The station car park bustled with activity as McLean claimed the parking spot in front of the car charging point again. He considered plugging Emma’s Renault in, but the screen on the dashboard told him it was still almost fully charged, so he didn’t bother. If anyone else needed electricity, they could always ask him to move. It reminded him that he needed to get something to replace the Alfa. Another one, perhaps? Or would he gracefully admit his age and visit the Jaguar dealership where Professor Turner had bought hers? Something to worry about when he wasn’t chasing down murderers and suspicious deaths. It wasn’t as if Emma was going to need her Renault any time soon, after all.
His stomach rumbled as he put his foot on the first step inside the station, reminding him that breakfast hadn’t happened yet. Turning away from the climb to the third floor, McLean made a beeline for the canteen. Armed with a large mug of coffee and a couple of bacon baps, heavy on the brown sauce, he retreated to a table in the corner and the hope of a few minutes of peace to gather his thoughts. Fate had other ideas.
‘That doesn’t look particularly healthy, Tony. Mind if I join you?’
Detective Superintendent Jayne McIntyre didn’t wait for permission. She pulled out a chair and dropped herself into it with a weary ‘oof’ noise. Halfway through the first of his bacon baps, McLean couldn’t say anything until he had finished chewing and swallowed.
‘You’re in early, Jayne.’
‘As, I see, are you. Breakfast not good enough at home these days?’
McLean shrugged. ‘There wasn’t time. I’ve already been out running errands for her ladyship.’
McIntyre raised an eyebrow, then picked up McLean’s mug and took a sip of his coffee. ‘You be careful now. Gail’s a good person to have fighting your corner, but I’ve seen what she can do when the shoe’s on the other foot. If you’ll excuse me mixing my metaphors.’
‘She asked me to go and check out an unexplained death.’ McLean told McIntyre of his early morning wake-up call and subsequent trip to Fountainbridge. ‘I have to assume that she and this Galloway bloke have history. How else did she know about it before pretty much anyone else? And why does everything have to be done on the hurry up? The guy had a heart attack, or a bad reaction to his painkillers. There’s no suggestion of foul play.’
‘And instead of going up to the third floor to tell her all that in person, you’re down here eating bacon baps.’ McIntyre helped herself to more of McLean’s coffee. He could see her eyeing up the second bap too, and he edged the plate away from her in an overtly possessive manner.
‘I’ll go and report to her soon as I’ve had my breakfast.’ He tried to keep the exasperation out of his voice. ‘I don’t quite share your admiration for her, though. Something about her puts me on edge. Her chumminess, maybe.’ Or the hand on his knee in the car driving back from Gartcosh, the casual, almost joking referral to him as her ‘plus one’.
‘She’s finding her feet, Tony. Not been in the job long and she’s already got half of the Police Authority eating out of her hand. Plus she got us half a dozen new DCs we’ve needed for ages. She’s unorthodox, I’ll grant you that much. But so are you, and I seem to remember you get results.’
‘And suspended, and demoted.’
‘You never wanted to be a DCI.’
‘It’s the principle of the thing, though.’ He paused long enough to take another bite of bacon bap, wash it down with coffee. ‘Sorry. I’m just a bit cranky before breakfast.’
‘No wonder Emma’s running away to Africa.’
‘Run away. She’s been gone a few weeks now. Communication’s been a bit sporadic, but all seems to be well so far.’
McIntyre eyed the coffee, then looked across at the canteen serving counter, no doubt trying to decide whether she should get her own mug or continue stealing McLean’s. ‘How goes your murder investigation, anyway? Last I heard it was a bit bogged down.’
‘A bit is being kind. The whole thing’s going nowhere. We’ve drawn a blank on forensics, CCTV in the area’s non-existent, the victim was a recluse with very little social interaction, so we can’t even find a motive. Unless we can come up with something to suggest the Bairnfather Trust wanted her out of the cottage so it could redevelop the land, we’ve basically got nothing.’
‘Is that even likely?’ McIntyre asked.
‘Not really, no. It doesn’t track right. If someone wanted the site, they could just have torched the house without killing the old girl. Or they could have simply moved her out. Not as if she’d be able to put up much of a fight. She’d have been looked after well for the rest of her days. Probably a suite in the hotel, or a care home in the city. Money doesn’t seem to be a problem for Lord Bairnfather, so it’s not that.’ McLean took a swig of coffee, marshalling the few facts he’d managed to unearth into some kind of order. ‘If I had to guess, I’d say it was a hate crime. It has all the hallmarks. They beat her black and blue before setting her on fire, after all. I just can’t work out why someone would hate a ninety-year-old woman living all alone and hardly ever interacting with society. Why her, and why then?’
‘Well, not to put a dampener on things, but you’ll need to come up with something fairly soon. I’m getting a fair bit of pressure to wind the whole thing up. Stick it in a cold case file and move on.’
McLean took the last bite of bacon bap, nodded his understanding as he chewed and swallowed. ‘Thought that might be the case. Not that I like it much. Poor old girl deserves better.’
McIntyre pushed back her chair and stood up. ‘Aye, I know, Tony. But we do what we can and we have to be realistic about when to stop.’
‘And if Lord Bairnfather isn’t happy about it? He’s well connected, you know, might kick up a stink if he thinks his sainted aunt’s being swept under the rug. If you’ll excuse me mixing my metaphors.’
McIntyre smiled at the joke. ‘Touché, Tony. But you can leave the smoothing of ruffled feathers to Gail. It’s what she’s best at. Which reminds me. Aren’t you meant to be reporting in to her about now?’
The way to the chief superintendent’s office took him past the major incident room, so McLean felt he could be forgiven for letting himself in and checking on the lack of progress before delivering his report on Galloway. A quick scan of the room revealed that DC Stringer and DS Harrison were head to head like thieves in the far corner. Possibly hearing the door close, or some sixth sense kicking in, they both stopped whatever it was they had been doing and turned to face him.
‘Morning, sir,’ Harrison said, a moment before Stringer could get his greeting in. ‘Heard you were at an unexplained death in Fountainbridge. Anything unusual?’
‘I take it your interest means there’s no progress on the Cecily Slater case?’
Harrison had the decency to look sheepish. ‘Not as such, sir. We’ve extended the archive search, but the most recent mention of her name I’ve found is a newspaper report about her brother’s funeral in 1984, so we’re pretty much stumped for useful background information. Can’t find much motive in the financials, either. She didn’t care about money, and the only beneficiary of her will’s already rolling in it. Gains nothing from her death.’
Nothing he hadn’t already known. McLean considered Detective Superintendent McIntyre’s words to him in the canteen, and the thoughts they had provoked. ‘Let’s go further back in her life then. See if we can’t wring something out of the Burntwoods angle. Only, don’t spend too long chasing it down.’
‘They’re closing the case?’ Harrison asked. So cynical for one so young.
‘Murder cases are never closed, you know that. They just get sidelined by other work and quietly slip down to the basement.’
‘Seems a bit early though, doesn’t it? We’ve barely scratched the surface of this one.’
‘I know. And I’ll fight our corner as long as I can. But unless we get a substantial lead from somewhere soon, we’re only going round in circles.’
McLean could see that the two detectives weren’t happy about it, and the quiet that had descended on the room suggested none of the other officers working the case were either. A quick look at the whiteboard wall reminded him of the messy corpse that had been left behind by whoever had taken out their anger on Cecily Slater. He wanted to find that person, or persons, and put them away. He wanted justice for the old woman so that she could rest in peace. So that he could rest in peace, more like. And yet sometimes you had to know when to let go.
‘One other thing, Janie,’ he said, as the detective sergeant began to turn away. She immediately snapped her attention back to him.
‘Sir?’
‘I hear you were looking into an incident in the Old Town a few days back. Two drunkards falling down some steps and doing themselves damage.’
Harrison wasn’t good at putting on an innocent face, but she gave it her best shot. ‘Aye, sir. Wasn’t really anything much. Just following up a complaint for a friend. Kir— DI Ritchie told me to drop it, so I did.’
McLean knew there was a great deal more to the story than that; Kirsty had bent his ear at great length about his corrupting influence. ‘You spoke to one of the men, yes?’
‘Christopher Allan, sir. He confirmed the story about the accident. Nasty injuries, though.’
‘The other one. Was his name Brian Galloway, by any chance? Lives in Fountainbridge?’
‘Aye, sir. Downfield Street . . .’ Harrison’s voice trailed away, her mouth staying open as the implications caught up with her.
‘Well there’s no point in trying to talk to him any more. He’s dead. Possibly a bad reaction to his painkillers, but we won’t know until the post-mortem’s done. Of course it’s equally possible that he died of the injuries inflicted on him when he accidentally fell down the steps of Fleshmarket Close. If that is indeed what happened.’
‘Oh.’ Harrison joined the dots.
‘This friend of yours with the complaint. What was that about, and where are they now?’
‘I . . . Umm . . . She’s at mine and Manda’s place. She crashed there the night of the attack. I sort of said it was OK for her to stay a while if she wanted.’
‘That’s very decent of you.’
‘Aye, well she was staying with Madame Rose, but she said the house was doing her head in. That’s why—’
‘Rose?’ McLean interrupted. ‘How does she know Rose? Who is this friend of yours?’
Harrison paused a moment before answering, and McLean could see the thoughts tumbling across her face. There shouldn’t have been any harm in him knowing the name. Even if it turned out Galloway’s injuries had proved the ultimate cause of his death, he was on record as saying he got them falling down steps in a drunken stupor. No point in trying to prosecute anyone for that other than himself. And yet something was bothering Harrison.
‘I need background on Galloway for the Procurator Fiscal. If you want me to keep your friend’s name out of that, Janie, I’ll need a good reason why. Better than Rose, for sure.’
‘Her name’s Izzy. Isobel DeVilliers.’
Well, that was a better reason.
‘She’s Con Fairchild’s half-sister, sir. You remember, that nastiness with the evangelists back in the spring?’
‘I’m aware of who she is. What’s she doing in Edinburgh?’
‘Well she was part of the crowd protesting against Tommy Fielding. I’m guessing that’s why he set a couple of his goons on her. Pity they didn’t know she could more than look out for herself.’
McLean sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose in the hope that it would all go away. It didn’t.
‘Detective Sergeant,’ he began, then realised that the entire room was listening in avidly. ‘Can we discuss this in my office?’ He gestured towards the door at the exact moment that it opened and the chief superintendent stepped in, closely followed by DI Ritchie. Elmwood had a scowl on her face that morphed into a broad smile the moment she saw him. Not a hello old friend smile, though. This was more of an I’ve got you now grin of triumph.
‘There you are, Tony. I was beginning to wonder where you’d got to.’ She patted Ritchie on the shoulder in the manner of a schoolmistress sending the admonished pupil back to her seat in the class, then turned her attention fully on him. ‘Come on then. I think you owe me a report?’