25

A knock at the door interrupted him from an endless cycle of thoughts, trying to make sense of the jumble of events and the disparate strands of evidence he somehow needed to knit together. McLean looked up expecting to see one of the detective constables bearing more bad news, or perhaps Grumpy Bob with the suggestion they nick off for a pint. Someone else entirely blocked the open doorway.

‘Nasty habit, leaving your door open so that anyone can walk in whenever they want.’ Ex-Detective Superintendent Charles Duguid had ditched the tweed suit in favour of dark trousers and a jacket that might have been stolen from a maths teacher. He stepped into the room, looking around with a slight sneer on his mustachioed face. ‘Mike Spence’s old office. He always said they’d have to offer him the top job or carry him out in a box before he’d give this up.’

It was a joke in bad taste, given Detective Chief Inspector Spence’s recent death, but then Duguid had rarely cared what his fellow officers thought about him. McLean put down the reports as he stood up, indicating the conference table across the room.

‘I quite liked my wee hidey-hole at the back of the station, to be honest. The new chief superintendent insisted I move, otherwise I reckon this place would have been left empty a while longer. Mark of respect.’

‘Misguided respect.’ Duguid pulled out a chair and dropped into it with a slight grunt of discomfort. ‘Still, at least there’s somewhere to sit down, and the light’s better than that dungeon you had me working cold cases out of.’

‘I take it this isn’t a social visit.’ McLean pulled out another chair and sat down slightly further away from his old boss than was perhaps polite. He looked back to the still open door on the other side of the room. ‘Should I shut that?’

‘What?’ Duguid followed his gaze. ‘No. Nothing I’ve got to tell you’s particularly secret. And this place is like a mortuary it’s so quiet. Where is everyone?’

‘I think they call it streamlining operations. That and the new setup mean half of the detectives based here are working somewhere else at any one time. Or away at the Crime Campus getting above themselves.’

‘Aye, well. There’s progress, I suppose.’ Duguid ran thin, long fingers through his straggly hair. ‘Been asking around about your missing young man, Eric Forrester. Not been in these parts long.’

‘It’s not six months since Brooks left and all that nonsense with Call-me-Stevie.’

Duguid laughed, a strange noise to be coming from the ex-detective superintendent. ‘Is that what you call him? Ha. And I used to think Dagwood was lame.’

‘Most of the station call him Teflon Steve now. We do our best.’

‘Aye, that you do. And now you’re saddled with Tom Forrester. Decent enough copper. Better at admin than anything else. And his son, Eric. Heard he’s quite the musician, which I suspect he got from his mother. Not sure where he got his taste for hard drugs from though.’

‘Hard drugs? A bit more than the odd joint with his bandmates, then.’

‘You’ve spoken to them?’ Duguid’s bushy, greying eyebrows raised in surprise. ‘They spoke to you?’

‘I have my ways.’

‘Well, if you didn’t need my help, why’d you ask for it?’ Duguid’s protest was half-hearted at best. Not like the old firebrand who suffered fools badly if at all.

‘I’ve no contacts in Glasgow. Well, none who’d talk to me without gossiping about it afterwards.’

‘Aye, well.’ Duguid shifted in his seat like a man who’s forgotten his pile ointment. Something was troubling him. ‘Seems young Eric almost got himself banged up a couple of years back. Possession with intent to supply. His dad had to pull in a lot of favours to make that one go away. Probably why he’s been handed this posting.’

‘Are we that bad?’

‘Worse. Believe me.’

‘So what was young Eric’s drug of choice? Who was he getting it from?’

‘What do all the young idiots take these days? Heroin’s right back in fashion, it seems. As to who was supplying him, I’ve no idea. Making the problem go away meant not following that up particularly closely. Eric got shoved off to a private rehab centre for six months, and that was about it.’

‘He didn’t give up any names? Nobody interviewed him? Even off the record?’

‘It’s possible.’ Duguid shrugged. ‘But, if so, no one’s telling me.’

He almost missed the phone, vibrating away in his jacket pocket, slung over the chair on the far side of the room. Duguid wasn’t long gone, and McLean was still sitting at the conference table, staring out of the window as he tried to make sense of the information the ex-detective superintendent had dug up for him. He hurried over, grabbing it out and hitting the screen with a hasty thumb just before it switched to voicemail.

‘McLean.’

‘You never came to the gig.’ A female voice, unfamiliar at first, but then he remembered. The venue, the bass guitar, the young woman with the shaven head and the tattoos.

‘It’s Margie, isn’t it?’

‘Wow. Didn’t think I’d made that much of an impression, Mr Polisman.’

‘I’m trained to remember things.’ McLean dropped down into the seat, catching himself before it tipped backwards too far and deposited him on the floor. ‘And, besides, I’ve not given my card out to many people recently.’

‘Aye, well. You missed a great gig. Music wasn’t much, but Gary and Big Tam got into a fight during the encore. Looks like we’re needing a new bass player if you’re still interested.’

McLean smiled at the thought. The looks on the faces of his colleagues if he told them he was quitting the police to go and join a punk band. Maybe twenty years ago he’d have been tempted. OK, maybe thirty.

‘Wouldn’t want to show you all up, but thanks for the offer. I take it Eric’s still a no-show then.’

‘Aye. Nobody’s seen him all week. I was wondering if you’d got those DNA results back. Was it him in that crash?’

Judging by Margie’s tone of voice, McLean reckoned there might have been something more than the casual friendship of bandmates between her and Eric Forrester. Then again, they’d known each other from childhood, so it might just have been that.

‘Nothing yet. Sorry.’

‘Can’t believe he’d just walk out like that. No’ come back. No’ even a call.’

‘Aye. We tried tracing his mobile, but it’s not switched on. Or the battery’s flat.’ Or it got melted into a puddle of plastic and solder by the same industrial solvent that dissolved half of your boyfriend’s body away.

‘You think it’s really him then?’ Margie sniffed, sounding more like an adolescent than the strong, independent young woman he’d met the evening before. ‘You think he’s really dead?’

‘I think it’s possible, yes. But I also think there’s another possibility. I think you do too, Margie, or you’d not have called.’

‘How d’ye mean? I was calling about the DNA, like.’

‘Aye, I know that. But I also know about Eric’s drug habit. The stuff he got up to in Glasgow. This isn’t the first time he’s gone off for a day or two, is it?’

The line fell silent, but McLean was confident the young woman was still on the other end. He gave her the time she needed. Not as if he had anywhere else to go. Finally, with a sniff that would have done a teenager proud, she spoke again.

‘He’s fine. Most of the time. A bit of weed never did nobody no harm, aye?’

McLean said nothing, not wanting to remind Margie that she was talking to a police officer. Better to be the surrogate parent at this point.

‘Only, sometimes that’s not enough for Eric. He … I dunno. He feels. Like, the weight of the whole world’s on his shoulders. See when he plays his bass. When he’s feeling like that. It’s magic. Swear I could just listen and listen. No need for Gary’s guitar or Jakey bashing away on his drums. No’ even my singing, really, though that’s magic, too, singing along to that.’ Margie paused as if remembering the feeling of bliss. McLean had an inkling of what she was on about; the magic of being in a band when everything just gelled.

‘But see when he comes out of it. Then he’s so down, it’s like I don’t even know him. And that’s when he goes off looking for something to bring him back up again.’

‘Something a bit stronger than weed. Maybe something involving needles.’

Another long pause and McLean glanced at his watch. Well past time for the antenatal class. He’d find a way of making it up to Emma somehow.

‘There was this bloke he mentioned. Think I might have seen him once at one of our pub gigs. Sam. No, Sammy, that’s what they called him. Skinny, long hair and shades. He looked kind of dirty, if you know what I mean. Like he never washed. Think I heard he had a place in the Old Town. One of those tenements down underneath the castle, you know? Off towards the Grassmarket?’

It was a start. The smallest of leads, but something he could work with. Duguid’s Glasgow intel had been useful, but it only went so far.

‘I shouldn’t be telling you this. If anyone finds out I’ve been talking to the polis I’ll –’

‘You have my word, Margie. I won’t tell anyone about this call. I’ll have a wee chat with the drugs boys, see if they know this Sammy and take it from there. No one will ever know you had any part in it, OK?’

‘Just … Find him, aye? Just find him.’ Margie fell silent again. Then the line clicked, and she was gone.

‘Who do we know in the drugs squad these days, Bob?’

McLean had tracked down Grumpy Bob to the canteen, hiding away in the far corner behind his newspaper. The detective sergeant glanced briefly at his watch before answering, but showed no other sign of guilt.

‘Local or national? Most of the large-scale stuff’s SCDEA now, though Vice come across a fair bit, too.’

‘I was thinking more local. Looking for a dealer called Sammy. Thin, long hair, greasy.’ McLean was all too aware of how little information he had to work with, but it was unlikely Margie would sit down with a photofit-trained officer and come up with a sketch.

‘This got anything to do with our missing lad, Eric?’ Grumpy Bob asked. McLean gave the canteen a nervous glance, but there were only a few officers in there, and none of them were paying any attention to him.

‘The same. I had a chat with his bandmates and one of them gave me that name. Chances are he’s dealing heroin. Doubt that’s all he’s got though.’

‘I’ll have a look through the records, see if we’ve anyone answering to Samuel on file. Probably quicker doing it myself than asking a favour of anyone in drugs. They get a bit antsy if you start poking your nose into their business.’

‘Well, we did ruin six months of surveillance work that one time, remember?’

Grumpy Bob stared at McLean with a blank expression. Then a smile spread across his face. ‘Oh, aye. Still, if the buggers ever shared any intel we’d no’ve had any problem. Ha. I’d forgotten that.’

McLean pulled out a chair, wondered whether it was worth his while grabbing a coffee while he was here, then decided against it, given the late hour, and sat down instead.

‘You find out anything about Gregor Wishaw yet?’

‘Gregor … Oh, aye. Funny story there. He’s been out almost three years now. Still on licence, but a fair bit before his parole should have come up. Seems he was a model prisoner, never put a foot wrong. That and he cut a deal and dobbed in all his mates. I know that’s not how it’s meant to work. We don’t do deals like that any more. But someone had a word somewhere and he got bumped up the queue for a hearing. Keeping a clean nose paid off, so he’s out and working security. Talk about poacher turned gamekeeper.’

‘I imagine the rest of the gang aren’t best pleased. Take it they know what happened.’

‘Aye, they do. First of them’s due out in about six months, so that’ll be interesting.’

‘His problem, not ours. I’m more interested in how he ended up out at East Fortune. Not exactly his patch, is it.’

‘No, he was strictly a city boy. Dalry born and bred.’ Grumpy Bob picked up the edge of his newspaper and began folding it. ‘Thing is, the job was waiting for him, apparently. All part of the package.’

‘Sounds a bit too cosy for my liking. And he knew Mike Finlay’s name, even if he denied it.’ McLean picked up the mug in the middle of the table, then remembered it wasn’t his and put it back down again. ‘Not enough to hang a guy for, though. He’s an ex con, so he’s always going to be suspicious around the likes of us, I guess.’

‘Aye, that’s probably it. He’s kept his nose clean since getting out of Saughton anyway. It’s probably just a coincidence he ended up working there.’

McLean leaned back in his chair, caught the look on Grumpy Bob’s face. ‘Aye, coincidence.’