The Sea Detective (3 page)

The klaxon intruder alarm went silent.

A dog howled: an eager lupine baying, the kind of noise Cal imagined a trained hound emitted when it first nosed the scent of its fleeing quarry.

He swore, lurching away. At the end of the lane was a gateway and he passed through it into what seemed to be a field. The ground underfoot was even but his injury made him unsteady and the darkness disorientated him. After stumbling twice, he twisted his right ankle. On a different occasion he might have broken his fall with his hands. But, as he toppled sideways, another stab of pain came from his ribs and he held his arms tight to him for protection. His right shoulder crashed against a stone and the side of his face pushed into mud. He grunted again.

Now he was alert, listening, barely breathing.

The police dog would soon be upon him: running softly, sure-footedly in the dark. He imagined the rhythmic plop of its pads on the damp earth; its relentless intensity of purpose, its jaws hanging with sloppy webs of saliva. He drew in his legs, covered his face with his arms and waited for the shock of its teeth. Seconds passed, a minute. Now the only sound was the wailing of another approaching police car and he dared to think the baying had been a village dog disturbed by the commotion of alarms and sirens. He pushed himself to his knees, still half-expecting a canine missile to lunge at him from the dark. He listened for a moment longer, then stood and staggered away, leading with his left leg and dragging the right after him.

He crossed one field and climbed a fence into another where the land started to fall away steeply. He followed its slope and soon the lights of a village appeared ahead of him, half a dozen at first, then more stretching to his left and right. Cal felt in his anorak pocket for his mobile phone and turned it on, shielding it to conceal the green glow from its screen. The time was 11.48pm. It would be dawn in about five hours. Then he’d have to trust to his only piece of pre-planning. He’d searched the local bus company’s website and found the late night service. It departed the Environment Minister’s village at 11.40pm, eight minutes ago. Just in case, he’d also checked the early morning services. A bus visited all the villages in this area between 7.30 and 8.15, picking up schoolchildren. This was his contingency. Another time, he’d work it out better. Why was it always another time?

The village lights were no more than 200 metres from him now, a field away on the other side of a hawthorn hedge which was silhouetted against the sky. Cal crawled under its branches and rested his back against a stump. His left hand instinctively reached for his side. His fingers found the tear in his anorak and felt the stickiness of congealing blood on his tee shirt. He decided not to try to clean it. His hands were grazed and dirty from falling and anyway it was too dark for him to see what he was doing. He pressed the fabric softly against the wound, staunching whatever bleeding there was, before finding his iPod in his anorak pocket and shutting off the outside world.

It was unusual for him to sleep badly outside. At any season of the year he’d go to the islands and bed down on the sand if the weather was fine or under canvas if it wasn’t. But this night he fretted about missing the pre-dawn. He wanted to be on the move before daylight for his approach to the village, in case the police were out hunting for him. He woke three or four times, checking the time, searching for the sky lightening behind the village, cursing when it was as dark as the last time. Then he fell into a deep sleep, lying on his left-hand side, muffling his phone alarm, and was woken by two pigeons fluttering noisily in the hedge beside him. His eyes flicked wide. Light washed the surrounding fields and hedges with the bright greens of May. Cal swore and opened his phone. It was 7.20, only ten minutes before the bus made the first stop on its morning schedule.

He twisted around to where remnant wisps of mist were lifting above the village, a neat collection of two dozen houses around a church and what looked like a hotel. The field between him and it was a football pitch, bordered on the short side by a stone wall which extended close to Cal’s resting place. He crawled to it and climbed over, jarring himself when he landed on the other side. With stiff fingers he probed at his wound. The blood was dry to touch. Then, crouching, he made his stumbling advance towards the village. Half way there he peered over the wall. A terrace of cottages stretched to his right. The bus stop was outside the hotel which had Craw’s Nest in black gothic script above its door. Cal ducked down and continued to the road-side fence. As he reached it he heard the sound of an approaching engine. It was a car, a red Volkswagen, not the bus arriving early or a police patrol. But standing by the bus stop were a child in school uniform and a man with a tweed cap; father and son, he assumed. They had their backs to him. He put his right foot on top of the fence and jumped into the road. The jolt of the tarmac forced from him a stifled cry of pain. He looked up anxiously but neither man nor boy had noticed him.

Cal pulled his anorak straight, brushed the tops of his jeans and crossed to the pavement. He was only 20 metres from the bus stop when father and son saw him. The man shot Cal an unguarded look of suspicion. His hand went protectively to the boy’s shoulder.

‘Good morning, fine day,’ the man said, his country manners overcoming his wariness. His voice croaked and he coughed to clear it. Cal noticed his hands. They were big and his fingers were swollen red. His trousers were tucked into labourer’s boots.

‘It is, it is,’ Cal mumbled and put his head down to discourage further conversation. He stepped back on the pavement to keep his distance.

Four more children, three girls and a boy, were coming towards the bus stop. When they saw Cal they squinted slyly at him. The tallest girl whispered something and all four put their hands over their mouths and giggled. Cal turned away. He didn’t want them giving the police a description apart from what was obvious and unhelpful: male, 5’10, wearing black North Face anorak, black hood, dirty jeans and walking boots. He pushed the zip on his hood to tighten it and pulled it forward so the rim extended over his eyes and beyond the sides of his face.

When he turned back the man was looking down the road but his son was staring, eyes wide, at Cal’s right thigh. There was a stain of dried blood, the size of a fist, on his jeans. Cal swivelled his hip to hide it just as the bus appeared round the corner. It slowed with an exhalation of brakes. When the door opened, the children raced up the steps to the back seats.

The father waved to his son and took a few uncertain steps along the pavement before stopping and glancing back at Cal. He seemed torn about leaving his boy on a bus with this stranger. But he turned and strode off, as if he’d decided that nothing bad could happen at 7.45 on a beautiful May morning in a village which last bothered the crime statistics seven years before when a joy-rider ran a stolen car into the side of the Craw’s Nest.

The bus driver, a red-faced bald man, who had greeted the children cheerily by their first names, noticed Cal when he was on the bottom step. ‘Lovely morning,’ he called out.

Cal, his head down, asked if the bus was going to West Linton.

‘Aye, that’s where we go in the mornings.’

‘Where do I get the connection to Edinburgh?’

‘That’ll be the stop by the school.’

Cal found a two pound coin in his pocket, collected his change and sat behind the driver. As the bus climbed uphill and veered left at a fork in the road, Cal noticed the signpost, swore and slid in his seat. The bus was returning him to the Environment Minister’s village, to the scene of his crime.

The first houses were soon visible through flowering chestnut trees. The minister’s house, a former Church of Scotland manse, was at the far end of the single street. Cal pulled his hood further over his head. A police car was parked at the gates of the property, a three storey Georgian building surrounded by flower beds with neat lawns and gravel paths lined with box hedges. The height of the bus allowed Cal a view over the wall to the saw-toothed fence. He saw where he’d skewered himself – one of the palings had snapped. Then he noticed the floodlights above the porch door and on the gable.

What puzzled him was why it had taken so long for the sensor to detect him and the lights to flash on. The delay had caught him off guard. He’d been in the garden for almost three minutes before he’d triggered the lights or the alarm.

Now Cal searched for the alarm box but instead he saw something which sent a shock of apprehension through him. On the first floor, between the two lights, was a small black camera on a wall mount. It ranged slowly backwards and forwards as Cal watched it. Why had he looked up?

Rule number 2: wear a hood. He had.

Rule number 3: never look up. He had; the moment the lights blazed; his face a pale, reflective moon with a startled expression staring into a camera.

Why?

Detective Inspector David Ryan’s day started badly with a phone call at 5.30am. It was the control room at headquarters with a message from the Assistant Chief Constable ordering him to take charge of a ‘politically sensitive case’.

‘There’s been an intruder in the Environment Minister’s garden …’ the duty Sergeant began. ‘It was last night … it’s taken a few hours to filter through from division.’

Ryan swore. Already it sounded like a short straw.

‘… The ACC wants you out there as soon as possible because of the significant political risk to the force.’ Anticipating Ryan’s temper, the Sergeant added a quick disclaimer. ‘His words not mine.’

‘Was anything taken, was there any damage?’

‘Apart from a bit of broken fencing, not a blade of grass was harmed as far as the local boys can tell.’

‘So it could have been a drunk, straying off course.’

‘It’s possible.’

Ryan swore again. ‘Where does this minister live?’

‘A couple of miles outside West Linton …’

‘Text me the address and post-code,’ Ryan snapped.

He showered, put on his clothes and drove to the by-pass, programming his sat-nav at the first set of red lights. There was so little traffic he’d cleared Edinburgh and was skirting the Pentland Hills to the south-west of the city in less than 20 minutes. No more than 10 minutes later he was driving through the minister’s gates. Then there’d been delay after delay, some of it routine and unavoidable, some of it not. Ryan had stopped distinguishing between them during the minister’s wife’s harangue about the muddy police footprints on her hall and drawing room carpets.

Short of offering to clean them himself what was he supposed to say?

At first he tried appeasement. ‘I’m sorry madam.’ Hadn’t the officers in question been checking the house for intruders? Hadn’t their concern been madam’s safety?

Madam this, madam that.

But on she went, about her book group meeting later that morning, about the forensic team ‘cluttering up the place’ when her guests arrived, about the police making more mess in the garden than the intruder.

When, at last, Ryan extricated himself he drove to the local police station. He spent an hour waiting for the officers who attended the scene the night before to drag themselves out of their beds to answer his questions about their (inadequate) crime report. He didn’t mention their footprints on the minister’s carpets. In his opinion it was the only thing they did half right; taught that bloody woman a lesson.

The return journey to headquarters took another 40 minutes and tried his patience some more. Ryan idled angrily in one rush hour traffic jam after another. Now, he was snatching a late breakfast of tea and a cheese sandwich in the canteen when a civilian technician handed him a file. Inside were a mug-shot and a record sheet. The face recognition programme had identified the intruder caught on the minister’s security camera as a petty offender cum political activist called Caladh McGill with an address in south Edinburgh.

Ryan swore again.

Everything about McGill smelt small time, way below where Ryan set his radar.

The last hurrah of the Edinburgh property boom was a former whisky bond on the road between the old port of Leith and the harbour at Granton where the sailing crowd kept their boats. The buy-to-let investors who bought off plan in July 2007 and stumped up their deposits had baled out before completing their purchases six months later. By now, The Cask, the building’s refurbished name, was showing its neglect. The red and white banner which proclaimed ‘1 & 2 bedroom luxury penthouses for sale’ was grimy with exhaust fumes. Underneath it was another, loosely flapping, which announced ‘For rent/may sell 25% reduction for quick completion’. It was erected last spring for the upturn in the market which never happened. There had been no buyers. There had been no viewers.

Instead the developer had done a deal with a social housing association to deter the bank, now majority owned by the British taxpayers, from repossessing the property. The association signed low rental leases on four of the 20 flats: ‘transition homes’ for teenagers coming out of care. The only other occupant was Cal. The developer let him live rent free in a ‘studio penthouse’ with views of the abandoned flour mill across the waste ground opposite in lieu of payment for caretaking duties. Cal’s ‘grace and favour’ flat, as the developer liked to describe it with a heavy inflection of sarcasm, was on the top, fourth, floor where the lift now deposited him with a final judder.

His apartment was at the far end of the landing. Recessed ceiling lights flickered on ahead of him. Cal dropped his chin to his chest to avoid their glare. Despite his weariness, the irony of it forced a wry smile: why hadn’t he done the same last night when the lights blazed in the Environment Minister’s garden?

His door, bearing the sign, ‘Cal McGill, Flotsam and Jetsam Investigations’, opened onto a large airy studio separated into living and sleeping areas by shelves on a metal gantry two metres high. Cal turned left past the sleeping area to the bathroom, descending the three steps slowly, holding his side. He untied the laces of his mud-stained boots, kicked them off, undid his belt and let his jeans and underwear fall to the tiled floor. His legs were muscular and white with a purple scar below the left knee, the result of a sea diving accident two months before. He unzipped his anorak which dropped from his shoulders revealing a blood stain on his tee shirt stretching from under his right arm to his hip. Cal pulled at the fabric but it stuck firm and he went to find scissors before padding flat footed into the rainstorm shower.