‘Wouldn’t there be traces left behind?’ Stallings suggested.

  ‘Nothing that couldn’t be cleaned up afterwards.’

  ‘As Matthew’s house certainly was.’ Skinner’s reminder was firm. ‘Arthur Dorward said the place was sterile. Yet another reason for doing that,’ he added.

  ‘What do we tell the media when the Spanish break the story in,’ the participants saw her check her watch, ‘thirty-five minutes’ time?’

  The virtual meeting fell silent. Skinner had an uncomfortable feeling that everyone was looking at him.

  ‘Well, Bob?’ McGuire asked, confirming the suspicion. ‘Come on, you’re the most experienced person here.’

  ‘Okay,’ he replied, ‘if you insist. The way I see it, you’ve got half an hour to beat my friends here to the punch, and drop them in it too. In your shoes I’d be issuing a statement one minute before theirs, announcing that Matthew Reid has been found dead in Sant Pere Pescador, Catalunya, that his death is being treated as murder, and that you’ll be co-operating with the Mossos d’ Esquadra’s investigation one hundred per cent.’

  ‘We shouldn’t say that he was killed here?’ Cotter exclaimed. ‘I don’t get that.’

  Skinner shook his head, sadly. ‘Outside of this group,’ he sighed, ‘there’s only one person knows that . . . the person who killed him. I don’t think it would be very clever to let him know that we know too. Do you?’

  ‘Maybe not,’ the DS murmured.

  Fifty-Nine

  ‘Thanks for letting me know, Sauce,’ Noele McClair said. ‘It doesn’t affect me, really, but I appreciate the thought. It’s weird, though, isn’t it? The embalming thing?’

  ‘It’s a first for me,’ the DCI admitted, ‘for all of us, the gaffer even. But it wasn’t just somebody showing off. It was more than just moving the body and concealing the death, which is what you’re investigating in Perthshire. It was done for a purpose.’

  ‘Whatever that was.’

  ‘Yes, but I’m thinking I might know. Matthew wasn’t killed on a whim, Noele. There was a motive, as there is with most homicides. I suspect that what we’re finding out now is a smokescreen, and that it’s meant to steer us as far away as possible from the reason for his death. I think the gaffer sees that too, and chucking the investigatory ball back at the Spaniards, that’s his way of letting the perpetrator think we’ve fallen for it.’

  ‘Too subtle for me,’ the DI chuckled. ‘That’s command corridor thinking. I’ll stick to the bare bones of my inquiry up here. Cheers.’

  She ended the call and turned to Wright who had been waiting impatiently for it to finish. ‘Jackie, sorry. That was more personal than professional; Sauce bringing me up to speed on something. What is it?’

  ‘Eck Smyth’s landlord finally got back to me,’ the DS told her. ‘It’s the Burghside Housing Association; it manages property in the Dundee area and over in Fife. The housing manager, a Mrs Rylance, told me that Eck died seven years ago, aged eighty-three. He left a widow, first name Magdalena, and the tenancy continued for another four years, until she needed sheltered housing. Burghside have that in their portfolio, so she was transferred to new accommodation in Wormit Bay, near the Fife end of the Tay Road Bridge. The old lady’s ninety now and partially sighted so Mrs Rylance is going to look out her daughter’s number and talk to her about arranging a visit. Soonest, I told her, and she took that on board.’

  ‘Fine,’ McClair said. ‘Let’s hope she doesn’t take so long that we have to chase her up. It might be historic but it’s still a murder inquiry. Mind you, ninety; I don’t expect—’ She was cut off in mid-sentence by her phone.

  ‘DI McClair,’ a young voice greeted her, ‘it’s Paul Dorward here, crime-scene investigator from Gartcosh.’

  ‘Yes, Paul, what have you got? Is it Cameron McCullough’s DNA profile?’

  ‘No, that’ll be a wee while yet. No, it’s something else I thought I’d update you with. One of our people found something on the sheet that was used as a shroud for the second skeleton at Black Shield Lodge; the female. It’s a hair and it should give us viable genetic material. The likelihood is that it belongs to the victim herself, but if not, if it’s someone else and it can be matched, well, it might take you forward.’

  ‘Hey,’ she exclaimed, her spirits lifted, ‘that’s good. Let me know if it works; let me know either way in fact.’

  ‘What’s that?’ Wright asked.

  ‘Possible third-party involvement at Black Shield Lodge. Fingers crossed.’

  ‘For sure,’ the DS said, crossing hers. ‘Meanwhile, Mrs Rylance took us seriously. We’re to meet Magdalena Smyth and her daughter Martina. Ten thirty tomorrow morning, at her home. All we need now is for her to have a memory beyond what she had for breakfast.’

  ‘Ageist, Jackie, ageist!’

  Sixty

  Samantha was voracious, and demanding. She had been fed an hour before but her cries made it clear that she was already in need of a refill. ‘Okay, okay,’ her mother said as she lifted her from her Silver Cross buggy. Her father had heard of the brand, but had been staggered by the cost of his daughter’s travel system, as the John Lewis sales person had described it.

  Settling into her husband’s swivel chair, Cheeky unbuttoned her shirt. The baby was silenced, instantly, as she was reunited with her food source. Haddock moved to close the integral blinds of the glass partitions that separated his office from the open plan area where his squad were at work. ‘It’s okay,’ she said, ‘I’m not bothered. It’s a natural function.’ She addressed his sensitivity by the simple expedient of turning in the high-backed swivel chair to face the window.

  Samantha had barely finished her replenishment and been returned, happy and smiling, to her pram when there was a knock on the door. Mario McGuire did not wait for a response. He swung it open and stepped into the room. He was not alone. ‘Arthur,’ Haddock said, greeting the second newcomer. ‘When the DCC suggested that Cheeky came in here after Waitrose, I didn’t realise there was going to be a conference.’

  ‘Your boss asked me to come,’ Dorward told him. ‘I’m a central service, a civilian not a police officer. His wish isn’t my command, only a suggestion, but seeing as you’re involved, I didn’t mind. Plus, it’s a pleasure to meet your lovely wife. They’re right, you know, everyone who wonders what the hell she saw in you. Sorry, Mrs Haddock,’ he exclaimed, turning to Cheeky. ‘I’m Arthur Dorward. The scientific bit of the Crime Campus is my baby.’ He leaned over the pram, admiring the sleeping child. ‘Not a patch on yours, mind.’

  She grinned. ‘Sauce told me you were eccentric, Mr Dorward,’ she said. ‘So I’ll let you off with calling me Mrs Haddock. There’ll be no mercy for a second offence.’

  Her husband looked at his boss. ‘Sir,’ he began, but McGuire cut him short.

  ‘Back in the time,’ he began, ‘that Bob Skinner and others, myself among them, still think of as the good old days, there used to be a senior officers’ dining room in this building. You could measure a person’s standing by where they ate. Today, everything’s egalitarian. Instead, we live in the era of a very different working lunch.’ He held up a brown paper bag and placed it on the table. ‘A selection of the finest from the Viareggio Deli. Paula made it up for me herself. By the way, Cheeky, she’s another one that’s kept her own name.’ He delved into the bag and produced a series of wrapped filled rolls, plated meats, olives and gherkins and three large bottles of flavoured sparkling San Pellegrino. ‘No Peroni, I’m afraid, Sauce. That would have been pushing it.’

  The quartet took seats around the table, Haddock and his wife side by side, with Samantha’s conveyance behind them, McGuire and Dorward facing them. They ate in silence for a few minutes, before the DCC broke it. ‘Have you seen the reaction to the press release about Matthew Reid, Sauce? It was top of the Scottish News on STV, and it made the national BBC coverage. The publishers will be absolutely loving it, and so will Reid’s agent. His sales are bound to boom, and the likes of Netflix and Amazon will follow that, like they always do. The guy may be dead, but the ten per cent lives on, for another seventy years according to copyright law.’

  ‘I’m happy for him, sir—’ Haddock began, but was stopped by McGuire’s upraised hand.

  ‘This is a lunch, Sauce, and your wife’s here, so let’s have a Sir moratorium. It’s Mario, all right?’

  Privately, the DCI was not certain that it was, but he nodded. ‘Okay, Mario. As I was saying, I’m happy for everyone who’s going to make more money out of Reid’s death than they ever did when he was alive, but as the cop who’s tasked with solving his murder, to be frank I’m fucking miserable. I’ve never said this . . . although I’m sure I’m not the only one that thought it . . . but I believed that Reid faked his own death in some crazy crime-writer way of boosting the sales of his next book. More: I suspected that he really did kill those three old folk in Gullane so he could build that book around it. That was fine, and at some point in the reasonably near future I was going to develop that as the likeliest solution and present it to the fiscal, fairly confident that she’d snap it up and get the file closed without even thinking about a Fatal Accident Inquiry.’

  Arthur Dorward nodded, vigorously. ‘I couldn’t agree more, Sauce, that was how it looked. But what about Reid being chief suspect for the Glasgow murder, the brother of the spook who was having it away with Karen Neville, his unofficial niece?’

  ‘First,’ Haddock replied, ‘that’s Lottie Mann’s problem, not mine. But I’m fairly sure she’s thinking the same as me. Reid disliked Andy Martin, and he didn’t appreciate the notion of them reuniting. That being the case, wouldn’t he have been quite happy for Karen and Houseman to be doing the horizontal mambo? As for trying to frame Andy . . . nah. I don’t buy that.’

  ‘He didn’t include it in the book,’ McGuire said quietly.

  Sauce stared at him. ‘How do you know that, Mario? The publisher wouldn’t give me the text, not without an order from an English court.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed, ‘but his editor did answer two specific questions that I put to him. That was one of them. There’s no reference to the Glasgow murder in the book.’

  ‘And the other?’

  McGuire grinned. ‘Guess.’

  ‘Reid and Noele McClair?’

  ‘Spot on. That wasn’t mentioned either.’

  ‘Reid and Noele what?’ Cheeky asked, then gulped. ‘Sorry, I’m not really part of this discussion.’

  ‘You live with it,’ McGuire reassured her. ‘Reid and Noele. That’s all.’

  ‘I see,’ she murmured, reddening slightly. ‘But he’s, he was . . .’

  ‘You’re giving away your youth, Ms McCullough,’ Dorward told her. ‘They did, I can assure you. I—’

  ‘Enough, Arthur,’ Haddock declared. ‘Anyway, what I’m saying now is that the gaffer finding the literal stiff in the Spanish freezer, and the Spanish autopsy finding what it did, it’s turned my happy life upside down. I do have a murder inquiry on my hands and a high-profile one at that. If that wasn’t enough, I’ve got no known crime scene, no physical evidence and no forensics.’

  ‘But apart from that, President Lincoln,’ Dorward tittered, ‘did you enjoy the play?’

  ‘Eh . . . fuck off, Arthur.’

  ‘Only kidding, lad,’ the scientist said, still smiling.

  ‘What about his car?’ McGuire asked him. ‘We’ve still got it, I assume. Is it worth re-examining that?’

  ‘We will if you want, but it was clean last time. My son examined it; if you don’t trust him, I’ll do it myself, but you won’t find anything, I promise you that.’ He looked across the table. ‘There’s always an answer. You can find it if anyone can. If you can’t, obviously this is a very clever murderer you’re tracing, so there’ll be no shame in it.’

  ‘Sauce can do it,’ Cheeky insisted. ‘They can start cleaning the cell, for its new tenant.’

  ‘That’s the spirit,’ McGuire said. ‘It reminds me of something Maggie said to me when we were married, that behind every successful man there stands an astonished mother-in-law.’ His three companions laughed and so none of them noticed him wince. ‘Anyway, Cheeky,’ he continued, ‘there’s a reason for this as you know.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, instantly serious. ‘You’re going to tell me how my daughter comes to be related to a thirty-year-old skeleton buried on my family’s land.’

  ‘I’m going to tell you more than that, I’m afraid. Arthur’s team have finished their analysis of the DNA sample you gave us.’

  Feeling a fluttering in her belly, she reached out and took her husband’s hand. ‘And you’re going to tell me that the male skeleton’s my father?’ she asked. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘No,’ McGuire replied. ‘I’m not. Cheeky, what has your mother Inez told you about your father?’

  ‘My mother?’ she snorted. ‘My mother’s hardly ever told me anything. About my dad, certainly not. When I got old enough to wonder, I did ask her. I was ten, and she’d come back from living with a bloke in Glasgow. I said to her, “Mum, who’s my dad?” Know what she said? “That’s none of your fucking business.” She actually said that, and she told me that if I ever asked her again, she’d have the skin off my back. I think I stopped speaking to her after that. Granny Abby was my real mum; she always was.’

  ‘No.’ McGuire met her eye.

  He held her gaze, gathering his thoughts, realising the importance not only of what he was about to say, but of the way he said it. In common with most young cops who had ever patrolled an urban area, he had been despatched on several occasions to deliver what was commonly known as ‘the death message’, to arrive on the doorstep of a person or a family and deliver news that would change their existence for ever and might break them irreparably. For some junior officers, it had been part of a job from which they would clock off at the end of the shift, leaving it all behind, banishing the day’s events from their memory before they even reached home or the pub or wherever habit or fancy took them. For the young Mario McGuire it had been part of a vocation, his calling to protect and serve. When the need arose, when the order was given, he always bore in mind the words of the sergeant on his training course, that he should always strive to deliver the cruellest tidings in the kindest way.

  That principle was in his thoughts as he looked across the table. ‘Cheeky,’ he said, softly, ‘the male skeleton in the forest, he’s your uncle. The other one, the one that we believe to be Naomi Trott . . . comparison of your DNA with hers proves beyond any doubt . . .’ he drew a breath, summoning a calmness that he hoped would convey itself to her, ‘. . . that she’s your mother.’

  Sixty-One

  ‘Are you all right, Sauce?’ Detective Sergeant Tarvil Singh was genuinely concerned. He had never known Sauce Haddock to be ‘not himself’, but that afternoon there was no doubt that he was distracted.

  The DCI blinked and stared at him. ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Nothing,’ the huge Sikh said, quickly. ‘I’m speaking out of turn, boss, sorry.’

  ‘No,’ Haddock sighed, ‘you’re right. I feel as if you and I have been landed right in it, the way the Matthew Reid inquiry’s developed. With the Perthshire investigation underway at the same time, the team’s stretched. Noele’s got both Jackie and young Benjamin with her in Dundee. I’m left with you, you big useless lump.’

  ‘Say what you really think, why don’t you?’ Singh grunted, with a smile, not buying the explanation but being careful not to let that show. ‘You’re right. I hadn’t really thought about resources, given that the Reid thing’s only really blown up this morning. Could we bring Tiggy back here?’

  ‘We could, but we’re not going to. That inquiry has its own special circumstances. If push comes to shove, I can bring in people from other units. One word to the ACC through in Glasgow will do that.’

  ‘It’ll come to it, no question. We couldn’t bring Noele back anyway, could we?’

  Haddock frowned. ‘No?’

  The DS’s smile widened. ‘Come on, Sauce. She’s as recused from Reid as you are from Perthshire. That happened on your wife’s land . . .’

  ‘Her company’s,’ Haddock corrected him.

  ‘How can you split a hair that fine?’ he asked. ‘Noele? In the Reid inquiry, she’s a witness. Don’t deny it, please,’ he added.

  ‘How did you know that?’

  ‘If I didn’t know it, I really would be a big useless lump,’ Singh observed, quietly. ‘She told me she’d a date with Reid; that was a couple of days before he disappeared. A few days after that we’ve got his genetic fingerprint, and that’s after we’ve been told by the forensic team that his house and his car had been wiped clean of everything. I’m a detective, Sauce. I didn’t have to ask Noele to work it out.’

  The DCI swivelled in his chair. ‘Remind me never to underestimate you, Sarge.’ He paused. ‘Since you seem to be on a hot streak, tell me how we’re going to revive this investigation that never was.’

  The large man laughed. ‘Ah, we’re probably stuffed there. This is a very clever and resourceful person we’re dealing with. You’re a realist; you know that most crimes are solved through the criminal’s mistakes not the cleverness of the cops. All we can do is follow procedures, like we did last year. The difference is that we know a bit more now. How am I doing so far, boss?’

  ‘You’re right,’ the DCI conceded. ‘I’m thinking too that we might be looking for more than one person. We start with the assumption that Reid was killed at home; the extent of the clean-up makes that the likeliest location. You’ve been to the house; you know that he must have chosen it for privacy. It’s not overlooked by any neighbours and it can’t be seen from the street, so it could all have happened there, unobserved. But setting up the apparent suicide, that’s another matter. It involved moving his car up to the Whiteadder reservoir and leaving it there. It takes a minimum of half an hour to get there from Gullane, longer if you avoid Haddington. If there was only one person, how did they get back? The likeliest scenario is that there were two. It would have taken a second vehicle to move the body, probably a van following the car and picking up the driver before heading south.’