Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
They started with the glass.
As of yet, Palmer’s team had been unable to identify its origin. The majority of the pieces had been found in the same spot, atop the mud beside the driver’s side door, while a few others had been discovered between three and twelve feet away from the front of the vehicle.
They were around three millimetres thick, and together looked like a cluster of uncut gems. Tests were being run on them to try to find out more, but as of that moment, all they knew was that it was tempered, given how it had shattered, and that it hadn’t come from the victim or his vehicle.
‘What’s Palmer’s best guess?’ asked Sinead.
The silence that followed was eventually broken by the sound of Ben Forde gently clearing his throat.
‘Oh! Sorry!’ Hamza jumped into life like someone had just put a penny in his slot. He flipped through a stack of notes, only for DC Neish to come to his rescue.
‘That’s on my handout, actually,’ Tyler said, looking far too bloody pleased with himself. ‘He’s playing his cards close to his chest on it. It’s the sort of thing you find in shower screens, coffee tables, that sort of thing. Best guess right now is a side window of another vehicle.’
Sinead ran her tongue across the front of her teeth, considering this. ‘There’d be a lot more of it, wouldn’t there? Those things shatter everywhere.’
Tyler looked down at his printout, like the answer might be written there. When it wasn’t, he shrugged.
‘I don’t know. I’m just saying what Palmer told me.’ He set the paper down on the desk. ‘He might’ve said other stuff, but he’s quite hard work, and I struggle not to completely tune him out.’
No one in the room could argue with that sentiment.
‘She’s right enough. About the amount. I’ve smashed a fair few car windows in my time,’ Dave Davidson announced. The questioning looks from the others made him hurriedly clarify. ‘Aye, not breaking into them. My own cars, I mean. Crashes, and that.’
‘That’s it, then. I’m never driving with him again,’ Tyler said.
This made Dave laugh—a dirty cackle at the back of his throat that shook his big barrel chest.
‘Aye, that’s fair,’ he conceded. ‘But Sinead’s not wrong. There’d be hundreds of pieces of glass if it was a side window. Thousands, maybe. I don’t know, I’ve never stopped to count them, but it’s a lot.’
He raised his mug and used it to point to the photograph of the fragments that had been blown up and pinned to the Big Board.
‘How many do we have?’
Sinead and Tyler replied simultaneously, though Tyler spoke louder: ‘Eleven.’
It was then that Logan dropped a bombshell.
‘Twelve.’
Tyler picked up his printout. Sinead checked the board. Everyone else turned their attention to the DCI.
‘Twelve, boss?’ Tyler asked. ‘You sure? Geoff said eleven.’
‘He did, sir. Definitely eleven,’ Sinead confirmed.
Logan crossed to the table beside the Big Board and reached inside the Exhibits box, where the evidence that had been released into their chain of custody was stored. Right now, it was empty. Or so the others had thought, at least.
To their surprise, Jack produced a small transparent bag that, from that distance, seemed to be empty.
‘Shona found it last night.’ He passed the bag to Hamza, who held it up to the light, revealing a single fragment of the same glass discovered at the scene.
‘Where?’ Hamza asked.
‘In an indent in the victim’s forehead,’ Logan explained. ‘Blood on the face and angle of the body hid it at the scene. She’s doing the full PM this morning, but wanted to get this over to us early.’
‘She got any idea what caused it?’ asked Ben. He leaned forward, then sat back again, raising his hands. ‘Sorry, forget I said anything. That’s not why I’m here.’
‘She couldn’t say for certain,’ Logan replied, ignoring everything after the question. ‘But we’ll know more today.’
‘Maybe he headbutted a car window,’ Tyler guessed.
‘That’d be a bold move,’ Dave said. ‘They’re pretty solid. They take a lot to break them.’
‘And yet you’ve somehow managed to shatter multiple,’ Tyler replied. ‘Seriously, never getting in a car with you again.’
‘He’s right,’ Logan said. ‘I mean, both of you are. I’m also not getting in a car again with you, Dave, after the last bloody time. But I mean car windows. Modern ones. Skull would shatter long before the glass did.’
He folded his arms and tapped a finger against a bicep as he considered the board.
‘We’ll come back to it,’ he eventually decided. ‘What’s this about footprints?’
Sinead answered while Tyler was still frantically scanning down his printout.
‘Two sets, sir. In the mud. One walking around at the driver’s side door. Size eight. Boot of some kind. Hiking, maybe, though the mud was wet, so they can’t get a solid read on them.’
‘And the other?’ Logan asked.
‘Found it!’ Tyler declared. ‘Single print, boss. Just one right foot. Maybe a one-legged guy.’
Even as he said that last part, he was wincing at the sound of it.
‘I mean, probably not, though,’ he conceded.
Sinead fought back a smirk. ‘The single print matches the victim’s shoe.’
‘He got out of the car,’ Hamza reasoned. ‘Or started to, anyway.’
That was a possibility, Logan agreed. The dead man hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt.
‘So, someone’s talking to him at the side of the car, and… Actually, that’s a point,’ Logan said. ‘Side window was up. So, if there was someone there, they’d be shouting, not talking. Any of the neighbours report hearing anything?’
‘Nothing, sir,’ Sinead said. ‘Door-to-door was mostly a waste of time. The houses are well back from the road, though, so not really a surprise.’
Logan nodded slowly, sucked in his bottom lip, then turned to Hamza. ‘You put out a shout for any drivers passing at the time? It’s a quiet stretch, but it’s not empty.’
Hamza fumbled his way through a largely indecipherable mess of words.
‘We’ll get on that, Jack,’ Ben said on the DI’s behalf. ‘Soon as we’re done here.’
‘Aye. Clock’s ticking on that,’ Logan said, then he waved vaguely in the direction of Tyler and Sinead to keep things moving along.
Between them, they covered the estimated time of death—between four and five forty-five in the evening, based on when the body had been discovered. Shona might be able to narrow that further, but it was a good enough starting point.
It hadn’t yet been dark at that point. The road would’ve seen steady traffic. If it was a gangland hit, it was a bold one.
Dave recapped the important parts of his interview with Joe Robertson. This didn’t take him long as the old man had, in Dave’s own words, ‘spilled a load of shite.’
The actual meat of what Joe had said about the timing and how he’d found the body seemed legitimate enough, though. He was a solid witness, just difficult to keep on topic.
It was then that Logan dropped his second bombshell of the briefing: Victor Belov’s dog. Or, more accurately, the complete lack thereof.
Palmer’s team had started running tests on the blanket from the back of the car, and were already confident in Logan’s initial assumption that the hair matted through it was canine in origin.
A Golden Retriever was the best guess right now, but whatever the exact breed, where it had come from was the big question.
Eleanor Belov hadn’t just seemed surprised by the dog question, she’d appeared horrified by it. From what little Logan had seen of the house, it was not a place where animals would be welcome. Any dog that jumped up on that couch was likely to be taking its life in its own paws.
‘We also don’t yet know where Victor was going, just that his wife was expecting him home at some point around the time I arrived.
Or maybe earlier,’ Logan said. ‘I want to talk to the widow and the brothers separately. There’s some weird vibe going on between them all that I can’t quite put my finger on. ’
‘Should I have them brought in, Jack?’ Ben asked. He shot a sideways look at the man beside him. ‘We, I mean. Hamza? Should he get them brought in?’
‘I could do that, sir, no problem,’ DI Khaled agreed, just a little too keenly.
Logan shook his head. ‘No. Let’s not go there yet.
There’s something going on, I’m sure of it, but I don’t want to put them on the back foot too soon.
Tyler, you can come with me to the house this morning.
See if we can talk to the wife there on her own.
Sinead, Dave, get me everything you can on the brothers.
Talk to CID, see about this Aberdeen thing they were working on. ’
‘No bother,’ Dave confirmed.
‘And any known associates, while you’re at it. Dig them up. Get me names, histories, criminal charges. I want to know who they were expecting at that house last night, and why they didn’t show face.’
Sinead scribbled a note in her pad. ‘Will do, sir.’
‘There’s one other thing of interest from Scene of Crime, boss,’ Tyler said.
He seemed to forget about what was written on his printout.
Instead, he used it as a pointer to indicate a photo on the Big Board.
‘Found under the passenger seat. Seemed to have slipped down under there from the back seats.’
Logan stepped in closer to the board, tilting his head left and right as he tried to decipher the slightly grainy, blown-up image of what looked like a tiny strip of plastic packaging. It was silvery blue, torn into a long, narrow triangle that was slightly serrated at the top edge.
‘What am I looking at?’ he asked.
‘Come on, boss, it’s not been that long, has it?’ Tyler grinned at him. ‘Condom wrapper. Well, part of one, anyway. Looks like he’s been having it away in the back of the car.’
‘God, I hope he’s no’ been shagging a dug,’ Ben remarked.
He crossed his arms, as if to shield himself from the looks of disgust that were fired in his direction by the other detectives.