Half past two and Logan was getting ready to shut down his computer when DC Rennie swore his way into the room, holding a wodge of damp paper towels against his cheek. ‘Bastard fucking shite bastard fuck. . .’
‘What happened to you?’
‘Your bloody beardy-weirdie took a swing at me! Took three of us to get him in a bloody cell.’
‘He’s a primary school teacher.’
‘He’s a bastard!’ Pulling away the damp towels and fingering the angry red welt beneath. ‘I was on a promise tonight as well. . .’ Rennie stopped and glowered at the tissue, then hurled it into the bin. ‘Insch wants to know if you need a lift tonight. To the rehearsal?’
Logan shook his head. ‘I’m going home. Anyway, thought you lot only met on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday.’
‘Two weeks till we’re on, so it’s pretty much every night from now till—’
‘So who’s supposed to watch Macintyre then?’
Rennie blushed. ‘I can come back later if—’
‘It’s Jackie, isn’t it? For God’s sake!’ If she was supposed to watch the footballer’s house every night for the next two weeks she’d be in a permanent foul mood. ‘What if she’s supposed to be on nights, or the back shift?’
Rennie shrugged. ‘I’m just doing what I’m told.’
‘This is stupid.’ Logan stood. ‘We know Macintyre’s not hunting in Aberdeen any more; all we have to do is stick his number plates into the ANPR system and call Tayside if he leaves the city.’
‘Er . . . the inspector doesn’t want anyone else knowing about—’
‘Yeah? Well guess what? I don’t care.’ He grabbed his coat and headed downstairs, Rennie trailing along behind him like some sort of bloody puppy, yapping away about how Insch wouldn’t like it and wouldn’t it be better to just keep their heads down. . .
The windowless CCTV room was quiet, lit by a wall of little fourteen-inch television screens: seventy-one of them flickering away, showing different views of Aberdeen. Three operators sat at the central desk, headphones on, working the cameras by remote control and drinking mugs of tea. Logan grabbed the inspector in charge and asked if he could have a word in the review suite across the corridor. ‘Can you do me a favour?’ he asked when the door was shut, leaving Rennie standing outside, looking anxious. ‘I need these number plates in the ANPR.’ Scribbling down the registrations for all of Rob Macintyre’s vehicles. Being personalized vanity plates, they were easy enough to remember.
The inspector took the list, holding the thing as if it was poisonous. ‘Why?’
‘Because you owe me.’
He thought about it. ‘We can’t just stick number plates in the system willy-nilly. I mean there’s an audit trail and—’
‘If any of those cars leave town – you give me a call. Day or night. Pretend Insch said to watch them a couple of weeks ago.’
‘Insch?’ The inspector looked down at the list, frowned, then said, ‘These Rob Macintyre’s cars? Coz if they are, they’re already in the system. They were set up ages ago. No one told us to stop monitoring them, so we didn’t.’
In Aberdeen, the Automatic Number Plate Recognition system monitored every car entering or leaving the city by a major road, recording the licence plate and searching for it in the local and national databases. If the car was on the ‘watch’ list, it got pinged. Rob Macintyre’s cars were all on the watch list. None of them had been ID’d leaving Aberdeen. Logan read through the log files again and swore. ‘What about Dundee?’
The inspector shook his head. ‘Nothing. If they’d clocked his car they’d have called us. It’s all the same database.’
‘Damn. . .’ Logan sat back on the desk in the small room. ‘Do us a favour and give them a call, OK?’
‘It won’t do any good. They—’
‘Get them to pull their CCTV for the road into Dundee – maybe he’s obscured his number plate? He could have got one of those special ones off the internet—’
‘Believe it or not, we’ve already done it. Insch was in here shouting the odds when the first copycat rape happened. Same again with the second. We checked. Tayside checked. Macintyre just wasn’t there.’
Out in the corridor Rennie was trying, and failing, to chat up one of the admin assistants. Logan marched right past, through the door and down the stairs. Rennie scurried after him. ‘Er . . . he’s not going to tell anyone, is he? Insch’ll kill me if he—’
‘It can’t be Macintyre – his car would’ve set off the ANPR. It has to be a copycat. That, or it was never Macintyre in the first place.’
Rennie groaned. ‘The Inspector isn’t going to like that.’
‘Tough.’ He passed through the back door and out into the snow-shrouded car park.
‘So,’ said Rennie, sliding in the icy slush, ‘you coming, then? To the rehearsal?’
‘No.’
‘Aw, come on! Please, Insch thinks—’
‘I don’t care! I’m not spending my evening watching you lot ponce about on stage forgetting your lines. So you can stop pouting: I’m not going.’