told her to do no more than chuck Mackail out. He wanted no police involvement, no exposure of the story. He walked about with a cast on his ankle for five weeks and never told anyone why.’

‘I can see why he’d want to keep that quiet,’ Pye said. ‘Did you think about running it?’

‘No, and neither did my one-night stand. The fight would have been denied, Luisa would have been fired and nobody would ever have proved any collusion between Eden and See You Next Tuesday.’

Macy finished the pie and stood up, abruptly. ‘I hope that was all worthwhile, guys. I’ve got to go now; Goldman Sachs is having a champagne reception in the Balmoral Hotel. There will be food.’

She leaned over and kissed Haddock on the cheek, leaving a lipstick impression. ‘Bye, Sauce, your secret is totally unsafe with me.’

‘Fuck me!’ Sammy Pye gasped as she left. ‘Now I understand why you wanted a minder.’