Last Resort (29 page)

I nodded.

‘I have something I can share with you,’ I told her. ‘My father sent me a couple of images that he took off the silly woman who was paid to trail him. They include one of a man; we don’t know who he is for sure, but he might just be Mr Baillie. I’ve just emailed it to you; you might want to show it to the neighbours.’

She nodded. ‘Thanks, Alex. I’ll discuss that with Jack, as well as your thought about the missing laptop. Speaking of the acting DI . . .’ she finished her coffee and rose to her feet, ‘he’s expecting me back before lunch. If anything else occurs to you,’ she said, as I showed her to the lift, ‘let us know.’

Actually something else had, but I planned to check that out for myself.

As soon as Karen had gone, I went into my bedroom and smartened myself up. I could have done so earlier but I’d chosen to let her see the other Alex, the one behind the quality clothes, the expensive hair and the make-up.

I didn’t go the whole hog in changing, but chose jeans, a plaid shirt and a long waxed raincoat, with a matching hat, and my beloved Panama Jack boots.

The rain had gone, but not too far away, as I set out. I walked through Holyrood Park, heading east, sticking to the grass rather than the roadway, as I didn’t want to be splashed by passing traffic. On another day I might have stopped to count the swans in the loch, but I had business in hand.

I’d been to Meadowbank House before. It’s an ugly seventies office block, on London Road near the Jock’s Lodge junction, but it’s screened off by greenery and the only thing that most people notice is the entrance. Its looks belie its purpose, for it houses one of our most valuable public resources, the Land Register of Scotland.

I walked in off the street, found the customer service centre and put a request to the desk officer. Ten minutes later I walked out of there with a history of the ownership of twenty-seven slash two slash c Portland Street, from its construction in the first year of the new millennium to the present day. It didn’t answer all my questions, indeed it begged a couple, but it told me one thing. Linton Baillie might pay the council tax on the property, but it wasn’t his.

I took the bus to my next port of call; while Meadowbank House will tell you all you want to know about Scotland’s property, Register House is the place to go for answers about its people.

I spent half an hour in there; when I came out I knew quite a bit more; although it didn’t relate to anything else in the inquiry, it did leave me feeling pleased with myself.

Back home, there was a message showing on my phone. I’d hoped it was from Dad, but no, it was Roger McGrane, telling me he’d booked a table for a pre-show dinner in a restaurant near the Festival Theatre, and offering to pick me up.

When I called him back, Mrs Harris told me he was busy, so I left a message with her saying simply that I’d see him there. I wasn’t ready for him to know where I lived. It would take another couple of dates for us to get there, if we ever did.

I’d planned to go to Torphichen Place with what I’d found, so I was surprised when it came to me, just after three thirty, in the person of Jack McGurk.

‘I thought I’d drop by to say thanks,’ he explained, as I let him in. ‘I had that image shown to as many neighbours as we could raise, three to be exact. Two of them identified him as Linton Baillie.’ He sighed. ‘Mind you, it’s the only bloody positive we’ve had today. Baillie doesn’t have a UK passport or a UK driving licence; he doesn’t even have a National Insurance number. It looks like he isn’t a UK citizen. I’ve spoken to his publisher, but she was no help. She told me that when a writer sells as many books as Baillie for a small house like hers, he can be as mysterious as he fucking likes.’

‘Then add this to the mix,’ I said. ‘He might live at Portland Street, but he doesn’t own it.’

‘You sure?’ he exclaimed.

‘I’m certain,’ I replied, handing him a foolscap envelope with all the information I’d dug up on my midday safari. ‘You can’t find Baillie, but that will give you someone else to look for.’

He beamed at me. ‘In that case, Alex, you’ve earned this bonus. We didn’t find Baillie’s laptop, either in the flat or at Coyle’s place . . . which was definitely his residence, by the way. However, we did find, in Baillie’s bureau, in a drawer that you must have missed, an external storage device, the kind you plug into a computer to make a back-up of the hard disk.’

He reached into a pocket and produced a memory stick. ‘There’s lots of stuff on it that’ll be of interest to the gaffer, so,’ he handed it over, ‘I made a copy and it’s yours, with my compliments.’

I’d have plugged the thing in as soon as he left, but he hung around for a while, and screwed up my timetable.

Out of politeness I offered him a drink, not thinking he’d accept, but he did, a bottle of Coors light, one of a few that I’d put in the fridge for Andy. I poured myself some of the previous night’s red and we chatted for a while.

I asked him about his fairly new second marriage, and he sympathised with me over my relationship; I’d dropped a big enough hint to him the night before that it was in the crapper, so it hadn’t come as a surprise when Karen confirmed it when she got back to the office.

‘Thanks,’ I said, ‘but worry not. I’m fine about it, and so is he.’ I checked my watch. ‘As a matter of fact, I have a date tonight.’

He chuckled. ‘Same old Alex. I didn’t think you’d be lonely for too long, but twenty-four hours, that’s pretty quick off the mark.’

‘Just dinner and the theatre,’ I insisted.

‘What are you going to see?’

‘I have no idea,’ I admitted. ‘Whatever’s on at the Festival Theatre.’

Jack managed to grin and shake his head at the same time. ‘Like I said, same old Alex. Is this one a cop?’

‘No fucking way,’ I snorted.

Twenty-Nine

I
dressed conservatively for the theatre, not too much glam; this was in part because I knew it would have been over the top in the restaurant Roger had booked, and also because I didn’t want to lead the guy on.

Before calling a taxi to take me there, I checked on the entertainment ahead: a musical based on sixties Californian pop. I’d have preferred
Jersey Boys
, but it was okay. I was definitely not in the mood for Wagner.

The taxi took longer than promised to pick me up so I arrived a few minutes late. My date was there; I could see him through the glass wall, studying his watch with a frown that I can only describe as impatient. The street light nearest to me was out and so he couldn’t have seen me, even if he’d looked straight at me. I paused, feeling suddenly uncomfortable.

I was brought up to believe that the eyes are windows to the soul. In some people the face is an open doorway.

Have you ever caught a person off guard and seen something that you hadn’t suspected was there? That’s what happened to me, right there on that cold pavement in Nicolson Street.

I looked at Roger McGrane and I didn’t see the urbane, charming, attractive man that I’d seen in his own environment. I saw someone else; someone cold, calculating and predatory. I knew for certain that if I went to his car wherever he’d parked it, I’d find a bag, with a change of clothes for at least one day.

If he’d caught sight of me what would he have seen? I’ve no idea but it wouldn’t have been the Alex he’d met. She was, as I’d told him, in a comfortable long-term relationship. She’d also been in denial, unwilling to admit that said relationship was constraining and ultimately pointless, and possibly, no certainly, she’d been throwing out signals.

Hadn’t he said I was ‘wonderfully direct’?

A lot can happen in a couple of days, as it had to me. Andy and I had stopped pretending; in the process I’d re-established my identity, and asserted my ambition. I didn’t need to flirt with a superficially attractive man, who was, when seen off guard, distinctly unattractive on the inside.

And something else had happened.

Twenty-four hours before I’d dressed in another fashion to meet a man. I’d kept that appointment and been faced by a sleazy sexual predator, even though he was dead. (Jack had told me that afternoon that when they’d emptied Coyle’s pockets at the mortuary, they’d found a packet of condoms, and a till receipt from SemiChem.)

As I looked at Roger McGrane through that glass wall, from my position of invisibility, his impatient, bored face was replaced by two visions of Tommy Coyle, leering at my tits in his office, and then lolling dead in Linton Baillie’s chair.

I backed away until my date was out of my line of vision, then turned and waved at the first taxi I saw. ‘He’s all yours, Mrs Harris,’ I murmured, as I climbed in.

On the way home, I called Sarah. She had brought the kids to her house in the Grange for the weekend, so I asked the driver to take me there instead. We had almost arrived when my phone sounded. The screen showed a number I didn’t recognise, but I guessed who it was: I bottled it and rejected the call.

Sarah . . . I call her my sometime stepmother . . . does the best corned beef hash in the world, and she never underestimates, so there was enough for me when I got there. I didn’t say much; I just played with Seonaid and let James and Andrew do the talking, until it was time for them all to go upstairs.

As soon as the field was clear, Sarah fetched two beers from the fridge, handed one to me and settled down beside me on the sofa. ‘Shitty day?’ she murmured. ‘Sorry, kid, but you look whacked.’

‘Shitty week. Completely fucking crazy. Even by your adventurous standards I’ll bet you’ve never had one like it.’

There are very few people I’ll allow to see me cry, but she’s one of them. I let myself go for a couple of minutes then when I was composed again, I took her through it, right to the end. By that time I was feeling a little guilt about Roger.

‘I left the poor guy sitting there like a lemon,’ I said, ‘after he’d come all the way through from Glasgow. He’ll be angry and I won’t blame him.’

I took my phone from my pocket and saw that I had one voicemail message. I played it back, on speaker. It was Roger, of course, but ‘angry’ had been an understatement. Pure, foul, threatening vitriol spewed out, until I couldn’t listen to any more and cut it off.

Sarah’s eyes were on fire. ‘Gimme,’ she growled, taking the mobile from my hand. She found recent calls and hit the number. She’d left it on broadcast, so I heard Roger when he picked up. ‘Yes?’ he crackled. He was on the road.

‘Dr McGrane,’ she began. ‘My name is Sarah Grace, associate professor of Pathology at Edinburgh University. I’m calling to tell you that after the message you’ve just left for my troubled stepdaughter, I am really looking forward to performing your autopsy, the sooner the better.’

‘Maybe I over-re—’ he began.

She cut him off in mid-word. ‘Too late, mister. Think on this as you drive home. The pathology work your lab gets comes directly from me, and people like me. There aren’t too many of us, and I know them all. You can start to plan for a life without that income stream.’

She hit the ‘End’ button and dropped the phone on the sofa.

‘Christ, Sarah,’ I exclaimed. ‘Now I really feel sorry for the man.’

‘Then don’t. There are two sorts of guy in this world. Them that are gentlemen, and them that are not.’

She took a swig of her beer. ‘I knew about Mr Coyle,’ she told me. ‘I opened him up this morning. Jack McGurk was there to witness, and he told me you’d found him.’

I nodded, dumbly.

‘This thing you’re doing for Bob,’ she continued. ‘Is it a threat to him?’

‘I dunno,’ I confessed. ‘There was a threat to Ignacio, potentially, but I dealt with that at the prison. I won’t be able to see the broader picture until I’ve looked at the contents of Baillie’s computer. I’ll do that when I go home.’

‘You’ll do it tomorrow,’ she countered, firmly. ‘You’re going to stay here tonight. You’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders. A major career change would be enough to carry on its own, without all the shit that’s been thrown at you this week. You need a good night’s sleep and I don’t trust you to get it at your place, so you are going to hit the pillows upstairs.’

I did, and I hit them hard. I turned in not long after ten, and was still sound when Seonaid wakened me next morning at eight fifteen. Sarah was taking her to meet Santa Claus that morning, and she couldn’t wait any longer to tell me about it.

After breakfast we tried to call Dad, but with no more success than the day before.

‘What do you think he’s up to?’ Sarah asked.

‘I have no idea,’ I told her truthfully, then laughed. ‘My only worry is whether this McDaniels girl, the one I told you about last night, might have pushed him too far and he might be in jail.’

She shook her head. ‘Nah, I don’t see that. Bob’s too fond of women to kill one of us. No, it’ll be something mundane that’s keeping him out of touch. You know how he is. He has a brilliant mind, but don’t ask him to pack his own suitcase.’

I went home from Sarah’s feeling a hell of a lot better. When I got in, there was a new message on my landline. It was from Roger, contrite and apologetic. I wasn’t surprised after the way Sarah had sunk the boot into him.

Rather than call him back, I wrote to him . . . yes, a real letter . . . saying that I was sorry for my no show, but explaining that it just hadn’t felt right, and that experience had taught me not to start anything I wasn’t prepared to finish. I found a stamp in a kitchen drawer, went out and dumped the missive in a postbox in the Canongate, then went back home to attend to the business I’d postponed from the previous evening.

I put the memory stick Jack had given me in a USB slot in my computer, powered it up then clicked the icon that appeared on the screen.

Whoever Linton Baillie was, he was organised. His computer management was clear, with his life set down in a series of folders, in alphabetical order.

They began with ‘Bank’. I’m sure that on his laptop it would have been password protected, but he hadn’t done that with his back-up disk. I clicked on it and got straight in, expecting to find account details, credit card statements and so on . . . but all I found was email correspondence, mostly incoming from First National Mutual and none of it meaningful.

I scrolled down the list; there was one called ‘House’, and another labelled ‘Travel’, but the others all appeared to relate to projects. A couple meant nothing to me, but ‘Glasgow’ and ‘MI5’ were in line with his list of publications.

The one that caught my eye, though, the one that hit me was headed ‘Skinner’.

I clicked on it and went straight in.

It was arranged in a series of sub-folders, headed ‘Carrie invoices’, ‘Carrie reports’, ‘pics’, ‘research’ and ‘manuscript’.

I opened the first. When my father called me, almost eight hours later, I hadn’t taken a break, and I was still reading.