45

McLean wandered the corridors of the station, trying hard not to think about the godawful mess unravelling all around him. Sooner or later Sammy Saunders’s previous history was going to come to light, and it didn’t take a genius to work out what would happen to Forrester then. At best he’d be quietly retired, but if the wrong people got hold of the story then there’d be all hell to pay. And McLean wasn’t sure if he was the wrong people or not. Keep quiet and be complicit in a serious miscarriage of justice? Or speak out and for ever hold the enmity of his fellow officers? Not an easy decision to make.

It didn’t help that they now had a body still unidentified, and one whose DNA had been on record for some reason. That it wasn’t Eric Forrester was scant consolation. McLean knew better than to hope the switched record was just a random pick from the database either. Somewhere out there, someone knew who it was, and chances were they didn’t want anyone else to find out.

Preoccupied with his thoughts, he almost walked into a uniform constable heading up the corridor towards him. Their impromptu dance as they tried to pass brought a shy, embarrassed smile to her face, which quite broke his dour mood.

‘Sorry, sir,’ she said.

‘No need. I should learn to look where I’m going.’ He left her standing there and carried on down the corridor.

Fewer officers milled around the major-incident room when he stepped inside. Afternoon was losing its battle with evening, the day shift looking to clock off soon. There’d been plenty of overtime early on in the investigation, but things were coming to a slow halt now.

‘Thought we’d got them all, sir.’ DC Gregg came over as soon as she spotted him. McLean looked past her to the whiteboard, where Pothead Sammy’s name was still scrawled in his crabbed handwriting, DI Ritchie’s question mark alongside it.

‘Sorry about that. Maybe I should have just left him be. Would’ve made our jobs a lot easier.’

‘Aye, but no’ really.’ Gregg shook her head slowly. ‘We’ve still plenty to be getting on with tracking down next of kin for the foreign victims. And Harrison’s working on Jennifer Beasley yet.’

‘Did she get anything from the notebooks?’ McLean looked around the room, hoping to see the young detective constable, but she wasn’t there.

‘Not that she said. Got a call from her flatmate, though, and headed out to the forensics lab about an hour ago. Should be a message on your phone.’

As if hearing its name used in vain, McLean’s mobile buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out to reveal half a dozen messages, including one from Harrison.

Gone to Forensics. Important info re. Crash. Call me.

He was just thumbing the icon on his screen to place the call when the phone lit up to say Harrison was calling him. He tapped accept and lifted the phone to his ear. ‘What have you got for me, Constable?’

‘Sir? Oh, sorry. You answered so quickly. I … Um. I’m at the forensics labs with Manda and Emma. They’ve been looking at the satnav that came out of the truck, tracing its journey.’

‘We know where it came from and where it was going, don’t we?’

‘Aye, sir. We do. But it’s not exactly … Well, it’d be easier to show you. Any chance you could come over?’

McLean glanced up at the clock above the door, then out of the window. Sure, it was shift end, but it wouldn’t be dark for several hours yet. One of the great delights of Scotland was the long summer evenings; the utter lack of daylight in winter less so. Of course, it could just have been that Emma needed a ride home and the other two thought they might cadge a lift halfway.

‘Give me half an hour,’ he said, then remembered the clock. Going-home time. Traffic. ‘Maybe forty-five minutes, aye?’

‘It’s not the most up-to-date equipment, but then neither was the truck.’

McLean stood in one of the smaller rooms in the forensics labs, staring at an inert plastic box with a badly melted and blank screen. It had taken him only thirty-five minutes to drive across town, against all expectations. And he hadn’t even been hurrying. Instead of instantly asking for a lift home, Amanda Parsons had led him through to this lab, where Emma and DC Harrison were deep in conversation. Both of them fell suspiciously silent when he entered the room, which only made the tips of his ears burn more fiercely.

‘It doesn’t seem to be working,’ he said.

‘I can see why you’re the inspector and Janie’s just a constable.’ Emma gave him a weary smile, then plugged a lead into the back of the box. ‘The screen didn’t enjoy being bathed in that foul gloop they were transporting. What’s the technical term you used, Manda? Fucked, I think it was?’

‘Aye, completely fucked.’ Parsons leaned over and tapped at a nearby keyboard, lighting up the computer screen above it. ‘Protected the circuits inside, though. And this wee program of ours can access the memory. See where the truck’s been and where it was going.’

‘I have to assume that’s not where we thought it was going, otherwise there’d be little point of dragging me over here other than getting a lift home.’

‘Well, if you were heading that way.’ Parsons grinned. ‘Actually, I’m on late shift. Don’t knock off until eight. I thought this was important, though.’ She clicked again, and the screen showed a map similar to the one that appeared on the satnav in McLean’s new car. The clunky graphics looked even worse blown up to a much larger size.

‘This is a commercial satnav unit. You can programme routes into it, but it also tracks where you’ve been. It’s connected to the tachograph, too, so drivers can’t cheat and skip their breaks. The more modern ones link up to the internet and do all sorts of fancy stuff so you can see where your delivery is in real time, but this is a bit older. It just records everything on to its memory. Lucky, really, otherwise we’d probably not have found this out.’

‘Found what out?’ McLean asked.

‘This.’ Parsons clicked the mouse again, and the map redrew itself, showing a route picked out in deep blue, from the compound of Finlay McGregor in Broxburn all the way to the corner of the Western Approach Road and the Lothian Road. There the blue line stopped with a terrible finality.

‘What am I looking at?’ McLean stared at the map, unsure what the point was.

‘Please don’t tell me you’re colour-blind, Tony.’ Parsons did something with the mouse and the image moved away from the crash site. That was when McLean saw it, a paler line overlaid on top of the bypass, out east along the A1. He looked for it heading off to LindSea Farm Estates, but instead it turned south, heading into the Cheviot Hills.

‘This is the route programmed in to the machine?’

‘That’s the route your driver was following, aye. He only headed into town because there was a pile-up on the bypass. That’s another thing this clever wee box does. Shouldn’t have done, mind. But then he thought he was just transporting a load of manure. No harm in taking that through the city.’

McLean stared at the map again. LindSea Farm Estates was marked, but the programmed route missed it by several miles. ‘So where the hell’s he going?’

‘Get on to Control will you, Constable? I want a couple of squad cars and some uniform to meet us at the junction before that turning.’

McLean concentrated on driving, wishing for once that he was in a squad car so he could go the full blues and twos. Evening and morning were always bad times to be trying to negotiate the city bypass, but there was no other way to get from the forensics labs to the A1 and on towards East Fortune without fighting with the traffic in town.

Beside him in the passenger seat, DC Harrison took out her Airwave and began to make the call. ‘Do we want to go in all guns blazing, sir? I mean, if it’s a proper raid, shouldn’t we scope the place first, find out what’s there and then work out what kind of force we need?’

McLean eased the car forward another twenty feet before everything ground to a halt again. He hated to admit it, but Harrison was right. Going in unprepared was at best foolish, at worst dangerous. The chemicals in the truck had melted flesh, bone and tarmac. What else might they find, and who might be making sure it wasn’t stumbled upon? On the other hand, what if the evidence was being spirited away while they sat in the major-incident room debating the best way to proceed?

‘We need to go there, see it. Or at least get as close as we can without raising suspicion.’ He paused a moment while the traffic inched forward another twenty feet. ‘Can you get DCI McIntyre on that thing?’

Harrison nodded. ‘Aye, sir. Or I’ve my mobile if you don’t want to go through the Airwave network.’

McLean looked sideways at the detective constable, raised an eyebrow in surprise at her guile. ‘No, Airwave’s fine. I’m not trying to be a hero. Just want to get out there and see where that truck was meant to be going.’

Harrison tapped away at the clunky handset, clicking to speakerphone once she had reached the detective chief inspector and explained where they were.

‘You’re sure you know what you’re doing, Tony? We could have a squad together for first light tomorrow morning. Go in a bit more heavy-handed.’

‘And find out we’ve just blown the department budget on raiding some old farmyard? No. It’s better if we do a bit of reconnaissance beforehand. Work out what we’re dealing with. I reckon we need to have a closer look at Extech, though. Possibly see if we can’t get a warrant to search the premises.’

‘You really think they’re the source? I thought they checked out. I mean, the sort of thing they do’s the exact opposite of spreading toxic waste about the place.’

‘Aye, exactly. What better way to hide your real game? And the amount of money that’s been sunk into that place doesn’t add up. Even if they are planning on growing tomatoes there soon.’

‘Tomatoes?’ Even over the airwaves, McLean could hear the disbelief in Jayne McIntyre’s voice.

‘Long story, but as soon as I asked DC Blane to look into the financial side of things the high heidyins started to get anxious. You know how I feel about strings being pulled like that. Especially when it’s the constables getting leaned on.’

Silence saw them cover a few more yards, and up ahead it looked like the blockage might have begun to ease.

‘I’ll see what I can do, Tony. No promises, though. We need justifiable cause for a warrant, not just suspicion and the fact their boss plays golf with our boss.’

‘Aye, I know. It would help if I even knew who their boss was, mind. Their chief operations officer was very reticent on the matter, and the paper trail’s not exactly straightforward either. The whole thing’s got dodgy written all over it.’