‘That’s certainly true of the Jock parliament,’ said Brown. ‘Just as well, mind you. They couldn’t run a raffle or even spell it in some cases. So where do we go from here?’
‘As I see it, there are two weak links in the operation,’ said Steven, ‘and they’re both called, Rafferty.’
‘You managed to talk to Trish Rafferty, then?’
‘She’s living here in Edinburgh, in a flat in Dorset Place. I was on my way back from her place when you phoned. She’s definitely in on it. She let something slip when she thought I was one of the Sigma 5 lot.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Something about her having told them things in exchange for them not bothering her again and him not getting into trouble.’
‘Her husband?’
‘A fair assumption.’
‘Do you think she can be persuaded to talk more about it?’
Steven shook his head. ‘She struck me as an intelligent, strong-willed woman who wouldn’t go back on her word unless she had reason to believe that someone had crossed her.’
‘So we concentrate on Tom for the moment?’
‘I think so.’
‘That leaves us with the problem of our two ‘venture capitalists’,’ said Brown. ‘They do a fair impression of being attached at the hip to our hop-loving friend. Mind you, the mere idea of tangling with these two is going to save me a fortune on All-Bran. Any ideas?’
‘I’ve an awful feeling that the next move may come from them,’ said Steven. ‘If Childs and Leadbetter are who you say they are, they will have reported my visit and questioning of Rafferty at Crawhill Farm.’
‘So what. You had every right to be there and to question him. You’re on official Sci-Med business.’
Steven told him about Sci-Med being warned off and Brown let out a low whistle. ‘It’s that big?’ he murmured.
‘I thought I was managing to keep a pretty low profile but apparently not. When I went to Crawhill and flashed my ID, I was actually knocking on the door of Sigma 5. I suspect that Trish Rafferty reported my visit too,’ said Steven thinking of her standing at the window with the telephone in her hand.
‘I see what you mean by ‘their move’,’ agreed Brown. ‘Any idea what it will be?’
‘I can’t see it at the moment,’ said Steven thoughtfully.
‘I’m going back to the office,’ said Brown. ‘I’m going to write all this down and leave it in a safe place, then I’m going to write you a letter on Scotsman-headed paper, saying that we know all about Sigma 5 and that if you should be the subject of any “tragic accident” we are going to shake the tree until all the apples fall down. Carry it with you.’
Steven smiled, uncomfortable as always with melodrama but still seeing the sense in what Brown was saying. Publicity was to covert operations as garlic was to a vampire.
‘I’ll pop it in to your hotel.’
Steven had just got out the bath when his phone rang. It was Detective Chief Inspector Brewer. ‘I’ve got something here that might interest you.’
‘Where’s here?’
‘The City Mortuary.’
Steven wrote down the directions he was given and dressed quickly. He drove over to the old town where darkness, dirt and history conspired with a late evening mist to produce an atmosphere appropriate to the nature of his visit. He found the unprepossessing building of the City Mortuary a few minutes after leaving the car and rang the bell. It was answered by an attendant, dressed in white overalls topped by an over-large plastic apron, which came right down to the floor, almost but not quite obscuring the toes of his Wellington boots. The man sniffed loudly and scratched his stubbly chin as he examined Steven’s ID before stepping back to let him come inside to bright lights and the smell of formaldehyde. There was something about mortuary attendants… thought Steven, but what it was he had no wish to pursue for the moment. He heard Brewer’s voice and followed the sound.
‘Ah, Dr Dunbar, I thought you’d be interested in hearing what Dr Levi here has to say about the Rev. McNish,’ said Brewer. Steven had walked into the PM room where the duty pathologist had just finished work on the body of a badly mutilated male corpse. He nodded to an attendant who started threading a suture needle to begin sewing up the long primary incision that extended from throat to navel.
Levi, a small man, wearing heavy square rimmed glasses, which seemed all wrong for his pear-shaped face, stripped off his gloves and tossed them into a pedal bin with an air of finality. The metal lid of the bin fell with a clang like a cymbal being hit by a percussionist at the end of a performance. It was obviously something he’d done many times before. It reminded Steven of a story that said Fred Astaire could walk across stage, throw down a cigarette butt and stamp it out without breaking stride.
‘This man did not drown,’ said Levi. ‘He died from blood loss resulting from biting injuries: the tooth patterns on these injuries are consistent with rat bites. This is the one that actually did it.’
‘Levi waved the attendant out of the way and pointed to teeth marks on the side of McNish’s neck. ‘Carotid artery. I hope for his sake that this was one of the earlier bites otherwise…’ He looked down at the horrific injuries over McNish’s body. ‘Well, let’s say, he didn’t have the easiest of passages from this life to the next.’
‘So the rats got him,’ said Brewer. ‘What do you make of that?’
‘Interesting,’ murmured Steven, still looking down at the corpse as if unable to take his eyes away.
‘Perhaps you know more about what’s happening up at Blackbridge than I do, Doctor?’ said Brewer.
‘No, but somebody does.’
Brewer looked at Steven as if not knowing whether to believe him or not. ‘This GM crop business wouldn’t have anything to do with it, would it?’
‘I don’t see how,’ replied Steven guardedly.
‘Maybe it’s like they say. There are just too many unknowns connected with something like that. They should have done more work in the lab before they started putting the stuff out into open fields.’
‘Don’t jump to conclusions,’ said Steven but he was wondering just how many other people were going to leap to exactly the same one.
‘Of course not,’ said Brewer sourly.
‘Otherwise it could be a recipe for disaster,’ added Steven, looking directly at Brewer so that he fully understood what he meant.’
‘Frankly, Doctor,’ said Brewer, ‘There are times when I’m tempted to torch the bloody stuff myself.’
Steven drove back to the hotel and, despite having bathed a few hours earlier, took a shower in order to free himself of the lingering smell of formaldehyde. He hated the foetid sweetness of it and the images it conjured up. The smell went but the image of McNish’s body stayed with him despite the best efforts of three gin and tonics. The rats at Blackbridge had actually killed a man — maybe two people if you counted Ian Ferguson as well. That was some behavioural change. True it wasn’t known just how much provocation there had been, at least not in the case of McNish. It was possible that he had fallen into the canal in his drunken state and provoked them in some way, just as it was possible that the Ferguson boy might have stood on one, but it was a worry all the same. Something would have to be done.
Just what that something would be was taken out of everyone’s hands next morning when the Clarion story appeared, confirming Jamie Brown’s worst fears about what McColl might do. The paper had used a funeral photograph on its front page. As predicted by Brown, it was the one of the rat sitting on top of Ian Ferguson’s coffin with McNish looking on with eyes like a homicidal maniac in the background. The headline screamed, ‘THIS SCANDAL HAS TO STOP’. The story was angled as a crusade against what the paper saw as the disgrace of an ever-increasing rat population in the Union Canal while the authorities did little or nothing at all about it. Yesterday one of these, ‘filthy creatures’ had defiled the funeral of Blackbridge teenager, Ian Ferguson, bringing unnecessary pain and anguish to his grieving family.