57

‘Please tell me you’ve had a response from the phone company.’

McLean had spent a good ten minutes searching for DC Harrison, finally finding her in the CID room, where he should have looked first. She sat in a huddle with DCs Stringer and Blane, the new detectives forming their own little clique of self-protection.

‘Nothing yet, sir. But I ran his car through the NMPR system. Nothing seen going over the Forth Bridge, so it’s unlikely he’s gone north to Perthshire. He’s not answering any of his phones, though.’

‘What about Border Control?’

‘Nope. His passport’s not been scanned any time recently. If he’s gone abroad he’s done it on the sly.’

‘Well, if I was doing a runner I’d probably not want to leave too many clues either. Doesn’t really seem his style, though.’ McLean leaned against one of the many empty desks in the large room. Not much call for them now the whole of CID had been restructured and most of the detectives that were left had been shipped off to Gartcosh.

‘What about you two?’ McLean turned his attention to Stringer and Blane. ‘Get any further with the mysterious Maddy?’

‘Hit a bit of a brick wall there, sir. Looks like she’s been systematically erased from the records.’

‘Perhaps not so surprising.’ McLean told them what he had learned from Featherstonehaugh.

‘Would they do that? Re-home two victims in the same city?’ Harrison asked when he had finished.

‘Not on purpose, no. I get the feeling there’s a lot more to the story than I’m being told, and they’re not happy that Maddy, Jennifer, whatever her real name is, was trying to track down her friend. I think that’s what they call a security risk.’

‘But why would they care? I mean, if all this happened when they were kids, and they’re both adults now?’ DC Stringer asked the question. Beside him, DC Blane had begun tapping at his keyboard and clicking his mouse, attention focused on his screen.

‘I can only assume the threat is still there. Either that or what they know could cause serious embarrassment to very influential people. Given how cagey my new friend from the NCA is about sharing any information, I’m going to go with the both.’

‘Might have something for you here, sir.’ Blane clicked his mouse again, then swivelled his screen around to where McLean could see. ‘Sixteen years ago. Big old country house burned down. Wee village called Hatfield Broad Oak in north Essex. About an hour out of London. Only survivors were a couple of young children, not related, taken into care.’ He scrolled down the lines of text. ‘Doesn’t give their names, but some fairly important people died in the fire, see?’

McLean scanned the words looking for the story between the lines. The news had completely passed him by sixteen years ago, but he’d been a junior constable back then, struggling to cope with the death of his fiancée. A house fire in the Home Counties that claimed the lives of two judges, an ex-Cabinet minister and a multi-millionaire hedge-fund manager wouldn’t have stuck in his memory even if he had seen it at the time.

‘Scroll back up to the top, will you?’ He flicked his fingers at the screen, then waited while Blane fumbled with the little wheel on the top of his mouse, too small for his enormous fingers. Eventually the line he was looking for came into view. A publication date at the start of the next millennium and the name of the journalist who had filed the piece.

‘Robert Simons. See if you can’t track him down. Have a word with him about the fire. Maybe drop the name Maddy into the conversation. You never know, it might jog his memory. Chances are he knew exactly who the children were but didn’t name them because someone told him not to.’

‘On it, sir.’ Blane reached for the phone beside his screen and started dialling.

‘You want me to help him with that?’ Stringer asked. Both he and Harrison were standing now, their eagerness to get stuck into this new investigation clear. It was a distraction, though, not something they should be wasting time and resources on. Jennifer Beasley’s true identity wasn’t a mystery, after all. There was at least one person in the building right now who knew it. But Stringer and Blane worked well together, and with the Organised Crime division taking over the Extech investigation there wasn’t much else left for them to do.

‘OK. But don’t waste a lot of time on it. I’ve already told Featherstonehaugh to claim the body. Chances are he’ll be taking the other one, too.

‘You want me to keep looking for Lewis, sir?’ Harrison asked. It was another piece of a puzzle they no longer had to put back together, but McLean hated leaving a job half done.

‘Aye. Keep on that. Needs be, we’ll pay his town house a wee visit.’ He checked his watch, the afternoon marching on. ‘First, though, I’m going to get myself that cup of tea.’

And with any luck there might even be some cake left.

‘Might I have a quick word, Tony?’

McLean looked up from his table in an almost empty canteen. The last piece of cake lay on a plate in front of him, a mug of tea beside it. He’d hoped for a moment’s calm in what had become an impossibly busy day. A chance to get his thoughts together, puzzle out the mystery of the facial reconstruction he recognized, and think up a way to refuse the promotion foisted on him by the DCC without losing his job. DCI Featherstonehaugh clearly had other plans.

‘Sir?’

‘Please, call me Tim. Less formal than “sir” and easier to say than Featherstonehaugh.’ He pronounced his own name incorrectly, then smiled at a joke he’d surely been telling for years. ‘And, besides, we’ll be the same rank soon enough.’

‘If it’s all the same, I’ll stick with “sir” for now. Was there something you needed?’

‘Rather the other way around, isn’t it? Or am I wrong that you’ve just set your band of sleuths to finding out all about Maddy?’ Featherstonehaugh had a smile on his face that was halfway between friendly and punchable. He pulled out a chair and sat down, eyeing the cake hungrily.

McLean drew the plate closer, setting the mug of tea as a barrier between them. ‘How long have you been at Gartcosh?’ He hoped the change of subject would throw the detective chief inspector off his stride.

‘Six months now. Not sure what I did to piss off my boss, but to be honest Scotland’s a lot nicer than London these days. Too much division what with the Brexit nonsense. All those politicians flailing about like they’ve got a clue what they’re doing, making life impossible for us poor civil servants. No, your lot seem a lot better organized. Or at least better disciplined. Much more interesting being up here. And that facility you’ve built over there is something else. You any idea how many foreign law enforcement agencies have sent teams to see what we’re doing? It’s mental.’

McLean had interviewed enough witnesses to know a man beating around the bush when he saw one. ‘There something I should know?’ he asked

Featherstonehaugh paused a moment before answering. McLean was fairly sure it was an act, but he was happy enough to indulge the man. It was always better to be on the right side of the NCA. They could make life difficult or they could be extremely helpful, depending on the phase of the moon. The longer he took deciding what to say, the more time McLean had to eat his cake, too.

‘It’s about Jennifer. Maddy. You’re right. She and the young boy were the only survivors of that house fire your DC Blane uncovered. She wasn’t meant to be here in Edinburgh. The last place we had her was a flat in central Manchester about six months ago. Then she went off the radar. Nobody knew where she was until her DNA match popped up on our screens. Caused quite a bit of consternation, I can tell you.’

‘Why are you still keeping them hidden? They’re both adults now, should be doing their own thing.’

‘Witness protection’s for life, Tony. You know that.’

‘What about the boy? I take it you set him up here, in Edinburgh.’

‘About five years ago. He goes by the name Edward Gosford now. Ed. He’s got a place in Gorgie, but he’s not answering his phone.’ Featherstonehaugh pulled a slim piece of paper out of his jacket pocket and handed it over. Two lines of an address, a mobile number. ‘You’re not supposed to have that. You certainly didn’t get it from me.’

‘You were quick enough to move in on Jennifer Beasley,’ McLean said. ‘Why not round up the lad, too?’

‘Beasley was protocol. Clean up. I’d love to go and knock on his door, but you wouldn’t believe the trouble we’d be in if we did anything more active than observing Ed right now, and he’s nowhere to be seen. If he’s got wind of what’s happening, chances are he’s gone to ground, but I can’t risk rocking that boat. Just thinking about the paperwork makes me itch.’

‘So you want me to do your dirty work for you.’

‘Something like that.’ Featherstonehaugh shrugged. ‘Look, you’re local CID. You can go to his place and nobody’ll ask any questions. More importantly, there won’t be a paper trail that people we don’t want finding Ed can follow.’

‘They’re still out there, then? Still looking for him?’

‘You know the sort of people we’re dealing with here, Tony. They never give up, and they’re very, very patient. There’s only two people in the whole of the NCA who know Edward Gosford’s real name, and quite frankly I’d like to keep it that way. Makes my life a whole lot easier.’

‘You care about him, don’t you.’

‘Of course I fucking care about him. He’s had a shit life so far and deserves a break.’ Something in Featherstonehaugh’s features changed, as if the DCI were thinking about his own past and not that of some young man in witness protection. ‘Look, he didn’t do well coming up through the care system. Hardly surprising given what happened to him before. He was two when his mother sold him to those people. Six when we found him and Jennifer.’

McLean made the paper disappear like a skilled magician. ‘Poor bastard. I still don’t know why you couldn’t tell me this before, though. And I think you’re forgetting the main reason why I wanted to track Jennifer down. She’s dead already, and if she was here looking for her friend, then there’s every chance he’s dead, too. Except that if it was him, you’d have matched his DNA like you did Jennifer’s, right?’

Featherstonehaugh shook his head sadly. ‘Wish it was that easy, Tony. There’s another thing you should know about Ed. Well, a couple of things, really. The first is that he’s what you might call a driven individual. He’s spent most of his short adult life tracking down what he considers to be injustice and exposing it to the world.’

‘Sounds like we should be recruiting him.’

‘Believe me, I’ve tried. He’s not big on being a team player, though. Likes to do things his own way. Can’t say as I blame him, after all that’s happened to him.’

‘So what’s the second thing?’ McLean asked.

‘He’s something of a hacktivist, if you’re familiar with that term. Breaks into corporate computer networks and exposes all their dirty secrets to the world. As far as I can tell, he’s not in it for the money, just some personal moral crusade, but he’s very good at it. When the DNA search pinged Jennifer’s record, I double-checked Ed’s just to be certain it wasn’t him.’

‘I assume it isn’t, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.’

‘I don’t know if it’s him. His record’s been tampered with and the entry on the DNA database is missing entirely. He must have hacked the NCA and we didn’t even know. I dread to think what other systems he’s been in.’

McLean finished his cake, leaned back in his chair and took a long sip of coffee. Too many coincidences were piling one upon another now, but one in particular niggled away at the back of his mind.

‘You set him up here five years ago. That’d be when he left school, right?’

Featherstonehaugh cocked his head to one side as he considered the question, then nodded. ‘Before my time, but yes.’

‘Where was he before that? Who was looking after him?’

‘I can’t tell you, Tony. You know that.’

McLean drained the last of his coffee, then stood up to leave. ‘It was Helensburgh, though, wasn’t it. And he didn’t hack the NCA database, you let him in. He just did a little more than you asked him to, am I right?’

He didn’t wait for the DCI’s answer. Didn’t need to. It was written all over the man’s face.