Chapter 11 #2
‘Here, don’t go shooting the messenger, I’m only saying.
You know what people are like. They’re dirty bastards, the lot of them,’ he said.
He shifted in his chair, like there was something uncomfortable going on in the downstairs department.
‘Lest we forget that lad sticking the ginger up his arse.’
Ben looked away to the window, to some distant horizon that turned his eyes glassy and made his head shake slowly from side to side.
‘Dirty, dirty bastards,’ he muttered.
‘I mean, hopefully it’s not a dog,’ Tyler said, steering things away from the ginger incident. ‘But given the Johnny wrapper being found where it was, I’d say someone’s definitely been shagging someone back there.’
‘Could’ve been the victim and his wife,’ Sinead suggested.
Tyler smiled kindly and patted her on the leg. ‘Oh, Sinead. Aye, maybe it was that, right enough,’ he said, smiling like he was talking to a sweet, innocent child.
‘What? It could’ve been!’ she protested, lifting his hand away.
‘They’ve got a massive house. Plenty of room for that sort of thing, I’d have thought,’ Logan said.
‘Maybe they’re just into it, though,’ Dave reasoned. ‘Car shagging, or whatever. Dogging. That old boy says he’s caught a few folk at it. Seemed pretty fixated on the idea, actually. He was pretty much foaming at the mouth at one point, just thinking about it.’
Logan wasn’t buying it. He’d seen Eleanor Belov. He’d seen her house, and her hair, and the way she carried herself. Getting down and dirty on top of a manky dog blanket in a lay-by somewhere didn’t seem like her style.
‘Although, actually… They’ve got kids, haven’t they?’ Dave said. ‘That would suggest they might not be using contraception.’
‘Oh, you’d be surprised!’ was all Sinead had to say on that particular matter.
‘Rest of the car was pretty clean,’ Tyler said, moving swiftly on. ‘You wouldn’t know he had kids. No baby seat, no crumbs, sweet wrappers, anything like that. Carpets had been hoovered recently, so the Johnny wrapper couldn’t have been there long.’
‘So, he’d been at it recently?’ Dave said. ‘Maybe that old boy with the Toblerone was onto something, right enough.’
Logan studied the Big Board. There were far more questions on it than answers. Where had Victor been going? Why was the blanket there? Did it belong to the killer?
The condom wrapper, the glass, the footprints, the dog hair. They were all data points right now, but not pointing anywhere particularly helpful.
And what about the business associate Victor’s brothers had been waiting for? He hadn’t turned up. Logan knew that for a fact, because he’d sat just along the road from the entrance to the driveway until a couple of Uniforms in an unmarked car had responded to his call and come to relieve him.
Nobody had turned up at the house. Two BMWs had left at just after three a.m. The gates had closed behind them, and had remained that way ever since.
Questions. Almost nothing but questions.
But getting answers, it turned out, was going to have to wait.
Nobody had heard Detective Superintendent Mitchell enter the room. She’d somehow slipped into a room full of police officers without any of them noticing until she cleared her throat to deliberately draw their attention.
‘Apologies for interrupting,’ she said.
She was not a large woman, and unlike her predecessor, she rarely felt the need to raise her voice. Also unlike her predecessor, she had never loudly referred to a more junior officer as ‘a calamitous clusterfuck of assorted flavours of hot excrement.’
So, she had that working in her favour.
Despite rarely shouting, though, and despite the lack of obscenity in her vocabulary, something about the way she carried herself left you in little doubt that she was the person in charge.
Even Logan felt it, which, considering his general disdain for anyone in authority who wasn’t himself, spoke volumes.
‘Ma’am,’ he said, with an implied, ‘what the hell are you doing here?’ left trailing in the air behind it.
‘Two reasons,’ Mitchell said. Even though Jack’s question had gone unspoken, she had heard it loud and clear. ‘First, I wanted to let DC Neish and DC Bell know that interview dates have been locked down.’
Sinead tensed.
Tyler drew in a breath.
‘Tomorrow,’ the detective superintendent continued. ‘I know timing’s not great with everything, but it’s the only time the full interview panel can get together. You’ll both get emails today with times. Good luck to both of you.’
‘Thank you, ma’am,’ Sinead said.
‘Aye, eh, cheers, ma’am,’ Tyler said, and he looked slightly annoyed that he hadn’t been the one to say it first.
‘The other reason I’m here, and I’m sorry to do this to you, given’—Mitchell flicked her gaze to the Big Board—‘everything we’ve got going on.’
She shifted her attention towards Hamza. For the second time that morning, he looked like he wanted his chair to swallow him whole.
‘I’m afraid I have some very bad news for DI Khaled.’
Hamza stared, first at the detective superintendent, then at Ben, then around at the meticulously organised office they’d both been pulled into.
‘A photo shoot, ma’am?’ The words felt strangely shaped and alien in Hamza’s mouth. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You’ll remember, during the interview, when we discussed the duties of a detective inspector, yes?
’ Mitchell posited from behind her desk.
‘Alongside the duties you were already familiar with was additional community outreach work. Talking with local councillors. Advising regional committees. Acting as a visible liaison between the force and the general populace. Serving the public trust, so to speak.’
‘Aye, but…’ Hamza tipped his head back in the direction of the door. ‘There’s an active murder investigation.’
‘There are also seventy members of the public, two Inverness-based council members, and a raft of local press representatives waiting at a freshly renovated community centre, where you’re supposed to be…’
Mitchell shifted a sheet of paper on her desk so she could see the page below. The movement was precisely coordinated, like the rest of her.
‘Presenting an award to a rural community vigilance scheme that has just been awarded funding from the National Lottery.’
She crossed her hands atop the paper.
‘They’re going to buy new vests, I believe.’ Mitchell tapped her fingers together. ‘This has all been arranged since last week.’
‘I… I didn’t know anything about it,’ Hamza protested.
‘You should have. You were emailed. There was a memo put in your mail slot.’
Hamza tried not to let the panic show on his face. There had been a lot of emails since he’d stepped into the new role, and though he’d scanned his pigeonhole for any urgent-looking physical mail, a lot of the rest of it still sat waiting to be opened.
A few days, that was all he was behind by. He just needed a few more to get systems in place, and to get things running smoothly.
But he’d missed this. He’d missed a direct order from the detective superintendent. Twice.
How could it all be going so wrong so quickly?
‘I, eh, I don’t suppose… Is there no way…?’
‘If the next word out of your mouth is going to be “cancel,” Detective Inspector, I’d think very carefully. The answer to that is no. Not without major embarrassment. Not without a number of questions being asked of me and so, subsequently, of you.’
She gave that a moment to sink in. Hamza’s shoulders seemed to stoop under the weight of it.
‘This is the job, Hamza. It’s a juggle. Yes, of course the case is important. Of course it takes priority if it has to. But DCI Logan has things under control for now. The team has things under control. Your job, like it or not, is out there today. Not here. Is that understood?’
Ben clapped a hand down on Hamza’s shoulder before the DI could stumble over a reply of his own. ‘Don’t you worry yourself about a thing, Suki.’
Mitchell’s nostrils flared at his usage of her first name, but they both knew there was hee-haw she could do about it. Ben was here as a consultant, not an officer. As far as anyone here was concerned, he was doing them a favour.
And if he just happened to be loving every moment, so be it.
‘Take my word for it,’ he said. ‘DI Khaled has got this in the bag!’