22

‘You always did have a knack for making things more complicated than they need be, Tony.’

McLean stood in one corner of the major-incident room, watching the ebb and flow of officers and admin staff as they ploughed through the mass of useless information generated by the telephone helpline. Behind him on the whiteboard, the same three numbers remained nameless, the list of their potential identities growing both longer and more hopeless by the hour. He wasn’t long back from Broxburn and the latest twist in what should have been a fairly straightforward case, and yet somehow DCI McIntyre had appeared only moments after his return. He imagined she must have been watching from her office window, waiting for his shiny black car to arrive.

‘News travels fast. I take it this is about Mike Finlay?’

McIntyre grimaced. ‘Recommend you avoid anyone above DCI level for the foreseeable. There’s quite a bit of panic.’

McLean pulled out his phone, thumbed the screen to life. No new messages. ‘Surprised I’ve not been called to a meeting then. I don’t suppose they’d believe me if I told them I thought it was an unlucky accident.’

McIntyre stared at him for just long enough to be uncomfortable. ‘You don’t really believe that, though, do you, Tony?’

‘I don’t know. It’s very early days, but Angus couldn’t find any obvious signs of a struggle. The office didn’t look like there’d been a fight either. It was just … horrible.’

‘Lack of a struggle doesn’t mean it was an accident, though. Could just be that he knew his assailant. Wasn’t it his sister who found him?’

‘Katie Finlay, aye. I spoke to her at the scene.’

‘She in the cells now, then?’

McLean shook his head. ‘She didn’t do it. Oh, I know. She needs to be questioned properly. I’ve got a constable with her now, and she’ll be in here for interview this afternoon. The circumstances don’t work for me, though. She had nothing to gain from her brother’s death. She called it in. I don’t know –’

‘The famous McLean gut tells you she’s innocent?’ McIntyre had the decency to smile while she said it. McLean just shrugged.

‘Something like that. But don’t worry. I’m not going to let her off easily because her brother’s dead. I just don’t want to make her my enemy. She knows more about the hauliers than anyone now. More than she realizes. I need her onside if I’m going to crack that. We still don’t know where the effluent came from, why someone tampered with the brakes. Christ, we don’t really know anything at all.’

‘But what if this isn’t an accident? What if someone’s done this to shut Finlay up?’

‘The thought had occurred to me, Jayne. And if I was trying to think of the best way to derail our investigation before it even got started, silencing Finlay would probably be it.’ McLean stared at the blank screen of his phone, the dark, fingerprint-smeared reflection of his own worried face. ‘It’s just a very messy way to go about it. Frankly, I’d be more suspicious if he just disappeared.’

‘Keep it in mind as a possibility, though?’ McIntyre’s inflection made it a question.

‘You know me. Always an open mind.’ He was about to say more, but the screen lit up, a reminder message he didn’t remember putting in the calendar.

‘Something come up?’ McIntyre asked. ‘Only I don’t like the look on your face right now.’

‘It’s just a reminder that Em’s got antenatal class this afternoon. I was going to join her, but with all this shit going on.’ He waved at the room, running more efficiently than any other major incident he’d been involved with. He could leave it alone for a few hours, but he’d agreed to interview Katie Finlay at three. ‘I’ll give her a call. She’ll understand.’

McIntyre didn’t argue the point, just shook her head as he found the entry in the phonebook and pressed the dial icon. ‘On your head be it, Tony.’

‘We’ve got the security camera footage in from the haulage company, sir. Thought you might like a wee look-see.’

McLean glanced up from his desk to see DC Harrison standing half in the open doorway. He’d escaped the incident room hoping for a moment to gather his thoughts. His phone call to Emma had gone just about as well as DCI McIntyre had predicted. He’d need to do something to make up to her for it, he just wasn’t quite sure what.

‘You set up the viewing room?’ he asked, pushing himself out of his chair and grabbing his phone off the desk. He half expected it to be hot to the touch.

‘Aye. Lofty’s down there now going over the stuff we got from Health and Safety.’

‘Health and Safety?’ McLean stopped in his tracks, halfway from desk to door. ‘Surely they were all gone by the time Finlay died. Would anyone have put the tapes back in?’

Harrison tried to suppress a smile but failed badly. ‘There’s no tapes any more, sir. It’s all hard drives and backups to the cloud. Finlay McGregor didn’t have the best system in the world, but they’d a lot of expensive kit in that yard. Place was pretty well covered. Night vision and movement sensors, too. And it’s all run by a contractor, so it’s been on the whole time we’ve been there.’

Suitably chastened in his ignorance, McLean allowed himself to be led along the corridor and down the stairs. One positive outcome from the ever-shrinking workforce in the station was that a reasonably sized room had been repurposed as a full-time video suite. Which was to say someone had put blackout blinds on the windows and wheeled in a few elderly computers, linking them up to the city’s expanding network of CCTV cameras. It wasn’t on a par with the major surveillance centres at Bilston and City Chambers, but it was better than the broom cupboard and elderly VHS recorder he remembered from earlier cases.

‘Find anything interesting?’ he asked as DC Blane twisted around in his chair to see who had entered the room.

‘Not yet, sir. Just trying to get my head around all the different cameras. It’s mostly footage of the forensics team and Health and Safety going over the maintenance shed and offices so far.’

McLean dragged a chair over to the screens and sat down alongside the tall detective. A grid of small images showed different views of the compound: the entrance gates, the car park in front of the cabin offices, the line of lorries awaiting their next job, the diesel tanks and maintenance sheds. He took a while to build up a picture of the place as the images spooled forwards in stop-motion jumps. Mostly there was nothing happening, but occasionally a yellow-jacketed Health and Safety inspector or white-suited forensic technician would wander across shot. One camera, presumably not noticed at first, helpfully covered an area of scrubby land between the shed and the back fence of the compound. A place old machinery went to die, it was also a good spot to steal a crafty cigarette unseen by the boss, or so it appeared.

‘How far back does this go?’

‘The system overwrites after a week, so there should be footage of the truck coming and going and the night it sat in the compound. I take it you’re more interested in last night’s footage, though, aye?’

‘For now. We need to see who came and went, and when. Can we concentrate on the car park there?’ McLean pointed at the relevant image, and with a couple of clicks, DC Blane enlarged it to the whole screen. The cameras took pictures every few seconds, so the video speeded up spooled through the minutes quickly. At first it was a frenzy of activity, figures jumping around the screen like spiders on acid. After a while the vehicles began to disappear from the car park, until there was only Mike Finlay’s Range Rover. A couple of seconds later a familiar-looking BMW appeared.

‘That’s the sister’s car. Slow it down, won’t you? Let’s see how long she stays.’

Nothing much happened as the minutes clicked forward. Then at around half past eight a slim figure appeared at the door, the BMW backed out of its parking space and drove away. For a while the only change was the colours of the scene muting as evening set in. The timestamp moved forward to half ten, on to quarter to eleven. Blane reached for the mouse, presumably intending to increase the playback speed. And then something flickered on the screen.

‘Hold up. Back a bit. What was that?’

McLean pulled his chair closer to the screen as Blane ran the images backwards, then inched them forward again one frame at a time. Nothing changed between each slow click, only the timestamp indicating that another ten seconds had elapsed, until suddenly there was something there.

‘Is that a person?’ McLean rubbed at his eyes, hoping it might make the image less fuzzy. The time on the screen was ten forty-eight and fifty seconds. Another click, ten forty-nine exactly, and the blur was gone. Blane clicked back a couple of frames. Nothing, blur, nothing. Was it possible to cover that distance in ten seconds?

‘Anything showing around that time on any of the other cameras?’

Blane fiddled with the mouse some more, keying up a couple of different views. McLean watched closely as he toggled through a ten-minute window around the appearance on the first camera. There was nothing by the sheds, nothing in the space where everyone had been smoking, but then he switched to the video feed of the entrance gate.

‘That’s not right.’ The lanky detective constable leaned in, peering at the screen so closely he was in danger of leaving greasy smears on it with his nose.

‘What’s not right?’ McLean tried to see for himself, but Blane’s head was so large it was difficult to catch a glimpse.

‘See here, at ten forty-six? The gate’s closed, chains hanging round it. Not locked, but then we know Mr Finlay was inside.’ Blane leaned back, clicked the mouse and moved the video forward a couple of minutes. ‘And here it is again, only look what’s different.’

McLean had to stare for a few moments before he, too, saw it. ‘The chain’s been moved. It’s only hanging from one side of the gates, not both.’

‘Someone must have moved it, gone through the gates and closed them behind them. Someone went in there between quarter to and eleven that night.’

‘And the pathologist reckons he died between eleven and midnight.’ McLean let out a weary sigh. So much for it being an accident. ‘Oh bloody hell.’