Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Detective Superintendent Mitchell was all but blocking the door to the Incident Room when Logan, Tyler, and Hamza reached the top of the stairs.
‘Jack. I need a word,’ she told him. ‘My office.’
‘We’ve just had a shout come in,’ Logan replied. He moved as if to pass her, but she didn’t take the hint.
‘I know. I passed it on,’ she said. ‘DI Khaled is here. He can run with it. Yes, Detective Inspector?’
Hamza blinked. Stared.
Logan was all but squaring up to her, ready to argue the point. Ready to fight his way into that room, if he had to.
Ben’s advice from the car echoed in the DI’s ears. His job now wasn’t about managing scenes or cracking cases. His job was about managing the man who was right now dangerously close to saying or doing something he might regret.
‘Yes, ma’am. I can handle things until DCI Logan gets back,’ he confirmed.
Mitchell nodded. ‘Good. Jack?’
She kept blocking the door until he finally relented and went storming off in the direction of her office.
Mitchell looked from Hamza to Tyler in turn, and there was something there in her expression. Something neither detective could quite put their finger on, but which made their hearts beat a little faster, and their stomach tighten into knots.
‘We all need a conversation after this,’ she said, then she followed Logan along the corridor.
Tyler and Hamza waited until she had rounded the corner at the far end before turning to one another.
‘The hell was that about?’ Tyler asked.
‘No idea. Didn’t sound good, though,’ Hamza reasoned.
From behind them came a jolly-sounding ping. The lift doors opened, and Ben Forde emerged, humming quietly below his breath.
He stopped when he saw the detectives standing in the corridor outside the Incident Room.
‘OK, then.’ Ben tucked his hands into his trouser pockets and rocked back on his heels. ‘What did I miss?’
‘Sit down, Jack.’
Logan folded his hands behind his back as the detective superintendent closed the office door behind them.
‘I don’t have time.’
‘You have as much time as I say you have,’ Mitchell insisted. She pointed to the chair that sat across the desk from her own. ‘Sit. Now.’
Logan hesitated, fighting his instinct to argue. Arguing would get him nowhere. Arguing would just slow all this down.
He sat. The chair squeaked as if alarmed by the sheer weight of him.
Mitchell took her own seat across the desk. She ran her hand back and forth across her mouth, fingertips digging into her cheeks. Whatever was coming, she didn’t want to say it. She didn’t want to speak the words into existence.
‘There a problem, ma’am?’
Mitchell looked away, took a breath, composed herself.
‘Yes. Maybe. Technically no, I suppose, but… There might be.’
‘That was a lot of words to not say very much,’ Logan replied. ‘What is it that—?’
‘Bosco Maximuke’s out of prison.’
The world seemed to grind into slow motion. The sound of the traffic passing on the bypass faded away, replaced by a roaring in Logan’s ears, like the rushing of sand through a timer.
‘What?’
It was all he could think to ask. All the pressure in his chest would allow him to say.
‘I wasn’t informed. If I had been, you’d have been the first to know,’ Mitchell assured him.
‘Out? Bosco Maximuke is out? How? How can he be out?’ Logan demanded. ‘He went down for twelve years.’
‘Four years ago,’ Mitchell pointed out. ‘He’d have done another two at most.’
‘So why the fuck isn’t he?’
The detective superintendent drew in a long, slow breath.
‘Well?’ Logan demanded.
‘He made some kind of deal. Provided evidence that helped the Procurator Fiscal net a bigger fish.’
‘A bigger fish?’ Logan jerked forward in his chair, a finger stabbing at the desk. ‘He stood there and watched while that bastard Owen Petrie was going to kill us! Sinead. Tyler. Hamza. Ben. All of us. He stood there, and he fucking watched!’
His anger bubbled up, bubbled over, until his voice was barely more than a growl.
‘And Maddie. My daughter. He was going to stand by while that… While that sick bastard…’
‘I know, Jack. I’m aware. But, ultimately, he stopped that happening.’
‘Only because I tricked him!’ Logan roared.
He was on his feet, he realised. When had he done that? When had that happened?
‘Because if I hadn’t, then he was going to stand there. Watching. Fucking revelling in it!’
‘We don’t know that.’
‘Aye! We do! I fucking know that!’
‘All we got him on was false imprisonment. That’s what we knew for sure would stick. That’s how we knew we’d get him off the streets.’
‘For four years? Twelve, I could live with. Six, if it came to it, but four? For what that bastard did?’
Mitchell clasped her hands together. ‘I’m as unhappy about it as you are.’
‘Oh, I doubt that very much!’ Logan spat back at her. ‘They should’ve told us. We should’ve had fucking warning of this!’
‘They should. We should,’ the detective superintendent agreed. ‘And rest assured, I’ll be raising that at the highest level.’
Logan was sitting again. He hadn’t noticed that happening, either, though he got a sense that his legs had given way beneath him.
Olivia. Christ. What about Olivia? What was he going to say to her? How was she going to feel about her father being free?
How was it going to affect her? Them? Shona?
Him?
A thought hit him. He was annoyed that it had taken this long.
‘When?’
Mitchell pursed her lips, like she didn’t want to say.
‘When did he get out?’ Logan pressed.
‘Five days ago,’ Mitchell said.
‘Five days? Five fucking days?’
Logan was on his feet again, but it was deliberate this time.
‘I’m getting him brought in.’
‘Jack…’
‘Four days after he’s released, one of the heirs to his empire winds up with his throat cut in a lay-by? And we’re supposed to believe that’s a coincidence? No. Bollocks. I’m bringing him in.’
Mitchell sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose, like she was fending off a headache. ‘We need to be careful.’
‘Careful? Aye. No bother. You can watch me carefully drag the evil bastard through the corridors by his fucking eyelids!’
‘That’s enough!’
She didn’t shout. As usual, she didn’t have to. Detective Superintendent Mitchell didn’t have to get loud to make her voice heard.
‘I get that you’re upset, Jack. For all kinds of reasons. For him being freed, for what he did to you all, for what it means for your home situation. For the sheer disrespect of being among the last to bloody know.’
That last part was said through gritted teeth. Clearly, Mitchell was feeling the sting of that one, too.
‘But we’re in an upsetting job, you and I. We face upsetting things every day. And part of that job is learning to compartmentalise those things to the best of our abilities. Bosco Maximuke is free. That’s not an attack on you, or a slight on me. It’s just how it is.’
‘It’s not right,’ Logan muttered, but his initial burst of rage had burned itself out, and there wasn’t the same fire in him now.
‘No. But it’s where we are, and it’s what we’re dealing with,’ Mitchell told him. She tapped her thumbs together, and considered her next few words carefully. ‘Besides, I am assured that his time behind bars has changed him for the better.’
‘Changed him? No.’ Logan refused to believe that. ‘People like Bosco Maximuke don’t change. They evolve. They adapt. Deep down, though, underneath it all, they’re the same monsters they always were.’
He pushed the chair back under the desk and leaned down, gripping the back of it. ‘I’m bringing him in.’
‘Jack…’
‘I wasn’t asking for your permission, ma’am,’ Logan told her. He straightened and shoved his hands into his pockets, if only to stop himself bunching them into fists. ‘I’m bringing him in. That’s all there is to it.’
‘Obviously, I’m not giving you permission. With everything that happened, you can’t be considered objective in anything involving Bosco Maximuke,’ Mitchell said.
‘What the hell are you saying?’ Logan demanded.
Mitchell started to reply, then stopped and took a second to compose her thoughts.
‘I trust you. I trust your team. I trust you all to do the right thing. Not the easy thing. Not the thing that will satisfy some personal vendetta. The thing that will get results.’
‘Oh, I’ll get results alright.’
‘Results that will stick. Results that will ensure that the right person, the person responsible for the events of this case’—she prodded the desk with a finger—‘this case, not a historic one, will face justice for their actions.’
Logan opened his mouth to reply, but she spoke over him, shutting him down before he could say something he might regret.
‘If this road leads to Bosco Maximuke, or if I think your opinions on that man are clouding your judgement, then you can’t be involved in this investigation, Jack. You, DI Khaled, any of them. You just can’t be.’
The words hung there between them, souring the air.
‘So, do you want to send someone to arrest Bosco Maximuke on the basis that you don’t like him?’ she asked. Her eyes darted to the door. ‘Or do you want to go back out there, consider the evidence, and do your bloody job?’
The hubbub of the Incident Room descended into silence when Logan pushed through the doors.
For a moment, nobody spoke. Nobody dared. They all just waited for Logan to say something, but the DCI just stood there, a silent monolith with lines of worry carved across his brow.
Tyler, as usual, was the first to crack.
‘You alright, boss?’
Logan breathed. In. Out. Slow. Steady.
‘Sir?’ Sinead rose from her chair. ‘Everything OK?’
Logan looked across their faces and saw them, not as they were now, but as they were back then. Back in that room. Back with Owen Petrie and Bosco Maximuke.
Terrified. Helpless.
Just like he had been.
‘We’ve, eh, we’ve got something interesting, boss,’ Tyler said, tentatively inching the conversation along like he was stepping out onto a frozen loch. ‘That shooting, out by Forres. His name’s…’
He looked down at the paperwork on his desk.
‘Kendrick Crichton,’ Sinead said, taking the reins. ‘He’s connected to the Belov’s operation.’ She indicated the stacks of boxes on the desks and on the floor around them. ‘If you think this is a lot of paperwork, you should see what CID has got on him. We’d need a van for it.’
Logan shifted his weight from one foot to the other. His stubble rasped as he ran a hand across his chin.
‘Let me guess. Stepped in to fill the gap left after Bosco Maximuke was sent down?’
‘Pretty much, aye,’ Dave Davidson confirmed. He held up a stack of notes. ‘CID has him pegged as one up the chain from Victor Belov, but they’ve got nothing concrete.’
‘And get this, boss.’ Tyler picked up his notepad and tapped it. His excitement was palpable. ‘He’s got a dog. A golden retriever. Guess what its name is.’
Logan didn’t get a chance to.
‘Goldie!’ Tyler cried. ‘His dog’s name is Goldie!’
Ben, who had been sitting slightly apart from the rest of the team, enjoying his final few sandwiches, glanced around at the floor, suddenly remembering something.
‘Speaking of dugs, where’s Taggart? I’ve no’ seen him. He’d usually be sat here giving me the eyes.’
‘He’s at home,’ Logan said, striding the rest of the way into the room.
Ben frowned. ‘What, on his own?’
‘No. Olivia’s there. She’s off sick with…’
He stopped talking. Stopped walking. Just stopped right there in the middle of the room.
Olivia was at home.
Olivia was alone.
‘Shite,’ Jack muttered. He reached into his pocket for his phone. ‘We need to get on to Palmer’s team, get Uniform to get up to Forres and secure—’
‘Already in hand, sir,’ Hamza said.
Logan paused, mid-dial. He met Hamza’s eye and gave him a nod. ‘Good work. Don’t call me sir.’
The others started packing up, getting organised, making plans for the trip out east. Logan stood in the middle of it all, at the eye of the storm, listening to the ringing, and ringing, and ringing of Olivia’s phone.
The girl was never off the thing.
It was always in her hand.
She wasn’t answering.
‘I’m going to meet you there,’ Logan said. He was already halfway to the door, his mind already miles away. ‘There’s something I need to go check up on.’
Before anyone had a chance to ask him any more, he was gone. They all watched in silence once again as the door swung closed and settled into place.
‘What was all that about?’ Tyler wondered.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ Hamza said, grabbing for his jacket. ‘We need to get out there as quick as we can.’
‘What’s the big rush?’ asked Dave. ‘Thought you said it was all in hand.’
‘It is,’ Hamza confirmed. He knocked back a swig of cold coffee and grimaced. ‘But Forres technically isn’t our patch. It’s the Aberdeen team. So, if we want to stake our claim to it, we’d better make sure we get there first.’