G. Moffat - Blindside

After a few minutes, a door opened to the right of the woman’s desk and a slim man in his early forties walked over to them and held out his hand. His handshake was firm and he maintained eye contact the whole time. He had neat, fair hair, tanned skin and a navy suit that fitted him very well.

‘I’m Paul Scott,’ he said. ‘Come on through and we can have a chat.’

The other accountant introduced himself as Lawrence Marshall. He looked a little younger than Scott, but not by much. He had the same air of health and prosperity about him, dressed in a charcoal pinstripe suit with thinning hair swept back on his head.

The two men sat together on the near side of a table in the office boardroom. It was on the ground floor and had two long windows which looked out towards the motorway in the distance. They were both doing their best not to look at Irvine’s bruises.

‘Can we get you anything to drink?’ Scott asked.

‘No thanks,’ Irvine replied, sitting two seats away from them.

Armstrong walked around to the far side of the table and sat opposite Irvine. Scott looked from Irvine to Armstrong and back.

‘What can we do for you?’

‘You own a property company. ScotLets. Is that correct?’ Irvine asked.

‘Yes. Is there a problem with it?’

‘Not that we’re aware of, no.’

‘You have a flat in Bridgeton?’ Armstrong said.

Both men looked at him.

‘You rent it to a couple of women.’

Scott shifted in his seat. Marshall remained still.

‘Is that what this is about?’ Scott asked.

‘You know what they do for a living?’

‘I do now. But not when we rented to them.’

Irvine raised her eyebrows.

‘Come on. Is that the best you can do?’

‘It’s the truth. I mean, we have an agency that rents all the properties for us. We trust them to get all the references and stuff.’

‘So long as the money rolls in you don’t care.’

‘That’s not what I said. It’s a respected agency. We don’t have the time to do all of that ourselves.’

‘It’s true,’ Marshall added.

‘But you know about these particular tenants. About what they do to earn a living and pay your rent?’

‘We started getting complaints about them from one of the other tenants in the building,’ Scott said. ‘They got the company name from the lease and called here direct to complain rather than going through the agency.’

‘And you didn’t do anything about it?’

‘We left it to the agency.’

‘It’s been tough in the property market,’ Marshall said.

‘So any tenant is a good tenant?’

‘Something like that.’

Irvine believed what they were saying, didn’t see any ‘tells’ to indicate that they were lying.

‘Can you give us details of the agency?’ she asked.

‘Sure, I’ve got it here.’

Marshall reached into his jacket and took out a business card which he handed to Irvine. She looked at it briefly, saw that it was one of the big commercial agencies with an office in the city centre.

‘One of the women died,’ Armstrong said. ‘Joanna Lewski. We’re treating it as murder.’

‘My God,’ Scott said, his tanned face going pale.

‘Is that why you’re here?’ Marshall asked. ‘You think we had something to do with it?’

‘We follow all lines of inquiry. This is one of them.’

‘If we knew anything, we would tell you.’

‘That’s terrible,’ Scott said, almost as though he was no longer listening.

‘You seem awful upset about a woman you didn’t know,’ Irvine said.

Scott looked at her.

‘It’s just… I don’t know.’

Irvine stood.

‘We’ll be speaking to your agency.’

Outside in the car, Irvine asked what Armstrong thought about Scott’s reaction to the news of Lewski’s death.

‘Yeah, I saw that.’

‘What do you think? Did he know her?’

‘It’s funny. His reaction. Those two uniforms we spoke to.’

‘I know. This girl seemed to have an effect on men.’

‘Difficult to tell why from the way we found her.’

‘I didn’t get the impression he was lying to us.’

‘I agree. So what do you want to do about it?’

‘It wasn’t the reaction of someone who had anything to hide. More like he was shocked. Like he just found out about it.’

‘Yeah.’

‘If we can get the lab results and look at the CCTV recordings and then go see this agency…’ She waved the card Scott had given her. ‘Something’s going to break on this. I can feel it.’

Irvine put an elbow on her desk and propped her chin up on her hand. She could feel her lower lip pouting and tried to pull it back in. Armstrong was sitting beside her and tried his best to look sympathetic.

Jim Murphy was used to pouting detectives.

‘You know how it is,’ he said to Irvine. ‘This blood stuff takes time. I’ve been up to the top floor twice already today but those lab guys can’t be rushed. It’ll be done when it’s done.’

Irvine leaned back in her chair and rubbed at her eyes, suddenly feeling tired.

‘What about CCTV? They delivered the recordings yet?’

‘Oh, sure. I got an e-mail with all that stuff in digital format. Save me logging on to try to find it.’

‘Anything on it?’

He looked at his watch. Stuffed his hands in his trouser pockets and looked back at Irvine.

‘Came over less than an hour ago. So…’

‘You haven’t looked at it yet?’

‘No.’

‘But you know how to, right? I mean, you can read the angles, know where the cameras are pointed, judge distances.’

‘Yeah, I can do that.’

‘Any chance you can make a start on it today?’

He looked at his watch again. Now rubbing at imaginary stubble on his clean-shaven face. He pushed his glasses up on to the bridge of his nose.

‘Well…’

‘It’s a murder inquiry, Jim. Please.’

‘Fine. But it’ll just be a start. There’s a lot of stuff on there and it’s…’ He checked his watch. Again. ‘After three now.’

‘I appreciate it, Jim. I do.’

Irvine gave him her best smile: figured if she couldn’t appeal to his sense of civic duty she’d try another route. Feminine wiles. Not subtle. Murphy didn’t go for it.

So much for the killer smile.

‘Let me know tomorrow morning how you’re getting on?’ Irvine said.

Murphy nodded, turned and walked away without saying anything else.

‘That was… helpful,’ Armstrong said.

Irvine watched Murphy pull open the door to the stairwell at the far end of the open plan area.

‘Actually, he is very good,’ she said.

Irvine looked at Armstrong, caught him staring at the injured side of her face. Realised that the pain was starting up again. She put her hand against her face and felt the swelling.

‘I don’t think we’re going to accomplish much more today, do you?’ Armstrong asked.

She knew where he was going with this.

‘Before you say anything, I’m fine.’

‘I’m not planning on contradicting you on that.’

‘But you are about to suggest that maybe I should go home early. After all I’ve been through.’

She made quotation signs with her fingers as she said the last sentence. Remembered someone else who did that — Cahill. It was a sign that his particular brand of rough charm was starting to work on her.

‘Something like that. We can pick up with him tomorrow,’ he said, nodding his head to the side in the direction Murphy had gone.

‘What about the rental agency for the accountants?’

She swivelled in her seat and lifted the card from her desk. ‘We could go and talk to them.’