“Sergeant, have you a phone I could borrow?” he asked Lewis.
“It’s my personal phone, Inspector.”
Gorrie held out his hand.
Melanie, the sister’s American friend, answered on the second ring. Ms. Cameron was out, but she volunteered to check the pad. Gorrie listened as she pulled open the drawers.
“Right or left?” she asked, and his heart sank.
“Left, I think.”
“Nothing here. Wait, I’ll try the right.”
It was there. Halfway down the page of the second pad was the note: “Hgh Spec Trprt?”
Highland Specialty Transport. Or highly special transportation. Or Hugh Spectre Transport.
“There was a phone number, wasn’t there?” asked Gorrie. “Read it to me, would you?”
He punched the number into the sergeant’s phone, even though it meant breaking his promise to the sergeant that he would only call the nearby number. A very correct though very young bureaucratic voice answered on the other end.
“UKAE Nuclear Waste Regulation, Transport Division.”
“Transport Division?”
“Sir, can I help you?”
“What precisely is it you do, son?”
“I hang up the phone if I don’t have an explanation as to why this is not a crank call,” said the man.
Gorrie explained who he was and why, more or less, he was calling. The young man became considerably more helpful. He believed he had spoken to Cameron, who sat on the area Land and Environment Select Committee. The council member had inquired about forms and regulations governing transport of spent nuclear fuel. The conversation had not lasted long; Cameron had been referred to Constance Burns. The head of the UKAE Waste Division liked to deal with elected representatives personally.
“She takes all VIPs,” said the young man. “I’m not sure if she spoke to the committee member or not, just that he would have been referred.”
“Could you tell her that I’d like a word?” said Gorrie, who wasn’t sure if he qualified as a VIP or not.
“Afraid she’s out of the country on vacation in Switzerland. She calls in every morning and evening. Shall I give her your number?”
“Why don’t you give me hers instead?”
“Well, sir, our privacy policy—”
“Come now, be a good lad,” said Gorrie.
“Well.”
“You never know when you might need a favor,” suggested the inspector.
“As a matter of fact, if it was convenient, I could use one. There’s a matter of a speeding ticket.”
“Speeding? And when were you in the Highlands?”
“My girlfriend, Inspector, she suggested a holiday and, well, you know how it is… ”
“You’re going to fix a ticket?” asked Lewis as Gorrie punched in the number for Ms. Burns’s mobile phone.
“I was hoping you would,” said Gorrie.
The phone was off-line. Gorrie left a message, then dialed the hotel next. He had the clerk ring the room, but received no answer.
The plant manager at Cromarty Firth had emphasized how safe transporting spent uranium was. Gorrie decided to drive over to the plant and find out why the matter had been on his mind.
Caught unawares, reception took a few minutes to find a suitable minder to escort DI Gorrie to Horace’s office. When he arrived, he noted that the pile of papers had grown a bit, as had the smell of furniture polish. Horace himself remained unchanged, not quite dismissive, yet not what one might call polite either.
“I can’t recall Ewie Cameron calling me. You can check the diary with my secretary,” Horace told him. He held a fountain pen in his hand, and every time he answered a question he glanced down at the paper at the top of his desk, applying another check.
“Perhaps I will do that,” said Gorrie.
“Mackay called him concerning the plant?”
“I didnae know that he did.”
“He didn’t bring anything to me,” said Horace. “No problem was reported.”
Gorrie nodded. There might be many reasons Mackay wouldn’t talk to Horace about a problem, starting with the fact that he thought Horace was involved.
“I might talk to your secretary then, and Mackay’s,” said Gorrie.
“Please,” said Horace, who now put his head down practically onto the desk, checking off a succession of blanks on the paper in a wild flurry.
The secretary had not recorded any meeting with Mackay during the week before his death, and according to the records they hadn’t spoken outside of regular staff meetings since he had come on. Gorrie formed no judgment of that, just as he did not hold Tora Grant’s frown against her when he appeared at her doorway. Mackay had not been replaced and she was obviously overworked trying to help handle some of the paperwork. Gorrie’s first request — for a roster of the department — was met with an even deeper frown.
“Addie at Personnel,” she said, digging her fingernails into her folded arms.
Gorrie nodded. “Miss Grant, what is the procedure for removing waste from the reactor?”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t know all the steps. The procedure — you’d have to talk to the men. It’s not like taking out the trash, Inspector. Spent fuel has to be carefully handled. The regulations are enormous. It has to be cooled in one of the ponds near the reactor. The spent rods stay quite long — years.”
“Had there been a removal since Mr. Mackay arrived?”
“I can check the records, but I believe the last was eight months. There’s no set schedule. You see, there are so few places for it to be reprocessed, and transport is quite a procedure. The spent rods have to travel in special containers, and can only be taken aboard a special ship.”
“Who owns the ship?”
Grant frowned, but pulled over the keyboard to her computer. Punching a few keys, she brought up an address book.
“BNFL. British Nuclear Fuels plc. The amount of material is very small, you understand; it’s the way it has to be transported that complicates things. Sellafield is typically where it would be sent.”
“What happened to the man who held Mr. Mackay’s job before his arrival?”
“Matthew Franklin transferred to UKAE — the energy commission.”
“Hard worker?”
“I couldn’t say. I came on with Mr. Mackay.”
Gorrie paused, considering how to proceed. The secretary pushed a piece of hair up at the side of her head behind her ear, her whole body heaving with a sigh. She seemed a good sort, slightly bewildered by the job and loss of her boss, he thought. She had a round, attractive face, but in five years, maybe less, her looks would muddle into a sort of plainness as her hips rounded and her legs grew thick. Gorrie thought of his own wife, which made him sympathetic toward the girl.
“Do you know who Ewie Cameron is?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Did Mr. Mackay speak of any government official?”
Another shake.
“Would he have?”
“The plant manager would generally handle any important matter, I believe,” said Miss Grant.
Mackay had not kept an appointment book, and a look back at the department phone records did not turn up Cameron’s number, nor any besides Cardha Duff’s that seemed extraordinary. The secretary’s sighs grew as she showed Gorrie through the forms and papers Mackay had been working on before he died. To Gorrie, nothing was amiss — or everything was; he couldn’t tell.
“Specialty Transport,” he said finally, “does the name mean anything?”
“Trucking firm that handles the spent fuel and some of the items that are bulky,” said the secretary.
“Are there reports here that pertain to it?”
“The traffic file,” she said, going to the files and thumbing through.
Gorrie took the folder and opened it on the desk. Four sheets sat at the top of the folder, out of order; they had been photocopied from other reports, which themselves were copies of thicker filings. The pages documented pickup times, routes, transmittals; all had blanks in the areas for “Incidents” and “Comments.”