Stuart MacBride - A Dark So Deadly

‘We’re on our way to break the news to Duffy’s wife now.’

‘OK, thanks.’ Callum grinned across the car at Franklin. ‘And Watt, Dotty? You did good. You make an excellent team.’

There was a small pause, then Watt’s voice rang out loud and clear: ‘Don’t patronise me.’ He hung up.

Franklin shook her head. ‘You did that on purpose, didn’t you?’

‘Oh hell yes.’

Franklin clambered out into the rain and hurried in through the overflow mortuary’s front doors. Paused for a second to turn and wave at him, then disappeared inside.

Callum sat there with the windscreen wipers moaning. Pulled out his phone and called Control. ‘What happened to the PNC checks I asked for days ago?’

Silence.

‘Hello?’

A woman’s voice stabbed out from the speaker. ‘Do you want to try that again, DC MacGregor, using words like “please” and “thank you”?’

Prima donnas. ‘Please can you tell me what happened to the sodding PNC checks I asked for days ago? Thank you.’

‘Good manners don’t cost anything, you know. And I don’t appreciate your sarcasm, by the way.’

‘Fine. I’m sorry. Please can I have my PNC results.’

‘That’s better.’ The sound of a keyboard being thumped into submission. ‘I have eight names and details all emailed to you the day before yesterday.’

Thursday. The day they accused him of murdering his own mother.

‘Yes. Sorry I was... It wasn’t a good day. I’ll check when I get back to the office.’

‘See: there was no reason to be all sarcastic and demanding, was there?’

‘No. Sorry. Thank you.’

He hung up. Ran his good hand across his face.

Well done, Callum. Way to be a complete and utter dick.

‘Urgh...’

Let’s face it, with all this crap going on, he needed every friend he could get right now.

And speaking of which: he dialled Shannon.

‘What?’ The word barked down the line.

‘Bob, it’s Callum. This a bad time?’

‘Oh, OK. Hold on.’ It sounded like Marilyn Monroe was singing in the background, boop-boop-de-dooping her way into silence. Then Shannon was back. ‘Sorry, it’s been bloody government boiler schemes and green-energy review calls all sodding morning. Some people need stabbing in the ear with a trowel. Is it too much to expect to watch a film in peace?’ A grunt. ‘Anyway, what can I do for you?’

‘Any news on that name?’

‘The Old Age Police network needs time, Callum. I know it’s important, but these guys are wading through nearly thirty years of junk to get at notebooks and case files. And even then, there’s no guarantee.’

Of course there wasn’t.

‘Sorry.’ He rubbed the fingertips of his broken hand across his brows. Trying to massage some life into them. ‘Pike’s up before the Sheriff at eleven and he’s still not saying anything.’

‘He likes screwing with people.’

‘It’s not like the name’s any good to him.’

‘He needs Viagra to have a wank, Callum, screwing with people is probably the closest he gets to a natural hard-on. And even then, it’s probably just a semi.’

Now there was an image.

‘I don’t know what to do, Bob.’

‘We’ll sort it out, don’t worry. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Tony Curtis is about to change out of his dress and into a blazer.’

Callum slipped the phone back into his pocket and sat staring out at the rain.

Checked his watch.

Half an hour and Pike would be making his guilty plea. Then a short car ride to HMP Oldcastle to wait for Social Work reports and sentencing. Taking his secrets with him.

And there was nothing Callum could do about it.

The old station house in Castleview had a weird sour coconutty smell, as if it’d got blootered on Malibu the night before and vomited all over itself. Maybe the Security Monitoring And Analysis Department liked to lube themselves up with suntan lotion of a Saturday morning?

Callum parked his backside on the windowsill and tucked his filthy fibreglass cast into his jacket pocket. Hiding it away. ‘What do you think?’

The man in the blue hoodie was far too old to be wearing it, or the big fancy trainers, or the ‘HALFHEAD ~ BONES & STONES WORLD TOUR!’ T-shirt. He’d scraped what little hair remained on his head back into a sumo-wrestler’s pigtail, glasses perched on top of his shiny scalp. ‘Hmmm...’ He picked at his soul patch — greying like the eyebrows. ‘Why not: Winston Smith likes a challenge.’

The Mondeo’s digital video drive sat in a little plastic cradle, connected to a silvery tower unit. A few clattering keystrokes and lights on the drive flashed green. A few more and the thing bleeped and whirred.

‘Of course, I can’t promise anything, yeah? Winston never knows what he’s going to see till he sees it.’

The room was strangely empty. Just the desk and the computer, one very expensive-looking office chair, one filing cabinet, one window, and a radiator that pinged and gurgled like a fat man’s stomach.

Callum checked his watch. Again. Ten past.

Pike would be on his way back to the cells by now.

‘Right, here we go...’ Smith’s fingers flew across the keys and half a dozen little windows appeared on the computer monitor, each playing a view from the Mondeo’s dashboard camera. Second-hand flickering lights and speeding streets. He fiddled with the mouse, closing all the windows but the one with yesterday’s date — the dual carriageway roared past at triple speed, cars and traffic cones flashing by, over the bridge, round the roundabout, up into Kingsmeath.

Another click and the video slowed to normal speed.

The car swept around onto Manson Avenue.

Froze.

Wound back a bit.

‘There we are, one black Mercedes.’ Smith tapped the screen, where the back end of the Merc was just disappearing around the corner, partially obscured by an ancient Fiesta. ‘Now, let’s see what being a genius gets you these days...’ He pecked at the keyboard and the window zoomed in on the car’s number plate. The footage ran forwards and backwards a few times and the frown on his face deepened. ‘Hmmm...’

‘What?’

‘Well, it’s low light, which doesn’t help, it’s far away, which also doesn’t help, and the camera lens isn’t the cleanest either. This is as good as we can get.’ A blurred and lumpy grey-and-yellow smear.

‘Can’t you do some sort of image enhancement thing on it?’

‘This isn’t science fiction, my friend. Winston is a genius, but he’s not a miracle worker. These cameras record the image as a big block of pixels and write them to the hard drive. You can zoom in all you like, but there comes a point where all you’re doing is making the pixels bigger. You can’t magically wring more resolution out of the system, because it just doesn’t exist.’

‘Oh.’

Well that was a complete waste of time.

Callum stood. ‘Well, thanks anyway.’

‘Ah, ha, ha!’ Smith held up a finger. ‘Winston said he wasn’t a miracle worker, but that doesn’t mean he’s incapable of the odd miraculous act. You see the pattern of blurring we’ve got here, the lights and the darks? That’s been formed by the numbers on the number plate, and the way they combine in a given set of lighting conditions at a certain range. Winston can’t make them any less blurry, but he can run a very clever bit of software to blur thousands of different number and letter combinations to see what produce the closest matches.’ A wink. ‘Told you: Winston Smith likes a challenge.’