And was transported how, exactly? Even by your standards, Bob, McGuire thought as the images disappeared, that’s a spectacular flight of fancy.

  He left his office and walked to the nearby corridor where most of the assistant chief constables’ offices were located. ACC Stallings was behind her desk, gazing at her computer screen through heavy-framed spectacles.

  ‘Morning, Becks,’ he said. ‘How’s your empire?’

  ‘Being overrun by hostile forces at the moment. Black Shield Lodge has become a double murder investigation and with Reid’s body being found, the two investigations in which he was a suspect are stood right on their heads. You’re not going to ask me to reassign McClair, are you? I spoke to her, she said she’s fine.’

  ‘Needs must,’ he replied. ‘If you’re content, she can stay where she is. As for the Reid situation, the East Lothian and the Glasgow inquiries, they’ve been dormant since his disappearance and possibly faked suicide. We thought it might have been his Lord Lucan copy. The Spanish authorities haven’t identified him publicly yet, but that can’t be long delayed. When it happens, and it will within the next couple of days, it’ll make headlines here, and we have to be ready for them.’ He paused, seating himself on a corner of her desk. ‘Strange but true,’ he continued. ‘We don’t actually know a hell of a lot about Matthew Reid. Yes, he’s an author of minor fame. Yes, he has a Wikipedia page, but as far as I can see, everything on that is taken from the biography on his publisher’s website, so it’s unreliable, especially the reference that puts him in his mid-seventies when we know he was actually ten years younger. We have to fill those knowledge gaps and we have to do it fast. I suggest . . . actually it isn’t really a suggestion,’ he chuckled, ‘. . . that you instruct Mann and Haddock to make that their joint priority. Reid has been a published author for almost thirty years. His activity during that period will be fairly well documented, but we know nothing about what he did before then. Tell them to find out, and do it quickly.’

  ‘I’ll address that, sir,’ she assured him.

  The DCC rose and made to leave, then stopped. ‘Hold on that,’ he said. ‘Bob Skinner’s absolutely certain that Matthew Reid died in Scotland, not Spain, and that his body was transported there. I don’t necessarily agree, but the sod has a long record of being bloody right, so we’d better give some credence to it. Divide your resources,’ he ordered. ‘Have Mann’s team work on finding out about Reid’s early years, with Sauce focused on a new inquiry, into his murder and what happened after it. How did his body get into a freezer well over a thousand miles away from where he was last seen alive?’

  Forty-Nine

  Arbroath Wynd was not one of the City of Dundee’s newer or more attractive thoroughfares, but neither was it a slum. It was a mix of three-storey blocks of flats and two-storey semi-detached villas, of which almost all were well maintained. The street was recognisable instantly as having been built by the public sector; either the local authority or a housing association. The varied styles of its doors and windows made it apparent that most of the properties had been purchased subsequently by their tenants, but there were a few that shared the same style of wood-framed double glazing. That indicated they might still be in the original ownership. Number eighty-one fell into that category, but it was not one of the better maintained in the street. The other half of the semi, number eighty-three, Jackie Wright knew to have been the home of the victim when Moses Trott’s full-volume Metallica had led to a homicide. Idly she wondered which track had been playing when it happened. Her money would have been on ‘Whiskey in the Jar’, which she regarded as one of the worst cover versions in music history, an act of violence in itself. She stood on the same step as had, she imagined, the ill-fated neighbour. The bell that she rang looked old enough to have a scrap of the victim’s fingerprint still upon it.

  There was music playing when the door was opened. It was far removed from heavy metal, but it was still loud: the Gipsy Kings, neither gypsies nor kings in reality but still among her favourites.

  ‘Good morning,’ she said, holding her credentials at shoulder height. ‘DS Jackie Wright. Mr . . .’

  ‘Robinson,’ the man replied. He was well into his sixties, she guessed, but there was a wiry strength about him. ‘Jackie Robinson. There’s a coincidence, eh? What can I do for yis?’

  The wind was ruffling her hair and the first of the day’s promised rain was beginning to fall. ‘Can I come in for a minute?’ she asked.

  ‘Aye, come on, freezin’ out there. He swung the door wider, admitting her to a narrow hall from another time. ‘Come on through to the kitchen. I was just makin’. Do ye want a cup?’

  ‘That would be good. Thanks,’ she replied, for the promised tea and also for the quiet as he silenced the Reyes family. ‘Baseball fan?’ she asked.

  He stared at her, uncomprehending.

  ‘Another Jackie Robinson,’ she said. ‘The first black man ever to play in the Major League.’

  The namesake smiled, with an angled glance in her direction as he picked up the kettle. ‘Is that right? I never kent that.’ The smile became a grin. ‘We’ll no be related though. Anyway, hen,’ he continued as he scooped tea into a pot, ‘what did ye want to ask me?’

  ‘How long have you lived here, Mr Robinson?’ Wright asked.

  ‘Jackie, please. Oh, twenty years anyway; a bit more than that. Our street was bein’ knocked doon and the cooncil offered us this place. My wife was alive then,’ he explained, ‘and wir son was on the rigs like a lot o’ lads still were in those days and stayed wi’ us when he came hame. He’s in Nigeria now.’

  She did a quick mental calculation. Twenty years, yes. ‘Did the council tell you . . .’

  ‘About whit happened here? About a woman bein’ killed in this hoose? Oh aye. Somebody telt me that three folk turned it doon before we got the offer. I’m no’ surprised,’ he grunted. ‘Ah’d tae clean blood aff the walls. The polis didnae do the best job of that, mind.’

  ‘What was the talk at the time among the neighbours?’

  ‘They a’ said the same,’ Robinson told her. ‘The guy, Trott his name wis, was a nutter, so the neighbours said. He was in and out the jail, till finally he kilt the woman next door and got put away for a long time. He came back here, ye ken, after he got oot. Turned up at the door thinkin’ it was still his hoose.’ Robinson tapped the side of his head. ‘No right there, poor bastard.’

  ‘Are there any neighbours left around here from his time?’

  He scratched his head, as if that might help his memory. ‘Until a few weeks ago there was Eck, the fella in seventy-seven. He was probably the last of them unless there’s folk in the flats, but ye tend no tae see them, the way ye see folk wi’ gardens. But listen,’ he continued as he poured tea into two mugs, ‘why are ye askin’ about Trott after a’ this time? Has he kilt somebody else?’

  ‘No,’ Wright said. ‘It’s his family we want to know about. When you took over the tenancy, was there anything personal left behind?’

  ‘If ye call a couple of tins of beans personal, aye, but otherwise no.’

  ‘Did any of the neighbours ever talk about them? We believe he had a son and a daughter.’

  ‘Aye, Eck mentioned them. He said they were a different cut fae him, decent folk, like. He said that Trott had a few stays inside afore he kilt the woman. While he was away the last time the daughter moved out; she’d a fella, Eck said, might have gone to live wi’ him, he thought, but he wisnae sure. When Trott got released, after a couple o’ weeks the son left as well, and Eck never saw either of them again. Does that help yis?’

  ‘It might,’ the DS told him. ‘Do you have any idea where I could find Eck? Can you remember his proper name?’

  ‘Alexander Smyth, wi’ a Y.’ He chuckled. ‘That’s Y Ah remember. As for finding him . . .’ He looked to the ceiling, then to the floor. ‘One or the other, take yir pick.’ He glanced upwards again. ‘Likely there. He wasnae a bad bloke.’

  Fifty

  ‘I’m looking forward to next Tuesday,’ Lottie Mann sighed. ‘The first of March; it’s one of my favourite days of the year. I like it because it lets me believe that winter’s on the way out and there’s better days to come. This one’s been a real bastard too. All these bloody storms, one after another. And all with bloody silly names. They make you think though, about global warming and stuff. I’ve never been a climate-change denier but I’ve maybe thought it was being exaggerated. After this winter I’m convinced.’ She grinned, a rare occurrence with Mann. It took her companion by surprise, not least because it revealed a hidden prettiness. ‘It’s my laddie that’ll suffer more than me though,’ she continued, ‘when he’s an adult and Cambuslang has its own sea shore with surfers and everything, and half of Glasgow’s under water. I’m ready to become an activist,’ she declared, ‘to join demos, yell slogans at the polis and burn my bra.’

  ‘I don’t think burning your bra will delay climate change,’ Karen Neville observed.

  ‘Maybe not,’ Mann conceded, ‘but it’ll keep a decent-sized crowd warm for quite a while.’

  ‘Mine would barely melt a snowball,’ Neville chuckled. ‘Anyway, Lottie,’ she continued, ‘what made you invite me for a canteen coffee when the day’s barely begun?’

  ‘A quiet chat,’ her colleague replied. ‘Informal and yet formal. You’ve been told about Matthew Reid, I believe.’

  Neville frowned. Pain showed in her eyes. She nodded. ‘Yes,’ she whispered.

  ‘A shock, I imagine.’

  ‘For him to be found like that, absolutely. For him to be found at all, to be honest. I know the signs suggested that he’d drowned himself, but I couldn’t bring myself to accept that he was dead. I chose to believe that he’d decided to disappear for reasons only he knew. I have no choice now, do I?’

  ‘You feel bereaved, I imagine.’

  ‘Absolutely. It’s almost as if I’ve lost my father again; that’s how close Uncle Matt and I were. For him to die under all that suspicion, that’s hard to take too.’

  ‘Did you believe any of it?’ Mann asked. ‘At all?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m a cop, Lottie. I like to think that if he wasn’t right, I’d have known it.

  ‘How about Bryant’s murder? There was a potential motive. Could you conceive he might have been guilty of that?’

  ‘No more than I believed Andy was, when you and Cotter thought he did it.’

  ‘I never believed that either,’ the detective confessed, ‘because I knew Andy as a police officer. John didn’t, so he went with the evidence. Andy rubbed him up the wrong way too. Matthew Reid, I didn’t know. To me he was just another person of interest after his DNA was found at the scene. Apart from the fact that I read one of his books once, and didn’t like it, I knew nothing about him. I still don’t. It looks as if none of us really did, not even Skinner, who was his neighbour. Not even Noele McClair, who slept with him a couple of nights before he vanished. Maybe not even you.’

  Neville smiled. ‘I knew about Noele and him; she told me about it. Not straight out,’ she said, ‘but I worked it out. I’m still getting my head round the idea of him giving her one for the road. I never thought of Uncle Matt as having much of a sex life, not any longer. We don’t consider that, with our parents’ generation, do we?’

  ‘I don’t suppose we do,’ Mann conceded. ‘The idea of Mum and Dad doin’ the deed doesn’t really cross our minds.’ She leaned forward. ‘Karen, this is an odd question but did you and he exchange birthday cards?’

  ‘Yes, we did. Presents too; just wee things.’

  ‘When he had a big birthday, did you know it?’

  ‘He told me when he had his seventieth.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Four years ago. Why?’

  ‘Did it ever occur to you that he looked quite fit for his age?’

  ‘He was,’ Neville said. ‘He walked a lot, and he worked out. He belonged to a local gym.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Mann murmured. She opened an image on her tablet and pushed it across the table. ‘Take a look at that. It’s his driving licence.’

  Her colleague turned the device round and studied it. Her eyes narrowed; her frown returned. ‘Is this right?’ she whispered. ‘It says he was . . . That can’t be.’

  ‘It is, though. I’ve spoken to his publisher, and to his solicitor. They all believed he was seventy-something because that’s what he told them. Actually, he was ten years younger. We know from his birth certificate that he was born Matthew William Reid, sixty-four years ago, in Hong Kong, where his father, also William, was working as a surveyor. His birth was registered locally. His mother died of typhus when he was seven and his father relocated; not to Scotland but to Dublin, Ireland. We know very little about his life there, only that he graduated from Trinity College Dublin aged twenty-two with a BA, first class honours. When he was twenty-six, he moved to the UK. Until then he had travelled under a Hong Kong passport. His driving licence was Irish. When he arrived in Britain he applied for the UK passport and driving licence to which he was entitled. They were issued and his National Insurance record dates from then. He worked for a few years as a freelance journalist, and was often on local radio, even STV on a few occasions. When he was twenty-nine, he set himself up as a media-relations consultant. He did well and acquired a string of clients. Then he published his first Septimus Armour mystery novel. As his sales improved, he phased out the PR stuff and wrote full-time. From then on everything pretty much falls into line with his publisher’s bio. That’s when the age perception began too; he wrote his own biography and, while he didn’t put dates on it, he adopted the persona of an older man. It’s noticeable that even in the earliest photos of him, from his journo days, he had a shaved head, as if he was beginning the process of ageing himself.’

  ‘Why would he do all that?’ Neville asked.

  ‘At the moment,’ Mann replied, ‘your guess is at least as good as mine, maybe better. What’s your earliest memory of him?’

  ‘It would be very early, a bit more than thirty years ago. I’d barely started school when I remember him first. My father was commercial director of a civic-development corporation and Uncle Matt was its press officer. They became friends then. They played golf and squash; my dad always won at golf and lost at squash, so they complemented each other. The older I got the more Uncle Matt . . . I called him that from the earliest days . . . became part of the family. Then my father passed away . . . he was a few years older than Uncle Matt, even at the age I thought he was. I assumed he’d be gone from my life too, but he wasn’t. He became like a proper uncle. He always told me what he thought I needed to hear. Like, for example, he never liked Andy and he told me so, but he was always formally polite with him when we were together, and gave him the respect a husband was due.’

  ‘Did he have a partner?’ Mann asked. ‘A girlfriend?’

  ‘Quite a few, over the years. I said earlier on I couldn’t think of Uncle Matt as having a sex life, but yes, when things were different, I suppose. I remember thinking back then that he was a bit of a contradiction. He seemed to keep his clothes for ever . . . but his girlfriends for a couple of years at the most. He never had a bidey-in. He went on a few holidays with girlfriends but none of them ever moved in with him.’

  ‘Can you remember any of them?’

  Neville frowned. ‘Their faces, most of them,’ she said. ‘Names, not so many. There was one though; I’m going back twelve, fifteen years. She lasted a year or two longer than most. She was the closest thing to a celebrity girlfriend he ever had. She’d been a TV presenter on a Channel 4 lifestyle programme, but by that time was doing mostly voiceovers for ads. She’d had a footballer boyfriend for a while too, when she was younger; that kept the red-tops interested. They stayed in touch, even after they split. I know that because he’d mention her occasionally. Verona, her name is. Verona Lyon. I think he said she’s a radio presenter now. She does fill-in shifts on a middle-aged FM station when the regulars go on holiday. It’s called Red Sky. Now that I think of it, I’m sure that Cameron McCullough owned it. His widow will now, I assume. I’m sure they can put you in touch with her.’

  Mann used her tablet to make a note. ‘I’ll give them a call. Meanwhile, Karen, think hard. Was there anyone, anyone at all that your Uncle Matt mentioned who might have held a grudge against him?’

  ‘I could think all night and the answer would still be the same as I can give you now. Matthew Reid didn’t have an enemy in the world. Nobody ever said a bad word about him, except possibly a few cranky reviewers on Amazon with nothing better to do. Assassins with keyboards,’ she said. ‘Trawl through them and maybe you’ll find Uncle Matt’s killer.’

  Fifty-One

  ‘Mr Robinson said that?’ Noele McClair exclaimed. ‘Naomi Trott had a boyfriend and had left the family home?’ The three detectives were crammed into the small room they had been allocated in the main police office in Dundee. The DI doubted that Sauce Haddock would have accepted the accommodation, but the local divisional commander outranked her, and did not look to be a man to compromise.

  ‘Yes, he did,’ Wright confirmed, ‘but remember that’s not from his own knowledge. He was repeating something told him by a neighbour.’

  ‘Are you saying you don’t think he’s reliable?’

  ‘No, I didn’t say that,’ she insisted. ‘Jackie’s a retired bin-man. There’s precious little he hasn’t seen, and he seemed to remember nearly all of it. He told me some stories about stuff he’s found in bins. A man’s entire wardrobe, after his wife found a condom in his pocket. A pig’s head. A placenta.’