Across the desk, Andrew John saw the chief superintendent"s face darken.
"f.u.c.k!" he swore quietly. "I"m coming down, Dan. Is Dorward on his way?
Good?" He ended the call and put the phone away.
"The horse has bolted, Andrew," he said. "The fish have swum; use any a.n.a.logy you f.u.c.king like. Your customer"s farm has been done; only this time they"ve left a casualty behind, and it isn"t a b.l.o.o.d.y trout."
"What?" John gave him a look of pure incredulity.
"Kath Adey, the manager. Someone hit her over the head, then dumped her in a fish tank. She"s dead."178.
Andy Martin made a point of learning by experience. On his second visit to Country Fresh Trout, he left his MGF in the care of a uniformed constable stationed at the head of the farm track and called for a police Land Rover to take him along the rough last leg of the journey.
Dan Pringle was standing at the door of the manager"s cottage as his driver pulled up and he jumped out. A black panel van, with a spinning ventilator on its roof, was parked outside, its rear doors open. As the Head of CID approached his colleague he pa.s.sed it, and glanced inside. A plastic coffin lay on the floor, its lid alongside it; he caught a glimpse of a white face, blue-tinged.
"Tell me about it," he asked quietly.
"Jack found her," said the superintendent, the only person on the scene, apart from Martin himself, who was not wearing a white tunic. "He came to change the tapes in the video, and he saw the girl, floating in the tank."
"What did the doctor say?"
"Just what I told you on the phone. He put the time of death at shortly after midnight, and said that the cause was probably cerebral injury rather than drowning. She was battered about the head with something solid, then chucked in the tank.
"We found this, just beside where the body was floating. We"ve been all over the place looking for a murder weapon; everywhere save the tanks.
They"re not all that deep, but given the cold we"ll need to use divers in dry suits if we"re going to search them properly.
"The sub-aqua team"s on the way down from Edinburgh right now. Effing and blinding all the way, I"ll betcha."
"Why the h.e.l.l did the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds have to kill her?" Martin muttered grimly.
"We"ll maybe have an answer to that when we have a look at the tapes."
"Maybe we"ll have an answer to everything. Do we know if she received any phone calls, or tried to make any?"
Pringle frowned. "Not with the cable cut, she didn"t."
180.
AUTOGRAPHS IN THE RAIN.The chief superintendent looked sharply at him. "Where"s the Alvarez woman?" he asked.
"I don"t know. She lives in Coldstream, but she"s not there."
"Well you find her, Dan. Wherever she is; something stinks about this, and I don"t mean the fish. I gave her till Friday to have her security installed, and this happens two days before."
He shook his head, and slammed his left fist painfully into his right palm in sudden remorseful anger. "That girl in the van. I told her not to leave the farm unattended; I read her the b.l.o.o.d.y Riot Act and told her that, whatever happened, she shouldn"t leave the fish.
"I"m going to have these guys, mate," he said, evenly, "and if Ms Alvarez does have anything to do with it, then G.o.d help her. Send McGurk and however many people it takes out to find her. Meanwhile, you and I are going up to Edinburgh to see the technical people and get as much as we can out of those tapes."The head of Human Resources stared at Mackenzie as if he had just asked he- to undertake a free climb, in winter, up the north face of the Eiger. "You cannot seriously expect me to tell you that, off the top of my head," Margaret Mair exclaimed.
The inspector looked at the top of her head, on which her hair was drawn into a tight grey bun. She reminded him of his first primary teacher, a warrior quite literally of the old school. For all his urbanity, for all his authority, he felt a memory of infant intimidation run through him.
He braved her glare. "Of course I don"t, Miss Mair," he a.s.sured her. "But I would like you to find out for me."
"It"s easy to say that, young man, but not nearly as easy to do it. You"re talking about the old days of British Railways. This man McConnell retired fifteen years ago. Things have changed since then. We"re privatised now, and many of the old personnel records simply don"t exist any more.
"Those that do might have been transferred to Railtrack, or to ScotRail or to another of the operating companies. It would all depend on what Mr McConnell did."
"Someone would be paying his pension, surely."
"That"s a different thing altogether. And besides, there are thousands upon thousands of pensioners."
Mackenzie decided to change tack. "But Miss Mair, I"m not necessarily talking about personnel records alone."
"Human Resources now," she nit-picked.
"Not even them. I simply want to speak to anyone who might have known this man, and with whom he might have had continuing contact over the years. Okay, he"s been gone for fifteen years, but there must be some people still around in the organisation who remember him, and remember who his friends were."
Her lips pursed. "Mr McConnell didn"t necessarily have any friends,"
she said, unexpectedly.
182.AUTOGRAPHS IN THE RAIN."You remember him?"
"Yes, Mr Mackenzie, as a matter of fact I do. I didn"t know him, you understand ... He was a senior manager then, and I was only a junior executive . . . and I don"t recall what section he worked in. However . . .
a.s.suming that it"s the same man, and I suppose it must be... I do recall that he was not regarded as a very nice man." She gave a brief, but severe nod of her head. "Particularly by the female members of staff."
The policeman saw her embarra.s.sment, and took secret delight in it.
"Why was that, Miss Mair?" he asked ingenuously.
She sniffed. "He had a bit of a reputation, among the younger girls at any rate. They used to call him ..." She paused, and for that second he thought he saw her blush. "... they used to call him "Feely John". He had the name of being a bit of a toucher. Always accidental, of course, and given his rank, no one ever complained, but most of the girls didn"t like to get too close to him."
"What about the others? Were there any who didn"t mind?"
"There were a couple of girls," she said. "There were rumours, shall we say. They were both flighty types, and neither of them worked here long.
There was gossip once about someone walking into a room at an office party, but the detail of it never came to my ears."
"" bet it did," thought Mackenzie, ""but it"ll never pa.s.s your tight old lips now."
"What about male colleagues? Do you recall anyone with whom he was particularly friendly? For example, I"m told that his former sister-in-law married a colleague of his. Her name would have been McConnell too; she died about twenty years ago. Does any of that ring bells?"
"No, it does not. As I told you, I did not a.s.sociate with the man, nor did I even know his section."
"In that case, do you know anyone who might have?"
"Mr Mackenzie," she exclaimed, indignant once more. "I am not a mine of information nor a h.o.a.rder of old office gossip."
"I never suggested that you were," he said at once, in his best mollifying tone. "All I was hoping to do was to draw on your experience."
The woman"s stiff spine seemed to unbend just a fraction. "Very well,"
she conceded. "If you leave the matter with me, I will search my memory rurther and consult other senior colleagues. Former sister-in-law, you said?"
She pursed her lips again, as if she did not approve of sisters-in-law in the "former" category."It may take some time, and I can make no promises. However, if you leave me your telephone number, I shall see what I can do."184.54."You realise, gentlemen, that you are not going to be seeing a seventy-mil movie here?" Tony Davidson pointed out. The force"s Director of Telecommunications had a reputation for plain speaking. "This is not Hollywood; we cannot trace fleeing criminals by satellite in the dark. We may be able to tell where a specific dust-cart is at any moment during its round, but that"s about it.