Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The house was lovely inside, provided you overlooked the dead man on the kitchen floor, and the brain matter spattered across the cabinets and walls.
It had a sort of farmhouse chic, with wooden ceiling beams, oak floors, and mismatched cabinets chock-full of dog-themed ornaments and knick-knacks.
There were porcelain poodles, bronze beagles, and wee crystal corgis all begging on their hind legs, or playing with balls, or just lying at peace with their sculpted tongues hanging out.
There had to be two hundred of them spread across three different shelving units, all different sizes, some new-looking, others scuffed and chipped away at by careless handling and the passage of time.
‘He liked dugs, then,’ Ben concluded, in the face of what was quite overwhelming evidence.
Hamza nodded to the narrow staircase. Three framed photographs of Golden Retrievers—very possibly the same one—took pride of place along the wall.
‘I think that’s a given, aye,’ he agreed.
‘You haven’t met her yet, have you? Goldie?’ DCI Reeve asked. ‘Poor thing was scared stiff. Just totally losing her mind in here. First guys on the scene called in the Dog Warden. Reckoned they were going to have to tranq the poor girl and knock her out.’
‘And did they?’ Hamza asked.
Reeve smiled and shook his head. ‘Like I said, she was scared, is all. She’s tucked up in the back of my van. Put a blanket down, left her some music playing. She’ll be fine.’
He sighed and shook his head. There was a sudden heaviness to him, like his personal gravity field had been dialled up to maximum.
‘Wish I could say the same for her owner.’
Hamza and Ben turned their attention back to the open kitchen door. From the hallway, they could see most of Kendrick Crichton. Or most of what was left of him, anyway, which was pretty much everything from the neck down.
The air was thick with a sour, acrid aroma that made Hamza instinctively switch to breathing through his mouth. His shoe coverings crinkled as he shuffled in closer to get a better look.
‘Shotgun, we think,’ Reeve said from the back of the line. ‘I mean, we’re pretty much a hundred percent on that.’
Ben peered over Hamza’s shoulder, eyes darting here, there, and everywhere around the room.
‘Blood’s no’ fresh. Been here a good few hours. Must’ve died during the night. Maybe yesterday evening. Afternoon, evening. Killer stood just inside the kitchen. Probably just a step or two further in from where we are here,’ Ben observed. ‘Your man there was facing him at the time.’
He clocked a kitchen chair that lay on its back where it had toppled away from the table. A bowl of soup sat on a placemat that had a picture of a Labrador on it. A spoon lay on the floor between the fallen chair and the body.
‘Sitting down at the time, you think?’ Ben ventured.
Hamza considered the chair, the bowl, the position of the corpse, and the angle of the blood spray. The ceiling and some of the cabinets had taken damage from the blast.
‘No. Gun was angled upwards when he was shot. Victim stood up quickly, maybe, sending the chair flying. Ran this way. Maybe at the killer, maybe trying to get to the back door. Whichever, he’d have to come this direction.’
‘And bang,’ Reeve said. ‘Yup. That was pretty much my conclusion about the whole sorry matter, too. But, I appreciate the second opinions.’
He put his hands on his hips. The shadow he cast on the wall looked like an image from the front of an old superhero comic book.
‘Now, while I am very much enjoying your company, gentlemen, it would be remiss of me not to ask you a somewhat personal question. I hope y’all don’t take it the wrong way.’
The spotlight of his smile swept across the hallway, dazzling them both.
‘Just what in the holy heck is it that you folks are doing here?’
Tyler sat in the passenger seat, gulping down air through the open side window.
He managed a smile of thanks when Sinead reached over from the driver’s seat and rubbed the top of his back.
‘You alright?’
‘Aye, I’m OK,’ Tyler confirmed, though the greyness of his face said otherwise. ‘Just that last couple of corners turned my stomach upside down.’
‘Sorry. Had to get past that tractor,’ Sinead said. ‘Take a minute.’
Tyler nodded and kept breathing. There was a lot of farmland around, though, and the unmistakable stench of liquid manure tainted every inhalation.
‘That must be the Aberdeen lot,’ Sinead said, peering ahead through the windscreen from where they were parked at the side of the road, eight or nine cars back from the Inverness side of the cordon.
The other side—the Aberdonian end—was heaving with Uniforms, SOCOs, and a sharply dressed female detective in her fifties, who appeared to be dishing out orders.
‘Aye, must be,’ Tyler agreed. ‘Any sign of Ham or Ben?’
Sinead leaned her head closer to the side window, getting a better view of the cars lined up in front of hers.
‘No. They’re here somewhere, by the looks of it, but I can’t see them.’
She unclipped her seatbelt, keen to get moving.
‘How you feeling?’ Tyler asked her.
Sinead turned, surprised by the question. ‘I’m fine. I don’t get carsick.’
‘No, I mean… about tomorrow. About the interview. How you feeling? You ready?’
‘Oh. Um, aye. I think so.’
Tyler scowled playfully at her. ‘Come on, that’s not exactly fighting talk. We’re in competition here, remember? Head to head.’
Sinead smiled. ‘Yeah. No, I know. I know that’s what we said,’ she replied.
There was a hesitancy to her, like she’d been building up to this, but hadn’t yet settled on the right words.
‘I just… I don’t want it to change anything, you know what I mean?
Whoever gets it, gets it. Whoever doesn’t…
I don’t want them feeling bad, or… Whatever. ’
‘It’s OK. Don’t worry,’ Tyler said. He put his hand on his wife’s knee and gave it a squeeze. ‘You’ll get over it.’
Sinead laughed at that. ‘Oh, right, that does it. I’m totally going to destroy you for that!’
‘That’s more like it!’ Tyler cheered. ‘Although, now it’s just going to be even more embarrassing for you when I win.’
‘No, you’re right. It’d be genuinely humiliating if you won,’ Sinead conceded.
‘Exactly, so… Here, hang on. Why would it be genuinely humiliating?’ Tyler asked, calling after Sinead as she opened the door and climbed out of the car.
He leaned across the driver’s seat to look up at her. ‘I’ve been doing this way longer than you have!’ he reminded her.
‘Oh, I know you have,’ Sinead said. She winked at him. ‘But I’ve been doing it better.’
She pressed a button on her key fob, and Tyler clambered out of the car as his window began to roll up.
He had just started to explain why he was the only sensible choice for the detective sergeant job when the screaming of brakes almost made him hurl himself into a ditch at the side of the road in fright.
Dave Davidson’s car screeched to a halt in a cloud of exhaust fumes and burning rubber.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ Dave said, grinning at them through his open side window. ‘Can you believe I got flagged down by a guy with a speed gun on the way up here?’
‘Yes! Of course we can believe that,’ Tyler shot back. ‘The speed you go, I’m amazed the bloody thing didn’t blow up in his hand.’
Dave cackled at the suggestion. ‘That would’ve been funny, actually. Should’ve seen his face when I showed him my ID. Totally shat it.’
Sinead pressed the button to lock the car. ‘Why? He was just doing his job.’
‘Naw, he wasn’t even a cop, just some old rando with a gun off Temu or somewhere. I told him to leave that sort of thing to us.’ Dave’s grin widened. ‘Don’t think he really appreciated the irony of that, but he was wise enough to keep his mouth shut.’
His engine rumbled then died away with a wheeze that sounded like a sigh of relief.
‘So, who are all these knobs, then?’ Dave asked, indicating the Aberdeen end of the cordon. ‘And how are we planning to show them who’s boss?’
Bosco sat alone now at the kitchen table, still clutching his mug. He’d asked for a word in private with Logan. Despite every atom in his body screaming at him to batter the bastard’s head in with a frying pan, the DCI had relented.
Olivia had slammed the knife back into the block and gone storming out of the room, clearly unhappy with this arrangement, but knowing better than to get in the way of it.
A look had passed between Shona and Jack, before she’d hurried off up the stairs after the girl.
Now, only the two men and the small dog lying under the table remained.
‘Well?’ Logan prompted. ‘Whatever shite you’ve come to spill, fire away. I can’t wait to hear it.’
Bosco looked down into the dregs of his coffee. He nodded slowly, as if running through one final quick rehearsal before a big speech.
This was something else that had changed about him. The Bosco of old was loud and obnoxious, and spoke off the cuff without any real thought for the consequences.
He still had the obnoxious bit down to a tee—the coffee slurping and his very presence here proved that—but the rest…?
Logan rested his weight against the kitchen worktop again, gripping the overhanging edge with both hands this time as he waited.
It took all of six seconds for his patience to run out.
‘Time’s ticking, Bosco. Either spit it out, or fuck off. Your choice.’
‘First thing is… I want to apologise.’
Logan felt a fiery flush of heat race up his chest, and a stream of equally hot bile rising in his throat.
‘Apologise? Seriously? There’s no apology for what you did, Bosco.’
‘No, I know this. I understand. What I did, what I almost allowed to happen, it is unforgivable,’ the Russian said. ‘Even if I did not allow it. Even if I helped prevent it. You were there, in that room, because of me. Because I allowed myself to be used by an evil man.’
Logan’s laugh was so sharp and loud that Taggart let out a yelp of fright beneath the table.
‘Used by an evil man? Come on, Bosco. Drop the fucking act,’ Logan told him. ‘You are an evil man.’
‘No. No more. Once, yes. Maybe. Not evil, but… misguided. On wrong path. But now, no. Now, I am on right path. Righteous path.’
‘For fuck’s sake, no’ this again,’ Logan muttered, rubbing a hand across his face. ‘I’m starting to think the church must have undercover missionaries working on the wings or something, the number of you bastards that come out of jail having found God.’
‘You do not believe me.’
‘I wouldn’t believe you if you told me that water’s wet, Bosco. So, do I believe you’ve made some deep-rooted emotional connection with a bearded fucking sky fairy? Sorry, colour me dubious on that one.’
Bosco smiled. Or half-smiled, maybe, something wistful tugging at one corner of his mouth.
‘Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed.’
‘That some Bible shite, is it?’ Logan asked. ‘Doesn’t mean anything to me.’
Bosco made a faint chuckling noise at the back of his throat and shrugged. ‘Ah well. It was worth a try.’
He knocked back the last of his coffee, then returned the mug to the table with a clunk.
‘I hear about murder. Victor Belov.’
‘Oh? And how would you have heard about something like that?’
‘I keep ear to ground. Always,’ Bosco replied. ‘For things that may involve me.’
Logan’s eyes narrowed. ‘And tell me, Bosco, how would the death of a known drug trafficker involve you? I thought you’d be too busy kum-ba-yahing to worry about the likes of that.’
‘Involved is wrong word,’ Bosco backtracked. ‘I mean for things that may harm me. Harm my family. For this, I keep ear to ground. Eyes open.’
Logan wanted to tell him that he didn’t have a family. Not now. Not anymore.
But it wasn’t his place. It wasn’t for him to say.
‘Victor Belov was, from what I hear, trying to move up in world. Trying to build on the territory he and brothers stole.’
‘Stole? From you, you mean?’
‘Stole is wrong word again. Territory they moved in on. Yes?’
‘And then you came back, and lo and behold, now he’s dead,’ Jack said. ‘I’d say that was one hell of a coincidence, but I don’t really believe in such a thing.’
Bosco spread his hands, as if to show they were empty.
‘You must see, this cannot have been me. I have been out just few days. Just few days. No time to plan, or make moves, or try to reclaim turf, even if I want to. Which I do not. I have no interest in old ways. Only interest in Olivia. In being good father.’
Logan didn’t believe a word of that. Even if Bosco had actually convinced himself of it, Logan knew better.
This was a man driven only by money and power.
Anyone who stood in the way of those things were just blockades to smash through.
Rivals, police, family. They were all just obstacles to be dealt with.
‘You know what, I think, Bosco? I think you’re full of shite. I think you killed Victor Belov. Maybe not yourself, but some minion somewhere. Some loyal wee underling. Maybe you had them do it, to show the world that the boss is back.’
Bosco cast his eyes down at the table. He rubbed a hand across the wood, sliding it back and forth as he composed his thoughts.
‘I am many things, Jack. You know this. I am not proud of things I have done. But you will agree, I think, that though I am many things, I am not idiot.’
Logan wished he could disagree on that one, but until getting in tow with Owen Petrie, Bosco Maximuke had mostly evaded arrest and prosecution for decades. Sure, Logan had nabbed him once or twice over the years, but never for anything major. Never for anything that really stuck.
Bosco Maximuke was nobody’s fool. And killing a rival so soon after being released from prison would be a very foolish move indeed.
Logan crossed his arms. He still didn’t believe the bastard, but he was willing to entertain the rubbish coming out of his mouth for a little while longer.
‘So, what are you saying?’
‘It is obvious, no?’
Logan shrugged. ‘Enlighten me.’
‘Someone wishes rid of me. Someone wishes me back in big house. Or… or using my freedom as opportunity to take out rivals.’
‘So, you think this is a drugs thing? Someone making moves?’
‘Of course. From what I hear, Victor was messing with much bigger fish. Stepping on toes. Bigger fish, I think, had been throwing weight around. Putting him in place.’
He slapped the table.
‘You want to know who kill Victor Belov? You reel in bigger fish. You ask him.’
Logan didn’t want to jump the gun, but he had a feeling where this might be going.
‘Right. And who is this bigger fish, exactly?’
‘Man by name of Crichton,’ Bosco said. ‘Kendrick Crichton.’
Logan sighed. Yep, just as he’d thought.
‘Aye, well, you see,’ he began, ‘about that…’