CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

The phone rang just after seven. It wakened Davina and gave Alex a jolt. After the attack on Weird, the slightest sound had penetrated his consciousness, requiring analysis and risk assessment. There was someone out there stalking him and Weird, and his every sense was on the alert. As a result, he’d hardly slept. He’d been aware of Weird moving around in the night, probably searching for more painkillers. It wasn’t a normal night noise, and it had made his heart hammer before he’d worked it out.

He grabbed the phone, wondering if Lawson was at his desk already, Henderson’s report in his in-tray. He wasn’t prepared for the jollity of Jason McAllister. “Hi, Alex,” the forensic paint expert greeted him cheerfully. “I know new parents are always up with the lark so I figured you wouldn’t mind me calling so early. Listen, I’ve got some information for you. I can come over now, and run it past you before I go into work. How would that be?”

“Great,” Alex said heavily. Lynn pushed the duvet back and blearily crossed to the moses basket, lifting her daughter with a grunt.

“Smashing. I’ll be with you in half an hour.”

“You know the address?”

“Sure. I’ve had meetings with Lynn there a couple of times. See you.” The phone went dead and Alex pushed himself up the bed as Lynn returned with the baby.

“That was Jason,” Alex said. “He’s on his way. I’d better get in the shower. You didn’t tell me he was second cousin to the Jolly Green Giant.” He leaned over and kissed his daughter’s head as Lynn put her to the breast.

“He can be a bit much,” Lynn agreed. “I’ll feed Davina, then I’ll throw on a dressing gown and join you.”

“I can’t believe he’s got a result so quickly.”

“He’s like you were when you first started the business. He adores what he does so he doesn’t mind how much time he spends on it. And he wants to share his delight with everybody else.”

Alex paused, hand reaching for his dressing gown. “I was like that? It’s a miracle you didn’t file for divorce.”

Alex found Weird in the kitchen looking terrible. The only color in his face came from the bruising that spread like greasepaint round both eyes. He sat awkwardly, hands wrapped round a mug. “You look like shit,” Alex said.

“I feel like it, too.” He sipped coffee and winced. “Why don’t you have decent painkillers?”

“Because we don’t make a habit of getting hammered,” Alex said over his shoulder as he left to answer the door. Jason bounced into the room on the balls of his feet, jazzed with excitement, then did a double-take that was almost comic as he took in Weird’s appearance. “Shit, man. What the hell happened to you?”

“A man with a baseball bat,” Alex said succinctly. “We weren’t joking when we said this might be a matter of life and death.” He poured a coffee for Jason. “I’m impressed that you’ve got something for us so soon,” he said.

Jason shrugged. “When I got to it, it wasn’t such a big deal. I did the microspectrophotometry to establish the color, then I ran it through the gas chromatograph for the composition. It didn’t match anything in my database, though.”

Alex sighed. “Well, we were expecting that,” he said.

Jason held up a finger. “Now, Alex. I am not a man without resources. A couple of years ago, I met this guy at a conference. He is the world’s biggest paint head. He works for the FBI, and he reckons that he’s got most extensive paint database in the known universe. So I got him to run my results against his records, and bingo! We got it.” He held his arms out wide, as if expecting applause.

Lynn walked in just in time to hear his conclusion. “So what was it?” she asked.

“I won’t bore you with the technical spec. It was made by a small manufacturer in New Jersey in the mid-seventies for use on fiberglass and certain types of molded plastic. The target market was boat builders and boat owners. It gave a particularly tough finish that was hard to scratch and wouldn’t flake even in extreme weather conditions.” He opened his backpack and rummaged around, eventually producing a computer-generated color chart. A swatch of pale blue was outlined in black marker. “That’s what it looked like, he said, passing the sheet around. “The good news about the quality of the finish is that if by some miracle your crime scene has survived, the chances are that you could still make a match. The paint was mostly sold on the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S., but they did export into the U.K. and the Caribbean. The company went belly-up in the late eighties, so there’s no way of telling where it ended up over here.”

“So the chances are that Rosie was killed on a boat?” Alex asked.

Jason made a dubious smacking noise with his lips. “If she was, it must have been a fair-sized boat.”

“Why do you say that?”

He pulled some papers out of his backpack with a flourish. “This is where the shape of the paint drops comes into play. Tiny tears, that’s what we’ve got here. And one or two very small fiber fragments, which look a lot like carpet tile to me. And this tells me a story. These drops came off a brush while something was being painted. This is a very motile paint, which means that it came off in minute droplets. The person doing the painting probably didn’t even notice. Typically, it’s the kind of fine spray that you’d get if you were working over your head, especially at full stretch. And because there’s almost no variation in the shape of the droplets, that suggests all the paint was applied overhead and at an equal distance. None of this fits with painting a hull. Even if you had the hull upside down to paint the inside, you wouldn’t be doing it somewhere carpeted, would you? And the droplets would vary in size because some of the surface would be nearer to you, wouldn’t it?” He paused, looking round the room. Everyone was shaking their heads, spellbound by his enthusiasm.

“So what are we left with? If it was a boat, then your man was probably painting the cabin roof. The inside of the cabin roof. Now, I did some experiments with a very similar paint and, to get this effect, I needed to be reaching quite high. And small boats don’t have much headroom. So I guess your man had a pretty big boat.”

“If it was a boat,” Lynn said. “Couldn’t it have been something else? The inside of a trailer? Or a caravan?”

“Could be. You probably wouldn’t get carpet in a trailer, though, would you? It could have been a shed, or a garage too. Because paints that are designed for fiberglass are pretty good on asbestos as well, and there was a lot more of that around back in the seventies.”

“The bottom line is that it doesn’t take us any further forward,” Weird said, disappointment in his voice.

The conversation veered off in several directions. But Alex had stopped listening. His brain was ticking, a train of thought triggered by what he’d just heard. Connections were forming in his mind, links between apparently unconnected pieces of information forging into a chain. Once you gave space to the first unthinkable thought, so many things made sense. The question now was what to do about it.

He suddenly realized he’d been out of it. Everyone was looking at him expectantly, waiting for an answer to some unheard question. “What?” he said. “Sorry, I was miles away.”

“Jason asked if you wanted him to write a formal report,” Lynn said. “So you can show it to Lawson.”

“Yeah, great idea,” Alex said. “That’s brilliant, Jason, really impressive.”

As Lynn showed Jason to the door, Weird gave Alex a penetrating look. “You’ve got an idea, Gilly,” he said. “I know that look.”

“No. I was just racking my brains, trying to think of anybody from the Lammas that had a boat. There were a couple of fishermen, weren’t there?” Alex turned away and busied himself, popping a couple of slices of bread in the toaster.

“Now you come to mention it…We should remind Lawson about that,” Weird said.

“Yeah. When he calls, you can tell him.”

“Why? Where are you going to be?”

“I need to go into the office for a few hours. I’ve been neglecting the business. It doesn’t run itself. There’s a couple of meetings this morning I really need to go to.”

“Should you be driving around alone?”

“I’ve no choice,” Alex said. “But I think I’m pretty safe in broad daylight on the road into Edinburgh. And I’ll be back long before it’s dark.”

“You’d better be.” Lynn walked through the door carrying the morning papers. “Looks as if Jackie was right. They’re plastered all over the front pages.”

Alex munched his toast, lost in thought, as the others went through the papers. While they were occupied, he picked up the color chart Jason had left behind and tucked it into his trouser pocket. He seized a lull in the conversation to announce his departure, kissed his wife and sleeping baby and left the house.

He eased the BMW out of the garage and onto the street, heading for the motorway that would take him over the bridge to Edinburgh. But when he reached the roundabout, instead of turning south on the M90, he took the northbound slip road. Whoever was after them was on his turf now. He had no time to waste sitting in meetings.

Lynn got behind the wheel of her car with a sense of relief she wasn’t proud of. She was starting to feel claustrophobic in her own home. She couldn’t even retreat to her studio and regain her calm by working on her latest painting. She knew she shouldn’t be driving, not so soon after a C section, but she had to get away. The need to shop had provided the perfect excuse. She promised Weird she’d get one of the supermarket staff to do all the heavy lifting. Then she’d wrapped Davina up warmly, tucked her into her carrier and escaped.

She decided to make the most of her freedom and drive up to the big Sainsburys at Kirkcaldy. If she had enough energy after shopping, she could always pop in to see her parents. They’d not seen Davina since she’d come home from hospital. Maybe a visit from their new granddaughter would help lift their gloom. They needed something to give them a bigger stake in the future than in the past.

As she left the motorway at Halbeath, the fuel warning light appeared on her dashboard. Rationally, she knew she had more than enough petrol to get her to Kirkcaldy and back again, but she wasn’t taking any chances with the baby on board. She flicked the indicator at the turn-off for the services and cruised down to the pumps, entirely oblivious to the car that had been on her tail since she’d left North Queensferry.

Lynn fueled up the car, then hurried inside to pay. As she waited for her credit card to be accepted, she glanced out to the forecourt.

At first, she couldn’t take it in. The scene outside was wrong, all wrong. Then it sank in. Lynn screamed at the top of her lungs and stumbled toward the door, her bag hitting the floor and scattering its contents as she ran.

A silver VW Golf was parked behind her car, engine running, driver’s door wide open. The passenger door of her car was also ajar, shielding whoever was leaning in from sight. As she hauled open the heavy door of the service area, a man straightened up, thick black hair falling over his eyes. He was clutching Davina’s carrier. He cast a glance in her direction then ran for the other car. Davina’s shrieks pierced the air like a blade.

He half-threw, half-pushed the baby carrier into his passenger seat, then jumped in. Lynn was almost upon him. He slammed the car into gear and took off, his tires screaming on the tarmac.

Indifferent to the pain from her half-healed scar, Lynn threw herself at the wildly swerving Golf as it careered past her. But her desperate fingers connected with nothing they could cling to, and her momentum carried her forward on to her knees. “No,” she screamed, banging her fists on the ground. “No.” She tried to stand up, to get to her car, to give chase. But her legs wouldn’t hold her and she collapsed on the ground, anguish wracking her.

 

Exultation swelled inside Graham Macfadyen as he hammered along the A92 away from the Halbeath services. He’d done it. He had the baby. He snatched a quick look, making sure it was OK. It had stopped that banshee screaming as soon as they’d hit the dual carriageway. He’d heard babies liked the sensation of being driven in a car, and this one certainly seemed to. Its blue eyes looked up at him, uncurious and calm. At the end of the dual carriageway, he’d cut off onto back roads, to avoid the police. He’d stop then and strap it in properly. He didn’t want anything bad to happen to it yet. It was Alex Gilbey he wanted to punish, and the longer the baby was alive and apparently well, the worse his suffering would be. He’d keep the baby hostage for just as long as it was of use to him.

It had been laughably easy. People really should take better care of their children. It was astonishing that more of them didn’t fall into the hands of strangers.

This would make people listen to him, he thought. He’d take the baby home and lock the doors. A siege, that’s what it would be. The media would turn up mob-handed and he’d have the chance to explain why he’d been forced to take such extreme action. When they heard how Fife Police were shielding his mother’s killers, they’d understand why he’d been driven to something so out of character. And if that still didn’t work, well, he had one final card to play. He glanced down at the drowsy baby.

Lawson was going to regret not listening to him.