Private Investigations

Forty-Seven

‘It’s a hell of a story, boys,’ Mario McGuire said, ‘but how does it relate to your inquiry? Your target is the person who killed Francey and the Polish girl, because it’s almost certain that he paid them to kidnap Zena. The other thing, this corporate skulduggery, there’s no way that it relates.’ The DCC scratched his chin. ‘Mind you,’ he mused, ‘I’m interested, for other reasons, that Eden Higgins is caught up in it.’

Sammy Pye had called him the previous evening, almost as soon as the doors in Bert’s Bar had stopped swinging after Macy Robertson’s departure, to ask for a review meeting on the investigation. McGuire had been on his way south from Inverness at the time, and had been only too eager to grab an excuse for avoiding the chief constable’s routine morning meetings with his deputies and assistants. He would admit it to nobody but his wife, but he was becoming irked by the micromanagement of the new force at the very top level and the spread of that culture downwards.

‘Surely Bob Skinner was a classic micromanager?’ Paula had argued, when he had voiced his concerns, over dinner.

‘Bob was an interfering so-and-so at times,’ he had replied, ‘on the criminal investigation side, but when he did stick his nose in, it was always to support the people on the ground, never to second-guess them. Andy Martin is trying to keep a grip on everything that’s going on, rather than trusting people to do the job he’s given them. Today he came down on me like a ton of bricks because Sammy Pye took a decision that he saw as questioning his judgement. I never told Sammy, but he ordered me to take him off the case and replace him with Lowell Payne.’

‘Who’s Lowell Payne?’

‘He was a Strathclyde man, the head of organised crime and counter-terrorism; what we used to call Special Branch. Bob appointed him, and I’d have kept him in post, but Andy told me to move him out and replace him with Renee Simpson from the old Grampian force. So now Payne’s a detective superintendent without portfolio.’

‘Did you replace Sammy?’

‘Like hell I did! I told Andy that I wasn’t going to undermine one of my best detectives and that he could replace me if he had a problem with that. He backed down, but the boy Pye’s future in CID is hanging by a very thin thread if he doesn’t get a result.’

‘And you? How are you placed with him?’

‘Honestly? I have no idea. I don’t know the man any more.’

He was still brooding as he sat with the two Edinburgh detectives in the Fettes canteen, a mug of tea enveloped in his very large right hand. He was focused on one single objective, preserving his own authority as deputy in charge of all criminal policing, and protecting Pye’s position was inextricably linked to that.

If the Zena investigation collapsed, and Martin carried out his threat to transfer Pye out of CID, it would be a resignation issue for him . . . and he would not go quietly.

‘The man Mackail’s death,’ he murmured. ‘What’s your thinking on that?’

‘We reckoned . . .’ Haddock began, but went no further as he felt the weight of McGuire’s heavy black eyebrows.

‘Sergeant,’ he growled, ‘when I put a question, unless I’m actually looking at you, it’s for the senior officer at the table to answer me.’

The DS gazed at the tabletop. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he murmured, icily.

‘Sauce and I reckoned,’ Pye began, then paused.

McGuire glowered at him; then he grinned, breaking the tension. ‘Nice one, Sammy; I appreciate you standing up for your sidekick. So go on, give me the benefit of your combined wisdom.’

‘We don’t have any,’ the DCI confessed. ‘We are stuck; we have no positive lines of inquiry left open. Callum Sullivan’s bank withdrawal was a red herring, as DCs Wright and Dickson have confirmed, and the banknotes found in Francey’s flat are untraceable. The Mackail connection to Grete Regal was all we had, and now that’s blown.’

He paused as the DCC drank some of his tea.?‘You’re right,’ he continued when he had his full attention once more, ‘that the corporate skulduggery, as you call it, doesn’t relate to the main investigation in any way we can see, but the aftermath . . . what about that? Hector Mackail was involved in a physical confrontation with Eden Higgins and a few days later he died in a hit-and-run, on his way home from the pub in North Berwick.’

‘Shit happens,’ McGuire grunted.

Pye laughed. ‘Sir, that’s just about the worst piece of devil’s advocacy I’ve ever heard.’

‘Maybe, but are you saying that one of Scotland’s richest men ran over a guy just because he’d stuck one on him?’

‘No, because his foot was in plaster; but he could have paid someone to do it, someone who knew the lie of the land and might even have known that Hector Mackail drank in the Nether Abbey bar with his pals every Friday and then walked home.’

The DCC swirled the dregs of his tea around the bottom of the mug. ‘North Berwick’s not awash with hit men, is it?’ he said.

‘No, sir, it’s not,’ Pye agreed. ‘But there is one, or rather there was, that we know of, someone who actually knew Mackail, or knew of him, through his daughter. What if . . .’

McGuire beamed. ‘Some of the greatest results in the history of criminal investigation began with those two words,’ he observed. ‘Go on.’

‘What if the money we found in Francey’s flat wasn’t a down payment for the Zena abduction, but payment in full for knocking over Hector Mackail?’

‘What if . . .’ The deputy chief paused. ‘Okay, you’ve established that Francey took the child and injured her mother, but nothing in your investigation of the bloke has suggested that he had a reputation for that sort of work.’

‘No,’ Pye accepted. ‘Maybe Mackail was killed by a drunk who panicked and drove off. But if he wasn’t, then at the very least, Francey should be investigated as a suspect. And if he was involved, is it likely that two different people, entirely unconnected, would approach him and hire him to commit violent crimes?’

The DCC leaned back and looked at the ceiling. ‘But what possible connection is there between one of Scotland’s richest men and an obscure graphic designer from Garvald?’

‘That’s the question, sir,’ Sauce Haddock ventured.

‘Then don’t just sit there,’ McGuire boomed. ‘Go and fucking answer it!’