Quintin Jardine - Private Investigations

I had to smile. ‘When it comes to insurers, my friend, I’ll believe anything. However, you should have asked the police to check it out and look for weaknesses.’

He frowned. ‘What damn weaknesses?’

‘For a start,’ I told him, ‘the sensor should have been as far away from the door as possible. I’m guessing,’ I continued, ‘that there was a big gate at the end of the boathouse.’

Rory nodded. ‘Yes, that’s right. The boathouse is really a U-shaped dock. The gate goes down to just below the water level. It’s powered, of course, and operated by a remote control that’s kept on the navigation deck. The thieves closed it after they left. If they hadn’t done that the gardeners might have seen that it was open, and we could have found out about the theft a lot sooner. It was discovered on the tenth of October, but we know from the alarm company that it happened six days earlier, at three a.m.’

I took a deep breath, taking time to ensure that what I said next wouldn’t be too blunt, then ventured, ‘Guys, are you absolutely sure about your two crewmen?’

Eden stiffened in his chair, ‘Yes,’ he snapped, ‘absolutely. Walter’s our right-hand man, and as for Jock . . . when you meet him, you’ll realise there isn’t a dishonest bone in his body.’

‘When I what?’ I asked, quietly.

He flushed a little. ‘I’m hoping that you’ll meet the guys, and that you’ll take a look at the boathouse. Bob, the truth is that while the insurers are refusing to pay out full value on the vessel on the basis of the police report, they have said they’ll go halfers on the cost of an independent review of investigation. If it’s successful, and the Princess Alison is recovered, they’ll pay all of it, plus a premium of ten per cent of the insured value. Will you take it on?’

Would I take it on? That was a hell of a big question. Would I step into an investigation that the police had been running for four months without getting anywhere? Would I waste my time looking for a rich man’s corporate toy, one that had quite possibly been repainted, renamed, altered cosmetically and sold on for a couple of million?

Yes, I would, for the original Alison’s sake. And of course a success bonus of half a million pounds was an added incentive.

‘Very well,’ I agreed, ‘I’ll look at it, but before I do I have to tell you that this was not an opportunistic theft. It’s been planned and executed by people who knew what they were doing, and almost certainly by someone who’d seen the interior of the boathouse, because of the way the alarm was neutralised.

‘Whoever stole the Princess had some sort of insider knowledge; that’s a racing certainty, and it should have been the basis of the police inquiry. Tell me, were you ever asked for a list of all the people who’ve been on board her, going back at least a couple of years?’

‘No,’ Rory replied. ‘We never were. We’d be able to provide it, but only up to a point. Some of our hospitality invitations were general; key execs of some of our customers and client companies regularly joined us for a day’s sailing, with partners. We don’t have the names of all of those partners, and we can hardly go back and ask them, especially not the customers. “Excuse me, but can you tell me your other half’s name so she can be eliminated from police inquiries?” No, I don’t think so.’

‘No,’ I conceded, ‘but if I’d been involved in this I’d have wanted that list. Who was the senior investigating officer?’

‘His name was Detective Inspector McGarry,’ Eden volunteered. ‘First name Randolph, I think. He was based in Dumbarton.’

‘Did you meet anyone else?’

He shook his head. ‘No. Not until Chief Superintendent Chambers came to see me. McGarry was my only contact throughout. I met him on the estate, at the scene of the crime, so to speak. He visited me a couple of times after that, to update me, but nobody else came near me, no more senior officer.’

I was incredulous. I was still in command of the Strathclyde force when the Princess Alison was stolen, a five-million-pound heist that nobody had seen fit to report to the chief constable. A major rural crime, dropped into the hands of a detective inspector, whose caseload would be entirely urban and who would have no specialist marine knowledge. If I had known of it at the time, arses would have been kicked. As it was I was going to make a fuss. ‘You never thought to take it up the line?’ I asked.

Eden stared back at me. ‘To whom? I didn’t know anyone else.’

‘You know me,’ I retorted. ‘I was in Pitt Street when it happened, getting ready to hand over to my successor in ScotServe. I’d have raised merry hell if I’d known that a DI had been assigned as the investigating officer. I’m not saying that the outcome would have been different, but there would have been a hell of a lot more resources committed, that is for sure.’

‘What can you do after the event?’ Rory asked. ‘Do we have a realistic chance of getting the Princess back?’ I sensed his accountant’s mind at work.

‘I don’t know,’ I told him, candidly. ‘I promise you this: as soon as I see it’s hopeless, I’ll tell you. I won’t waste my time or yours.’

‘Fair enough,’ his father said. ‘How will you begin?’

‘By seeing how much influence I still have,’ I replied. ‘I need to get my hands on the police report.’

‘As a deputy chief,’ Mario McGuire said, ‘I’m not going to be crawling over every crime scene like Bob Skinner did, but this one . . .’ He shuddered. ‘I’ve attended very few child deaths in my career, but every one’s burned into my brain.’

‘I’ve never seen anything like this,’ DCI Pye confessed. He looked up at his senior colleague. ‘To be honest I didn’t expect you to come here, sir. I thought you’d want to know, that’s all.’

‘You did the right thing, Sammy,’ the DCC reassured him. ‘And you’re not alone. In the last couple of weeks I’ve had half a dozen calls from crime scenes, from your opposite numbers in Aberdeen, Fort William, Dumfries, Inverness, Falkirk and Motherwell. Strictly speaking none of you should have called me, but we’re all still bedding into this new structure, at all levels, and until we all feel comfortable, I’m quite happy with over-reporting.’

‘You don’t look very comfortable in that uniform, sir,’ Sauce Haddock chipped in.

McGuire grinned. ‘Don’t let it fool you, lad,’ he joked. ‘This isn’t your ordinary woolly tunic, this is Hugo Boss.’ In truth he did feel awkward in the clumsy garment. He had spent most of his career in plain clothes, and had never dressed casually for work; on his first day as an acting detective constable, he had worn a pale-blue mohair tailor-made suit. When he recalled that time, he could still hear Bob Skinner’s gentle admonition: ‘This is CID. We do unobtrusive here.’

As the first chief constable of ScotServe, Sir Andrew Martin had taken a different position. His deputies and ACCs, and all divisional commanders, were required to wear uniform on duty. He had considered extending that to CID, and had backed down only in the face of the united opposition of Maggie Steele, his designated deputy, and McGuire himself.

‘When you called me, Sammy,’ he continued, ‘I was heading for Hawick, to visit CID down there. If I hadn’t been in the vicinity I wouldn’t have come here, but I was, and when you told me there was a kid involved, I felt that I should.’ He looked at Haddock. ‘Have the SOCOs got a paper suit to fit me?’

The DS nodded and handed him a package, containing a sterile overall with a hood. He put it on, then added paper bootees and latex gloves. Prepared, he followed his similarly clad colleagues into a large tent that stood in the centre of the cleared area of the Fort Kinnaird car park.