3

Detective Sergeant Susie Drummond stared at the message on her phone: one missed call from Doug, one voicemail. She chewed her lip for a moment. Debating. Listen or not?

With a sigh, she pocketed the phone then went back to trying to get comfortable. She was sitting on a low wooden bench in the marble-filled main corridor outside court two in the High Court building on the Royal Mile, waiting to be called to give evidence in the attempted murder case she had worked on earlier in the year.

She snorted despite herself, drawing an arched look from a red-faced, jowly man in an expensive suit, who was waddling past her clutching an untidy pile of papers. The whole trial was a waste of time, and wee Kevin Malcolm should be sitting in a cell in Saughton and shitting himself about shower time now. And he would have been too, except that “Charming” Charlie Montgomery QC had other plans.

Kevin was known around Edinburgh as a small-time thief with a big-time temper. He was five-foot-seven of bad attitude, greasy hair, cheap tattoos and skin bleached grey by too much booze, dope and fried food. For years he had been linked to some of the nastier break-ins and assaults in Edinburgh, including, infamously, the kneecapping of a security guard too stupid not to stop Kevin when he was making a bolt for the front doors of the St James Shopping Centre after smashing in the front window of a jewellery shop.

The guard – Jamie Miller, a dad barely out of his teens and a keen five-a-side football player – had sprinted for Kevin, taken him down with a flying tackle and waited for the police to arrive. They dragged him from the floor, held him back when he lunged for Jamie. And then Kevin had hawked back and spat a wad of blood-flecked phlegm at Jamie. “Yer a fast wee cunt,” he hissed. “Better hope ye stay like that.”

Jamie shrugged and went back to his life, unaware that he had just lit the fuse on Niddrie’s nastiest ned. His run-in with Kevin got him in the papers twice: firstly, as the local hero who stopped a “dramatic daylight smash-and-grab raid in Edinburgh’s busiest shopping centre”; and then a few weeks later as the local hero who had been viciously beaten and hospitalised.

About a week after he’d floored Kevin, Jamie was grabbed as he came out of the Pitz – a five-a-side football centre just on the outskirts of Musselburgh. Dragged down a side street and beaten senseless by someone with a taste for cheap sovereign rings and the sound of breaking bones. His hands had been stamped on, his ribs broken and his knees shattered. The doctor Susie spoke to couldn’t say for sure, but it was her guess that whoever had done this to Jamie had beaten him unconscious then jumped on his knees until they had snapped.

“I hope he didn’t like getting anywhere fast,” she had muttered to Susie, eyes hidden by the reflection from the X-rays of the ruined bones shining from the wall.

It didn’t take much to connect the dots back to Kevin. He opened the door to his flat in Niddrie – in a block of new-build housing association homes that somehow managed to look dilapidated and smell of cat piss despite being only six months old –and glared sullenly at Susie, one eye glinting in the cushion of a badly bruised socket. At least Jamie had managed to get one hit in.

He admitted nothing, but hardly needed to – they found blood-spattered clothes in his bedroom and a copy of the Tribune open on the coffee table, Jamie’s face smiling nervously out of the centre spread, the paragraphs about his love of football and the local league games at the Pitz carefully underlined. It was an open-and-shut case – until Charming Charlie Montgomery had got involved.

Susie could hear him now: the cultured, Stirlingshire lilt with a confidence just this side of arrogance. How could it be attempted murder when no weapon had been used? Were the police there at the time? Did they know the psychological trauma Mr Malcolm had been through – driven to a stupid theft by crippling debts and a young child to feed, then ridiculed while on bail by his friends who saw the story in the newspaper? Was it any surprise that Mr Malcolm, fuelled by his addiction to alcohol, had sought revenge on Mr Miller? Surely the members of the jury could see his client was not in his right mind at the time, but had merely lashed out? Surely he was deserving of some leniency and recognition of his diminished responsibility? Surely…

Susie’s phone beeped in her pocket again – a reminder of the missed call and message from Doug.

Listen or ignore?

She clamped it to her ear, turned toward the wall to hide the fact she was using it right under a sign that read, No mobile phones in the court buildings, and listened to the message. Smiled as he fumbled his way through “had fun last night”, felt a flush of awkward guilt.

They hadn’t started out on the best of terms. About three years ago, Doug got in touch out of the blue, to matter-of-factly tell Susie he had found out about her drunken one-night stand with a married Chief Super who had then gone for a press gagging order about the whole affair (excuse the pun, she thought), before the phrase “super-injunction” had even been whispered by the tabloids.

He really had been a little prick all round, Susie thought sourly. Emphasis on the little.

But then Doug surprised her. Instead of pressuring her for access or information, he told her he was killing the story because he wasn’t “a gutter-mining shit”. All he wanted to do was introduce himself as a face she could trust. He shared contacts where he could, got her information that people wouldn’t always give to the police, and all he asked in return was a heads-up when a story was about to break, or perhaps an advance quote to get him half a step ahead of his rivals. He could be a pushy little shit, and she’d been bollocked by her DI, Jason “Third Degree” Burns, and her other bosses more than once for “being too close to certain sections of the press”, but the arrangement worked for both of them. He got stories, she got information she needed and the chance to paint the police in a positive light now and again.

But lately, something had changed. They were spending more time together, focusing less on work. It seemed to start after the Buchan incident last year, but was that it? Was the trauma of almost being killed together bringing them closer to each other, or was it something else?

He was a contact, but he was also a friend: the guy who would listen to her rant about a shit day at work without judging – or running the stories she told him; the guy who fixed her car, went for pizza and a pint after a hard day.

But then there was what happened a couple of weeks ago, the “fun” last night and now…

…now…

“Detective Sergeant Susan Drummond?”

Susie looked up, startled. A court usher was leaning out of the doors to courtroom two, calling her to give evidence.

Susie switched her phone to silent and pocketed it, heading for the courtroom. As she walked through the door, the phone started its insistent buzz in her pocket. She cursed quietly under her breath, hoped the judge and jury wouldn’t hear it as she entered the witness stand. Work knew she was in court all morning so it was unlikely to be them. And Doug? Well, Doug could wait. It couldn’t be that urgent, could it?