Ian Rankin: Witch Hunt

‘What time is it?” she’d muttered.

“Ten past ten.”

“Bloody liar.”

“Then stop trying to make me feel guilty.”

The hour was too late for an argument really. The neighbors had complained in the past. So they kept it jokey and low-key. Just.

He’d taken her toast and tea in bed this morning as penance, despite feeling dead on his feet. And the drive into work hadn’t helped. A car smash at Finsbury Park and a defunct bus holding everybody up between Oxford Street and Warren Street. There was nothing he could do about it except consult the A-Z for useless shortcuts and swear that he’d start traveling to work by tube. Good old public transport: a brisk morning walk to the bus stop, bus straight to Seven Sisters, and hop onto a Victoria Line tube, which would rush him to Victoria and the short final walk to his office. Good old public transport.

Only he’d tried the trip a few times and it didn’t work like that. From the half dozen crammed buses that glided past his stop without slowing, right to the crushed and sweaty tube compartment and the feeling that he would kill the next person who jammed their elbow into him... Good old public transport. London transportation. He’d stick to the car. At least in the car you had a choice. Stuck in a jam, you could park and wait it out in a café, or try another route. But stuck in a tunnel in a tube train... well, that was a tiny rehearsal for hell.

He thought of Doyle, dawdling over croissants and coffee at some French bar, making ready to stock up on cheap beer and duty free. Bastard. But Doyle was useful. Or rather, Greenleaf’s dislike of Doyle was useful: it goaded him. It made him want his work to be efficient, and that included his reports. Which was why he was here so early. He wanted to get his notes typed up into presentable shape, so he could hand them to Trilling before lunchtime.

Basically Doyle had been right. The pathologist noted burns, scorch marks, on both men. A razor-sharp section of plastic had almost taken off Crane’s head. And there were splinters and shards — of wood, glass, metal, Plexiglas — embedded in both bodies. Definite signs of an explosion.

“Somewhere beneath them,” the pathologist added. “Below decks. The two men were probably on deck at the time. The various angles of penetration are all consistent with a blast from below, sending the shrapnel upwards. For example, one splinter enters above the left knee and makes its way up the leg towards the groin, the exit wound appearing on the inside upper thigh.”

There were photographs to go with the doctor’s various graphic descriptions. What couldn’t be shown, and might possibly never be shown, was what had caused the explosion in the first place. That was all down to deduction and supposition. Greenleaf guessed that a bomb wouldn’t be too far out. One of those simple IRA jobs with timer attached. Messy though, blowing the whole caboodle up like that. Why not shoot the men and dump the bodies with weights attached? That way the bodies disappeared and the boat remained: a mystery, but without the certainty that murder had been done. Yes, a loud and messy way to enter the country. In trying to cover their tracks they’d left a calling card: no forwarding address, but a sure sign they’d been there.

And could now be anywhere, planning or doing anything, with a cache of drugs or of arms. It had to be a sizable haul to merit killing two men. Six if you included the French...

Well, so much for the doctor. The local police were on the ball, too. Inside George Crane’s jacket they’d discovered a wad of banknotes. £2,000 or thereabouts. The wad had been pierced by a chunk of metal, but the notes were still recognizable. More important, some of the serial numbers remained intact. Steeped in blood, but intact.

There were ways of checking these things, and Greenleaf knew all of them. He’d faxed details that evening to the Bank of England, and to the Counterfeit Currency Department inside New Scotland Yard, supplying photocopies of several of the cleaner notes. The photocopies weren’t great, but the serial numbers were the crucial thing anyway. The notes themselves he was careful not to handle, except with the use of polyethylene gloves and tweezers. After all, it was unlikely that Crane carried so much money around with him on every boating trip (unless he was planning to bribe some customs officials). It was much more likely that the money had been a payment made to him by whomever he’d transported from mid-Channel to the English coast.

As such, the notes might well boast the odd fingerprint. The corpse of George Crane had already been fingerprinted — on Greenleaf’s orders — so that the dead man’s prints could be eliminated. Somehow, Greenleaf didn’t think George Crane would have let Brian Perch near the money, but his body was being fingerprinted too. Best to be rigorous.

Perch was an employee, a no-questions-asked hired hand who would, as a fellow worker had put it, “go to the end of the earth” for Crane, so long as there was overtime in it. Why had Crane taken him along? For protection? Because he didn’t trust whomever he was carrying? Maybe just for company on the voyage out to mid-Channel? Whatever, Brian Perch didn’t really interest Greenleaf, while George Crane did.

The accountant to the building business wasn’t about to say that Crane’s company was in terminal trouble, but he agreed that times were hard and that the company was “overstretched financially.” Which meant there were bigger loan repayments than there were checks from satisfied and solvent customers. For example, a larger than usual contract had gone unfinished and unpaid when the company employing Crane’s firm had itself gone broke. Crane just managed to hold his head above water. Well, in the financial sense anyway. He still had the big house outside Folkestone with the swimming pool and sauna. He still had a Porsche. He still had his boat. But Greenleaf knew that often the more prosperous a man tried to look, the deeper he was sinking.

He’d considered an insurance scam. Take the boat out at dead of night and blow it up, then claim the money. But it didn’t add up. Why not just sell the boat? One reason might be that no one was buying. Okay, so why did he have to die, too? A miscalculation with the timer or the amount of explosives used? Possible. But Greenleaf still didn’t buy it. Why take someone else along? And besides, there was the French sinking to consider. It had to be tied in with the British sinking; too much of a coincidence otherwise.

Bringing him back to murder.

Crane’s wife didn’t know anything about anything. She knew nothing about her husband’s movements that night, nothing about his business affairs, nothing about any of his meetings. All she knew was that she should wear black and deserve sympathy. She seemed to find his questions in particularly bad taste. Crane’s secretary, when tracked down, had been no more forthcoming. No, no meetings with strangers. No sudden “appointments” out of the office which couldn’t be squared with his diary. No mysterious phone calls.

So what was Greenleaf left with? A man in debt, needing a few thousand (well, fifteen or so actually) to see him back on dry land. Personal financial affairs which had yet to be disentangled (it seemed Crane had been a bit naughty, stashing his cash in several accounts kept hidden from the prying taxman). A midnight boat trip which ends with him two grand in pocket but not in any position to spend it. It all came back to smuggling, didn’t it? Just as Doyle had said. Arms or dope or someone creeping back into the country unannounced. Well, hardly unannounced. Whatever it was, it had cost six lives so far, which was too high a price to pay, whatever the payoff.