G. Moffat - Blindside

No sound this time.

‘I’m so sorry, Melanie. I really am.’

He could hear the scream starting way down inside her, rising up from a place so deep inside that no person should ever have to know the pain it brought as it burst up and out. Cahill had heard it before. Too many times.

‘If it helps,’ Cahill said, ‘I can’t believe that Tim was involved in something illegal. That’s not the Tim I knew.’

He knew he’d said it already today, but what else was there to say?

‘Are… you… sure?’ She was barely able to get the word out between sobs.

‘As sure as I can be. He was on that plane when it went down.’

‘I can’t…’

The line disconnected.

Cahill stood and went to the window, looking down at the people passing by outside.

What were you doing on that plane, Tim?

Irvine found DS Ewen Cameron when she got back to Pitt Street from the riverside. She explained that she had to go to a briefing on a new case and that she didn’t know how long it would be. He didn’t seem too bothered, his head buried in a mountain of paperwork that was expanding on a daily basis.

Kenny Armstrong headed off to find the senior SCDEA guys. They had called to say the briefing was already set up somewhere in the building.

Irvine didn’t want to hold things up, but she was keen to get a head start on the inquiry: knew that the first couple of days were crucial in solving any murder. She called the mortuary to find out about the post-mortem and was told that it was scheduled for tomorrow.

After that she called the CCTV ops room down at the Fruitmarket and spoke to someone about getting the recordings for the last few days sent over to see if they could track the girl’s movements in the city centre. They said they’d do what they could, but they were short staffed this week.

Armstrong came into the room and waved at her to come over.

‘They’re all set upstairs,’ he said.

‘Okay. Can we hold for another couple of minutes? I want to check in with DS Murphy, our crime scene guy.’

‘You go see him and I’ll tell my guys to wait. We’re on the second floor, last door on the left.’

‘I’ll walk up with you. Murphy’s on the same floor.’

Jim Murphy stared at Irvine over rectangular glasses that had slipped down his nose, a heavy fringe flopping down on to his forehead. He reminded Irvine of her old history teacher, sitting there in his black V-neck with a white shirt and paisley-patterned tie.

‘The floater?’ he asked as she reached his desk.

She nodded.

‘I got nothing for you yet. Still waiting for the lab geeks upstairs to let me know what they collected at the locus.’

‘Okay. Let me know when you do get anything.’

Irvine knew that Murphy could be ponderous and sometimes needed a kick. Murphy preferred to think of it as being methodical and diligent.

‘I called the Fruitmarket,’ Irvine said as she turned to leave. ‘You know, for the CCTV.’

He knew: nodded slowly.

‘And the pathologist. Post-mortem is tomorrow. Can you keep on top of all that for me?’

His head retracted like a tortoise.

Irvine took it as a ‘yes’.

The briefing room at the end of the hall was already busy with other officers and was set up conference-style with rows of chairs facing a long table that had three more chairs behind it. Everyone was in plain clothes except Eric Thomson and Bryan Fraser — the senior SCDEA officers Irvine had met at the scene that morning. They sat at the long table.

She was glad to see that there was a coffee pot on a table at the side of the room. She filled two cardboard cups and sat next to Armstrong, handing him one of the cups. He gulped at it. The woman on the other side of Armstrong fidgeted with a thin blue folder which was open on her lap. Irvine had seen her around the building and guessed she was one of the force’s drug officers and not with the SCDEA.

Paul Warren — the SCDEA Director General — came into the room and pushed the door closed before taking up position behind the empty third chair at the long table. There were seven people sitting in the chairs facing the table.

‘Everyone say hello to DC Irvine from the CID,’ Warren said.

Irvine held her hand up. The others looked at her and nodded.

‘There should be packs under your seat with the briefing material,’ Warren said. ‘So grab one if you don’t have it already.’

Irvine now saw that everyone except her and Armstrong had one of the blue folders with a sheaf of papers inside. She put her coffee down on the floor and reached under her seat to grab the folder there. Armstrong followed her lead and did the same.

Irvine flicked through the papers quickly, seeing extracts from three post-mortem reports for the previous deaths and some jargon-heavy stuff about drug types. The drug references went over her head.

‘Eric is going to take you through this.’

Warren sat down and his Director of Operations stood.

‘I’ll give you the basics,’ Eric Thomson said. ‘We had, as most of you know, a fourth death this morning. It’s a different ball game now. Young girl. Teenager.’

He paused to let this sink in.

‘The main substance found in the three previous victims was fentanyl. And there were also the same lower levels of heroin.’

Someone spoke from the front row of seats.

‘Same levels in all the victims?’

‘No,’ Thomson replied. ‘Slight variations in each of the three. And we’ll have to wait for the post-mortem results from the victim today.’

‘Somebody experimenting?’

‘Too early to say definitively. But we’ve brought more people in to this task force because that’s how it looks. As of today we’re treating all the deaths as suspicious. I mean, beyond the fact that illegal drugs were involved. That’s why CID is here.’

Thomson looked quickly at Irvine before scanning the room.

‘We’re treating them all as murders now,’ Warren said. ‘Someone knowingly sells bad gear, they deserve all they get.’

‘What we seem to be dealing with here,’ Thomson went on, ‘is a new product in the market. From what we’ve been able to find out so far it’s being distributed in the usual channels. There are no new dealers we know of and the deaths can be traced back to buys from different dealers.’

‘That’s why we think it’s probably a new wholesaler,’ Warren interrupted. ‘If all of a sudden it was a new retail crew on the scene there would be the usual territorial flare-ups. We’d have seen, and heard, something from our informants. A wholesale business can keep it under the radar more easily.’

‘Yeah,’ someone shouted from the other side of the room. ‘Four bodies. Way to keep it under the radar.’

There was a ripple of laughter.

‘This is a relatively high level of organised crime,’ Thomson said. ‘It may be a foreign outfit because our usual sources don’t seem to know much about it.’

‘Any sign of increased smuggling into the country anywhere?’ someone asked.

‘Not that we’ve seen. But then, that doesn’t mean much. Could be the supply network is using entry points we don’t know about yet and, of course, that’s something we need to look into. Or they may just be smart. Or lucky.’

‘We are looking at increasing our resources on the smuggling front,’ Warren said. ‘We need to look at the budget first, though.’

Irvine felt a little lost, decided to ask some basic questions.

‘For my benefit, can you say a little more about the drugs?’

Warren looked at DI Fraser.

‘Of course,’ Fraser said as he stood, stretching above Thomson. ‘Fentanyl is not something that you hear much about but, in fact, it’s actually more potent than heroin. It’s similar in that it’s an opiate