McLean had been to the Crime Campus at Gartcosh a couple of times since its opening, but it wasn’t somewhere he felt the need to visit often. It was too far from his usual stomping grounds, for one thing, and it represented a very different approach to policing from the one he was accustomed to. Then again, crime had evolved in directions nobody could have even dreamed of when he had still been a beat constable. The internet had barely been a thing back then, and yet now maybe half of the crime they dealt with was directly linked to the web. Even everyday criminals used smartphones and encrypted emails, and the old boundaries between countries had all but dissolved away.
A case in point was the theft to order of high-end cars, as he was finding out at far greater length than he would have cared to know. Detective Inspector Maurice Ackerley of the National Crime Agency was part of a team tracking down a gang who operated throughout the UK and Europe, sourcing expensive and exotic machinery.
‘Your car would have been in a container and on its way to Africa or China before you’d even noticed it was gone,’ he said, as they stood in an incident room that looked more like the starship Enterprise than somewhere organised crime was investigated. Banks of computer equipment lined the walls, far more modern than anything McLean’s team had access to, and in one corner a massive screen showed an electronic map of the greater Glasgow area.
‘It has a tracker in it.’ McLean knew this was what Ackerley wanted him to say; he wasn’t an idiot after all. The DI came across as extremely proud of his technical facilities.
‘Ah, but those are easily traced and disabled. And I’ve no doubt you thought your Alfa Romeo was well protected by its alarm and immobiliser, and yet they proved no more of a problem to overcome than the lock.’
McLean tried to ignore the hint of triumph in Ackerley’s voice, as if the DI was impressed with the ingenuity of the thieves. Almost as if he respected them. He glanced across to where the chief superintendent was standing by the door, and tried not to smile at her raised eyebrow and ever so slightly rude hand gesture.
‘That much would seem obvious,’ he said. ‘Along with the fact that the wee toerag who stole the car might have had all the technology he wanted, but he still didn’t know how to drive.’
Ackerley’s animated excitement evaporated in an instant, his whole body slumping like a teenager asked to take the rubbish out. ‘That’s what doesn’t add up,’ he said. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong. Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio. That’s not your average policeman’s ride. Five hundred horsepower through the rear wheels?’ He made a little ‘poof’ noise and flicked the fingers of both hands open to indicate an explosion. ‘Plenty of them parked backwards in hedges when they first came out. But these guys . . .’ and now he turned towards the big screen, even though it didn’t show anything that might indicate the gang stealing expensive cars to order. ‘They know how to drive, Tony. They’re some of the best. They don’t show off. They steal the car, then get it as quickly and safely to their lock-up as possible.’
‘Well this one obviously hadn’t read the script. You know who he is? Was? Whatever.’
Ackerley tapped his keyboard. The big screen changed to a profile page, and finally McLean got a look at the man who had stolen his car.
James ‘Jimmy’ McAllister had been twenty-six years old when he died. Average height, a skinny sixty-five kilos, he had the pasty white complexion of a north Edinburgh housing estate and a surprisingly clean criminal record. He’d been cautioned a couple of times as a youth, both for joyriding offences, and then from his eighteenth birthday until the day of his death he appeared not to have put a foot wrong. He appeared not to have had a job either, or paid any tax. And yet his address was one of the modern apartments in Fountainbridge. Not somewhere you’d live if you were eking out your dole money.
‘That’s pretty close to where he crashed,’ McLean said, all too aware that he was stating the obvious. ‘Do we know where he was going? Not home, I take it.’
Ackerley tapped his keyboard again, and the screen changed to an Edinburgh street map. A red line from McLean’s police station to the point of the accident took an odd, circuitous route first north, then west, and finally south again.
‘That’s what we can’t work out. From the reports we’ve had, and the CCTV we’ve managed to collate, he came roaring up the Lothian Road from the Princes Street end. But if he’d been heading from your station car park to Tollcross, he’d have gone across the Meadows. It’s a stupid route the way he went. Makes no sense.’
‘And I had to come all the way here to be told that?’ McLean spread the question between Ackerley and the chief superintendent. ‘Could you not just have phoned? Or maybe sent me a copy of the report?’
‘Well, I was hoping you could answer a few questions about your daily use of the car, where it’s parked at night, that sort of thing. We need to work out how McAllister knew where to find it.’ Ackerley’s tone was one of mild confusion rather than annoyance, which made things worse as far as McLean was concerned.
‘I don’t know if you’re aware, Detective Inspector, but I’m currently SIO on a murder investigation and my team is looking into two other suspicious deaths that will probably turn out to have also been murders. We’re short-staffed enough as it is, without my being dragged across the country to deal with this. The theft of my car is quite low on my list of priorities right now.’
Ackerley looked across the room at the chief superintendent, who shrugged unhelpfully. This really wasn’t how policing was supposed to be done.
‘OK.’ McLean conceded defeat. He was stuck here anyway, might as well make the best of it. ‘I’ll answer your questions as best I can. But I’d like something in return, if it’s not too much to ask?’
‘Name it,’ the NCA man said, which was perhaps a little foolish of him.
‘Your vast database of stuff.’ McLean waved a hand at the big screen. ‘I’d like you to run a name through it, see what pops up.’
‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’ Ackerley stepped up to the keyboard again, flexing his fingers like he was expecting a fight. ‘What’s the name?’
‘Slater. Lady Cecily Slater.’
‘You didn’t need to be quite so hard on Maurice, you know. The NCA can be very helpful when you’re nice to them.’
Much later, and McLean sat next to the deputy chief constable as they drove back to Edinburgh, wondering how he was going to catch up with a wasted day. He’d climbed into the back when they were finally ready to leave the Crime Campus, thinking that the same two constables would be in the front seats as before. To his annoyance, only the driver reappeared, and now he eyed up the front passenger seat with deep longing. Anything to get away from the too-close proximity of Gail Elmwood.
‘Everything we did today could have been done in an email,’ he said. ‘There was really no need for me to travel halfway across the country for any of it.’
‘And would you have dealt with that email straight away? Or would it have lain unread in your inbox for a fortnight?’
McLean didn’t want to admit that she had a point there. ‘A phone call, then. Or sending a constable over with some questions. Instead I’m stuck in a car in traffic when I should be . . .’ He stopped speaking, aware that he’d been about to say ‘out there investigating a murder’. That would have left him open to the accusation that as SIO he should most certainly not have been ‘out there’, but back at the incident room co-ordinating his sergeants and constables to go ‘out there’ and do the job their pay grade demanded. And which they had no doubt spent the whole day doing. Without him.
‘You did OK out of it though, didn’t you?’ The chief superintendent nodded towards the brown folder McLean held on his lap like some kind of protective ward. It contained a printout of everything the NCA database had spewed out for him about both Cecily Slater and her nephew, the eleventh Lord Bairnfather. Ackerley had even promised to send more over if he turned anything up about the Bairnfather Trust and the hotel, although he’d admitted there was nothing on their radar he was aware of.
‘Again, if I’d needed it I could have emailed them or picked up the phone. I only asked face-to-face because I was already there.’
‘Relax, Tony. You can’t be fighting crime all the time. You have to let others deal with all the details, sort and sift the information they bring to you. Delegate, in other words.’ The chief superintendent took her own advice literally, loosening her collar and leaning back in her seat as if she were a vacuous celebrity in a stretch limo on the way home from some gaudy awards ceremony, and not one of the most senior police officers in the country, on duty.
‘With respect, Gail, that’s not the way I work. That’s not the way murder investigations work either, especially not ones like this, where there’s no obvious motive and no forensic evidence.’
The chief superintendent reached out and placed a hand on his knee, just briefly. More the lightest of pats than anything else, but McLean did his best to hide the flinch at her touch. He was still trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, but it was hard to ignore the evidence, especially when he’d been trained to notice such things. The deputy chief constable was a welcome change from her predecessor in many ways, but at least McLean had understood Teflon Steve.
‘Why is it that whenever someone begins a sentence “with respect” it’s actually the complete opposite that they mean?’
‘Probably because it’s considered rude to be frank.’ McLean focused his attention on the chief superintendent where before he had been doing his best to avoid her gaze. The expression on her face didn’t fill him with great joy. This was a game for her, he could see, and right now he was doing exactly what she wanted him to.
‘I’d be horrified if I thought my officers were holding back on me, Tony. Be frank. I won’t be upset.’
OK. If that was how she wanted to play it. ‘You’ve never been a detective, have you, ma’am?’ He posed it as a question, even though he already knew the answer. Neither did he give her time to speak before he carried on. ‘I know we can have a bit of a reputation for being difficult, us plain clothes coppers. We don’t keep an eye on the budgets as much as you’d like, I’m sure. And we’ve a tendency to get a bit fixated sometimes. It’s part of the training. So you can imagine how anything that distracts us from the task in hand can be a bit annoying. Especially if there’s no obvious good reason for it. Like today’s trip and last night’s so-called function.’
Something like irritation flickered across the chief superintendent’s face then, but she kept it well hidden. For a while there was nothing but the roar of tyres on road and the whistle of wind around the car’s wing mirrors. Then she hitched a smile on to her face that would have done a politician proud.
‘I can sort of see your point, Tony. Really, I can. But you hit the nail on the head right there. Specialist Crime has a tendency to think of budgets as a distant second priority, if it thinks of them at all. But we live in a world of finite resources, sadly. Cuts are everywhere, and they’re only going to get worse.’ And now she leaned in close, her hand back on his knee but not lightly this time. ‘And that’s why I need you by my side. So I can fight off the accountants and the Police Authority when they come demanding we keep chipping away at the costs. I need someone who’s been at the coal face to remind them that it’s not pounds and pence, but people’s lives.’
It was a good speech, he had to admit. Even if it was all bollocks. McLean held the chief superintendent’s stare for a moment longer, then looked pointedly down at her hand. She followed his gaze and a moment later removed it, sliding away to sit more comfortably in her seat with the faintest flicker of a smile playing across her lips.
‘Think about it, Tony. You and me, we could do great things together.’
McLean let his head tip back and stared at the cloth lining the roof of the car. He didn’t need his years of experience to hear the unspoken threat. Sure, they could do great things together, but she could also make his life hell if he continued to spurn her advances.