Private Investigations (23 page)

Its name was on a small plaque, wall mounted, to the right of brown wooden double doors that looked in want of a coat of varnish, and above a white plastic bell stud. I pressed it, leaning hard for five or six seconds, then waited: in vain.

I tried the storm doors, but they were locked. I rattled the letter box, in case the bell wasn’t sounding indoors. I took out my mobile and called Hodgson’s number. From within I could hear it ring out seven times, then go silent as it switched to auto answer.

‘Bugger,’ I muttered.

There was a square bay window to the left of the entrance and a smaller single pane to the right. I peered in each, but they were screened by Venetian blinds, closed tightly enough to deny me any more than the narrowest glimpse of the rooms inside.

Sure as hell, I hadn’t driven all that way to turn around and go home without having a bloody good look around. I walked round to the back of the house, checking the window of each room as I went, but none of them offered any better view than the two in front, other than the kitchen, at the back.

I peered through the dirty glass. There was a milk carton on the work surface and a packet of biscuits, but nothing else in sight other than a few lazy flies.

Jock Hodgson’s garage was at the end of the driveway, in the rear left-hand corner of the plot. It had an up-and-over door that was locked, and another to the side that wasn’t.

I opened it and stepped inside.

I hadn’t seen a Ford Escort in years, not one from the late sixties with what they called the Coke bottle body style, but Jock Hodgson had one, F registration in the old number style. Unlike his house, it was immaculate. The body shell looked as new, and the paint was brilliant white, beneath a coating of dust. The bumpers were shiny without a speck of rust to be seen. I opened the driver’s door and leaned inside; even the blue imitation leather seats were pristine. The only thing about it that wasn’t original was a Samsung mobile phone lying in the footwell on the driver’s side. I knew for sure that if I raised the hood, I’d find that the cylinder head was polished. It was a collector’s car, an engineer’s car, a show car.

And the key was in the ignition. And the side door to the garage was unlocked.

I don’t know much about collectable cars; these days I buy mine new and trade them in before they’re old enough to need an MOT. But looking at that Escort, which was nearly as old as me, I guessed it had to be worth close on ten grand. Clearly, the man Hodgson loved that vehicle, yet anyone could have gone in there, raised the up-and-over from the inside and driven off with it.

That was the point when my instincts told me that something was very wrong. I knew I should have twigged it earlier, that something else should have rung my alarm bell, but I couldn’t pin it down. While I thought about it, I turned the key in the ignition . . . and all I heard was the clunk of a stone dead battery. I tried the lights; the dashboard panel barely flickered. I gripped the steering wheel and my hand became enmeshed in a spider’s web that I hadn’t noticed before.

And that’s when I realised what had been out of place: those flies in the kitchen. How many flies do you expect to find in a cold house in the first week in February?

There were three other keys on the ring that fed the ignition. I pulled it out and examined them. One was long and thin, and had to be for the up-and-over, another was a Yale, and I suspected that it matched the lock I’d noticed on the side door.

The third was for a mortice lock. I returned to the back door, looking into the kitchen again as I passed the window. There were quite a few of those damn flies, especially if I counted the dead ones that lay at the foot of the pane. I tried the key; it turned, I opened the door, stepped into the kitchen . . . and that was when the smell hit me.

The geeks who post on lurid online forums say the odour of decomposing human flesh is unique; they’re wrong. In my experience, the smell of death is more subtle than that. There’s an underlying, cloying sweetness to it, but it varies with the stage of decomposition and with the shape and bulk of the person before life became extinct. The one thing that is universally accepted is that it’s horrible and you don’t want to be breathing in the molecules that create it.

I’ve asked Sarah how she copes with it; all she says is ‘mental conditioning’, and yet the same woman has repeating deodorant sprays in every bathroom in our house.

I grabbed a towel that was hanging from a hook on a cupboard door, held it over my nose and mouth and went in search of the source. All I had to do was follow the flies; the closer I got the thicker they swarmed.

I found him in the living room. Jock Hodgson had been tied to a chair; his wrists and left ankle were secured by some form of restraint that I couldn’t see properly because they were so swollen. His face was black, and his head lolled on his left shoulder; his body was distended, and his clothes stretched, by gases. He looked ready to burst; I hoped he would contain himself, literally, until I was gone.

The swelling was most obvious in his feet, for he wore neither shoes nor socks. They had been removed and lay beside him. I could guess the reason.

I backed out of there. I didn’t want to contaminate the scene, nor did I want the scene to contaminate me, any more than it had already. In the garden I drew deep breath after deep breath, and blew my nose hard, on the handkerchief from my breast pocket, yet the stink of the dead Hodgson was still with me. My suit wasn’t going to the dry cleaner, that I knew; it was bound for the incinerator.

I took my phone from its pocket inside my jacket and thumbed through my directory until I reached ‘M’. A few months before I’d probably have stopped at ‘Martin’, but in the new situation there was no guarantee that my call would be accepted. Instead I carried on to ‘McGuire’.

‘Bob,’ my friend answered on the first ring. ‘What’s up? Have you decided you need to speak to McGarry?’

‘No,’ I replied. ‘I’ve got somebody else in mind, two people in fact. My assignment for Eden Higgins has just become very complicated and very smelly. You need to send a CSI team to Dunglas Avenue, in Wemyss Bay; that and the best matched CID pair you’ve got.’ I told him who they were.

‘They’ll all be on their way inside ten minutes,’ Mario promised. ‘And I won’t be far behind them. I’ve hung around you too long, chum: I can’t stay away from a juicy crime scene either.’

Thirty-Nine

As it happened Mario beat the crime scene team to Wemyss Bay by fifteen minutes, but he trailed behind his detectives by five.

Detective Inspector Charlotte Mann and I didn’t have the best of starts to our professional relationship, the first time that we met in Glasgow. A major public figure had just been murdered, she was the senior officer attending from the Strathclyde force, and she thought I was getting in the way. But once the new reality had been explained to her, and we had a chance to watch each other at work, we got along just fine.

If I could go back five years, and was still running CID in Edinburgh, I’d poach her like a shot. For all that she’s had a subtlety bypass, she’s as good a DI as I’ve ever met. Lottie is a big woman, all of six feet tall, and she has a presence about her that makes it easy for her to take a command role in what can still be a predominantly male environment.

As for her perennial sidekick, Dan Provan, he’s best described as an anachronism. He’s a year or so older than me, but he stuck at detective sergeant rank over twenty years ago, principally because he had no ambition to go any higher. I’ve heard people described as wizened, many times, but I never really understood the term until I met him.

He’s deliberately scruffy, with a chameleon-like quality that’s been invaluable to him throughout his career. He gave up smoking years ago, I’m told, and yet his badly trimmed moustache still looks as if it’s stained by nicotine. Walk into a busy pub and you probably wouldn’t notice him, but by God he would notice you. He knows Glasgow like he knows his own features. He carries two football club lapel badges, one Celtic, the other Rangers, and always wears the right one in the right place. For him, no-go areas in the city do not exist.

Not long after Mario McGuire took charge of criminal investigation in ScotServe, he asked me what he should do with him. My advice was, ‘Cherish him, but on no account let Andy Martin anywhere near him.’

When they emerged from their car and saw me standing at the start of the Ailsa View driveway, I found myself wishing I’d had my phone ready to snap a photo. It was obvious from the simultaneous widening of their eyes and dropping of their jaws that their DCC hadn’t told them the whole story.

‘What the . . .’ Provan gasped. ‘Has all this Polis Scotland stuff just been a bad fuckin’ dream?’

‘Some would wish that it was,’ I replied. ‘But no; this is reality and I am here, a private citizen who’s happened on a crime scene and done his duty. That said, it’s good to see you.’

Lottie Mann was frowning. ‘Did you ask for us, sir?’

‘That I did. I figured it would be better if the responding officers knew me, rather than having to explain my whole fucking back story to a couple of fast-trackers. Do you have a spare protective suit?’ I asked. ‘And a face mask. That’s important.’

‘One o’ them, is it?’ Provan grunted.

‘Ripe.’

I led Mann up the drive and round to the house, leaving the DS to fetch the paper tunics. ‘Would you like to tell me what this is about now, sir?’ she asked.

‘I’ve been looking into a theft for a friend,’ I replied. ‘I came here to interview a witness. It seems he isn’t in a position to talk to me.’

‘I take it we’re not talking about a missing garden gnome,’ she murmured.

‘Leave Provan out of this,’ I retorted, drawing a smile. ‘No, we’re talking about seventy-five feet of motor cruiser, value five million.’

‘We didn’t find it, then?’

‘Do you know a guy called Randolph McGarry? Ex-DI, now back in uniform.’

‘I’ve come across him,’ she said. ‘He couldn’t find his arse with a compass, but he and ACC Gorman had a thing going . . . or so they said.’

‘Bloody hell,’ I gasped. Bridie Gorman was my acting deputy during my brief spell as chief constable of Strathclyde. I’d never heard as much as a whispered rumour about her private life, far less the suggestion that she was protecting her fancy man’s work from proper scrutiny.

‘As soon as she left the force after the unification,’ Lottie continued, ‘Randolph was on borrowed time. Nobody was surprised when DCC McGuire moved him out of CID.’

‘What’s Bridie doing now?’

‘Gardening, from what I hear.’

‘And you, Inspector,’ I asked, ‘what job have you landed in the brave new world?’

‘Dan and I are in Serious Crimes. In theory we could be deployed anywhere; in practice, most of them are in the Glasgow area.’

‘Who decides what’s serious?’

She grinned. ‘That is the million-dollar question.’

Then she frowned, just as Provan arrived with the paper suits. ‘I suppose this is a crime, yes?’

‘From what I’ve heard and seen, Jock Hodgson was a skilled engineer, but I doubt that he tied himself up.’

We suited up, and I took them inside. We were still in the kitchen when Provan, for all his experience, started to retch. I paused until he had his heaving stomach under control, then led them to the doorway of the living room, through the fat, buzzing flies.

‘Are you sure this is Mr Hodgson?’ Lottie asked, a perfectly decent question.

‘I’m open to correction,’ I admitted, ‘but I don’t see that it can be anyone else.’

‘How long do you think he’s been dead?’

‘Weeks, I’m guessing.’ I went back into the hall and opened a glazed front door. A pile of mail lay beneath the flap in the storm doors. ‘The earliest date on those letters should give you a clue, but let’s leave it to the CSIs to sort them out.’

‘Did ye see any signs of forced entry?’ Provan asked.

‘No,’ I told him. ‘There are none.’

‘How did you get in?’ Mario McGuire’s muffled voice came from behind us, announcing his arrival. I turned; he too was wearing a sterile suit, hat and face mask.

‘I found a back door key in the garage.’

‘It wasn’t unlocked?’ He was surprised, and I knew why.

‘No, and neither was the front door. Which means that whoever killed the guy actually locked up when they left. They didn’t want him to be found in a hurry.’

‘Eh?’ Mann exclaimed. ‘If that’s right, wasn’t it a bit risky to leave him here?’

‘Probably less risky than moving him and chancing being seen,’ I suggested. ‘This house is a cul-de-sac at the end of a cul-de-sac. Hodgson’s neighbours called him the Hermit. The one I spoke to didn’t even know his name, and I’ll bet she doesn’t miss much.’

‘They’ll know his name from now on,’ Mario McGuire observed. ‘It’ll be all over the press tomorrow.’

‘If he’s a hermit, sir,’ Provan countered, ‘how are we going tae get a formal ID that fast?’

‘That won’t bother our communications department,’ the big DCC chuckled. ‘They make their own rules these days.’ He looked at me, giving me a wordless signal that we should leave.

I followed him into the garden happily, having seen enough of Jock Hodgson for a while. He went straight to the point as he ripped off his paper mask and cap, posing the question that I’d been turning over in my own mind.

‘Could this be related to the job you’re working on?’

‘I have no idea,’ I admitted. ‘No, let me rephrase that. I have no evidence of that. I didn’t come here expecting to find Hodgson dead, or even missing. I marked him down as a bloody nuisance of a man who was lazy about checking his voicemail, or who only returned calls from people he knew.’

Mann and Provan had followed us outside, and heard my reply. ‘What do you know about him, sir?’ the DI asked.

‘Not a hell of a lot. That’s what I came here to find out. He was an ex-naval engineer, and in retirement he worked part-time on my client’s stolen motor cruiser, and, I’m told, on a variety of other jobs. I know nothing about any of them. I know nothing about the man, period. Did he piss off one of his other clients? Was he in debt to the wrong people? Was he shagging somebody else’s wife? You’re going to have to do it the hard way, Lottie, and eliminate possibilities until you’ve only one solution left.’

‘That’s fine, Bob,’ Mario said, ‘but leaving aside by-the-book policing and proper procedure, what does your instinct tell you?’

I looked at my old colleague, my old pupil, and I smiled. ‘It doesn’t tell me anything, but it suggests to me that somebody else wants to know what happened to Eden Higgins’ boat.’

‘If that’s the case,’ he pointed out, ‘by rights you should hand your inquiry over to us.’

‘As far as Hodgson’s death is concerned, you’re absolutely correct,’ I agreed.

‘But you’re not going to, are you?’

‘I will if you insist,’ I told him. ‘I have too much respect for you all to do otherwise. But if Hodgson’s death is linked to the theft, or it looks as if it might be, I’m offering to cooperate with Lottie and Dan, if they want. I’ve already got someone working on one aspect of it. I can share her findings if they’re relevant.’

‘Do you want?’ the DCC asked Mann.

‘Of course,’ she replied. ‘I was going to ask Mr Skinner for his help anyway.’

‘I’ll need to tell the chief; I can’t authorise this behind his back.’

‘I took that as read,’ I said. ‘You must tell him. If he has a problem with it, you can add that if he vetoes it, I’ll work independently. I’ll be trying to find the stolen boat, not Hodgson’s killer, but if my investigation bumps into yours, tough shit. I have a commission from Eden Higgins and I intend to see it through.’

‘Understood and okay. Assuming Sir Andrew approves, how do you want to go forward?’

‘On the basis of shared information. As a first step, I’d like to attend the post-mortem.’

Mario whistled. ‘Rather you than me!’