G. Moffat - Blindside

Armstrong sighed.

‘Remind me what she said. Murray, I mean.’

Irvine went through it all again for him.

‘What do you think?’ she asked when she was finished.

‘I don’t know. Let me think about it some more and we can speak later.’

‘When are you coming here?’

‘I need to go to SCDEA in Paisley. Catch up on some other work. See you before lunch.’

Irvine hung up. She thought that Armstrong would be the best person to look for a discrepancy in the story. He knew the drugs scene and she did not. She blew out a breath and tapped her pen on the desk.

She decided that she would go and find Jim Murphy and press him again for progress on the blood results and the CCTV footage. They were the only live leads that were still to bear fruit.

‘I’m going through it now,’ Murphy said, pointing at the screen in front of him.

Irvine saw familiar images from the city centre cameras.

‘Anything so far?’

Murphy tapped on a notepad by his mouse mat where he had written what looked like some kind of code to Irvine. She picked it up and looked at the random numbers.

‘What’s this?’

‘Reference points on the film for where there might be something you want to look at. An individual or a vehicle. Something like that.’

‘How much more do you have to go?’

Murphy opened another window on his screen and pointed at it. Irvine was none the wiser.

‘Another file after this one. And I’m about halfway through it now.’

‘Can you send that other file to me and I’ll look at it. Speed things up.’

He nodded and clicked on the file, sending it to her e-mail address.

‘Anything from the lab yet?’ she asked.

He looked up at her from his seat.

‘You are a pain in the arse, you know that.’ He smiled.

He opened a drawer in his desk and handed her a report.

She scanned it quickly and saw the expected references to fentanyl and heroin.

Irvine thanked him again and went back downstairs to her desk, feeling a little more positive now that there was progress being made.

There was a message on her phone when she got there and she saw that she had a missed call from Armstrong. She dialled into her voicemail.

‘It’s Kenny. Look, I just got a call on something. Another body. It’s unconnected to our thing but it’s my case and I need to go to the scene. If you want to tag along and we can catch up that’s fine. Give me a call.’

Irvine called him back and said that she had news to report and would tag along.

‘I’ll swing by and pick you up in five minutes,’ Armstrong told her. ‘It’s on my way.’

Irvine said fine and hung up. She was getting far too used to the sight of dead bodies.

Armstrong was waiting out on the street in front of the headquarters building with the car engine running.

‘You in a hurry?’ Irvine asked as she got into the passenger seat. ‘I mean, so far as I know, the dead guy probably isn’t going anywhere.’

‘You’re funny.’

He drove away from the building and headed east out of the city centre. Irvine looked out of the car at the redevelopment that was going on — gentrification of poorer areas in the east end. Some property developers would likely make a bundle, even in a depressed market like now.

‘Who’s the body?’ Irvine asked, turning to face Armstrong.

‘Guy I’ve come across before.’

‘You said that earlier. What’s the story?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You heard of Frank Parker?’

‘The gangster? Of course. It’s not him, is it?’

‘One of his senior guys. Russell Hall. We think he’s the one who runs Parker’s drug operation.’

‘Parker’s the nightclub guy, right?’

‘Yeah. He’s got three in the city and is starting to expand his empire to bars and restaurants.’

‘He owns a chunk of real estate on the south side too, I hear?’

‘Correct.’

‘Wasn’t there some issue over a fire in a warehouse years ago?’

‘Like, twenty years ago. Frank came out of it clean with over a million in insurance money. It’s how he got to where he is. That was his stake money.’

‘Torch job?’

‘That was the rumour.’

‘You got someone inside his operation?’

Armstrong looked sideways at her. ‘No.’

‘That the official answer?’

‘That’s the answer I’m giving you.’

Irvine knew better than to pry any further. She assumed that undercover operations required a small circle of knowledge to avoid leaks.

‘Blood results came in on Lewski,’ she said.

‘And?’

‘They found the same stuff as the others.’

‘No surprise.’

‘Any more thoughts on Suzie Murray?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. I had one idea.’

‘Go on, then.’

‘It’s something I heard about when I was in Quantico a few years ago. I was over there…’

‘The FBI place?’

‘Yeah. A bunch of us went over to see how they do things.’

‘And?’

‘Impressive. The resources they have committed to the drug war is beyond anything that we can manage.’

‘No, I mean what was the thing you heard?’

‘Oh. Well, they busted an operation in South Florida where the bad guys had used prostitutes as mules. The drugs came ashore, got transported to a car dealership and from there went to Miami on public transport. They sent the prostitutes down to the dealership from Miami on the bus and they took the stuff back in plain bags on the bus again.’

‘Not very high tech.’

‘That’s the point. Makes it difficult to track.’

‘So you think maybe our guys took a leaf out of the Americans’ book, that Lewski and Murray are mules?’

‘Maybe. Was the only thing I could come up with.’

‘Would explain her attitude. Not wanting to speak to us.’

Armstrong slowed the car. ‘Here we are,’ he said, pointing at an area of waste ground opposite an industrial park.

The Scenes of Crime team were there and had erected a portable white tent around the body. The area had been cordoned off with tape and uniformed officers patrolled the perimeter while the forensic technicians scoured the area on their hands and knees looking for evidence.

Armstrong stopped his car at the edge of the ground where a crowd of locals had gathered to see what was going on. It was more interesting than anything on daytime TV.

‘You coming?’ he asked, unclipping his seatbelt.

‘Why not.’

They walked together across the grass and showed their badges to get inside the cordon. Irvine saw a man standing at the entrance to the tent and recognised him as Paul Warren, the SCDEA Director General.

‘Kenny,’ Warren said as they approached. ‘And DC Irvine. What brings you here?’

‘I’m tagging along with Kenny. We were discussing Joanna Lewski.’

‘Right. You’ll want to see this, Kenny.’

Warren turned and pulled aside the entrance flap to the tent. The three of them stepped inside.

A man dressed in a grey suit and a pale blue shirt lay on his back, all colour drained from him — his skin an unnatural, waxy grey. Irvine stared at the multiple stab wounds on his abdomen and neck, the ground around him drenched in blood.

‘That’s him all right,’ Armstrong said. ‘What do we know so far?’

Warren was about to answer when Irvine looked at the man’s face and inhaled sharply, bringing a hand up to her injured eye.

‘What?’ Armstrong said, turning to her.

‘That’s him.’

‘Who?’

‘The man who attacked me at Joanna Lewski’s flat.’

They stood by Armstrong’s car, looking at the tent in the middle of the waste ground.