The Roots of Evil (Bob Skinner) Page 8
He went to Mia McCullough’s mobile number in his directory. As his thumb hovered over the screen, his mind went back to the time they had met, he a newly promoted detective superintendent, she a daytime presenter on a popular Edinburgh local radio station, not Mia Watson but Mia Sparkles, with a devoted following of early teenagers, of whom his daughter Alex had been one. She was the last surviving sibling of a trio, born into a brutal criminal family; he had visited her at the radio station while investigating the killing of her brother and there had been unavoidable chemistry. Their relationship had been entirely unprofessional on his part; it had also been brief, one night, but long enough to produce Ignacio. She had been pregnant, unknowingly, when she left town in a hurry, disappearing from the potentially fatal repercussions of an act of treachery, and had brought up their son in Spain without ever considering telling his father of his existence, until it was in her interests to do so, and until the boy was in the kind of trouble from which not even Skinner could extricate him unscathed. Mia had settled back in Scotland and had gone back to her old occupation, radio, landing a job on a Dundee station owned by the city’s wealthiest man, Cameron ‘Grandpa’ McCullough. He had his own colourful story, which included an acquittal on murder and drugs charges after the mysterious disappearance of the principal Crown witness, and the narcotics in question. He had laughed out loud when he had been told of their marriage. There had been an inevitability about the events of Mia’s life and so it had been entirely predictable. And yet it had been successful; Cameron and Mia McCullough were an undoubtedly devoted couple and Skinner’s misgivings about his son’s new stepfather had been overcome.
He hit the WhatsApp call button and waited. She answered within ten seconds, taking him by surprise by switching the call to video. Her hair was wrapped in a towel, and she wore no make-up, but she was as striking as ever. He saw the tension in her eyes, the tightness of her mouth, and knew from those signs that the crisis, whatever it was, had not been resolved.
‘Grandpa’s gone AWOL, I’m told,’ he began.
‘Completely off the fucking grid,’ she exclaimed. ‘His phone’s off; the cars are all still there. I’ve had hotel staff search the whole estate but there’s no sign of him, neither hide nor hair. I don’t know what to do.’
‘Have you called the police?’
‘No, not yet. If I reported him missing, I wouldn’t trust that lot not to leak it. You know how much they love him,’ she added, her voice heavy with irony. ‘He’s a man in his sixties, fit and well, with no worries. What are they going to do? Laugh up their sleeves, probably, but otherwise nothing.’
‘They’d have to take it seriously, Mia,’ he assured her. ‘Do you want me to make the call?’
‘No way. It would leak to the Sun for sure. I’m taking a chance that it won’t leak to the Saltire, by talking to you.’
‘I wouldn’t do that,’ he said. ‘Besides, it isn’t a news story. How can I help?’
‘To be honest I don’t know.’ The lines around her eyes deepened. For a moment, to his surprise, he thought she would cry. ‘Bob, the best I can hope for is that the phone rings and I get a ransom demand. The worst I can hope for . . .’
‘No, no, no, Mia. You’re getting way ahead of yourself. Kidnapping for ransom is very rare in this country; if that’s what this is, it would be even more unusual. If I was looking to extort money from Cameron, I’d be kidnapping you, not him. It would be much easier and much less of a physical risk.’ He paused. ‘That said, we need to look to your security. What arrangements does the hotel have?’
‘It’s well protected. There are cameras in all the corridors, the rooms are secure and we have a janitor who used to be in the Parachute Regiment.’
‘Right. If Cameron doesn’t come walking in later on today smelling of cheap perfume and claiming to have no memory of the previous twelve hours, I want you to move in there. Let’s give it twenty-four hours. If I’m wrong and it is a kidnap, you should have had contact by then. If not, I will come up with my apprentice and take a look at the scene.’
‘Your apprentice?’ she repeated.
‘Our son. That’s always assuming I can peel him off his girlfriend by then.’
‘Girlfriend? What girlfriend? He never told me he has a girlfriend.’
He laughed. ‘When a young man begins to have regular sex, the last person he’s going to discuss it with is his mother.’
On his screen, he saw her nostrils flare. ‘If that’s the case,’ she exclaimed, ‘I hope he’s a fucking sight more careful than you were!’
Eleven
‘This place is a tip,’ Tarvil Singh observed. ‘I’ve seen tidier scrapyards.’
‘I doubt that he was expecting visitors,’ Sauce Haddock said. ‘When I lived on my own, I let things slide from time to time.’
The sergeant picked up an empty food container, held it to his nose and sniffed. ‘Lamb Balti,’ he guessed. ‘Letting things slide is one thing; this is more like an avalanche. I don’t know how Noele put up with this guy for as long as she did. Griff must have been a culture shock. Did Coats own the place?’
‘Yes, he bought it after the divorce from Noele was finalised. The SOCOs got the address from his employer, and the key from them too. There was a spare in his office at the airport.’ Terry Coats’ home was a small semi-detached villa in Corstorphine, to the west of the city, convenient for his place of employment. Haddock guessed that it was around a hundred years old.
‘The SOCOs are done here already? That must be a record for Dorward’s crew. He usually makes them do everything twice. They might have cleaned up for us.’
‘All they really had to do was establish that this wasn’t the crime scene,’ the DI pointed out. ‘The place is tiny, and they aren’t as fastidious as you.’ The living room was no more than fifteen feet square and the furniture was minimal; two armchairs, a gateleg table, a small sideboard and a television on a stand. Haddock looked around the debris. ‘There’s nothing personal at all, apart from that one photo of his wee boy on the sideboard. This is sad, Tarvil, when you think about it. We’re looking at the life of a forty-one-year-old man, and this is all there is?’
‘What’s even sadder,’ Singh retorted, his size compressing the room still further, ‘is that he doesn’t even have a toilet brush. Have you been in that bathroom? Holy Moses, what a mess. And the bedrooms! One thing’s for certain, if he was still shagging that cabin-crew woman you caught him with, he wasn’t bringing her here.’
‘Nonetheless,’ the DI insisted, ‘we will still search the place. The SOCOs might have been over it, but they weren’t looking for the same things as us. Again, we want to find anything that links him and Montell, or anything else that we don’t know about that might point us at whoever killed the two of them. Of course . . .’ His voice tailed off, the sentence unfinished, his forehead narrowing.
‘What?’
‘It’s just . . . Tarvil, I’m thinking, we’ve been assuming that Montell and Coats were acting together in this enterprise, whatever it was. But what if they weren’t? Griff’s lifestyle showed unexplained wealth, but this is the home of a man with barely a pot to piss in. I assume that the split from Noele left him with hefty child support to pay; he seems to have been struggling, rather than raking it in.’
‘Aye, so?’
‘Well, we know that Griff was booked on a flight from Edinburgh to Johannesburg via London on Saturday evening. We know that he checked in for it, but he never boarded the flight. Coats worked at Edinburgh Airport. Could he have intercepted Griff when he arrived there? Might they have been rivals in some way rather than partners? Do something for me, while I go through this place. Get in touch with British Airways and find out whether there’s an unclaimed suitcase lying in Jo’burg off that connecting Heathrow flight.’
‘Technically a bag isn’t meant to fly without its owner,’ Singh said.
‘Mistakes happen. Do it anyway.’
Haddock began to search the little house, examining everyth
ing, looking under cushions, shaking every discarded magazine in case something had been stuck between the pages. He found nothing out of the ordinary other than a Ninjago magazine that he guessed Harry had left on a visit. He moved to the sideboard. It revealed a twenty-four-piece dinner set, a bottle of Famous Grouse, three-quarters empty, a miniature chess set and two crystal glasses. Their weight told him that they were quality pieces. He moved upstairs. The bathroom was untidy, but clean, apart from the toilet. The suite might have been an original fitting; it was a pale green colour that made Haddock wince. There were two bath towels on a rail, and a hand towel on a ring beside the basin. The shower was a hose-type attachment over the bath, contained by a plastic curtain. Coats appeared to have been a blade shaver; a Gillette disposable stood in a glass, on a shelf above the basin with a brush beside it. Haddock touched it and felt residual dampness. He winced at the thought that the man who had used it was in a refrigerated drawer in the City Mortuary. Leaving the bathroom, he went into the second bedroom. It showed no signs of use; indeed, with its smoothed and folded bedspread, it was the neatest room in the house. He wondered if Harry Coats had been allowed to stay overnight with his father on his court-approved visits. The main bedroom was a complete contrast. Discarded clothes were piled in a corner. Rather than look through them he kicked them, then shuffled them apart with his right foot to satisfy himself they were concealing nothing. There were two bedside tables but only one reading lamp, with a USB socket in its base, into which a mobile phone cable was plugged. The place smelled ripe; he pulled the drawn curtains apart and threw open the window, letting in the crisp winter air to flush out the muskiness. He opened the wardrobe and again was struck by the contrast between Coats and Montell. There was one suit . . . he checked the label; ‘Slater’, he murmured . . . two pairs of trousers, one of jeans, a shiny leather jerkin and a sports jacket. The shirts looked over-laundered, the underwear in two boxes was a mix, some of it with BHS labels. On the floor were a pair of New Balance trainers, three pairs of shoes, and leaning against the back wall, a laptop, a Dell Inspiron that Haddock judged to be the newest and most expensive item in the apartment. He reached in to pick it up, wrinkling his nose against the odour of stale clothing. He was familiar with the keyboard layout, owning a similar model himself.
‘What’s that?’ Singh asked from the doorway as he switched it on.
He turned to face him, displaying it. ‘Computer. Did you get through to anyone?’
‘All the way. There is an unclaimed case in Johannesburg; it came off last Sunday’s Heathrow flight and the barcode says it was routed all the way through from Edinburgh.’
The DI smiled. ‘Progress. It needn’t mean a hell of a lot, of course. Griff may have checked it in to lay a false trail, but it tells us that he was at the airport, and it gives us a shot at picking him up on camera.’
‘Do you want me to check that?’
‘Yes, but not right away. Go and knock some neighbours’ doors first and see if you can establish when Coats was last here. Even if nobody saw him, find out when his car was seen last. While you do that, I’ll check in with the DCC. He’ll want to know everything there is to know before he sees the press at five.’
Twelve
Mario McGuire looked out across a space that had been the gym of the Edinburgh police service before it was superseded by unification. He had expected a smaller turnout, during what was a two-day public holiday, but there were a dozen recording devices and four microphones on the desk behind which he sat and at the back of the room five TV cameras on stands. One of the latter belonged to his own media department, an innovation by Peregrine Allsop, the director, that Sir Andrew Martin, the former chief constable, had approved without consulting his senior colleagues. Its purpose, McGuire believed, was to strengthen the control of Allsop’s department over police communications by allowing him to highlight officers’ failings. The director was in the DCC’s sights, but Maggie Steele had been reluctant to face the flak that his removal might provoke. He had no such qualms.
The press officer, a small dark-haired woman seated on McGuire’s left, leaned towards him. ‘I’ll introduce you,’ she whispered. She made to rise but he put a hand on her arm.
‘It is all right, Ms Balfour,’ he told her. ‘I know every reporter in this room. I don’t think we need that.’
‘The Director says . . .’ she began, but by that time he was on his feet.
‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, projecting his voice as the buzz of conversation died away. ‘Thank you for coming. You’ll be aware by now, I think, of an incident earlier today in the centre of Edinburgh. It’s with regret that I tell you now, that not long after twelve thirty this morning, a car was abandoned outside the West End police station in Torphichen Place, at Haymarket. Its driver was taken from the scene by another car. On examination, the bodies of two men were found in the back seat of the vehicle; each had been shot in the head. They have been identified formally and next of kin have been informed, so I can tell you that the deceased were Mr Terry Coats, aged forty-one, formerly a detective inspector with the now defunct Strathclyde Police, latterly employed in the security department of Edinburgh Airport, and Inspector Griffin Montell, aged thirty-nine, a serving police officer stationed at the West End office. Enquiries into their murders have begun, under the direction of acting Detective Chief Inspector Harold Haddock, the senior investigating officer. He has nothing to report at this stage, which is why he’s not here, so any questions you can fire at me. I just want to say that DCI Haddock and I, and many of the investigating team, knew Griff Montell as a friend and colleague and are shocked by his death, but I promise you that our enquiries will be conducted dispassionately and efficiently.’ He paused, looking around the room as voices were raised in competition for the first question, then pointed to a man in the front row. ‘Jim.’
The chosen reporter leaned forward. ‘Jim Finney, Sky News. DCC McGuire, obviously you knew Inspector Montell, but did you also know Mr Coats personally?’
‘No, I didn’t, because I wasn’t Strathclyde myself, so our paths didn’t cross, but I can tell you that he was the former husband of one of our serving officers, Detective Sergeant Noele McClair. She’s part of the Serious Crimes Unit based in Edinburgh, in this building. Obviously she’s been recused from this investigation.’
‘Can we talk to her?’ a BBC reporter seated close to Finney asked.
‘That will be up to her, Lisa. I’ll consult with her and see how she feels about that. However, she has a child, yes, Mr Coats’ son, and he has to be protected. What I do not want to happen is for her to be door-stepped, mob-handed, or even approached at her home by individuals.’ He gazed around the room. ‘Should that happen, and I am happy to say this on camera, there will be hell to pay. I want her and her wee boy left alone. What I will do is ask her if she’s prepared to issue a statement. If she is, it’ll come through Ms Balfour here, our press officer.’
‘You said “former husband”,’ Jim Finney said. ‘They were divorced, yes?’
McGuire nodded. ‘Yes, last year.’
‘Were they on good terms?’
‘I have no idea, but I don’t regard that as having any relevance to this investigation. Do you hear me, Jim?’
‘Loud and clear . . . not that you’re saying anything.’
‘Can I ask, Mr McGuire,’ a sharp voice interrupted, ‘what these two men were doing in the same car?’
The deputy chief constable managed to keep his feelings from showing on his face. Jack Darke, the crime correspondent of the Saltire, would not have made a list of his hundred favourite journalists. ‘That’s one of the first questions that DCI Haddock’s team is trying to answer,’ he replied. ‘When we know that, we might come closer to knowing who put them there.’
‘Do you have any lines of enquiry at all?’
‘Several, Jack, and as always we’re going to keep them to ourselves until it’s in the public interest to share them.’
‘They never served on the same force,’ the DCC said.
‘That doesn’t answer my question,’ Darke shot back.
McGuire shrugged. ‘As far as I’m concerned it does.’
‘Why did Coats leave the police?’
‘He chose to. My understanding is that he was offered a uniformed posting that he didn’t like, and that was behind his decision.’
‘It had nothing to do with him being bent?’
There was a collective intake of breath. All eyes in the room fastened on the Saltire journalist, and then on the DCC, as if expecting a volcanic eruption.
None came. Instead McGuire nodded and said, quietly, ‘Mr Darke, I’m not going to respond to that, because I know you’re trying to provoke me into throwing you out of this briefing. But I know also that your knowledge of police matters is encyclopaedic, and that there’s an underlying reason for your question. So why don’t you enlighten us, or are you going to keep it for a front-page exclusive?’
The reporter leaned back in his chair and pocketed his recorder. ‘I might just do that, Mario.’
‘That’s your right,’ the Deputy Chief Constable agreed. ‘Mind you,’ he added, ‘it’s mine to offer a little background information to everyone here. The dead can’t sue but there are things a kid might not want to read about his dad when he grows up.’ His gaze swept across his audience. ‘It’s not correct, ladies and gentlemen, to say or imply that Mr Coats was corrupt. However, he was accused by a website called Brass Rubbings of having protected from prosecution a valuable source of criminal intelligence. He did that, yes, but it’s in no way unique. Sometimes good detectives have to compromise when it comes to intelligence-gathering; they might decide to let a small fish stay in the water to catch a big one. In this case, unfortunately, the website named the informant, and he was found dead shortly afterwards. That was the background to Terry Coats being moved out of CID, and to his decision to resign. I tell you all this in clarification. It’s a matter of public record, so feel free, all of you. With that, I’m drawing this to a close. You’ll be briefed when we have something positive to tell you, until then Ms Balfour here is your contact for questions.’