Private Investigations (5 page)

I smiled. ‘I might have put it more subtly than that, but essentially it would have been the same, if that’s how the investigation’s turned out. If the police and other services haven’t found a vessel that size within a month of it going missing, they aren’t going to. What’s its range?’ I asked.

‘On a full tank? Maybe around fifteen hundred miles at cruise speed,’ Rory volunteered.

‘How much fuel was on board when it was taken?’ I continued.

‘Dunno.’ He turned to Eden. ‘Dad?’

‘Hodgson reckoned about a quarter tank, maybe a bit more,’ his father replied.

‘Enough to get it to the south of England, for example,’ I suggested.

Eden nodded. ‘Or the Irish Republic: that’s what the police assumed at first. They contacted their opposite numbers over there, but without success. There was no trace of it having docked anywhere to take on fuel.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘there was no trace of the
Princess Alison
, but what’s the first thing you’d do if you stole a large and very conspicuous luxury yacht?’

‘I’d change the name,’ Rory retorted. ‘And I’d disguise as much of the superstructure as I could.’

‘Minimum,’ I agreed. ‘Eden, anyone who can make a seventy-five-foot power yacht disappear has either taken her a short distance and sunk her out of malice, or they had a very sophisticated plan, possibly with inside help. Does the vessel have a permanent crew?’

‘No,’ he replied, ‘not exactly. It takes only two to run it, captain and engineer.’

‘Captain?’ I interjected. ‘What does that make you?’

Eden laughed. ‘It makes me the bloody admiral, I suppose. The captain’s name is Walter Hurrell, he’s ex-navy, and when he’s not driving my boat he’s driving my car, and doing other things for me. He’s on the holding company payroll as my personal assistant. The engineer is another ex-naval bloke, Jock Hodgson; he’s retired. When we need him we hire him by the day. If you’re suggesting they might have been involved, either one of them, I’d disagree with you. I’d vouch for both of them.’

I nodded. ‘Okay, I’m going to assume that both of them were checked out by the investigating officers and came up clean.’

‘Better than that,’ he said, ‘they were checked out by me, before I hired either of them. They’re sound, both of them.’

‘Did the police interview them?’ I asked.

‘I have no idea,’ Eden admitted. ‘I’m not privy to the extent of their inquiries, only the few details that they’ve volunteered.’

It seemed that I was being asked for my opinion of little or nothing, but I pressed on. ‘Where was the vessel moored? Inverkip?’

‘No,’ he replied. ‘We have a small estate just north of Rhu. It has a purpose-built deep-water mooring with a jetty and a boathouse. The
Princess Alison
was actually in secure premises when she was stolen.’

‘It must be a hell of a size of a boathouse,’ I observed, ‘to hold a seventy-five-foot yacht.’

‘It is,’ Rory confirmed. ‘It’s like a bloody aircraft hangar. It has an alarm, linked to a central monitoring station, but it goes through a telephone landline. They cut that as they broke in.’

So what?
I thought. ‘Didn’t that very act trigger the alarm?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘When the phone line goes down, the system switches to a back-up mobile phone. It takes a few seconds; by that time they’d cut the padlock, got in, and had disabled the sensor above the door.’

‘Now,’ Eden exclaimed, ‘the damned insurers are trying to say that the system wasn’t effective. Even though they specified it! Would you believe that?’

I had to smile. ‘When it comes to insurers, my friend, I’ll believe anything. However, you should have asked the police to check it out and look for weaknesses.’

He frowned. ‘What damn weaknesses?’

‘For a start,’ I told him, ‘the sensor should have been as far away from the door as possible. I’m guessing,’ I continued, ‘that there was a big gate at the end of the boathouse.’

Rory nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. The boathouse is really a U-shaped dock. The gate goes down to just below the water level. It’s powered, of course, and operated by a remote control that’s kept on the navigation deck. The thieves closed it after they left. If they hadn’t done that the gardeners might have seen that it was open, and we could have found out about the theft a lot sooner. It was discovered on the tenth of October, but we know from the alarm company that it happened six days earlier, at three a.m.’

I took a deep breath, taking time to ensure that what I said next wouldn’t be too blunt, then ventured, ‘Guys, are you absolutely sure about your two crewmen?’

Eden stiffened in his chair, ‘Yes,’ he snapped, ‘absolutely. Walter’s our right-hand man, and as for Jock . . . when you meet him, you’ll realise there isn’t a dishonest bone in his body.’

‘When I what?’ I asked, quietly.

He flushed a little. ‘I’m hoping that you’ll meet the guys, and that you’ll take a look at the boathouse. Bob, the truth is that while the insurers are refusing to pay out full value on the vessel on the basis of the police report, they have said they’ll go halfers on the cost of an independent review of investigation. If it’s successful, and the
Princess Alison
is recovered, they’ll pay all of it, plus a premium of ten per cent of the insured value. Will you take it on?’

Would I take it on? That was a hell of a big question. Would I step into an investigation that the police had been running for four months without getting anywhere? Would I waste my time looking for a rich man’s corporate toy, one that had quite possibly been repainted, renamed, altered cosmetically and sold on for a couple of million?

Yes, I would, for the original Alison’s sake. And of course a success bonus of half a million pounds was an added incentive.

‘Very well,’ I agreed, ‘I’ll look at it, but before I do I have to tell you that this was not an opportunistic theft. It’s been planned and executed by people who knew what they were doing, and almost certainly by someone who’d seen the interior of the boathouse, because of the way the alarm was neutralised.

‘Whoever stole the
Princess
had some sort of insider knowledge; that’s a racing certainty, and it should have been the basis of the police inquiry. Tell me, were you ever asked for a list of all the people who’ve been on board her, going back at least a couple of years?’

‘No,’ Rory replied. ‘We never were. We’d be able to provide it, but only up to a point. Some of our hospitality invitations were general; key execs of some of our customers and client companies regularly joined us for a day’s sailing, with partners. We don’t have the names of all of those partners, and we can hardly go back and ask them, especially not the customers. “Excuse me, but can you tell me your other half’s name so she can be eliminated from police inquiries?” No, I don’t think so.’

‘No,’ I conceded, ‘but if I’d been involved in this I’d have wanted that list. Who was the senior investigating officer?’

‘His name was Detective Inspector McGarry,’ Eden volunteered. ‘First name Randolph, I think. He was based in Dumbarton.’

‘Did you meet anyone else?’

He shook his head. ‘No. Not until Chief Superintendent Chambers came to see me. McGarry was my only contact throughout. I met him on the estate, at the scene of the crime, so to speak. He visited me a couple of times after that, to update me, but nobody else came near me, no more senior officer.’

I was incredulous. I was still in command of the Strathclyde force when the
Princess Alison
was stolen, a five-million-pound heist that nobody had seen fit to report to the chief constable. A major rural crime, dropped into the hands of a detective inspector, whose caseload would be entirely urban and who would have no specialist marine knowledge. If I had known of it at the time, arses would have been kicked. As it was I was going to make a fuss. ‘You never thought to take it up the line?’ I asked.

Eden stared back at me. ‘To whom? I didn’t know anyone else.’

‘You know me,’ I retorted. ‘I was in Pitt Street when it happened, getting ready to hand over to my successor in ScotServe. I’d have raised merry hell if I’d known that a DI had been assigned as the investigating officer. I’m not saying that the outcome would have been different, but there would have been a hell of a lot more resources committed, that is for sure.’

‘What can you do after the event?’ Rory asked. ‘Do we have a realistic chance of getting the
Princess
back?’ I sensed his accountant’s mind at work.

‘I don’t know,’ I told him, candidly. ‘I promise you this: as soon as I see it’s hopeless, I’ll tell you. I won’t waste my time or yours.’

‘Fair enough,’ his father said. ‘How will you begin?’

‘By seeing how much influence I still have,’ I replied. ‘I need to get my hands on the police report.’

Six

‘As a deputy chief,’ Mario McGuire said, ‘I’m not going to be crawling over every crime scene like Bob Skinner did, but this one . . .’ He shuddered. ‘I’ve attended very few child deaths in my career, but every one’s burned into my brain.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ DCI Pye confessed. He looked up at his senior colleague. ‘To be honest I didn’t expect you to come here, sir. I thought you’d want to know, that’s all.’

‘You did the right thing, Sammy,’ the DCC reassured him. ‘And you’re not alone. In the last couple of weeks I’ve had half a dozen calls from crime scenes, from your opposite numbers in Aberdeen, Fort William, Dumfries, Inverness, Falkirk and Motherwell. Strictly speaking none of you should have called me, but we’re all still bedding into this new structure, at all levels, and until we all feel comfortable, I’m quite happy with over-reporting.’

‘You don’t look very comfortable in that uniform, sir,’ Sauce Haddock chipped in.

McGuire grinned. ‘Don’t let it fool you, lad,’ he joked. ‘This isn’t your ordinary woolly tunic, this is Hugo Boss.’ In truth he did feel awkward in the clumsy garment. He had spent most of his career in plain clothes, and had never dressed casually for work; on his first day as an acting detective constable, he had worn a pale-blue mohair tailor-made suit. When he recalled that time, he could still hear Bob Skinner’s gentle admonition: ‘This is CID. We do unobtrusive here.’

As the first chief constable of ScotServe, Sir Andrew Martin had taken a different position. His deputies and ACCs, and all divisional commanders, were required to wear uniform on duty. He had considered extending that to CID, and had backed down only in the face of the united opposition of Maggie Steele, his designated deputy, and McGuire himself.

‘When you called me, Sammy,’ he continued, ‘I was heading for Hawick, to visit CID down there. If I hadn’t been in the vicinity I wouldn’t have come here, but I was, and when you told me there was a kid involved, I felt that I should.’ He looked at Haddock. ‘Have the SOCOs got a paper suit to fit me?’

The DS nodded and handed him a package, containing a sterile overall with a hood. He put it on, then added paper bootees and latex gloves. Prepared, he followed his similarly clad colleagues into a large tent that stood in the centre of the cleared area of the Fort Kinnaird car park.

A floodlight had been set up beside the red saloon, focusing on the boot. The child lay as Pye and Haddock had found her, tiny, helpless, her dead eyes shaming them all for allowing what had happened to her.

There was one other person in the tent, a very small man. He wore a face mask in addition to his tunic, removing it as he turned towards them.

‘Professor Hutchinson,’ McGuire exclaimed. ‘I thought you had . . .’

‘Not yet, Mario,’ the pathologist replied. ‘I’ve got a few weeks till I retire. Even then, I imagine I’ll probably help out on a part-time basis, if I’m needed.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. You’re too good to lose completely. Have you any initial thoughts about this? Can you give us a time of death?’

‘No more than three hours ago. I’m certain of that.’

‘And the cause? How about that?’

The professor frowned. ‘I can’t say yet,’ he replied, ‘and I’m not even going to hazard a guess. All I can tell you is that I see no sign of trauma. There’s no bruising to the neck, nothing to suggest strangulation.’

‘Asphyxiation?’ Haddock suggested.

‘That’s a possibility, Sauce,’ Hutchinson conceded, ‘but how? No, I won’t speculate; you’ll all have to wait until I’ve done the post-mortem.’

‘Soonest, yes?’ Pye murmured.

‘This afternoon,’ he promised. ‘I have one observation, though. If you take a look inside the boot, you’ll see that it’s been lined, with thick foam rubber; it’s even been fixed under the boot lid. Why? The only thing I can suggest is that it was done to protect the wee lass from being bumped around too much while the car was moving. That leads me to suppose that poor wee Zena was still alive when she was put in here.’

‘Zena?’ Pye repeated. ‘Why do you call her that? We haven’t identified her yet.’

‘There’s a name tag in the neck of her jacket, beside the maker’s label. I believe that’s what you detectives call “a clue”.’

‘Is there a surname?’

He looked up at the DCI, with an eyebrow raised. ‘No, but I don’t imagine there was another “Zena” in her school class, so it wouldn’t be necessary. I’m finished here,’ he continued, briskly. ‘The poor child can be removed to the mortuary. I’ll schedule the post-mortem for four o’clock.’ He pulled up the arm of his tunic to check his watch. ‘That gives you just over four hours to find out who she is and let her parents have a chance to see her before I proceed.’

The three officers left the tent; as he stripped off his crime scene outfit, Pye glanced across at an area of the perimeter where three television crews and other media were being marshalled by PC Jules Hoare.

‘Do you want to talk to them, sir?’ he asked McGuire.

‘No,’ the DCC replied, ‘but you should give them a statement. The midday bulletins will be coming on air very soon. Better all round if it’s based on the few facts we have rather than rampant speculation.’

‘Should I tell them that Bob Skinner was the one who found the child’s body?’

McGuire stared at the DCI. ‘Are you fucking crazy? Tell them that and it’s all they’ll report; on top of that they’ll hound him for quotes. If it was Joe Soap that had found her you wouldn’t have given a thought to naming him. Bob’s a private citizen now, and has as much right to that privacy as anyone else.’

‘Mmm,’ Pye murmured. ‘I’ll take that as a no.’

The DCC grinned. ‘You were winding me up, weren’t you? You do that, Sammy,’ he said. ‘What’s your plan of action?’

‘We find and interview the owner of the car. We search for the driver who ran off; the site manager says they have some CCTV footage of someone who might be him. We complete the identification of the girl.’

‘And there’s no chance the owner was driving?’

‘No. The boss . . . Mr Skinner, that is . . . was quite certain that the driver was in his twenties.’

‘Okay. You talk to the media. I’m off to Hawick.’ McGuire took a few paces towards his car, then stopped. ‘One more thing: no doubt Bob asked you to keep him informed of your progress. Be sure you do, otherwise he’ll bend my fucking ear, and I don’t want that.’

Pye smiled. ‘He did, and I will.’

As the DCC left, he signalled to the duty press officer, and headed in the direction of the corralled media. By the time he reached them, red lights were showing on the three TV cameras, and a clutch of portable recorders were thrust out towards him.

‘Morning,’ he began. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Samuel Pye. I’m the lead CID officer for the City of Edinburgh, and senior investigating officer here. I’m sorry to tell you that two hours ago, the body of a little girl was discovered in a vehicle, a red BMW, that had been involved in a minor collision in this car park. The driver ran off after the incident, before the child’s body was discovered. Obviously, finding him is very important to us. We’re looking for a thin-faced white man in his twenties, last seen wearing a grey hoodie and jeans. Any help the public can give us will be appreciated.’

He looked at the TV cameras. ‘I’m asking anyone who saw a person matching that description in this area at any time this morning to get in touch with us. Even if you can’t help us identify him, if we’re able to plot his movements that will be a help.’

‘Has the girl been identified?’ a female voice asked. Pye knew its owner, Lennox Webster, crime reporter of the
Saltire
.

‘No. That’s our top priority; somewhere there are parents who are facing some tragic news. We need to find them, and break it as gently as we can.’

‘So you don’t know her age.’

‘We’re guessing four or five; we’re asking schools and nurseries whether there have been any unexplained absences this morning. We’ve already established that no children of that age have been reported to the police as missing in the last few days.’

‘Do you know how she died?’ an STV reporter asked, breathlessly.

‘I’m sorry, we don’t. The pathologist’s initial examination found no signs of physical assault. That’s all I can tell you at this stage.’

‘But you are treating her death as murder, yes?’

‘We can’t, not yet. As of this moment we are investigating a suspicious death; that’s all I can say. That may change after the autopsy. In the meantime, I’m as impatient as you are to learn how this little girl died. Thank you.’

Pye forestalled any further questions by turning and walking away, heading back towards Haddock, who stood waiting beside the tent.

‘We’ve located the owner,’ the DS announced. ‘Callum Sullivan. There was no reply at his address when uniform called earlier on, but half an hour ago he walked into the North Berwick police office to see whether we’d found his missing car. The duty sergeant asked him, very politely, to wait there for us.’

‘Excellent,’ the DCI said. ‘And Zena? Did that name get any reaction anywhere?’

‘Not yet, other than this: we know that neither Sullivan nor his housemate Harris has a child of that name. However, he does have a daughter from a previous marriage. She’s called Kayleigh and she’s five years old.’

‘Let’s go and talk to him.’

Haddock nodded. ‘Oh yes, we should, for there’s more.’