Wearing Purple

Chapter 47

Susie was as good as her word: the phone on my desk rang at ten minutes before nine. I was sat in my captain’s chair, chewing my way steadily through my muesli and reading the Herald at the same time. It was another slow news day, which meant another photo of Lord Provost Jack Gantry on the front page.

‘I’ve checked those files,’ the First Citizen’s daughter told me. ‘Twice, just to be sure. As far as I can see, everything’s there.’

‘Is that right,’ I said. ‘I suppose she must have gone to your place in the afternoon and put them back.’

‘If she did,’ said Susie, ‘someone’s getting the sack. I have a standing rule here that everyone on the premises, staff and visitors, must sign in and out. It’s a fire safety thing. Maybe she took photocopies,’ she suggested.

‘No way. Jan never took copies of her clients’ confidential papers. She worked on the originals, then returned them as soon as she was finished. Can you remember which papers she’d have been working on then?’

‘Only that they had to do with our health care set-up; that’s all I can tell you. Now, unless there’s anything else, I’m off to read the Riot Act out in my front office. If Jan put those papers back on that Friday afternoon, as she must have, I’m going to want to know why her name isn’t in the book.’

I nodded absent-mindedly as she hung up. I had noticed changes taking place in the face in the mirror over the previous three weeks, and I could feel my new frown lines as I stared at the desk-top. Jan had still been working on the papers on the Friday morning, and she hadn’t even begun to consult the people she had talked about when we had Susie and Mike to dinner. Why would she take them back to the Gantry office that day? I was confused, a bit dazed; something was tapping at the back of my brain, trying to work its way to the front.

I went round to Jan’s drawer once more and took out her working notes on the Gantry project. There were several pages, quite a thick bundle of manuscript; I went through them one by one.They began with a summary of the financial position of the development division, then moved on to look over the construction business. The bulk of the pile of notes reflected Jan’s detailed analysis of the profitability of the public houses, with a summary page listing them all together and stating her opinion that all of the licensed premises were being operated properly.

And that was all there was. There were no notes on the health care division. None at all. Yet when I had left on that damnable Friday morning to catch the flight to Barcelona with GWA, they had been all over the place. Christ, I even remembered chiding her, in fun: ‘That’s supposed to be a partners’ desk,’ I said to her, less than five minutes before I kissed her goodbye. . without knowing that’s what it was. ‘How much of it do you need?’

The thing looked huge now, as I put the pages back into their original order and replaced them in the filing drawer. I sat down once more in my captain’s chair, staring blankly at the remains of my muesli, my heart pounding as I fought in vain against facing up to a frightening truth.

If Jan hadn’t put those papers back into The Gantry Group filing system — and I was sure she hadn’t — then, sure as God made wee sour apples, someone else had.

There was only one answer to that, of course: someone had broken in and retrieved them. But when? I reached across and picked up Jan’s lap-top — we each had one — and switched it on. It was powerful and booted up quickly. I selected her electronic diary and opened it at the date in question.

The only entry for Friday read, ‘Work at home’. Saturday’s listed priorities were ‘Hairdresser’, ten am, and ‘Watch BattleGround’ at nine-thirty pm. From the Sunday entry, she’d decided to go to Anstruther; only for her, Sunday had never happened.

As I looked at the page, the thing that had been working its way through my cluttered brain finally broke surface; my wife spoke to me again, inside my head. Our last conversation, the last time I had ever heard her voice: on the mobile phone, me in the chaotic restaurant in bloody Barcelona, Jan sitting opposite where I sat now, working.

‘I suppose so,’ she had said. ‘I’ve got the hairdresser in the morning, and I’m shopping in the afternoon, but I can always work in the evening, before your show.’ I strained to remember what she had said after that, as I had strained to hear her words against the Spanish shouts all around me. ‘I’m getting there, Oz. I’ll let you see what I’ve found when you get home.’

Of course she hadn’t taken those papers back to The Gantry Group office. She’d been keeping them to show to me.

There could only be one answer to the riddle: someone had been watching the flat on Saturday morning, had seen her drive away, and had made an unnoticed entry to recover the files, which I knew would have been tidied away by then. Jan and I had a strict rule; we never allowed our jobs to mess up our home, outside working hours.

Of course, this led on to a further conclusion. Whoever broke into our flat would have had ample time to roll out the washing machine and fit a booby-trap device, just as the manufacturer’s ‘impartial’ experts had suggested.

And who, apart from me, knew that Jan was working on those papers, and about the thing which she had been anxious not to discuss across the dinner table under the ears of Detective Inspector Mike Dylan? Only Miss Susie Gantry, that’s all.