Danso drank tea from a stainless-steel pot and the rest of us had coffee in plastic filters that dripped all over the table. We ate damp ginger biscuits from heavy white plates still hot and cabbagy smelling, like they’d come straight from a dishwasher. The cafeteria was a Turkish bath, the tea urns and the hotplates steaming the place up, making the windows drip with condensation.
Danso and Struthers kept us waiting. They fed us snippets of information that hadn’t got anything to do with the big news. They said they thought Dove had found us through the rental car. Somehow, Christ knew how, he must’ve picked me up on one of my drives, maybe from Oban police station, and had been watching the rape suite for days. They told us there had been seventy-eight public sightings of the saloon car, because it turns out a Celtic kit hanging over the back shelf isn’t such a rarity in that part of Scotland. They showed us a tiny column in the Glasgow Herald saying the police were refusing to confirm or deny an attack in Dumbarton, which had left one woman critically ill in hospital.
‘Which reminds me…’ Danso wiped his mouth and looked at me. ‘Something else I wanted to ask you.’ He swallowed his mouthful of biscuit. ‘The car. You sure you didn’t see that car parked?’ He pulled a biro from the inside of his jacket, and uncapped it with his teeth. He unfolded a napkin and made some rudimentary lines on it. ‘See, we think it could have been parked here.’ He made an X on the road that led to the east of the estate along the playing-fields. ‘What do you think?’
‘Could have been. When I saw it,’ I pointed to the parallel road, ‘it was here – on this road.’
‘So, let’s get this straight. You’d driven in from here,’ he marked the west road, ‘from where your babysitter was, so you stopped here, facing this way, and you saw him here, parallel to Humbert Place.’
‘Yes.’
‘So he’d parked either here or here. Anyone on this road, or walking in the fields, would have seen him.’
‘Anyone except our babysitter.’
Danso cleared his throat. ‘We’re just trying to plot his movements on the estate.’
‘Because you want to get your lad off the hook?’
He sighed. ‘Joe, I’m sorry. I see you think we came here to antagonize you. But we didn’t. The officer wants to apologize to you when his disciplinary’s over.’
I breathed out and sat back, my arms folded, giving him a disbelieving smile. ‘Please. Don’t jerk me around.’
‘I’m serious. He wants to say sorry. It’d do him good to speak to you. What do you think?’
I grinned brightly at him, then at Struthers. A fake, face-splitter of a grin. ‘What do you think I think? Did you really think I’d say yes?’
Danso ran a finger inside his collar, uncomfortable. ‘Aye. That’s how we thought you’d feel.’ He glanced sideways at Struthers. ‘We didn’t think he’d be happy. Did we?’
‘We didn’t.’
‘OK,’ Danso said. ‘I’m not going to force the—’
‘I mean it. I’m not going to speak to him. I don’t want to hear him whingeing about how difficult it was to see Dove on that estate.’
‘That’s not why we’re thinking about Dove’s movements.’
‘Then why?’ I put my hands down, looking at them both. I could feel a beat of anger flaring in my temple. ‘What other reason do you need to know which way he drove on to the fucking estate to put my wife in a fucking coma?’
‘Because,’ Struthers interrupted, his face a bit red, ‘we want to know when he posted this.’ He pulled a brown envelope from his briefcase and put it on the table. ‘That’s why.’
There was a moment’s silence. Me and Angeline stared at the envelope.
‘He cleaned up the house,’ Danso said irritably. ‘I told you – there was nothing of him in there, nothing. Couldn’t even place him on the estate until this. It’s the only evidence we’ve got.’ He opened the envelope and tipped out the contents. There were two black-and-white photographs and a manila envelope sealed in plastic evidence sheaths. ‘Posted in the box on the estate some time before the collection at three on the day he did Lexie. If it’s what we think it is, then everything’s going our way.’
‘Everything’s going our way?’
‘Everything.’ He looked at me, then at Angeline, then back at me. ‘It’s a suicide note. He’s telling us when he’s going to do it.’