Quintin Jardine - Hour Of Darkness

Her eyes narrowed, as if she was looking a couple of questions ahead, then she replied to the one in hand. ‘Father Donnelly,’ she murmured.

‘That’s his priest?’ I added for Wilding’s benefit. ‘The man who more or less adopted him in his teenage years?’

‘Yes, that’s him.’

‘But he hasn’t gone there,’ I told her.

‘That’s a pity,’ she said.

‘You’re right. It is. I know he didn’t because just before you got here I called Father Donnelly, and I asked him that point-blank. He told me that he hadn’t.’

I let that sink for a second or two before I went on, to what by then she knew was coming.

‘But you did, Cheryl,’ I murmured, lowering my voice, because I didn’t want to frighten her. ‘You went to see Father Donnelly on Monday, in Tighnabruaich, where he lives now. When we check with your bed and breakfast I think we’ll find that you checked in there on that same day, having taken the ferry to Tarbert from Portavadie. It’s not that far from Tighnabruaich.

‘That answers another question: why someone had been checking out ferry routes on your computer. It begs another, of course. Did that person check so many just to confuse Ray here?’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ she whispered.

‘I’m afraid that I think you would, that you know all too well. I’ll tell you what else I’ve worked out. You must have slept in David’s Honda on the Sunday night. If you slept at all, that is; it must have been pretty challenging in that confined space, all things considered.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she snapped.

‘Yes you do, Cheryl. Father Donnelly couldn’t tell me what you and he talked about. Couldn’t, I repeat, not wouldn’t, which can only mean that he took your confession, as a priest, and is bound to keep it secret.’

She sagged in her chair and I knew that we had gone as far as we could.

I rose from mine. ‘I’m going to stop there, Mrs Mackenzie,’ I said. ‘DI Wilding will now arrest you on suspicion of the murder of your husband, and you’ll be formally cautioned. You’ll be re-interviewed by other officers, no doubt. What you’ve told us here won’t be offered as evidence, but we will be able to use it to put together a complete picture of your movements.’

I stood, and she looked up at me, nothing much in her eyes any more other than exhaustion.

‘I have one more question, Cheryl,’ I concluded, ‘but I think I know the answer already. I expect we’ll find that you checked out of your B and B on Wednesday or on Thursday, at the latest. After that, did you visit your Uncle Max?’

Karen Neville was still more than puzzled by the news from Missing Persons as she drove into Stockbridge. So much so that she had almost called her former husband once again, only staying her hand when she realised that he would probably be with Alex Skinner, not wanting to be suspected of phoning him at any excuse.

Mary Chambers was waiting on the pavement when she pulled up outside her partner’s flat. The whole force knew that the DCS was involved with the sister of Griff Montell, a fellow Edinburgh cop. He had taken the news badly when he had found out, but a transfer to Special Branch, which operated outside the CID network, had been the diplomatic solution.

‘It’s called Oakmount,’ Chambers said as she buckled herself into the passenger seat, ‘and it’s in the Grange. I’ve got the location on my phone. Head for the area and I’ll find it when we get there.’

Neville obeyed, staying silent for a while as she concentrated on navigating her way through three sets of the temporary traffic lights which had become a curse of the city. The head of CID left her to it, uninterrupted, until they had crossed the Meadows, and were heading up Kilgraston Road.

‘What’s this boy like, Karen?’ she asked.

‘I found him okay,’ she replied, ‘but what Jack and I told him changed his whole lifetime thinking about his father, and made him part of a family he never knew existed. When Mr Partridge said he seemed disturbed, that was enough for me.’

‘Me too. I’ve got a car up there, with orders to stop anyone other than family from getting to McGrew. Mind you, from what I heard from DI Pye, we’re only postponing the inevitable by keeping him safe.’

‘More than that, ma’am,’ Neville said. ‘I’ve got some questions to ask him.’ She told the DCS about the latest finding from the DNA trawl of the Caledonian Crescent flat.

‘Was he, by God?’ she hissed. ‘But we were told he’s physically harmless.’

‘Himself, perhaps,’ the DS conceded, ‘but he might not have been alone. There’s so much DNA he could have had a platoon of known heavies there without us finding them. The only questionable thing is, the DNA was found in the living room; that wasn’t affected by the burst pipe from above, so it wasn’t redecorated. He could have been there at any time and not just in that short window between the workmen finishing and Watson being killed.’

‘Then we do need to have a serious chat with Hastie; maybe he was meeting the folk in the Spanish van.’

‘There’s a thought,’ Neville murmured as she stopped for a red light, and as Chambers’ phone rang.

As the head of CID took the call, she seemed to straighten up in her seat as she listened to what she was being told. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she said, and her sergeant knew at once who the caller was. ‘As soon I’ve wrapped up the urgent matter I’m on at the moment, I’ll be there. Allowing for the weekend traffic, I should be at Gayfield in an hour.’

She whistled as she took the mobile from her ear. ‘Fucking hell!’ she exclaimed. ‘That was the chief. If this here gets complicated I might need to haul in Haddock to join you. I’ve just been ordered to meet ACC McGuire at Gayfield, to do a formal interview with Cheryl Mackenzie. Ray Wilding’s just arrested her for murdering her husband.’

The bombshell was still reverberating in Neville’s mind when her boss called out, ‘Take a right here,’ as she approached a junction. ‘Second on the left next,’ she continued as they made the turn, into a quiet suburban street, in which only a single pedestrian could be seen, ‘and we should be there.’

She had barely finished speaking before her driver slammed on the brakes. ‘That’s him,’ Karen shouted, as she freed herself from her seat belt and jumped from the car. ‘Marlon Hicks.’

By the time Chambers’ feet hit the pavement the DS had pinned the lightly built youth against the wall of the house he had been passing. ‘Don’t run, Marlon,’ Karen warned him. ‘There’s no point and there’s no need. We want to talk to you, that’s all.’

‘What about?’ he retorted. ‘I ain’t done nothin’.’

‘That’s true, and we want to make sure that you don’t. What are you doing here?’

‘Just walkin’, lady, that’s all. I got a right.’

As he spoke she patted him down. Her hand came upon something in a pocket of his hoodie; she reached in and withdrew a kitchen knife.

‘You don’t have a right to carry that,’ the head of CID said, as she reached them. ‘Give us some sensible answers, son, or we’ll arrest you.’

‘We know where you were going, Marlon,’ Neville told him. ‘And I don’t like the fact that you were going there with a knife in your pocket.’ She dropped her hands to her sides, freeing him, but ready to stop him instantly if he tried to run again.

‘I wasn’t going to use it,’ he murmured. ‘I only brought it to scare him.’

‘I don’t think it would,’ she replied, fingering the blade. ‘You could barely cut butter with this thing. Why did you want to frighten him?’

‘I wanted to make him tell me why they killed my father. They took him from me before I was even born, those people.’