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Chapter 20

‘Did the Grampian guys say anything to you? Did they tell you whether they had any leads at all?’

‘They told us bugger all, Mike. They just asked questions, that was all.’ Dylan had a day off, so he and I were in the Horseshoe for a Thursday lunchtime pint, pie and beans.

I had said nothing at all to Prim about my Aberdeen adventure, after making sure that the press hadn’t blown it up. There had been some local coverage, in the Evening Express and on NorthSound about the police being called to the scene, but the force press office had written it off as a false alarm. Kiki Eldon, Miles’ unit publicist, had done a good job too, spreading a few tenners around among the extras just to emphasise the point, as it were.

I had told her about meeting Noosh, on the off-chance that she did phone, or send me an e-mail. She had been interested, and pleased that there were no hard feelings, but that had been that.

Nevertheless, I was still suffering after-effects from the incident — like waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat — so when Dylan had called proposing a Horseshoe session I had jumped at the chance; not because I’m a great lunchtime boozer, but because I needed to talk to someone.

He had sat there quite calmly as I told him the story. I was a bit huffed; I had expected him to be more impressed.

‘They would ask questions, Oz,’ he mumbled, indistinctly, through a mouthful of pie. ‘It’s their job; I just wondered whether they’d told you what they were thinking.’

‘I got the impression that they weren’t thinking too hard. All they really did was ask us what we thought.’

Dylan nodded. ‘Standard procedure; more often than not the victims will tell you who did it, even if they don’t know themselves, or if they do but are trying to protect someone. See you, Oz, you’re a romantic when it comes to criminal investigation. You think the answer always comes in a flash of brilliance, like a revelation from God, or your Uncle Bob, or somebody.’

‘You mean that isn’t what happens?’ I asked him innocently. ‘That’s how it’s always worked for me.’

‘Sure,’ my friend countered, ‘after you’ve picked your way through a pile of casualties. Your blinding light always strikes you too late.’ A flash of uncertainty in his eyes told me that he knew he’d dropped a clanger, but he decided, rightly, that the best way to deal with it was to blunder on to the next outrage. ‘I’m a detective, pal,’ he continued. ‘You’re a chancer.’

I couldn’t let that one past. ‘Is that right, Detective Inspector? In that case, which of us has the better clear-up rate?’

‘Clear-up rate? You, what have you cleared up, except the empties from the night before and the Durex from under the bed?’

‘Well,’ I countered, feeling my eyes narrow a bit, ‘for a start there was the guy two years ago. I got him, didn’t I.’

‘He was barking mad, Oz. Christ, he was banging your enormous pal’s wife; that’s how nuts he was.’

‘Nonetheless, I got him; you lot didn’t.’

‘We might have, if your pal had reported it as a crime long before he did.’

‘There were reasons for that. And that business with the painting out in Spain that Prim and I were involved in. We got a result there too; and what a result.’

‘The way you tell the story, the guy confessed to you.’

‘Sure, but we’d worked it out by then. Anyway, what about the wee stockbroker in Edinburgh, the one who was found dead in Prim’s flat? That’s still on the unsolved list, is it not, despite you and ex-Superintendent Ross being hot on the trail?’

Dylan frowned. He always does when I bring that one up. ‘We reckoned the wife did it; you know that. The Crown Office wouldn’t prosecute, that was all.’

‘That’s balls, Michael, and you know it. Your boss Ricky thought that Dawn did it. He even had me in the frame at one point; or so you told me. As for Linda Kane, no way did she do it.’

‘You still let us arrest her, though.’

‘Well? The cow did try to kill Dawn, Prim and me. Too effing right we let you arrest her.’

‘You know, Blackstone,’ Mike growled; he only calls me by my surname when he’s on a fishing trip. ‘I think you’re hinting that you got a result there too.’

‘We got a large reward for the money we recovered.’

‘That’s not what I mean. I think you know who killed Kane. What if I was to pull you in — you and Prim — and ask you that, under caution?’

I laughed. ‘A rubber hose job?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Greg McPhillips would have us out of there in two minutes, and you know it.’

‘Aye, I suppose so. But come on, Oz, give us a clue, between friends. That one’s always niggled at me.’

I looked at him for a while. Then I put part of my life in his hands. ‘You can close the book on it, Mike. The guy who killed Willie Kane is dead himself.’

‘Accident?’ he asked, quietly. ‘Natural causes? Or did someone do him?’

‘Accident. Sudden, bloody and very, very fatal.’

‘Not in Geneva, by any chance?’

My eyes, formerly narrowed, widened suddenly, giving him his answer.

‘I wondered about him when I heard about the accident report from Switzerland. I even had a look at it. At the time the Swiss police were a bit puzzled by the fact that the guy had two bullets in his chest and he was as high as a kite on heroin, but a street full of witnesses saw him run right in front of the bus, so that was that.’

I left him staring at the table while I went up to the bar for another round of pints.

‘Dawn wasn’t involved, was she?’ he asked, when I returned.

‘No way.’

‘That’s all right then. Now, back to your bother in Aberdeen. I’ll ask my SB colleague up there if he can find out anything for me. I’ll check the network too, just in case there’s been an alert about Russian gangsters coming into Britain.

‘Mind you, that sounds like clutching at straws to me.’

‘What way?’

‘Ach, you’ve always had a taste for the exotic, but in the real world, where we’re faced with an alleged crime like this, the first thing we do is look for a domestic solution. We usually find it too.’

I shook my head as I sipped my pint; no mean feat, that. ‘You won’t find it here. I promise you.’

‘Oh no? You mean it couldn’t have been a jealous boyfriend, because of Ms Turkel’s preferences?’

‘Something like that.’

‘So who says it was a man on the bike? What was the rider wearing?’

I described the biker’s outfit, in detail.

‘And was his cock hanging out of his leathers?’

‘No. Mind you, it was cold that morning, so if it was it’d have been pretty shrivelled up, and I might not have noticed it.’

‘Somebody would have. I can see the headline now: “Motorcycle flasher in Union Street gun drama”. No, Oz, for all you know your gunman could have been a gun person, a hellishly furious, scorned, et cetera, former woman friend of the lesbian lawyer. Tell me different, go on.’

I couldn’t.

‘That’s if there was a gun person at all. Are you dead sure of what you saw?’

‘Of course.’

‘Who else saw the gun?’

‘Only me. The rider was coming right in behind her, but I was in the line of fire. Noosh heard it, but only I saw it.’

‘She could have heard a backfire from the bike. You could have seen something else; the biker could have slowed down because his mobile phone rang. Maybe that was it.’

I leaned across the table. ‘Michael,’ I asked him, straight-faced. ‘Do you remember your first shag?’

He looked at me as if I was daft. ‘Of course; everyone does.’

‘Well, having a gun pointed in your general direction is just as unforgettable, and you don’t just remember the first time.’

‘Maybe so, but I suspect that my colleagues up in Furry-boots City are a bit sceptical, nonetheless.’

‘They’re giving Noosh protection.’

‘Of course they are. She asked for it, and she’s a lawyer, so they’re playing it by the book. Let’s see how long it lasts, though. Like I said, I’ll ask some questions tomorrow, and find out what their thinking is.’

For the next few minutes we ate in silence, doing justice to the Horseshoe pies. When we were finished, and the last bean scooped up, I looked at Dylan again. ‘Any progress on your own stalker?’ I asked him.

To my surprise, he beamed back at me. ‘I was saving that. We got a result off the wire-tap on Tuesday. Mrs Donn had a call from her baby boy; we managed to trace it all the way to a call-box in Amsterdam. Bugger’s in Holland.’

‘Did he say anything significant?’

‘Not as far as I could see from the transcript. He was just asking after her, that was all. She asked where he was, but all he said was “Moving about”. She asked when she’d be seeing him again, but he was vague about that too.

‘Still, at least it gives us something to go on, we can keep an eye out for the boy coming in on the Schiphol flights and the ferries.’ He paused. ‘Of course there’s a problem with that. We don’t actually know what Stephen Donn looks like. Susie’s given me a general description, but we don’t have a photograph of him, for the people at the airports. The thing is, we don’t want to tip our hand here, so I’ll probably just give them a photof it.’

‘Why don’t you pull Prim and me back on to the case. We’ll get you a photo.’

He gave me his best sarcastic look. ‘How will you do that? Break into his mother’s house while she’s at college?’

‘I suppose we might. But no, that’d be too risky; there are too many retired people in the block she lives in. No, I thought we’d just go back to Uncle Joe.’

I knew that I didn’t have to make the offer, but what else could I do? Mike was going to check out Aberdeen for me to make sure that Noosh was okay; he was good at extracting one favour for another.

‘Okay,’ he agreed. ‘See if you can do it tomorrow morning.’

I waved my empty glass at him. ‘In that case,’ I suggested, ‘on balance, the last pint’s on you.’