Having put a face to the name she called the number Biggs had sent her, only to be sent immediately to voicemail and invited to leave a message. ‘Mr Lloyd,’ she began, after a tone, ‘this is Detective Inspector Noele McClair of Edinburgh Serious Crimes squad. I need to talk to you about your late client, Mr Gavin Ayre. I’d be very grateful if you can reply to this message as soon as you receive it.’

  She pocketed her phone and went through to her small kitchen. Her craving for a coffee was close to desperate, but she had sworn to abstain for as long as she was feeding the baby. Instead, she took a bottle of aerated water from the fridge. She was in the act of uncapping it when her ring tone chirped. ‘McClair,’ she announced crisply as she put the phone to her ear.

  ‘Detective Inspector? This is Tim Lloyd, architect. Your message said my late client. What do you mean? Is Gavin dead?’

  ‘Yes,’ she confirmed. ‘I’m sorry to tell you that he was shot dead on Friday morning.’

  ‘God,’ Lloyd murmured. ‘I’m driving just now. I heard a news report at the top of the hour on the car radio, about the police announcing they’re investigating the murder of a man they can’t yet name. Then I had a call from my office, then I got your voice message and pulled into a layby to call you back. Are you telling me that was him they were talking about, that it was Gavin?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Were you and he close?’ she asked.

  ‘He was my client,’ he said, ‘but we got on, yes.’

  ‘And you actually met, unlike Mr Biggs the builder and him.’

  ‘Of course we did.’

  ‘In that case, would you be prepared to formally identify Mr Ayre’s body? We’re having trouble finding someone to do it.’

  ‘If it’ll help and there’s no alternative, yes, I’ll do that. I’m not surprised by your difficulty. Gavin was a very private man. As I said, I got to know him reasonably well, but I can’t recall him ever letting anything slip about his background.’

  ‘How did the two of you meet?’

  ‘He walked into my office one day, said that he’d bought a plot in East Lothian and was going to build a house on it. He told my partner Sue and me that he’d looked at our work online along with a few others and that we fitted the bill, so were we interested? Not just in designing it, he said, but in project managing the construction, because he worked internationally so he couldn’t do it himself. We jumped at it of course, especially when he told us what the budget was. Up to five million construction, over and above our fees.’

  McClair nodded, as if he had been in the room. ‘Was he around much during the building?’

  ‘Hardly ever,’ Lloyd told her. ‘He left me to choose the builder, which was good, for both of us. Gerry Biggs’ company wasn’t actually the lowest bidder; another contractor was marginally cheaper, but I had worked with both of them and factored reliability into the choice. A hands-on client might not have let me do that.’

  ‘Did you get to know Ayre at all?’ the detective asked. ‘Beyond the professional, I mean.’

  ‘Mmm,’ he murmured. ‘He visited East Lothian a couple of times, at weekends when there was no activity on site. On each occasion he turned up with no more than a day’s notice. The second time, when the job was almost done, was the longest I spent with him. I took him up to my golf club . . .’

  ‘Would that be Witches Hill?’ McClair interjected.

  ‘Yes, that’s right. He said he’d never played the game, so I gave him an old driver from my locker and let him hit a few balls. He was okay for a beginner, so we played a few holes. The next time I saw him he was a member. We played a couple of months back with another couple of guys. He was desperately slow, though. In fact, we held up Sir Robert Skinner and his son for the last few holes. I was embarrassed by that; one of the other guys apologised to them in the locker room afterwards.’ The architect paused for a brief moment. ‘And yet,’ he resumed, ‘now that I think about it, in all the time I spent with him, I still didn’t learn anything about him. Funny people we Scots, are we not? We have this phobia about being thought to be nosey . . . or maybe we’re just inherently polite. Gavin didn’t volunteer anything about himself, and I never thought to ask.’

  ‘Was he Scottish?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Lloyd replied. ‘If his accent was anything to go by, he wasn’t. It was transatlantic; that’s how I’d describe it. But I’m almost certain he was Canadian.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’

  ‘Because of the way he said one word, “house”. I’ve been to Ontario a few times. It took me a while to notice it but when they say the “ow” sound, it comes out Scottish. A lot of Scots migrated to Canada so it’s natural, I suppose, if part of our accent’s been assimilated.’ He took a breath, ‘Does that help you?’

  ‘It might,’ McClair conceded. ‘It’s another avenue for us. We’re hoping that when we get into the house all our unresolved questions will be answered. My boss is meant to be putting a forensic team in there this morning.’

  She heard Lloyd laugh, softly. ‘How are they going to get in?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re taking a locksmith, I suppose.’

  ‘In that case he’d better be good. There are no locks as such. Entry’s by keypad on every main door: to the house and to the stable too. That was Gavin’s stipulation. It’s a high-tech system with no keys. It can’t be drilled out, and your standard police battering ram will just bounce off it. I don’t see how you’re getting in without the code.’

  She sighed. ‘That’s bloody magic! We know nothing else about Mr Ayre so how are we going to get that?’

  ‘You could try asking me,’ the architect suggested quietly. ‘The system was installed by a specialist firm from Switzerland: I was there when it was programmed. A pass code was needed and they asked me, so I used the first thing that came into my head. It’s possible Gavin could have changed it but not without going through the installers, and to get to them he’d have had to go through me. “Could he have asked my secretary?” you might ask. Yes. “Would she have told me?” Certainly.’

  ‘Is this where you tell me you’ve forgotten it?’ McClair sighed.

  ‘No,’ Lloyd replied, ‘but it might be where I have to ask my lawyer whether I’m at liberty to disclose it.’

  ‘Which would take us to where we have to get a disclosure order from the Sheriff . . . or charge you with obstructing the police,’ she added, with a light laugh.

  ‘But my lawyer is expensive,’ he continued, ‘so maybe I won’t bother asking him. Your people also need to know that there’s an alarm system as well as the keypad entry; belt and braces. I used a local provider for that rather than one of the big boys; again, someone I know and trust, like Gerry Biggs. The control panel’s just inside the door; you open the keypad then deactivate the alarm. To avoid confusion I set them up with the same code. It’s the Queen’s birthday . . . the late Queen, not the new one.’

  ‘Which birthday?’ she asked. ‘Unlike the rest of the world she had two.’

  ‘The real one,’ Lloyd said. ‘Not the official one where they troop the colour. But,’ he paused, ‘in the code, the numbers are reversed.’

  Nineteen

  ‘Six . . . two . . . four . . . zero . . . one . . . two,’ Sauce Haddock dictated. Detective Inspector Tarvil Singh keyed in each number carefully, ensuring that his massive digit did not accidentally press more than one number simultaneously. On the stroke of ‘two’, there was a click and the massive door swung open seemingly of its own volition.

  ‘What does this level of protection say to you, big man?’ the superintendent asked as the pair, each wearing a disposable sterile tunic, stepped into a great airy hall, lit by a cupola above their heads.

  ‘It takes me right back to my earliest days in the police, bursting open steel doors in Pilton, going in fast and hard before they had time to flush the drugs down the lavvy. I was always the guy that got to swing the ram, because I could do the job in one go. The rest took three or more, and by the time you got in you could hear the cistern. It wasn’t just Pilton either,’ he added. ‘There were dealers in posher parts of the city than that but they all had the steel door in common.’ His laugh boomed, unexpectedly. ‘I remember once we got sent to the wrong address, a terraced house in the New Town. I swung the knocker and the door just splintered. It turned out that the owner was an advocate who’d given a certain detective constable a hard time in the witness box. No prizes for guessing who was behind the bogus tip, but the bosses never could pin it on him.’

  ‘Was it a name I might know?’ Haddock enquired.

  ‘Yes, but I’m not going to share it, just in case you go looking for him when you make Assistant Chief.’

  The superintendent grinned. ‘You’re getting ahead of yourself, Tarvil.’

  ‘No, I’m not and we both know it.’

  ‘Maybe I don’t want that,’ he suggested, voicing a thought that had been occupying his quieter moments.

  ‘Sure,’ Singh laughed, dismissively, ‘like my wife doesn’t want to go to Barbados this Christmas.’

  His movement triggered the alarm system. Quickly, Haddock moved to the control panel and silenced it with the deactivation code. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘you can bring in Jackie and the search team.’

  The DI stepped outside and waved to Wright, who had been waiting in a seven-seater vehicle with six other officers. She led them into the house where they grouped together in the hall.

  ‘Nine of us,’ Haddock said. ‘Enough for an efficient search. This isn’t a crime scene, but we’re dressed as if it was, and I want you all to behave that way. Don’t rip the place apart, don’t make a mess; leave everything as it was. We’re looking for personal items that will tell us who this man was. Phone, computer, documents, business correspondence, personal letters, everything. If you find a birthday card, we’ll want to know who sent it.’

  ‘Do we think this guy was dodgy?’ a constable called out. The man was a veteran; possibly as much as ten years older than the detective superintendent. The edge to his tone made it clear that he knew it.

  ‘That would be, do we think this guy was dodgy . . . sir?’ Singh’s eyes were cold as he stared at the speaker. For all his size he was not an intimidating figure: unless he chose to be.

  ‘We’ve got no specific reason to believe so,’ Haddock replied briskly. ‘But in my experience,’ he paused for a beat, but it was enough to send a message, ‘when someone reveals as little about themself as Mr Ayre did, there are usually reasons beyond them being just naturally reclusive. But let’s proceed and see what we find. Report everything to DS Wright; she’s the coordinator. DI Singh and I will search the stable. We’d do the swimming pool as well,’ he added, with a grin, ‘but Tarvil can’t swim, and if he fell in, I wouldn’t fancy hauling him out.’

  As the search team dispersed, the two senior officers stepped outside. The front of the house overlooked the wide Firth of Forth, through a stand of pines with trunks so tall and narrow that they would never obstruct the view. The stable was in a separate block, behind the house, located in such a way that it was out of the sight of the neighbouring properties from most angles. It had a pitched roof and high double doors that looked high enough to accommodate horse and rider.

  ‘What would you call this lot, Sauce?’ Singh wondered as he looked around. ‘A villa? A mansion? A palace?’

  ‘When you’ve spent that amount of money, you can call it anything you fucking like,’ Haddock observed. ‘As far as the planning authority’s concerned it’s a detached dwelling with an out-building and that’s it.’

  ‘Will you and Cheeky be moving into something like this?’

  The superintendent stopped and looked, unsmiling, at his colleague. ‘I’ll say this only once, mate,’ he replied. ‘My wife inherited a fortune. I didn’t. Its use, as it affects her, that’s her business. As it affects us, that’s a joint decision, but it will not involve a seaside gin palace, that’s for sure. We’ll do what’s best for our kids. End of story.’

  ‘Understood,’ Singh said, quietly. ‘I didn’t mean to rattle your cage.’

  ‘You didn’t, don’t worry about it.’ As they moved on, he continued. ‘Does anything strike you about the layout of this place?’

  ‘Not really. What are you seeing?’

  ‘It’s minimum maintenance. Monoblock paving, sculptures, all sorts, but no grass. It’s as if Ayre wanted as few people here as possible, gardeners, cleaners, what have you. It strikes me as an extension of his obvious obsession with privacy.’

  ‘There’s worse faults in a man.’

  ‘Maybe, but why would you build something like this, when as far as we can see it’s all just for him and his horse?’

  ‘Dunno,’ the DI said as they reached the stable. He beamed. ‘Maybe he just loved his horse that much. It certainly seems that the animal’s got a nice sea view.’ There was a window to the left of the double entrance door. Through it they could see a wide padded stall, with a manger on one side, stretching back into the building.

  Singh punched the code into the keypad on the right of the frame and once again the doors swung open, seemingly under power. ‘More than just a stable,’ he exclaimed as the two stepped inside. The horse’s stall occupied less than half of the building. Behind it on the left, there was a changing room with built-in storage, a shower and, they saw through its open door, a toilet compartment with a hand basin. The space to the right served as a garage, with a separate up-and-over door. It housed three vehicles: a Land Rover Defender, a sports car and a Triumph Tiger motorcycle.

  ‘That Land Rover would do me,’ the big detective said. ‘I’ve never been a biker, and no way would I fit in that two-seater. What is it, anyway?’

  ‘A Lotus Emira, I think,’ Haddock ventured. ‘It’s modest, compared to everything else we’re seeing here. I was expecting a Ferrari or a Lamborghini.’ He inspected each vehicle, finding nothing in either glove box, or in the door storage compartments. ‘He trusted his security,’ he noted. ‘The keys are in them.’

  Singh moved across to the changing section and opened the three doors. ‘Riding gear,’ he said, looking at a wardrobe section. ‘Formal and waterproof. For the winter, I suppose.’ Alongside were two smaller compartments. One held a few items of equestrian equipment: a tiny saddle, spare stirrups, a short whip. The other was mostly filled by towels. The DI lifted them out, but found nothing else save for a box; he opened it and saw spare keys, two lightning cables and an old sixteen-gigabyte USB drive, irrelevant in the modern era, Singh thought. ‘Anything in the horse’s stall, Sauce?’ he called out.

  ‘Hay and shit,’ the superintendent replied. ‘Large quantities of the latter. Let’s be generous and say he was planning to sweep it out when he got back . . . only he never did. Tarvil, one thing occurs to me. We were assuming that Ayre lived here full time, but didn’t the architect tell Noele that he worked internationally?’

  ‘That’s right,’ his colleague confirmed, re-joining him.

  ‘In that case, what did he do with the horse when he was away?’

  ‘That’s a bloody good question,’ Singh agreed.

  ‘We should get Inspector Hill to ask around. Come on, we’re done here. Let’s see how the team’s getting on.’

  The pair returned to the house to find Jackie Wright in the living room, with her back to them. The window was panoramic; the sunlit view took in four islands including the massive Bass Rock. Beyond, the outline of Fife coastal villages could be seen. The scene appeared to be lost on her as she sorted through the items on a table. She turned at their entry. ‘What we’ve found so far,’ she said. ‘His phone and an Apple MacBook Pro laptop, both password protected, obviously. There’s an iMac desktop in a study just along there; we’ll take that too.’ She held up a watch. ‘Rolex, platinum and diamond. One hundred grand, give or take?’ she wondered. Then another. ‘Breitling Aerospace. More affordable, my girlfriend has one like it. We have his wallet, containing two hundred and forty pounds in cash. Also a Moneze Mastercard and a debit card from his bank in Jersey plus an Amex gold card. Two airline club cards from British Airways and Singapore Air. We have his driving licence, obviously renewed recently because this address is on it. There’s his passport, a new blue one, showing his date of birth; that’s also the same as the old Queen, believe it or not, but only thirty-four years ago. There are no other personal records that we’ve found so far. No birth certificate. I can’t see anything that refers to any other family member.’

  ‘How about photographs?’ Haddock asked.

  ‘There’s nothing,’ Wright replied. ‘No photographs; none at all.’

  ‘Fuck me,’ he whispered. ‘The Gaffer might be right.’

  Singh frowned at him. ‘What?’

  ‘I spoke to Bob Skinner earlier on, just picking his brain. He suggested that Ayre might have been a spook. The way things are here we’re being pointed in that direction. I might need to go back to him. He’s part spook himself; he’s still got contacts way out of my league, or even Mario McGuire’s.’

  ‘Does your average spook own a hundred-grand watch?’

  ‘Whatever Mr Ayre was, there was nothing average about him. We need, I need, to check out that avenue.’ He turned back to the DS. ‘Jackie, what else have they found?’

  ‘Personal items. Shaver, toothbrush, gold cufflinks monogrammed “GA”. Clothing, all of it designer stuff. And yet he didn’t have a big wardrobe. He had two suits, two casual jackets, trousers, jeans, a big Barbour overcoat, a dozen shirts and a white tuxedo with black trousers. They’re all top brands like I said, not mass market; no Marks and Spencer in his wardrobe, not even Charles Tyrwhitt.’

  ‘Who?’ Singh asked.