Private Investigations Page 3

  My eyebrows rose; I really was out of touch, it seemed. ‘Indeed? I hadn’t heard. Congratulations, Sammy.’

  I stepped aside, to allow them a clear view into the boot. ‘In other circumstances, I’d say I was pleased to see you, but this . . .’

  DCI Pye’s face paled a little. He’s a father too; Ruth, his wife, used to be my secretary. ‘Oh my,’ he whispered.

  Beside him, Harold ‘Sauce’ Haddock’s eyes blazed with anger. ‘Bastard!’ he growled. ‘We were told that the driver of this thing ran off. Is that right, sir?’

  He looked at me, sideways, with a hint of an accusation in his eyes.

  ‘That’s right, Sauce,’ I agreed, ‘and no, I didn’t give chase. But I hadn’t seen the child then; at that point I thought he was a joyrider, caught at it.’

  ‘I suppose, boss,’ he conceded. ‘Can you give us a description?’

  ‘Not a very good one, ’cos I only saw him full-face for a second, through a car windscreen, but I’ll be amazed if you don’t pick him up on one of the CCTV cameras they have in this place. Twenty-something, white, thin faced, grey hoodie, jeans, trainers. Slim built,’ I added, ‘and hell of a quick on his feet.’

  ‘Did you do a trace for the owner of the vehicle?’ Pye asked.

  I sighed. ‘Sammy, I’m not a cop any more,’ I reminded him.

  ‘But still . . .’ He looked at me as his junior had, as if I’d betrayed him in some way. Then he nodded. ‘You’re not, are you,’ he conceded. He turned to Haddock, ‘Sauce . . .’ stopping short as he saw that the lad was on the phone already to the comms centre.

  We waited for no more than a minute for him to finish the call. ‘It’s registered to Callum Oliver Sullivan,’ he announced when he had its results, ‘of nine St Anthony’s Place, North Berwick. Age thirty-seven.’

  ‘So he wasn’t the driver, then,’ I said. ‘I couldn’t be that wrong in my age estimate. Find out what you can about Mr Sullivan; occupation, employer, whether he’s on any criminal intelligence database, marital status and most important of all whether he has a daughter aged five or six.’

  ‘And you said you’re not a cop any more,’ Pye murmured.

  He had me there. ‘Sorry, Sammy,’ I conceded. ‘That was me at my worst. I never needed to teach you guys your job, but I never could stop myself. My excuse this time is, I discovered this poor wee lass. Because of that I see it as my bounden duty to find the bastard who did this to her and to put him down, whether I’m a serving police officer or not.’

  ‘Understood, Chief,’ Haddock said.

  I shook my head. ‘Don’t call me that any more, Sauce, please. Sir Andrew Martin; he’s your chief constable now. My name’s just plain Bob.’ I paused.

  ‘Now,’ I continued, ‘the media will be arriving soon, for sure, and it would not be good for me to be seen here when they arrive. God knows what they’d read into that. Any statement you need for the investigation, I can give you somewhere else. In the meantime, you should ask that redhead over there with Jack Lemmon to move her jeep, so that I can get the fuck out of here. I’ll be at the Saltire office for a while, if you need me. After that, well, you have my mobile number, I think.’

  ‘Yes, we do,’ Pye concurred. ‘And you’re right about getting out of here. I’ll have her shift the thing right now. Will she be a useful witness, do you think?’

  I shrugged. ‘She might give you a more detailed description of the bloke in the hoodie, but that’s all.’

  ‘If he’s left his DNA in there, and he’s a known car thief,’ Sauce pointed out, ‘that’ll give us the best description of all. You didn’t touch anything inside did . . .’ He blushed slightly, as he saw my raised eyebrow. ‘No, of course you didn’t,’ he added.

  ‘I switched off the engine,’ I admitted, ‘but no, son, I didn’t leave any prints to confuse the CSIs.’

  I looked across at the Grand Cherokee and saw its driver climbing up behind the wheel. As I dug my key out of my pocket and headed for my own car, Sammy Pye called after me.

  ‘We’ll keep you in the loop, sir. Promise.’

  I nodded. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘We still need you, gaffer,’ he added. ‘It’s not like the old times. Things have changed, and not for the better.’

  Three

  ‘Should you have sounded off to Mr Skinner like that?’ Sauce Haddock ventured, as he watched a silver Mercedes cruise carefully out of the shopping centre car park.

  Sammy Pye shrugged. ‘Why the hell not? The whole world knows he’s dead against the unified police service.’

  ‘The vast majority of serving cops were too, but we’ve got it now. He’s got to live with it like the rest of us. Then there’s the small matter of our new chief constable being his best pal . . . and practically his son-in-law as well.’

  ‘You’re behind the times, chum,’ the detective chief inspector said. ‘Andy Martin and Alex Skinner have split up, and for good this time, from what I hear. As for Andy and him being close, not as much as before. The story is, the First Minister pretty much offered big Bob any job he liked to persuade him to stay on; he even told him he could define it himself, but he was turned down flat.’

  ‘You and I both know there’s another reason for him chucking it,’ Haddock countered, ‘and he’s in jail. Anyway,’ the detective sergeant continued, ‘we shouldn’t even be thinking about that, not here. This is awful, Sammy. It’s the first child homicide I’ve ever attended. It makes me wish I’d pulled a sickie. Honest to Christ, who could have done that to the poor wee lass?’

  ‘We will find out,’ the senior officer growled. ‘Be sure of that. We’ve got two starting points: Sullivan, the owner of the vehicle, and the hoodie guy that the gaffer described.’

  Pye was known for two things, his undisguised ambition and his even temper, but the latter was nearing breaking point as he waited for the scene of crime team to arrive. ‘Where the hell are these people?’ he snapped.

  ‘They’ll be here,’ Haddock reassured him. ‘We can’t secure this area anyway, until all the parked cars around us are moved.’

  ‘And that could take all day, unless we do something about it.’ He moved towards the shopping centre manager, who had been summoned to the scene, and was standing a few yards away, with a sergeant in uniform.

  ‘Mr Hall,’ he said, ‘I need your help. I want you to instruct every shopping unit in this part of the mall to make an in-store announcement asking all customers to return to their vehicles and move them, as directed by my officers; staff too. I need this whole area cleared. Nothing should be within two hundred yards of that red car.’

  The manager frowned. ‘That’ll be difficult. Some people might have parked here then walked to the other side of the centre.’

  ‘Then make the announcement in every store,’ the DCI told him. ‘The alternative is that we close the whole damn place.’

  ‘Hey, steady on,’ the manager protested. ‘What’s this all about anyway? Sergeant Lemmon called me here, but he hasn’t told me what’s happened.’

  ‘You don’t need to know the detail. All I’ll tell you is that the BMW is at the centre of a major criminal investigation.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  Pye shrugged his shoulders. Let him think that, he decided.

  ‘Okay, I’ll do it now.’

  ‘Good, fast as you can.’

  He rejoined Haddock, who had his mobile phone to his ear. ‘Got that,’ the DS said. ‘Thanks. Give us the rest as soon as you get it.’ He ended the call. ‘The registered owner of our vehicle, Callum Oliver Sullivan, is a dealer in classic cars. Half an hour ago he reported the theft of this red BMW, registration Charlie Sierra Oscar One Echo, from his depot in a village called Kingston, in East Lothian.

  ‘The electoral roll shows two other people registered to vote at his address. One is Mary
Jean Harris, the other is Maxwell White Harris, who becomes a voter next month, on the fifteenth of March.’

  ‘Which makes him seventeen at the moment,’ Pye observed. ‘And we know that Sullivan is?’

  ‘Thirty-seven.’

  ‘What else do we have?’

  ‘Detective Constable Wright’s established that Sullivan’s not known to the police; no convictions, not even motoring offences. She’s looking into his marital status now.’

  ‘I suppose Mary Jean Harris could be Mrs Sullivan,’ the DCI suggested. ‘It’s the in thing for women to keep their own name after marriage. Or they could just be cohabiting.’

  ‘If Maxwell Harris is his son, that would mean they had him when he was twenty. Young, but why not? Jackie’s search will tell us one way or another, and it’ll tell us whether there are any other kids.’

  ‘Only if they were born in Scotland.’

  ‘True,’ Haddock agreed, ‘but if the need arises, before we get into a broader search, Jackie will call round the primary schools in North Berwick, to check on infant class girl pupils, named either Sullivan or Harris.’

  ‘We’re guessing that she’s five or six; she could have been four and big for her age.’ Pye said. ‘She should check the nursery schools too.’

  ‘If necessary, she will, and she won’t need telling; she’s smart, is our DC.’ He glanced across the car park, at a blue van that was approaching. ‘Hey, here comes the crew.’

  ‘About bloody time,’ Pye muttered. ‘Get them moving, Sauce. I want a tent over the BMW right away. The pathologist won’t want to work in public. Do we know who’s coming?’

  ‘I asked for Professor Hutchinson, old Master Yoda. I figured that with Dr Grace having a wee girl herself, of the victim’s age, it might be better if he attends. You saw how cut up Mr Skinner was after finding the body. I think he’d actually been crying.’

  ‘I’m sure he had,’ the DCI agreed. He paused, then asked, ‘Otherwise, how did you think he looked?’

  ‘Leaving aside his distress,’ Haddock replied, ‘I’d say he looks fitter than he has for a while, and more relaxed. Towards the end of his time in the job, he struck me as being wound up real tight.’

  ‘Me too. I wish he was still with us, though. I always liked it when he turned up at a scene. It felt safer with him around, somehow. Right now, carrying the CID ball for the whole of the city, I will tell you, Sauce, I feel exposed.’

  ‘Then report this up the line; spread the load.’

  ‘I have to do that. The new protocol says I have to call our area commander, the chief super. But that’s no great help. Mary Chambers is uniform now. I’m senior CID officer in the city. The buck stays mine.’

  ‘I know that, Sammy, but I was thinking higher than that. Why don’t you ring the DCC?’

  Pye frowned. ‘I don’t want it to look as if I’m crying for help.’

  ‘It won’t. What do you think Mario McGuire would prefer? To read in the Evening bloody News about a child murder three miles from where he lives, or to hear it from you direct?’

  The DCI sighed. ‘You’re right, of course. Thanks. You get on with setting up the scene. Have the uniforms establish a two-hundred-yard perimeter, and manage the flow of cars out of the area. You do that, and I’ll call him.’

  Four

  ‘Somebody’s stolen my boat, Bob.’

  Eden Higgins gazed from the window of his office on the Mound, surveying Princes Street, across the gardens. His head moved very slightly, as if he was following the progress of one of Edinburgh’s sleek new trams as it headed westwards on yet another expensive journey.

  I was so badly shaken by the incident in the car park that I had come very close to calling off my lunch date. I was full of anger at what I had seen, and hugely frustrated also that I wouldn’t be involved in the search for the person who had killed that lovely, helpless child. No, never mind ‘involved’; I wanted to be in command of the whole damn show.

  One of the jobs that I’d been offered by Clive Graham, Scotland’s First Minister, in an attempt to keep me in the service, was as head of a Major Incident Agency, a body that would operate not as part of but alongside the national police force. The idea was that I would form a team of elite detective officers that would provide an added investigative resource in the most serious crimes.

  I’d turned it down, because it was a recipe for conflict with Andy Martin from day one, but right at that moment, I wished that I’d accepted.

  More than anything else, as I left that shopping mall I wanted to drive back to Gullane, go into the primary school and give my daughter a hug, but that would have raised too many eyebrows, Seonaid’s among them.

  Instead I went to my office in Fountainbridge, and turned on the journalistic instincts that I’d developed since I’d taken the InterMedia job. I went to see June Crampsey, and I told her what had happened and how the child’s body had come to be found, without saying that I was the one who’d done the finding.

  The other details I omitted were the car’s registration number and its owner’s name and address. That was privileged information; plus I didn’t want her crime reporter getting in the way of the crucial early stages of a murder inquiry.

  That done, I sat behind my desk for an hour, doing my best to pass the time usefully, until I was ready to take a taxi to my lunch date with Higgins, a blast from my past, to use his own words.

  ‘Your boat?’ I echoed, feeling an involuntary frown knot my eyebrows, and a sudden flash of anxiety grip my stomach.

  He started to turn, as if to face me, then seemed to think better of it. Resuming his inspection of the grey February morning, he nodded. ‘Yes. It was taken from its mooring in the Gareloch.’

  ‘Run that past me again,’ I said. ‘We’ve just come through the worst spell of winter weather since God was a boy. Who in their right mind would steal a yacht in all that? Are you sure it didn’t just sink?’

  ‘No, no; it’s been missing for a while, since early last October. The police have been looking for it ever since, but now it seems they’ve given it up as a bad job. I had a visit from a senior bod a couple of weeks ago. She gave me the pro forma chat about priorities, budgets and all that crap,’ he snapped, his tone full of anger, ‘then she told me that they’ve closed the active investigation.’

  ‘That’s too bad,’ I responded. I understood his frustration and did my best to sound sympathetic, although it was a judgement call that I’d probably have backed, if it had been referred to me . . . as it might have been, for I was in my last few days as Strathclyde chief constable.

  ‘What about your insurers?’ I asked.

  Finally he did step away from the window, limping over to a tub chair at the coffee table where I was seated, and slumping into it. ‘My bloody insurers?’ he moaned. ‘Given the value of the vessel, I’d have expected them to employ their own investigators, but no, they said that there is no recognised independent expert in pursuing this type of theft, so they elected to leave it in the hands of the police.

  ‘However, they did appoint a maritime lawyer to look into the circumstances of the theft. He looked at the boathouse, interviewed me and then reported back to the insurance company.

  ‘On the basis of what he said, they’ve now offered me a fraction of its value in settlement, only one million against the insured value of five million sterling. They’re claiming negligence on my part, saying that the alarm system wasn’t adequate. I could fight them, of course, and my legal advice is that I’d get some sort of a result, but that’s not the point! I want the damn thing back!’

  ‘Look,’ I began, then paused, trying to work out how best to explain to him that if the investigation had been thorough and the combined police and marine services, nationally and possibly internationally as well, hadn’t been able to find his missing vessel, then he’d better get
ready to sue that insurance company.

  I was about to tell him as much, when a memory broke in and overrode everything.

  ‘Hold on!’ I exclaimed. ‘I’ve seen it. I know where it was taken!’

  Five

  Yes, there is indeed history between Eden Higgins and me. It stretches back twenty years or so, to the days when I was the newly promoted Detective Superintendent Skinner, heading up Edinburgh’s Serious Crimes Unit, to the years when I was a single parent, widowed and doing my best to raise my adolescent daughter Alexis on my own.

  That said, I wasn’t always alone: between Myra’s death and my meeting Sarah, my second wife, there were a few ladies in my life, and of those the most serious was Alison Higgins. She was a cop like me, a detective sergeant, then detective inspector, and she matched me in most ways, not least in ambition.

  We were a natural couple; we liked each other, we were good together, vertically and horizontally, and our tastes were similar. Alex approved of her too; that was a prerequisite of any relationship, and Alison passed that test from the start. Although we never formally lived together, she was the only woman who had clothes hanging in my wardrobe, and whose toothbrush stood alongside mine in the mug, until Sarah came into my life.

  She didn’t talk about her family much, not at the beginning. Looking back, I recognise that may have been because in those days, I never talked about mine. I was still hurting too much over Myra, and my childhood was an absolute no-go area. Thus, it was a complete surprise when she invited Alex and me to go sailing with her one weekend, on her brother’s yacht.

  Anyone who watched commercial television in those days had to be aware of Dene Furnishing; it was one of the nation’s biggest retailers, with a huge turnover and an advertising budget to match. When Myra and I set up house as a very young couple, most of our furniture came from its Bathgate store; indeed, I still have some of it.

  I knew all about Dene, but I had no idea that it was owned and had been built, from the ground up, by Eden Higgins, Alison’s older brother. She’d mentioned him to me, but only vaguely. On the other hand, he knew all about me. Once we met, on board his schooner, it didn’t take me long to realise that he’d had me checked out.