When The Devil Drives (30 page)

‘Tight,’ Fallan observed. ‘Scope’s zeroed for a longer distance.’

‘That’s right,’ Ross said. ‘Last shooter must have been set up for the far targets, back of the range. I generally don’t re-zero these because you never know what level the next guest is going to be.’

‘And what does any of this mean in English?’ Jasmine asked.

‘That you’re a natural, hen,’ Ross replied.

He made an adjustment to the scope and handed Jasmine the rifle again.

‘Try now.’

She began another grouping, still aiming dead centre. This time the pellets found their mark.

It was strangely calming. She could lose herself in the view through the scope, putting everything else from her head.

She had no idea how long she’d been there, but she was snapped back to the here and now when Ross mentioned the death of Hamish Queen. Suddenly the view through a rifle scope meant something else entirely.

‘Heard some scuttlebutt from a shooter I know who’s still on the job. They haven’t found the slug yet, but from the damage it did they reckon Hamish was killed by a very high-powered rifle, something with serious distance capability.’

‘So it could have been a hunting accident after all?’ Jasmine wondered.

‘I sincerely doubt it. The theory that the bullet might have been aimed at one of the bankers is bollocks as well. A long-range shot, cover of darkness: this was someone who knew what they were doing.’

She caught just a hint of professional admiration in Ross’s tone, like he knew it was inappropriate but he couldn’t help but give the shooter his due. And with that, she realised what that brief flash of brightness on Fallan’s face had been.

It was pride.

Catherine hated these mobile incident rooms. They made her feel like she was about to give blood in some supermarket car park. Truth was, she was merely going to sweat it. They also reminded her uncomfortably of temporary toilets, like you’d find at fairgrounds and festivals. The one time she and Drew had gone to T in the Park, back before Duncan came along, she had decided just to hold it in rather than bare her nethers to the abominations of the cubicle she’d found herself in. They were only there for the day and her bladder was already well trained by the job. She had thought she could hang on until she got home, but didn’t make it past the first motorway services area on the M8. The relief bordered on a euphoria that eclipsed everything she’d felt all day, except perhaps when she heard Steven Lindsay play ‘Swimmer’ live for the first time since her teens.

Given the manpower she’d been allowed to commandeer, it was a squeeze fitting so many detectives into the cramped and flimsy little space, and she was glad to be doing it early in the day, given the paucity of the ventilation. Right then, shampoo, deo and body spray were still winning. Nonetheless, cramped, crowded or sweaty, she knew this part was the cornerstone upon which any investigation was built. Sometimes it was repetitive to the point of seeming redundant, but it was an indispensable practice, the importance of which had been instilled in her by her old mentor, the redoubtable Moira Clark: ‘Make sure everybody else knows what everybody else knows.’

She checked her watch. It was just coming up for ten. She’d give it a minute, then clear her throat and bring the room to order.

The drive had taken more than two hours. The first time she’d come up, with Zoe at the wheel, she had thought it quite a picturesque trip, a nice change from motorway tailbacks and grey housing schemes, but she could see it getting old fast if she had to keep
coming here. The road was rapidly becoming over-familiar, and she was already fed up with blue-lighting it to get past caravans.

She wouldn’t be seeing a lot of Drew and the boys this week either. She had crossed paths briefly with Duncan this morning, as he was an early riser, but all she’d managed with Fraser was a groggy kiss, waking him up for school as she was heading out the door.

Duncan didn’t ask about
Trail of the Sniper
, which meant Drew must have had a word. He had, however, been staring at an advert for it in a magazine when she walked into the kitchen, his expression baleful despite it being the day before school broke up for the holidays. She deduced that he’d assembled the pose for her benefit; it was no coincidence she just happened to walk into the room and find him there with that page open. Dad had said no; was he trying to melt Mummy’s heart, thinking she might be good cop on this occasion? Or had he read something in Drew’s explanation that pointed the finger back at her? Maybe it was a consolation to be out of it. By the end of the week he’d have moved on to obsessing about something else anyway.

What was all the more galling about coming up to Alnabruich was that her role here was nothing she couldn’t do over the phone from Glasgow. This was political: this was about the TV and press cameras shooting her outside Cragruthes Castle instead of outside Govan police station when she made a statement later today. That said, she’d feel a lot more justified in whining about it if she could argue that the travelling was getting in the way of all her rapid progress.

Ten years ago, this would have been considered early days. Now she was serving under the tyranny of ever-accelerating news cycles, of people hitting refresh on a browser and expecting the story to change from minute to minute. When it didn’t, it wouldn’t be long before the politicos began asking whether the investigation had stalled. Progress wasn’t measured in days any more, but in hours. That was why even she was conscious of having seen the same footage over and over again: cops in hi-viz vests combing the grounds and the woods beyond; the same statements from her and from a spokesman for the Cragruthes estate.

The bank had put forward nobody, wanting their part in it to be quietly buried. Given the recent revelations about former Royal Bank of Scotland boss Fred Goodwin taking out a super-injunction to conceal what he was getting up to when he wasn’t flushing billions down the toilet, it was no surprise that his counterparts at the RSB weren’t firing salutes over Hamish Queen’s body.

The interviews with the bank’s delegates and guests were ongoing, but they were all telling the same story. There were no accounts of anybody acting suspiciously or sneaking away during the show. Drink was flowing, and that meant urine would have been too, but there had been toilet breaks between acts. When there are only three rows, and not a lot of leg room, it’s hard for anybody to take their leave without being noticed. And yet there were only thirty-five guests accounted for, including the host and the late Mr Queen, and someone had taken pains to erase the paperwork.

She had gone back and pressed Sir Angus on this. He said he had been sure they were full, though he added that in the past the bank and other clients had booked the full complement of places while keeping one or two free in case they had to add someone at short notice. Plausible enough, but it didn’t explain why somebody had deleted the lists from the Cragruthes computer.

A copy of the final booking emailed to the castle had been requested from the RSB, as the original outgoing version would still be on their system. When it arrived, Catherine suspected it might pose some awkward questions for somebody, and she was going to enjoy asking them.

One of the local officers spoke first, a sandy-haired outdoorsy type she could easily have made a fool of herself over once upon a time.

‘DC Brian Frazer, ma’am,’ he identified himself. ‘We’ve been bracing folk known to be fond of a wee moonlight trek with a gun on them purely for defending themselves from animals. Alibis all round, which is to be expected, because it’s standard practice that you always have somebody to vouch that you were in the pub while you’re out bagging an unauthorised bit of game. Further to that, the consensus is that nobody goes shooting during the fortnight that these plays are on, because there’s just too much activity.’

‘I hope I’m hearing a “but” here,’ Catherine observed by way of urging him to get to it. You didn’t pipe up first just to tell everybody you had nothing.

‘Indeed. I spoke to a younger guy called Andy Philips. He’s seventeen. It was his dad I was there to talk to, Donny, but it turned out his boy had been out doing a bit of late-night fishing. It’s not just the woods that are well stocked on the Cragruthes estate, you see. He was on his way out here along the Oban road when he saw somebody getting into a black Range Rover some time after ten. He didn’t take note of the time; he was just estimating according to when he left the house and how long it normally took him to get there.’

‘Please tell me he got a plate.’

‘Sorry. The boy wasn’t wanting to be seen, so he was more concerned with staying out of sight at that point. But the driver emerged from the woods on the side of the road nearer the castle.’

‘Did he get any kind of look at him?’

‘Not much. Says he was dressed in dark-coloured camo with a hat pulled down ever his eyes. Weird thing is, he said he didn’t see a rifle. The bloke was running, though. Got into the Range Rover and took off in a hurry. Andy ditched his tackle at that point and was thinking of turning back because he thought the bloke might be running from gamekeepers. He’d heard a shot a wee while before; he thought maybe fifteen minutes but, as I said, he didn’t check his watch. He lay low for a while and when no keepers appeared he proceeded as planned. He didn’t know about what happened until I showed up, as he was fishing half the night and then sleeping.’

‘So do you know where the vehicle was parked?’

‘Aye. I drove Andy up to show me. It’s estate land on either side of the road at that point. The Range Rover was parked in a layby, about a kilometre from the castle as the crow flies, maybe a kilometre and a half on foot.’

‘Are you familiar with the territory?’

DC Frazer gave a coy smile.

‘I may have strayed on to it when I was Andy’s age, with a fishing rod purely for protection from the salmon.’

‘Perfect. I want you to take charge of a second ground search. Start from where the Range Rover was parked and work back towards the locus along the probable routes.’

‘Yes ma’am.’

It was a positive start, and just as well, because Catherine suspected the next part would be less dynamic.

‘Have we got anything new on the victim?’ she asked, for which, read ‘motive’.

All eyes fell on DI Malcolm Gillan, who did very well not to wince at being put on the spot. Nonetheless, his body language was clearly apologetic for what was about to follow. On a major investigation such as this, there was always going to be at least one job that would turn out to be like nailing jelly to a wall, and he had been assigned it. There was no way of knowing that in advance, so she hoped he understood amid his frustrations that giving him this beat was an endorsement, not a booby prize. She knew it was going to be crucial, so she needed someone who could get the job done.

‘A whole load of bugger-all at the moment,’ he admitted. ‘No business deals gone sour, no drug habit connecting him to the wrong people, no debts, obviously, and no Jekyll-and-Hyde public face versus business face stuff. So far I’m getting the impression Barney the Dinosaur had more enemies.’

‘
I’d
shoot Barney the Dinosaur,’ Catherine said, partly to offer Malcolm a boost and partly in bitter memory of the cloying dreck she’d had to sit through when the boys were very small.

‘Detectives have spoken to the family,’ Malcolm went on, ‘and we’re also using their information to spread our inquiries to close friends and to his professional associates. Nobody’s jumping up to point any fingers, so no obvious candidate has leapt to anyone’s mind. The one thing that sticks out so far is that Queen was in the middle of his third divorce. It’s possible his latest flame had a rival suitor – or even a husband – who was the jealous type, but at this stage we don’t know if there even
was
a latest flame.

‘Three wives and counting also implies that he was given to flinging it about; certainly if there’s a vice to be looked into, it would appear to be women. However, the main thing is we’re aware that the dirt
and the grudges don’t start coming out until the eulogies are all finished, so we might have to be patient.’

‘It’s early days,’ Catherine agreed, trying to sound supportive, but everybody knew this was bad news. It was early days, but in another sense it was already very late. They were way past the twenty-four-hour mark and moving into the exponential stage, whereby the longer it took, the longer it was going to take.

Nobody was pointing fingers, no names were leaping to anyone’s mind. Nobody had a motive. Nobody had a clue.

‘What about our secondary angle?’ she asked the room. ‘The possibility that the shot was wide and Sir Angus McCready was the target?’

It was Laura’s turn to look apologetic.

‘Nothing coming in to support that so far, boss. A dispute with a property developer where he’d agreed to sell off some land then changed his mind, that’s the only controversy in his recent past, and it wasn’t that recent: 2006. A lot of lawyer sabre-rattling on either side, then it died away. He’s mouthed off about the animal rights lobby a few times in the local papers, so that might be worth pursuing, but he’s not exactly Huntingdon Life Sciences. He seems popular enough with the punters around here, mostly getting “decent cove” and “harmless old duffer” type reviews. We’re digging into his private life as discreetly as we can manage.’

‘Keep it that way,’ Catherine said. ‘We don’t want the political fall-out from our aristocratic innocent bystander discovering he’s being investigated. And in the event that he
was
the intended target, then nor do we want the shooter to know we’re on to that possibility.’

‘Yes boss.’

‘Now, anything else we need to share?’

Catherine scanned the faces around the rapidly heating room and noticed that one of them wasn’t giving her his undivided attention, being instead bathed in the glow of an open laptop.

‘Beano, I’ve told you before: you can bring in games on the last day of term, but no earlier.’

‘I’m sorry boss,’ he responded. He raised his head dutifully, but
his attention was still partly on his screen. ‘It’s the RBS guest list. It just pinged into the inbox the second you called us to order, and I wanted to bring us up to speed if there was anything we should know.’