Private Investigations

Fifty-Five

There wasn’t much conversation on the journey. Even Sauce Haddock stayed silent until we were well clear of Edinburgh, heading west, until his tongue just wouldn’t stay at rest any longer. Finally, from the back seat of my slightly damaged car, his voice raised above the Miles Davis playlist that I had on that morning, he asked the question that I’d been expecting for over an hour.

‘This man Hodgson, sir: you said he’s dead.’

‘That’s right,’ I agreed.

‘How did he get that way?’

‘Suddenly,’ I said. ‘Hopefully I’ll be able to expand on that over lunch.’

‘Where are we going?’ I sensed that his curiosity was giving way to impatience.

‘Mystery tour,’ I chuckled. ‘It won’t be long now.’

We passed the newish Heartland interchange, then the old, isolated Kirk O’Shotts on the left, heading on until I ended the game by leaving the motorway at junction six. I negotiated two more roundabouts, and we had reached our destination.

Pye looked up at the sign over the entrance. ‘The Newhouse,’ he murmured as he stepped out of the front passenger seat, reading the sign above the entrance.

‘Used to be the Newhouse Hotel,’ I told him, ‘a place of legend. Back in my father’s time,’ I explained, ‘the only way you could get a drink on a Sunday was in a hotel, and even then only if you were what the law called a bona fide traveller. That meant you had to be on a journey of at least three miles. You even had to sign a declaration in a book. In those days, this place was pretty much three miles from everywhere. They used to have bus parties coming here, every Sunday afternoon.’

‘That’s weird,’ Haddock exclaimed. ‘My grandad used to talk about that but I always thought he was taking the piss.’

‘No,’ I assured him, as I led the way inside and through to the dining room. ‘It’s a genuine relic of our colourful Presbyterian past. Where I live, in Gullane, it’s about a three-mile walk to and from Dirleton, the next village. The old-timers say that on Sundays the drinking populations of the villages used to pass each other on the road, there and back. The licensees changed the date on the book every week, to save time.’

‘Is this a nostalgia trip for you, boss?’ he asked.

‘Hell no,’ I replied. ‘The law changed not long after I was born. I chose this because it’s a midpoint. We’re being joined here.’

The head waiter recognised me . . . sometimes I hate my media profile . . . and showed us to a table for five, by the window. The quorum was completed a couple of minutes later, when Lottie Mann and Dan Provan came through the door. I stood, and waved them across to join us.

I allowed my former colleagues to size each other up for a few seconds; each of them looked as puzzled as the others but none of them was ready to break the silence.

Finally I did. ‘Each of you guys has been under my command at different times and in different places,’ I began. ‘Now I’m gone, and you’re all colleagues; it’s time you met.’ I made the introductions, and stayed on my feet as east and west shook hands.

Provan looked across at me as he took his seat, his eyes narrowed. ‘It’s nice of you tae invite us to lunch, big fella . . . I’ll be havin’ fillet steak, by the way . . . but . . .’

‘Dan!’ his DI hissed.

‘It’s all right, Lottie,’ I said. ‘His irreverence is part of his eccentric charm. You’ll be having it well done, I’d imagine, Sergeant.’

He nodded. ‘Absolutely. Anything else is too big a challenge for my teeth these days.’

As I mentioned, Provan and I are around the same age, although I like to believe that I look about ten years younger. Possibly that’s why he shows me less respect than most people do. Even when I was his chief constable it had taken the little toerag all his time to call me ‘Sir’. Clearly there was no chance now I was a civilian. ‘You should get a new set,’ I suggested. ‘The ones you’ve got look a bit yellowed; age and tobacco, I guess. When are you chucking it, Dan?’ I asked.

He nodded to his right, towards Mann. ‘When she does,’ he replied. ‘They cannae kick me out on age grounds now.’

No, I thought, but ‘they’ could make your life a misery if ‘they’ chose.

‘Not if you behave yourself,’ I agreed. ‘Which could be a problem for you.’

‘I know when to touch my forelock,’ he assured me.

‘You couldn’t find your fucking forelock,’ I laughed, not only at his malignant leprechaun act, but also at the obvious puzzlement of Pye and Haddock, neither of whom seemed to know what to make of him. By the way, you might wonder about my industrial language with a female officer present, but Lottie is more likely to be offended by its omission than its use.

The arrival of the waiter cut short the banter. Provan kept his word, ordering steak, ‘Burnt and covered wi’ onions.’ The Edinburgh side both ordered fish. I settled for a York ham salad and was more than a little surprised when Mann asked for the same.

‘Yesterday was a blip,’ she volunteered. ‘This is what I eat normally.’

‘So,’ Provan resumed as soon as the interruption was over, ‘since there’s been nothin’ on our bulletin board about you bein’ seconded to do CID team-building, gonnae tell us why we’re all here?’

He was right; it was time to get down to business. ‘There’s nothing about this on any bulletin board,’ I shot back, with a glance at Lottie. ‘You haven’t told him, then?’

She shook her head. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I thought I’d leave that to you.’

I knew that she’d had the same call from Mario that he’d made to Sammy Pye. It was one of the things we’d discussed when we’d spoken earlier, before I’d left Edinburgh.

‘Good shout,’ I agreed. ‘You’d have had him in your ear all the way here. Did you bring that stuff I asked for?’

She nodded and took two envelope folders from her briefcase, handing one to me and one to Sammy Pye.

‘This is a copy of the paperwork in the investigation into the murder of Jock Hodgson,’ I told him. ‘He’s the third link in our naval chain.’

‘The dead guy?’ Sauce Haddock asked.

I nodded. ‘The same. He’s dead because somebody shot him.’ I looked at Lottie. ‘Any joy from forensics?’

She smiled. ‘You knew there would be, didn’t you?’ she said.

I smiled back.

She looked across the table at Pye and Haddock. ‘The single bullet that killed Hodgson came from the same gun that accounted for your two victims in Edinburgh the other night.’

‘Which means,’ I declared ‘that you four are all investigating the same series of crimes. And they are all linked, to the matter I was hired to review: the theft of Eden Higgins’ multimillion-pound boat.’

‘How?’ Pye asked. ‘Why?’

‘I believe that the Princess Alison was stolen as an act of revenge, by Hector Mackail, who blamed Higgins for the collapse of his company, and his personal bankruptcy.’

‘And was Higgins responsible for that?’

‘He benefited from it,’ I said, ‘but that’s all I’ll say for now. It’s the consequence of the theft I want to focus on.’ I raised an eyebrow in Mann’s direction. ‘Did you get anything from Hodgson’s card activity?’

It was Dan Provan who replied. ‘There’s one thing that’s unusual. All his shopping was either done online or locally in Ayrshire; with one exception. We can put him in East Lothian, about six months ago. He filled up his car in a petrol station in Dunbar. The day before, he bought his groceries in Tesco in Kilmarnock. The day after, he bought a takeaway pizza in Largs. But that one day he was on the other side of the country.’

‘What was the date?’ Haddock asked. As he spoke he opened a tablet computer.

‘The twenty-second of August; a Saturday.’

The younger sergeant tapped the screen of his device a couple of times. As I looked at him a smile spread across his face. ‘You cracker,’ he murmured. ‘That same day, Hector Mackail paid for lunch in a restaurant called the Rocks, in Dunbar. I checked with the owner yesterday; he matched the payment to the bill. It showed three covers.’

‘Interesting,’ Pye murmured, ‘but he could have been there with Gloria and Hazel.’

‘Sure,’ I agreed, ‘but that’s not the way I’d bet. Mackail and Hodgson served together in Portsmouth for three years. In the last of those years, they overlapped with a sub-lieutenant called David Gates. Trust me on that,’ I added. ‘It’s kosher.’ It had taken Clyde Houseman half an hour to dig out their records.

‘I believe that what they were doing was planning the theft of the Princess Alison from her secure boathouse in the Gareloch. It was handy for Gates,’ I added. ‘The Trident submarine base at Faslane is only a couple of miles up the road. He and Mackail stole the damn boat, I’m certain.’

‘And Eden Higgins found out?’ Haddock exclaimed. ‘Is that what you reckon, boss?’

‘Although I hate to say so, that’s the way it’s pointing,’ I conceded. ‘We know . . . that is Lottie and Dan know . . . that Jock Hodgson was tortured for information before he was killed. You two discovered that shortly afterwards, Hector Mackail died in a hit-and-run. David Gates, however, is untouchable, because of what he does. So instead, this week, his wife was attacked and his daughter was taken, only things went tragically wrong. I believe that the intention was to exchange wee Zena for the Princess Alison.’

‘If she’s still afloat,’ Mann pointed out.

‘Yes, exactly, and that’s what we have to find out.’

‘How?’

‘That part of it is down to me,’ I told her. ‘After all, it’s what I was hired to do.’

I hadn’t worked my way through my agenda, but lunch arrived. It was well timed, giving my four companions the chance to absorb what they had learned about the others’ investigation, and to consider the bigger picture.

It gave me breathing space also, to come to terms with a seemingly inevitable conclusion, one I had fought against: Eden Higgins, my client, my friend, my one time ‘acting brother-in-law’ as he had described himself at a gathering in the dying years of the last century, was a murderer.

He had been assaulted by Hector Mackail; a man enraged and embittered after being cheated out of his business. His boat, his pride and joy, named after his lost sister, had been stolen. Frustrated by an incompetent police investigation that had got precisely nowhere, salt had been rubbed into the wound by his insurance company’s reluctance to settle his claim for the loss of his property.

Eden was a media hero; his PR people worked hard to maintain his image of a benevolent businessman. But nobody achieves what he had by being a soft touch. I knew that from my own experience, from the fact that he had employed private investigators to check me out when Alison and I had started getting serious, uncovering in the process a secret from my private past that I thought I’d buried beyond discovery.

If, as the evidence suggested, he had been offended by Mackail’s reluctance to sell out to Destry Glazing, a Higgins Holdings subsidiary, and had used his power and his influence to ruin the man, and virtually steal his business, well, I shouldn’t be too surprised.

And if, faced by the theft of five million quid’s worth of property, he had displayed the same ruthlessness in pursuing it, if he’d had a blowlamp held to Jock Hodgson’s foot until he screamed out the whole story in his secluded kitchen, signing Mackail’s virtual death warrant in the process, well, that shouldn’t astonish me either.

But if all that was the case, why had he brought me in, on the very day that the nasty, vicious Dean Francey had seized David Gates’ daughter and hospitalised his wife?

That halted my analysis for a while, until I forced myself to take a mental step back and look at the situation objectively. When I did, an unpalatable possibility was clear.

Could it be that Eden had never believed that I would find the Princess Alison, or uncover the secrets of her theft? Was my role quite simple? Was he buying my reputation as an investigator, as he bought everything else, to force the insurance company to settle his claim?

If so the son of a bitch had underestimated me . . . and I wasn’t having that.

As I finished my salad and looked around the table I realised that I’d been able to develop my thinking uninterrupted because everyone else had been ignoring me. Pye and Mann were deep in conversation, while Sauce Haddock was picking away at his namesake but absorbing everything the weathered sage that is Dan Provan had to say.

I sat back and allowed the gathering to bring itself back to order . . . or as close to that as is possible when Provan is involved. ‘I was just telling the boy here,’ he said, looking up at me, ‘that the police service is going to hell in a handcart. We used tae know who our bosses were, and where we worked. Now we don’t have a fuckin’ clue. We’re Glasgow, Lottie and me, and we get sent down tae Wemyss Bay.’

‘You weren’t sent,’ I replied, ‘you were called.’

He stared at me ‘Who called us then?’

‘Effectively, I did.’

‘But you’re history. How could you dae that?’

‘Effectively,’ I repeated. ‘I still know who to call.’

‘Hardly worth your while leavin’, then,’ Provan muttered.

I laughed. ‘On the contrary, Bilbo. It’s been very much worth my while.’

His eyes twinkled. ‘I’ve always seen maself more of a Gandalf type,’ he said, ‘but it’s true; you’re lovin’ this.’

‘I’m loving watching how you can talk and eat at the same time,’ I replied. ‘I’ll grant you there are things I miss. Times like these for an example. But I’ve been missing them since I became a deputy chief.’

‘That’s how you were crap at it.’

The ungrammatical grenade hung in the air for a few seconds, until I defused it by agreeing with him.

‘That’s exactly why,’ I conceded. ‘Just as your inability to master basic diplomacy while dancing on the edge of insubordination is how nobody’s ever been tempted to promote you to inspector, even though you’re probably the best detective in Glasgow. You’ve never aspired to being a wizard, Dan; you’ve always been happy to be a hobbit.’

‘You know me so well,’ he laughed. ‘And I know you. You’re a pure hunter. You cannae stop yourself.’

‘I can,’ I retorted, a little sharply, because he was getting to me, ‘and I do. It’s made easier because you are right about one thing. The police service is going to hell in a handcart, as I knew it would when I opposed unification, but even though I’m no longer part of it, that’s something I will not allow.’

‘How are you going tae stop it?’ he challenged.

‘Watch this space.’

I pushed my plate away, enjoying the silence as the waiter cleared the table. He asked for our dessert orders. I pointed at Provan. ‘He’ll have Black Forest gateau,’ I said. ‘I could not bear to watch him picking sticky toffee pudding out of those teeth.’

He did, too, just to spite me, I’m sure, for everyone else declined the sweet course and went straight to coffee.

‘Well,’ I said once everyone had been served. ‘What does everyone think of my analysis?’

Pye was the senior officer at the table; the others, even Provan, looked to him.

‘I don’t disagree with any of it, sir,’ he said. ‘I’m in no doubt that’s how it happened. Eden Higgins as prime suspect? It can’t be anyone else, can it?’

‘No, it can’t,’ I concurred. ‘But now the hard bit . . . proving it.’ I paused, looking at Sammy and Sauce. ‘You two, of course, you could walk away at this stage with brownie points. You’ve had three parts to your investigation and two of them are cleared up. You’re in the plus column, even more so when you consider that a victim of your unsolved strand was the perpetrator in the first two.’

‘Try telling that to the chief constable, boss,’ Haddock chipped in.

‘I will if I have to,’ I promised him, ‘but there are folk within the force who’ll do that before me.’

‘That’s nice to know, sir,’ Sammy murmured, ‘but there’s somebody you’ve forgotten: Anna Hojnowski, Anna Harmony, Singer, whatever you want to call her. I don’t know why but I feel as if I knew her. There’s no way I’m walking away from this without putting my hand on the collar of the person who shot her.’

I smiled at that; warrant card or not, I felt exactly the same way.

I turned to Lottie. ‘You two, on the other hand, have a big, smelly unsolved on your hands. Jock Hodgson did one of two things; either he betrayed his employer or he did a pal a favour to right a perceived wrong. However you see it, what was done to him was obscene, and can’t go unanswered.’

She nodded. ‘Agreed, sir. From everything we know, the Edinburgh team and the two of us are looking for the same man. But where do we begin? Do we just walk into Eden Higgins’ office and lift him?’

I sipped my coffee; it wasn’t bad. ‘You have cause to question him right now,’ I suggested, ‘but you cannot get this wrong, because he has too much influence. This whole story has an opening paragraph, and so far that is hearsay; it’s a tale told twice, to different people, by the same person, Sauce’s pal Macy Robinson. She’s a journalist, so she’d be the first to tell you that for a story to be reliable you need two sources. The government might think it’s okay to do without corroboration in criminal cases, but I don’t. Somebody needs to talk to the person who makes the decisions within Destry, and verify that Eden knew how Mackail’s business was shafted. Higgins Holdings benefited from it,’ I said. ‘But did he order it?’

‘We’ll do that,’ Sammy Pye volunteered.

I nodded. ‘Okay. Then there’s Hodgson. Lottie, the images on the phone prove to my satisfaction that he was involved in the theft. He was an idiot to think that nobody would suspect him, unless he underestimated his boss. Maybe he believed that a simple denial would be enough. He might have been fired as engineer, but that would have been it. Sadly, he got that wrong, but . . .’

Mann put my question for me. ‘Did Eden Higgins personally hold a naked flame to his foot?’

‘Not only that,’ I added. ‘Was he physically capable of subduing Hodgson? Remember, he’d had his ankle smashed not long before that. I would suggest that while Sammy’s looking at Destry, you divide the labour by arresting, isolating and questioning Walter Hurrell, Eden’s driver, personal assistant, minder, whatever title you choose to give him.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘I do, and I say this too. Don’t piss about with Hurrell; I know his background and he’s dangerous. Get a warrant for his arrest from a sheriff; I’ll help you draft the application. When you go for him, go mob handed. Maybe even use armed officers.’

‘Are you saying he might have been Higgins’ hit man?’ Provan asked, licking the last remnant of his gateau from a corner of his mouth.

‘I don’t care for the term,’ I said, ‘but his track record makes him top pick for the job.’ I paused. ‘Now, back to the task of proving all this. We need to establish the link between Higgins and Dean Francey; those two are unlikely bedfellows, to say the least. Where could they have met?’

‘Callum Sullivan.’ All four of us looked at Haddock. ‘Sullivan sold his company to Higgins Holdings for millions,’ he continued, ‘and stayed involved to complete the earn-out and maximise the price. We know that he had a great big party in his great big house in North Berwick, and we know that’s where Dean Francey met Anna Harmony. But we don’t know who else was at the party.’

‘In that case, go and see Sullivan, Sauce,’ I advised him . . . although it probably sounded like an order, ‘and find out.’

There was nothing else to cover, other than the bill. I gave the waiter the universal signal, and dug out a credit card as he approached with the tab and a terminal in hand.

‘How are ye going to do it?’ Provan asked, as I keyed in my PIN.

‘Do what?’

‘Get back in. You’re no different from me. You’ll always have the itch and you’ll always have to scratch it.’

I smiled at him, cheerfully, even though I knew he was right. ‘There are other ways of soothing itches,’ I said. ‘Why would I want to get back in? As you said, the service is heading to hell in a handcart. Your problem is you’re still on board.’