58

‘This just come in from forensics, sir. I know Kirsty’s in charge, but I thought you’d want to see it.’

McLean had barely stepped into the major incident room, fresh from his walk back from the mortuary, when DS Gregg came bustling up with a sheet of paper. The rest of the room lacked the same sense of urgency, but then they had been packing up the Cecily Slater case for a couple of days now, so that was hardly surprising.

‘What is it?’ he asked, at the same time as he took the page and scanned it.

‘Fingerprint analysis of the mirror in Fielding’s bathroom. You know, the ghostly message?’ Gregg waved her hands around in a very loose approximation of something spooky, but McLean barely noticed. Top marks to the forensics team for turning it around so quickly. No doubt someone had made it clear that the chief constable himself was likely to be taking an interest in the case. It was just a shame that the results weren’t particularly helpful.

According to the report, the team had found remarkably few fingerprints around the bathroom, all of which seemed to belong to Fielding himself. The writing on the mirror appeared to have been done with one index finger, an almost perfect print picked out at the end of each letter where that finger had been lifted to move to the next one. The only problem was that the print was also Tommy Fielding’s.

‘He wrote it himself?’ McLean asked, even though he could see well enough.

‘Apparently.’ Gregg shrugged. ‘Is it important?’

McLean scanned the report again, searching for any mention of when the writing might have been done. The only indication of timescale was a small note at the bottom confirming that the cleaner had wiped down all the surfaces in the bathroom the morning before Fielding’s death. He remembered her telling him she cleaned every day, so she was obviously diligent about her work.

‘It’s odd. Not sure what to make of it, to be honest.’ He looked past Gregg, across the room, not seeing the faces he hoped to see. ‘Harrison and Stringer still out chasing up the men from the pub?’

‘Far as I know. The chief super’s back, though. Went straight up to her office. No’ sure if anyone’s spoken to her yet about . . . well.’

‘Have you seen Kirsty about?’ McLean asked. It was easier than approaching Ritchie’s office and risking an unprepared meeting with Elmwood. But that was just being stupid. McLean knew he had to grasp this nettle or risk getting stung. ‘Forget it, Sandy. I’ll go find her.’ He waved a hand at the incident room and the officers slowly packing things away. ‘Tell this lot they can knock off early. We’ll know better what’s going on by tomorrow. Wouldn’t want to have to put it all back together again.’

‘Aye, sir.’ Gregg accepted her new orders without question, bustling off to carry them out. McLean glanced around in case either Harrison or Stringer had magically appeared, but they were all still absent. He pulled out his phone and rattled off a quick text to Harrison as he left the major incident room and went in search of his new DCI.

He’d only made it halfway to her office when the shouting started.

‘I’ve never heard so much fucking rubbish in my life.’

McLean didn’t really want to go into Detective Superintendent McIntyre’s office, even though the door was open. A little further up the corridor, the chief superintendent’s secretary, Helen, was sitting at her desk, transfixed. McLean caught her attention, hooked a thumb at the door, and then raised both hands in a gesture he intended to mean ‘should I go in?’ but which could have meant anything. Or simply made him look like an idiot. Helen merely shrugged, then shook her head and held both hands up to indicate she wanted nothing to do with it. Fair enough, this was way above her pay grade.

‘You can’t possibly think I’d have anything to do with—’

McLean chose that moment to reach out and knock at the open door, much more loudly than he would do normally. The effect was instant, and more or less as he had hoped. The chief superintendent stopped shouting, but the expression on her face as she rounded on him was one of such fury he feared he might blister under its heat.

‘You’re behind this, aren’t you, McLean? What is the meaning of this outrageous—’

‘Jayne, ma’am.’ He stepped into the room and then very deliberately closed the door behind him. Elmwood stood in the middle of the room, shaking in her rage. McIntyre was leaning against her desk as if prepared to scuttle behind it for safety should the need arise.

‘I’ve just been at the mortuary, getting the details on Mr Fielding’s cause of death.’

In the silence that followed he could hear the tick of the clock on the wall.

‘He was strangled. Possibly by the tie, by his own hand as it were. But there were other marks on his neck. Angus thinks someone could have choked him with their bare hands until he fell unconscious, then did the thing with the necktie to make it look like an accident. Auto-erotic asphyxiation gone wrong. Those are his preliminary findings. We’ll know more once all the tests are in. But I’ve known Angus a long time, and he’s usually right first time.’

‘I still don’t know—’

McLean held up his hand to stop the chief superintendent from speaking. ‘Before you say anything else, we know you were there. We know you met him in the Walter Scott bar around half nine, walked back to his apartment and stayed there until about half past ten. You were seen by multiple, reliable witnesses, and we have security camera footage from the apartment block lobby. Denying it isn’t going to help.’

‘I didn’t kill him. He was fine when I left. The bastard.’

‘That’s useful information,’ McLean said. ‘But until we can prove it, you are at the very least a person of interest.’

‘This is ridiculous.’ Elmwood looked from McIntyre to McLean, then back again. She held out her arms, wrists pressed together. ‘What are you going to do? Cuff me and throw me in a cell?’

‘I really don’t think that’s necessary, Gail. But you understand as well as I do that you can’t be anywhere near this investigation. Not until we know exactly what happened to Mr Fielding.’ McIntyre crossed the room, taking the chief superintendent’s hand. ‘We have to be seen to be doing everything right here.’

Elmwood almost flinched at the detective superintendent’s touch. She turned away and focused on McLean, the earlier anger gone now, replaced by earnest supplication. ‘Tony, surely you must believe I’m innocent?’

‘Fielding used you, back when you were a sergeant. You never forgave him for that.’ He couldn’t help himself, even though he knew it was mean to kick someone when they were down. ‘And yet you met up with him last night. Went back to his flat and had sex with him.’

‘Used me?’ Elmwood narrowed her eyes, staring at McLean as if she might be able to see his thoughts. ‘Is that the best gossip you could come up with?’

‘Well, maybe it went both ways. Mutual support with a bit of mutual loathing thrown in. Let’s just say the two of you have had a long and complicated relationship, shall we? Culminating in a . . . liaison last night.’ McLean enjoyed the flinch his choice of word brought. ‘Tell me, ma’am, do the words “with my dying breath I curse thee” mean anything to you?’

If he’d been hoping for a reaction, he was disappointed by the one he got. Elmwood’s face went from angry to confused far too quickly for it to have been an act. She knew nothing about the message on the bathroom mirror, so maybe she was innocent after all. At least of Fielding’s murder.

‘What on earth are you talking about?’ she said eventually.

McLean told her about the writing, failing to mention the forensic conclusion that it was Fielding himself who had done it. ‘We’ve no evidence of anyone else entering the flat until the cleaner arrived the next morning. Fielding’s death is suspicious. We have to investigate, and you can’t be involved in any aspect of it. By all rights we should be calling in a team from another region to do this.’

‘So, what? I just go home and lick my wounds?’ Elmwood dropped herself into one of the chairs that had been pulled out from the conference table.

‘Actually, that would probably be the best idea,’ McIntyre said. ‘Go home, Gail. You can have a couple of days off while we run everything down and prepare a report for the PF. I doubt anyone will even notice you’re gone.’

McLean grimaced, not wanting to be the one to break bad news. ‘Actually, that might not be true.’

‘Oh?’ Elmwood tilted her head in an accusatory manner, which given what McLean was about to say was probably fair.

‘The press already know Fielding’s dead. And they also know about your history with him.’ He held up a hand to stop the chief superintendent before she could complain. ‘Not about last night, but about your history. London, all that stuff.’

Elmwood narrowed her eyes at him. ‘How is it you know this?’

‘Because one of Edinburgh’s finest muckrakers told me. The press have been digging into your past ever since you arrived. It’s what they do.’

‘Dalgliesh?’ McIntyre asked.

‘The same.’

‘And you’re one of this hack’s sources, are you?’ The ice in Elmwood’s voice would have chilled a perfect Martini.

‘We have history, but I don’t talk to the press without official sanction. I’ve not told Dalgliesh anything about you.’ McLean heard the defensiveness in his voice and hoped neither Elmwood nor McIntyre noticed it.

‘Go home, Gail. Let us do our job, aye?’ McIntyre said, and finally the chief superintendent relented.

‘Fine. But I want to be kept up to speed on developments, OK?’ She turned on McLean. ‘And if this Dalgliesh fellow so much as breathes any rumour, you can tell him I’m not afraid of suing, right?’

McLean nodded, feeling it unnecessary to point out that Dalgliesh was a woman. ‘We’ll need to post an officer outside your door.’

Now the heat came back into the chief superintendent’s face. ‘What? You think I’m a flight risk? Where the fuck would I go?’

‘I don’t think that’s necessary, Tony.’ McIntyre stepped in to calm things down. ‘I’m sure Gail will be happy to call in regularly. Won’t you, Gail?’

Elmwood glared at both of them, but McLean could see her considering the options. She was trapped and she knew it, but she also knew he and McIntyre were her best hope. Standing tall, she adjusted her uniform jacket, squared her shoulders, then without a further word, she strode to the door and left.

McLean was still waiting for the call from Elmwood’s driver to say that she had been delivered safely home when he heard a knock at his open office door. Glancing up, he saw DS Harrison standing half in, half out of the room.

‘I heard about the chief super, sir,’ she said. ‘Did you really threaten to throw her in a cell?’

‘One of these days I’ll find out who’s behind all the station gossip and kick them so hard they’ll not be able to sit down for a month.’ McLean shook his head. ‘And no, I did no such thing. We all agreed it was best if she went home, took a bit of leave while we sort things out.’

‘House arrest then,’ Harrison said. McLean was going to object, but then he remembered that after Elmwood had left McIntyre’s office he’d persuaded the detective superintendent to assign a uniformed officer to guard duty outside the Stockbridge house anyway.

He shrugged. ‘If that’s what we have to say to keep the papers happy, I’ll go with it.’

‘Just as well there’s someone on the door, anyway. I think we might have a problem.’

‘Oh?’ McLean sat up a little straighter.

‘Fellow by the name of Gary Tomlinson. He was in the bar with Fielding last night, and the day Izzy and her mates broke into the seminar. I spoke to his ex, and it seems Gary’s a bit free with his fists around women. Which is why she’s his ex and he doesn’t get to see their wee girl any more.’

McLean felt a tingle of something unpleasant on the back of his neck. ‘Go on.’

‘According to the other two who were in the pub, Fielding had got right pally with Gary these past couple of months. Spending a lot of time with him, promising to help him get access to his kid.’

‘Isn’t that what Fielding does? It’s kind of his thing. Was his thing, I should say.’

‘Aye, right enough. But this is where it gets weird. Apparently Gary got stiffed by the lawyer his ex used. Threatened he’d go to jail, then got him to sign away everything to have the charges dropped. But here’s the thing. There weren’t any charges. It never got that far. And the ex’s lawyer? He works for DCF Law.’

‘That doesn’t make sense. Why would Fielding’s firm screw this bloke over, then Fielding . . .’ McLean stopped talking as the pieces began to fall into place.

‘Aye. What better way to radicalise someone? Just like Izzy said.’

‘Did you speak to him? This Gary . . . ?’

‘Tomlinson, sir. And no. We went to his place. His new place. But he wasn’t there. According to the landlady he just upped and walked out. Left his front door open, lights on, laptop on the table showing a news bulletin about Fielding’s death.’

‘So he knows. I guess he’ll be upset. Maybe gone out to get pissed?’

‘And leave his flat unlocked? Door open? He was in the pub with Fielding last night, sir. Him and two lawyers Izzy identified for us. They all left before Gai— the chief superintendent arrived, but what if he’d not gone home? What if he was hanging around and saw her with him? With Fielding?’

McLean frowned, trying to squeeze all the different snippets of information into something resembling a sensible whole. ‘How would he know who she was, though? I mean, she’s not exactly high profile. You and I know her, but the average man on the street?’

Except that she was high profile. The English copper come to Edinburgh. Elmwood might not have known who Jo Dalgliesh was, but Dalgliesh sure as hell knew the chief superintendent. He picked up his phone, meaning to call her, then instead stood up and slipped it in his pocket.

‘Come on then. Let’s go pay our boss a visit.’