Chapter 22
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The bag was a Louis Vuitton, made of brownish-grey fabric patterned with circles, diamonds, and “LV” logos, with a thin pair of brown leather handles at the top.
According to the quick Google search Sinead had done, it was worth a couple of grand.
But that was a drop in the ocean compared to what it contained.
‘You think they’re going to be hundreds all the way through, boss?’ Tyler asked, leaning over and peering into the bag.
It was the size of a small holdall, and filled to the top with bundles of rolled-up notes.
The topmost note on each bundle was a turquoise Bank of Scotland hundred quid note.
Without looking, it was impossible to say for sure that the rest were the same, but the colour of the edges certainly suggested so.
‘If they are, that’s got to be…’
Tyler’s lips moved silently, as he tried to calculate how much money might be in the bag.
He eventually decided on, ‘A shitload.’
Logan tore his eyes from the bag and looked across the table to where Sergeant Fleck stood, rubbing his forehead. Joe Robertson had been slung in an interview room almost as soon as the bag had been revealed.
‘He found this in the car?’
‘So he says, aye,’ Fleck replied. ‘He said he saw it in the back, spotted what was inside, then took it and stashed it before he called 999. I guess the guilt got to him, because he fronted up to me after the event.’
‘Did you tell him he’s a bloody idiot?’ Logan barked. ‘Tampering with a murder scene.’
‘Oh, believe me, sir, I went through him,’ the sergeant said. ‘He knows it was stupid. He said he wasn’t thinking straight. He’s a good guy. Really. This isn’t like him at all. He knows he messed up. He’s ready to face the consequences.’
‘Aye, well, they’ll start with my foot up his arse,’ Logan said. ‘Where is he?’
‘Interview room two,’ said Dave.
‘Right. You. What’s your name?’
‘Uh, Gavin.’ He straightened and pushed his shoulders back. ‘Sergeant Gavin Fleck, sir.’
‘Gavin. You know this guy, right?’
‘I do, sir,’ the sergeant confirmed. ‘And I can absolutely vouch for him being a decent—’
Logan waved him into silence. ‘I don’t care. I don’t want you to vouch for him, I want you to sit in with me and see if you think he’s telling the truth.’
Fleck glanced down at the open bag of cash. ‘The, eh, the truth, sir?’
‘Aye.’ Logan set off at a clip towards the door. ‘If he was hiding this, who knows what else the old bugger’s been lying to us about?’
Shona Maguire pointed to a chair in the corner of her office, inviting Olivia to plant her arse on it.
The call had come in to let her know about the second post-mortem, and given that she had yet to type up her notes on the first, she had no choice but to head to the hospital.
Olivia had insisted she’d be fine at home, but there was no way Shona was leaving her on her own. Not with Bosco around. Not with how upset the girl had been.
‘I’ll try to be as quick as I can,’ Shona said, shrugging off her jacket and hanging it on the peg by the door. ‘I’ll get preliminaries done now, make sure he’s all checked in, then come back in the morning to do the full PM.’
Olivia shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
She flopped onto the computer chair, and immediately found the lever that tipped the back so she could slouch down. She sat there sprawled in it, shifting her weight left and right on its swivel base with her legs.
‘You going to be OK?’
‘I’d have been OK at home,’ Olivia replied.
Shona smiled, but it didn’t feel natural. It had been a stressful day. She understood that Olivia was upset—of course she did—but her pain-in-the-arse attitude wasn’t making things any easier.
‘I’m sure you would. I’m sure I’m overreacting.’
‘You are.’
Shona’s smile both widened and became even less real.
‘No doubt, but I don’t want to take any chances.’
‘What chances? He’s my dad. He’s not going to break in and kill me.’
‘And yet, you threatened to cut his heart out,’ Shona reminded her.
Olivia tutted and rolled her eyes. ‘I wasn’t actually going to do it.’
‘Well, no. Obviously. You’d need more than a kitchen knife to fully crack open the breastplate for a start.’ Shona shook her head quickly. ‘Not that that would be the reason for not doing it. That’s not what…’
She rubbed at her forehead, fending off the early nigglings of a migraine.
‘I just feel better with you here, OK?’
Olivia sighed. ‘Fine. But Taggart’s still at home. What if my dad breaks in and kills him instead?’
It was clear by the way she said it that she was teasing. The girl had a dark sense of humour, and though Shona shared it to an extent, some things just went too far.
‘Well, then I’d cut his heart out,’ she said. There was a snap as she pulled on a blue vinyl glove. ‘And I’ve got all the tools I’d need to do it.’
Joe Robertson was in ruins.
He sat at the interview room table, shoulders stooped, eyes red-ringed and bloodshot. Any stiff upper lip he might previously have possessed had now wilted away to nothing.
His hands were clasped together between his knees, and he rocked back and forth while Logan and Sergeant Fleck took their seats across from him.
‘You’re OK, Joe,’ Fleck said, offering the old man a comforting smile.
Logan pulled his chair in as close to the table as it would go. ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, Sergeant. Just how OK Mr Robertson is very much depends on what he has to say for himself.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, it was stupid of me.’ Joe’s voice was just a few decibels above a whisper. ‘I’m an idiot. I’m an old bloody idiot.’
‘You’ll get no argument from me on that,’ Logan told him. ‘What the hell were you thinking?’
‘I… I wasn’t. Thinking, I mean. I was in shock. I saw the… I saw the blood.’ Joe gulped after that last word, like he was swallowing back nausea. ‘It was everywhere. There was so much of it.’
‘Right. And so, because of all that blood, you thought, “I know, I’ll nick this big bag of money”?’ Logan pressed.
‘What? No. It wasn’t… It wasn’t like that.’
‘Then how was it, Mr Robertson? Join those dots for me, because I’m struggling to find a reason not to charge you with theft and interfering with a crime scene.
’ Logan leaned forward for emphasis. ‘That’s attempting to pervert the course of justice.
On a murder investigation, too. You know what the punishment for that is? ’
Joe shook his head. His lips moved, but no sound came out.
‘Nor me,’ Logan replied. ‘Because there’s no maximum sentence. Two years? Ten years? Judge’s discretion. You fancy ten years behind bars, Mr Robertson?’
Another frantic shake of the old man’s head revealed that he most certainly did not.
‘No. I’m sure it’s not exactly high on your bucket list.’
Logan clasped his hands together and arranged his expression into something marginally less intimidating.
But only marginally.
‘Now, the good news is, that it may not come to that. You may yet walk out of here with a flea in your ear from me, and a fresh appreciation for just how lucky you are. That’s within the realms of possibility, Mr Robertson.
But, in order for that to happen, I am going to have to believe every single word that comes out of your mouth from here on in. Every. Single. Word.’
Logan let that sink in. Let the old man dwell on it for a while.
‘Do we understand each other, Joe?’
‘Yes. Yes, absolutely. I understand. Thank you.’
‘Don’t thank me yet,’ Logan warned. ‘That light at the end of the tunnel might still be a speeding locomotive headed straight towards you.’
He looked to his left to make sure Fleck was paying attention. The sergeant looked worried on the old man’s behalf, but he had his notebook out and his pen in hand, ready to do his job.
‘Now, Joe,’ Logan said. He hitched his mouth into a smile that made the old man recoil in fear. ‘How about we take this from the top?’
Joe needed no further incentive to start spilling his guts. The nature of what he spilled, though, caught both police officers off guard.
‘It’s them bloody dolls. That’s the issue. That’s why I did it. Those awful bloody dolls.’
Fleck finished writing the word “dolls” on his pad, and then glanced down at it as if realising he’d made a mistake.
‘Dolls, Joe?’ he asked.
‘She gets them from China. Japan. I don’t know.
Somewhere over that way. The Orient, if you can say that these days.
They’re custom-made. Sort of’—he held both index fingers about twelve inches apart, one above the other—‘that size. Soft bodies, porcelain faces and hands. Hair. Clothes. Wee shoes, whatever.’
Logan grunted. ‘The fuck are you talking about?’
‘These wee dolls. The wee dolls she gets! She’s obsessed.
Maureen. She keeps ordering the bloody things.
Calls them “the great-grandkids” because they’re meant to look like, you know, ten-year-olds or whatever.
Only they’re wearing kimonos and have got a full face of bloody makeup on.
’ He shook his head. ‘Great-grandkids my arse.’
Fleck looked down at his pad again. He still hadn’t written anything else.
‘Maureen—your wife—she’s been buying dolls?’ the sergeant asked. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Three-hundred quid apiece!’ Joe cried. ‘That’s your basic model. Only, Maureen’s not satisfied with an off-the-shelf one these days. Oh, no. She needs custom. You can’t have them all the same, what would be the point in that? They all need to be different, which means…’
He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together in the universal gesture for hard currency.
‘So, to be clear, here, Mr Robertson,’ Logan intoned, ‘you’re saying you stole money from a murder scene in order to buy dolls?’
‘No! I just… We’re behind on bills. Price of electricity these days.
Price of petrol. Price of food, price of everything.
We’re just… we’re struggling. And I tell her, I do, I say, “Maureen, no more dolls. Enough with the bloody dolls.” But does she listen?
No, she just tries to be fly about it. Gets a new credit card without telling me.
Gets her sister in Fife to order it, and transfers her the money when her pension comes in. ’
He had barely looked at the men across the table during the speech, the shame of it keeping his gaze fixed on his hands, which now rested on the table. He picked at loose skin around his thumbnails hard enough to draw tiny spots of blood.
‘I can’t sleep for worrying about it. Losing the house. Losing everything. I would never have taken that money otherwise. If I’d been in my right mind. If it wasn’t for them fucking dolls!’
He buried his face in his hands. His shoulders heaved as he tried to stifle his big, throaty sobs.
‘I thought stuff from China was meant to be cheap!’
Fleck reached a hand across the table and gave the old man’s arm a rub. Though it was clear from Logan’s face that he disapproved, he made no attempt to stop him.
‘I saw the body. And the blood, all that blood, and I blew my whistle for help, but nobody came,’ Joe said, spluttering and wheezing through shaky, irregular breaths.
‘I was going to run back to the house for my phone, but then, I thought I’d better check in the back to make sure there was nobody else there.
Nobody needing help, or whatever. And that’s when I saw it. ’
He met their eyes, just briefly.
‘The bag. With the money. And I thought… I just sort of thought… He doesn’t need it. On account of… You know. And I thought, if I took it, if I had that money, maybe things would be alright. I could take care of the bills. I could get some sleep, at last.’
Joe swallowed. His fingertips smeared blood down the sides of his thumbs.
‘But I didn’t. Not a wink. It was worse than ever, because I knew. I knew what I’d done was wrong. It was stupid, it was selfish, and if I could go back in time and stop myself doing it, I would.’
‘If you can go back in time, maybe stop the murder happening, too, eh?’ Sergeant Fleck suggested, and Joe managed a half-smile in reply.
‘Aye. Aye, that would be the ideal, right enough.’ The old man wiped his eyes on his sleeve. ‘And I’d maybe give that lassie a piece of my mind while I’m at it.’
There was a subtle change to the atmosphere in the room. A slight shifting, like an electrical current had begun humming through the air.
‘Lassie?’ Logan asked. He turned to Fleck, but the sergeant appeared equally in the dark. ‘Tell me, Joe—just what lassie might that be?’