13

An excited buzz of conversation filled the major-incident room as McLean stepped in through the open door, DC Harrison close behind. Over on the far side, a row of uniform officers sat at workstations, taking notes as the calls from concerned members of the public flooded in. Judging by the chatter, the hotline must have been almost overrun. He’d have to see about getting in some more resources, if DS Gregg hadn’t done so already.

He spotted her at the back of the room, reaching up to write in a neat hand on the whiteboards. Walking over, he made out some of the names of the victims, a brief summary of their lives. John Sullivan had been a teacher nearby, Eleanor Danton, a film director. McLean suspected there was more to Riuchi Takamora than simply tourist, but that was all he would be remembered as here. Not much of an epitaph. Rachel Sprake, Andy Spong and Fiona Mclellan didn’t even have that, just a tick in red that he assumed meant their next of kin had been given the bad news. Other names had no tick, some had question marks and a few lines remained empty, just a number to indicate a body still unknown. Given that not much more than twenty-four hours had passed since the crash, he was heartened to see that there were fewer blank spaces than filled. Still plenty of work to do, though.

‘Ah, Tony. You’re back. I was beginning to wonder whether you’d make it for the briefing.’

McLean looked around to see DCI McIntyre, surrounded by a small army of constables and sergeants like a queen bee in the middle of the hive. She pushed through the throng as if it wasn’t there, leaving a trail of discarded officers in her wake.

‘It’s just as well the chief superintendent’s new to Specialist Crime. I don’t think he quite understands how little respect for procedure you have.’ McIntyre looked over his shoulder at DC Harrison. ‘Or decorum. Going off into the wilds with the youngest female detective constable you can find. I’d have thought you’d know how the rumour mill works by now.’

McLean turned to Harrison, aware that he was blushing and seeing the red across her cheeks at the same time. It was stupid, of course. She was a good detective, true, but the only reason he’d taken her out that morning was because nobody else had been around.

‘Really? Is the station so starved for gossip they have to go making up stuff like that?’

McIntyre gave him a smile, but it was weary enough to tell him she was worried. ‘Just be careful, Tony. And you, too, Constable. I know it’s bloody ridiculous, but the last thing either of you need is a stupid rumour going around.’

McLean looked at DC Harrison, her eyes wide at the DCI’s comment. Yes, she was young and he was two ranks senior to her, perhaps twenty years older, but what of it? They were professionals tasked with a difficult job, for Christ’s sake. You used whoever was available and preferably most competent. Should he only ever take male detective constables out when he wanted to interview witnesses or review crime scenes? If he did that then the rumours would suggest he was gay. Perhaps he should start evaluating the attractiveness of the female officers he worked with, but then what were the criteria? Christ, there were times he wanted nothing more than to jack the whole thing in.

‘I’ve enough on my plate without having to worry about what the station’s latest rumour is, Jayne.’

McIntyre shook her head from side to side just the once. ‘I know, Tony. And it’s not you I’m worried about. You don’t give a damn what anyone says about you. Janie here’s still got to prove herself, though.’

‘Well, she can prove herself now by getting all those notes on to the system so we can bring everyone up to speed. Go see if you can’t find your chums Stringer and Blane, will you, Constable? I need Lofty’s particular skills.’

Harrison nodded once, then scurried off. McLean watched her thread her way through the busy incident room, pausing to talk to some officers, watched with critical eyes by others.

‘Are they really talking about her behind her back?’ he asked.

‘Not yet, but it’s only a matter of time. Remember how they treated the last keen young DC you took under your wing, aye? And he wasn’t anything like as pretty.’

‘You’re as bad as the rest of them, Jayne.’ McLean shook his head to try and get rid of the frustration at having to work with people no more mature than the children at his old boarding school. ‘So, what’s been going on here while young Harrison and I have been away on our tryst?’

‘You can see for yourself.’ McIntyre pointed at the whiteboard as Gregg wrote in another name. ‘Mostly we’ve been identifying the dead, informing next of kin, sorting out formal identification procedures with the city mortuary. I’m hoping Ritchie will be back in time for the evening briefing. She’s on her way, apparently. I’ve not had much to do, actually. The chief superintendent’s been running things most of the day. He’s a damned good organizer, loath though I am to admit it. Every time we get a new name in, he’s right there. Been contacting the next of kin himself, I’ve heard.’

McLean scanned the room, seeing the smoothness of the operation. He’d put that down to DC Gregg’s management skills, but it made more sense if the boss had been whipping everyone into shape.

‘I’d heard he ran a tight ship. Didn’t expect him to be quite so hands on, though. It makes a change from Brooks and Duguid. Which reminds me. Any news on the detective superintendent job?’

‘Why? You fancy your chances?’

‘Probably just about as good as anyone else here. But seriously, Jayne. I don’t see why they haven’t just given it to you. Pissing about trying to get someone from the regions to come in and sort us out. I wouldn’t mind, but it’s taking so bloody long. Not as if we were overstaffed before …’ McLean stopped. No point going over old news.

‘If it makes things any better, the DCC has said that if they can’t get anyone by the end of the month then the job’s mine.’ McIntyre took a breath, let it out as a long sigh. ‘Not sure I want it, if I’m being honest. But there’s a few DIs and DCIs have put their names forward already. If they’re that keen to move, maybe we can encourage some of them to transfer even if there’s no promotion in it. Looks like you’ve got the new constables under control anyway.’

McLean followed McInytre’s gaze to the far side of the room, where a group of plain-clothes officers were huddled around a computer terminal. Most were standing, some leaning forwards. One sat on a low chair directly in front of the screen, and even so his head was on a level with the rest of them. Detective Constable Lofty Blane. McLean checked his watch.

‘You’ll be at the briefing? Forty minutes?’

McIntyre nodded. ‘Aye. And you can expect more senior company, too.’

It made sense, McLean supposed. This was a high-profile investigation with a lot of public interest. No surprise that the top man would need to face the cameras. He just needed to make sure the chief constable had all the facts.

‘OK. I’ll see you there. Meanwhile I’ve a complicated task needs doing, and I know just the detective constable for the job.’

‘You got a moment, Constable?’

‘Sir?’ DC Harrison spun around so swiftly she almost knocked over the person next to her. ‘Almost got them all typed up now, sir.’

‘What? Oh, the briefing notes. Fine. We’ll be starting at half five. Hopefully won’t take long. It looks like we’ve got most of the bodies identified now, anyway.’

All eyes turned to the whiteboards, where another name was being written out in neat script. McLean had worked on too many investigations to count, and almost always the scrawl on the whiteboards tended towards the illegible. And yet, here, each name was spelled out with care. The horror of the incident, perhaps; it was as if collectively the investigation team acknowledged how utterly random and senseless these deaths were. How easily it could have been any one of them, or their friends and family. The scale of it was daunting, too. Twenty lives snuffed out in an instant. Many of these officers would have attended car crashes or house fires, accidents that claimed a couple of victims, perhaps even a whole family. But twenty people dead and another fifty injured. You had to go back a long time to find anything comparable. At least up here in Scotland. Manchester, London, the big cities down in England had seen more than their fair share of tragedy and atrocity in recent times, but up here there’d been nothing comparable since before some of these officers had been born.

‘It was Constable Blane I wanted to talk to actually.’ McLean pulled his attention back to the case. ‘What are you working on right now?’

The tall detective swivelled in his chair enough for McLean to see the screen in front of him. A data entry form designed by some statistics genius to capture the information from phone calls, interviews and any other source and put it into a format that computers could use.

‘Just collating the latest from the phone lines, sir. And Janie … DC Harrison’s notes from your interviews. Important to get everything cross-referenced and filed correctly. Wouldn’t want to miss an important clue.’

‘Good, good. There’s something else I need you to do, though.’ McLean indicated the computer terminal with a flick of the hand. ‘The admins can keep on top of this.’

Blane looked a little hurt at the suggestion. ‘What is it you wanted, sir?’

‘I need you to look into the financial status and corporate structure of a couple of companies. Finlay McGregor and Extech Energy. You reckon you can do that?’

The look of concern turned to one of pride on the young constable’s face. He’d be hopeless in an interrogation, but he knew finance better than any of them. ‘Of course, sir. Do we have a warrant? For getting financials from the banks?’

McLean tapped the breast pocket of his suit jacket. He had a warrant to search the compound where Finlay McGregor locked their trucks up at night. If it had been worded correctly it would stretch to investigating any aspect of their operations. On the other hand, he didn’t want to go full forensic accountancy on them. At least, not yet. There were budgets to be considered, after all.

‘Let’s just see what you can come up with through normal channels first, OK? Companies House and that sort of thing. See what the links are between them, if there’s anything suspicious. We’ll only bring out the heavy artillery if we have to.’

‘Thought you were trying to get home at a reasonable hour these days.’

McLean looked up from his overlarge desk and its tide of paperwork to see a welcome face smiling back at him. Detective Inspector Ritchie leaned against the open doorway, her short-cropped strawberry blonde hair looking like it hadn’t seen a brush in days. Her clothes weren’t much better, her jeans ripped at both knees and sporting some interesting stains, bum-freezer leather jacket over a tight once-white T-shirt. She looked like someone who’d just got home from a rock festival, not a detective inspector at work.

‘And I thought T in the Park wasn’t on this year,’ he said.

Ritchie stuck her tongue out at him, stepped fully into the room. ‘Aye, funny. Guessing it’s been a while since you last worked undercover.’

‘That you just in, then? You could have taken your time, you know. Had a shower, change of clothes.’

‘I know that now. Missed the bloody briefing, didn’t I. The traffic’s all to buggery back the way to the bridges. It helps that this is all over the news, mind you. Nobody’s shifting anything at the moment, so I can skive off a few days.’

‘And how is Operation Fenton going? Still camped out in the Perthshire Glens, I presume?’

Ritchie dropped into one of the comfortable chairs over by the window that filled most of one wall of the office. ‘I’m beginning to think it’s a bust. We had good intel. We know they’ve been working through there before, but we’ve not seen anything for a fortnight now.’

‘I take it that’s unusual.’

‘Possibly. Might be a seasonal thing, might be that we’ve been strung along. Could be they’re moving stuff through the next glen, safe in the knowledge we’re all tucked up in our wee hidey-hole on the other side of the mountains. Bloody waste of time, if you ask me.’ Ritchie sighed, ran a hand through her hair, then stared at her palm as if only just noticing how grubby she was. ‘So what’s the story with the crash. Heard you were there when it happened. Must’ve been horrific.’

‘Not sure I really want to talk about it.’ McLean leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t so stupid that he couldn’t understand his own motivations. Heading out to the hauliers’ compound first thing, speaking to Hamish Tafferty and then swinging past the anaerobic digester site: these were all ways of avoiding the quiet moments when he would be able to think about what he had seen. Time would take the raw edge off that experience, but for now he needed something to keep the horror at bay.

‘Understandable.’ Ritchie shrugged, the buckles and zippers on her jacket jangling quietly. ‘How’s the investigation going?’

‘Early days. Have you seen Jayne yet?’

Ritchie shook her head. ‘In a meeting with the boss man. Quite why they dropped him on us and didn’t give the job to her I’ve no idea.’

‘Funny you should say that. We were having the exact same conversation earlier.’ McLean leaned back until his head clunked against the wall, a distance much further than he was used to. He only managed to avoid tipping himself over completely by wedging a swift foot under the desk. ‘We’ve currently got two strands to the investigation. First one’s working out what happened and why. That’s what I’ve been doing all day and it’s already looking murky.’

‘Doesn’t it always when you get involved, Tony?’ Ritchie had the decency to grin as she spoke. ‘What’s the second strand? I take it that’s my job.’

‘Aye. Jayne’s been dealing with it today, and Sandy Gregg’s got most of the legwork done already, but you’re in charge of identifying all the victims.’ McLean held up his hand before Ritchie could interrupt. ‘And I know, yes. It would make more sense for me to do that, given how closely I’ve worked with Angus and the rest of the staff at the city mortuary before. Chances are there won’t be much for you to do anyway. Last I saw there were only six bodies still to identify.’

‘There’s a helpline number? People coming forward with suggestions?’

‘Like I said, Sandy Gregg’s got it all under control. And, believe it or not, Forrester’s rolled up his sleeves and pitched in, too. It’ll only get complicated if we can’t identify someone from dental records or DNA or something. Then we’ll have to start going through missing persons reports, CCTV and the like.’

‘Wait … What? Dental records? DNA?’ Ritchie ran her hand through her hair again, didn’t look at the stains on her palm this time. ‘I’d heard the crash was bad, but … really?’

‘It melted the tarmac, whatever the chemical goo was that spilled from the tanker. Stank so bad I had to throw my suit away. There’s a chunk of the Lothian Road still closed, likely to be that way for weeks. That’s why the traffic’s a nightmare.’ McLean pulled himself forward again, leaned his elbows on the desk. ‘Look, it’s probably not going to take long to identify everyone. Collate all the witness statements, sort out the timeline, put it all in a nice report and deliver it to the Procurator Fiscal. Job done, and then you can get back to your splendid isolation in the Highlands. Who knows? Might even be in time to catch those gun runners of yours before they bring the next batch in.’

‘Aye, I’m sure it’ll all be fine and dandy.’ Ritchie stood, yawned, rolled her shoulders as if she’d been sitting for hours rather than minutes. ‘I’ll go see if Jayne’s finished her meeting. Head home and get some kip. Early start tomorrow, I’m guessing?’

‘Six o’clock briefing, yes. I’d probably better get home myself if I want Emma ever to speak to me again.’