Carnett put her cup down on a mouse pad stained with dozens of coffee rings. Rebus set his own cup on the worktop.
‘Irregular,’ she said again, as if he might be persuaded to leave. Instead, he just shrugged. ‘Information is usually requested by telephone or fax.’
‘I’ve always preferred the personal touch,’ Rebus said. He handed her a scrap of paper on which he’d jotted the reference number concerning Charmer Mackenzie. She slid her chair closer to the desk and hammered on the keys, as if meaning to do violence to the keyboard. Then she slid the mouse around the pad, expertly avoiding the coffee cup, and double-clicked.
Charmer Mackenzie’s file came up. Rebus saw straight away that there was a lot of stuff there. He moved his own chair closer to hers.
‘Initially,’ she said, ‘it looks like we got on to him because Crime Squad had him hosting private parties for someone called Thomas Telford.’
‘I know Telford,’ Rebus said. ‘I helped put him away.’
‘Good for you. Telford used Mackenzie’s club for meetings, and also rented a boat part-owned by Mackenzie. The boat was used for parties. Crime Squad kept tabs on it because you never knew who might turn up. Didn’t get much joy, though: operation suspended.’ She hit the return key, bringing up another page. ‘Ah, here we go,’ she said, leaning in towards the screen. ‘Money-lending.’
‘Mackenzie?’
She nodded. Rebus read over her shoulder. NCIS suspected Mackenzie of running a little business on the side, fronting money for criminal schemes — guaranteed payback, one way or another — but also loaning cash sums to people who either couldn’t get the money elsewhere or had reasons not to go walking into a bank or building society.
‘How accurate is this?’ Rebus asked.
‘It wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t one hundred per cent.’
‘All the same...’
‘All the same, there’s obviously not enough to go on, or we’d have had him in court.’ She pointed to an icon at the foot of the screen. ‘Case-notes went to the Procurator Fiscal, who decided there wasn’t enough for a prosecution.’
‘So is the case ongoing?’
She shook her head. ‘We have patience, we can wait. We’ll see what else filters down to us, decide when the time’s right to try again.’ She glanced at him. ‘Robert the Bruce and all that.’
Rebus was still studying the screen. ‘Have you got names?’
‘You mean people who’ve borrowed from him?’
‘Yes.’
‘Hang on.’ She hit more keys, studied the information as it came up on the screen. ‘Hard copies,’ she mumbled at last. Then she got up from her seat and told him to follow her. They went to a storeroom filled with filing cabinets.
‘So much for the paperless office,’ Rebus said.
‘I’m with you on that.’ She found the cabinet she was looking for, pulled out the top drawer and started riffling through the file-holders, found the one she was looking for and pulled it out.
Inside the green file were about three dozen sheets of paper. Two of the sheets listed ‘suspected’ users of Charmer Mackenzie’s loan scheme.
‘No statements,’ Rebus said, sifting the sheets.
‘Case probably didn’t get that far.’
‘I thought it was your case.’
She shrugged. ‘We get sent a lot of stuff from Crime Squad, Customs, wherever. It goes into the computer and into a drawer — that’s my job.’
‘You’re a filing clerk?’ Rebus suggested. Her eyes narrowed aggressively. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Trying to make a joke.’ He went back to the file. ‘So how did you come by these names?’
‘Probably one or two people talked.’
‘But didn’t make reliable witnesses?’
She nodded. ‘People who need to go to a loan shark, we’re not talking public-minded citizens here.’
Rebus recognised a couple of names: known house-breakers. Maybe looking to finance some bigger scheme.
‘Others on the list,’ Carnett was saying, ‘could be they got thumped by Mackenzie or his men, and Crime Squad got wind of it.’
‘And nobody would talk?’ Rebus guessed. She nodded again. He’d come across this before; they both had. It was fine to have seven bells knocked out of you, but a black mark to talk to the filth about it. You’d get ‘GRASS’ sprayed on your front door. People would cross the road to avoid you. Rebus started jotting down names and addresses, sure none of it was going to be any use. But he’d come all this way, after all.
‘I can make copies,’ Carnett suggested.
Rebus nodded. ‘I’m a bit of a dinosaur, need to have the gist in my wee book.’ He tapped one entry. No name, just a series of numbers. ‘Is this what we’re supposed to call Prince now?’
She smiled, covered it quickly with her hand. ‘Looks like another reference,’ she said. ‘I’ll check it back at my desk.’
So they went back there, and while Rebus finished his cold coffee, he watched her work.
‘Interesting,’ she said at last, leaning back in her chair. ‘It’s our way of keeping certain names quiet. Computers aren’t always safe from prowlers.’
‘Hackers.’
She looked at him. ‘Not quite a dinosaur,’ she commented. ‘Wait here a minute.’
She was actually gone three minutes, long enough for her screen-saver to activate. When she returned, she had a single sheet of paper with her, which she handed to Rebus.
‘We use numbers as codes when a name is judged too hot: that means someone we don’t want everyone knowing about. Any idea who he is?’
Rebus was looking at the name on the sheet. There was nothing else printed there.
‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘He’s a judge’s son.’
‘That would explain it then,’ Pauline Carnett said, lifting her cup.
The name on the sheet was Nicol Petrie.
When they delved a little deeper, they found a Crime Squad report detailing a mugging attack. Nicol Petrie had been found unconscious in one of the shadowy back lanes off Rose Street — about a hundred yards from Gaitano’s nightclub. Petrie had been taken by ambulance to hospital, a uniformed officer waiting to talk to him. But when he’d regained consciousness, he had had nothing to say.
‘I can’t remember,’ had been his refrain. He couldn’t even say if anything had been stolen from him. But a couple of eye-witnesses gave descriptions of two men leaving the lane. They were laughing, lighting cigarettes. One of them even complained that he’d scraped his knuckles. Police got as far as holding an ID parade for the witnesses, but by then they’d long since sobered up and wanted nothing to do with it, refused to identify anyone.
Two bouncers from Gaitano’s had been in the parade: one of them was named as Calumn Brady.
Rebus went through the witness statements. The descriptions of the attackers were vague. He could just about see one of them — the shorter of the two — as Cal Brady. But it didn’t matter. Nicol Petrie wasn’t about to say anything, and the witnesses had either been warned off, paid off, or had just come to their senses.
Crime Squad put it down to a ‘warning’ from Mackenzie, and let it go at that. Speculation: that’s all it was. But Rebus was willing to go along with it. All the same... something refused to click into place.
‘Nicol’s dad’s a judge, plenty of money. Why didn’t he just borrow from him?’
Pauline Carnett didn’t have an answer for that.
Later, he asked if he could speak to someone from the paedophile unit. He was introduced to a woman officer called DS Whyte. He asked her about Darren Rough. She brought the details up on her screen.
‘What about him?’ she said.
‘Known associates.’
She hammered keys, shook her head. ‘He was a loner. NKA.’
NKA: No Known Associates. Rebus scratched his chin. ‘How about Ray Heggie.’