‘You’re right, Ray,’ he whispered to himself as he walked back to his tiny glass-walled room, ‘this is heavy-duty.’
He had barely resumed his seat before his phone rang. He snatched it up, thinking that it might be Skinner, checking that his orders had been followed. But the voice in his ear was female, and English. ‘Sammy? Becky. I bet you thought I’d given up on you and gone back to checking stolen cars.’
‘You want to know the truth?’ Pye asked, then confessed, unprompted. ‘I’ve been so busy chasing other leads and angles that I’d forgotten about you.’
‘Then let me remind you. I’m the colleague who’s been letting crime run rampant through west Edinburgh while she tries to crack the mysteries of a computer you and her boyfriend dumped on her.’
‘Yes, I know, I’m sorry. But this investigation has had me chasing fugitive former secretaries of state, banging up dukes’ daughters with huge heroin habits, and now, when I thought I had only one mystifying homicide to clear up, I find that I’ve got two. That might seem like just another week at the office to a veteran of the Sweeney, but to us provincial hicks. .’
‘Stop it!’ Stallings chuckled. ‘I get enough grief from ’im indoors without hearing it from you too. He called me this morning to tell me that Mount is now officially on your caseload as well.’
‘Are you going to help us with it?’
‘To be honest wiff yer, as that annoying bastard always says on the football commentaries, I don’t know. However, I am going to make your fucking hair stand on end, as my beloved would put it. I have finally got into the boy sllinco’s box on his girlfriend’s computer. I’m sorry it’s taken so long, but sometimes you crack a password easily, sometimes the obvious takes forever; in this case, the latter. I won’t bore you with all the names and combinations I tried, but finally I recalled which paper Mr Collins works for and used that. No joy first up, so I reversed it, tried eritlas. . sounds like a place in Middle Earth, doesn’t it. . and bingo.’
‘Well done, Becky. What did you find?’
‘He didn’t use it much; only for one purpose as far as I can see, to communicate with someone using the screen name neboc@redmail.com.’
Pye gulped. ‘Spell that, please,’ he asked, quietly.
‘All of it?’
‘No, just the front end.’ He noted the letters as she read them out, then reversed them. ‘Fuck,’ he whispered.
‘Pardon?’
‘Sorry, go on. What was in his files? I need the text of all the messages he sent.’
‘Apart from one message, he didn’t send text, just images.’
‘That word-message. What did it say? When was it sent?’
‘Sunday afternoon, just; ten past twelve. It said, “Got it. Left as arranged.” Whatever that may mean.’
The inspector considered the words. ‘I think I might be able to guess: the disk drive from Glover’s computer, and his back-up. He must have done a dead drop. What about the images?’
‘They’re stored within his mailbox facility,’ she told him, ‘so they don’t show up on Carol’s hard disk, but I accessed them no problem. They’re dated, and they go back for a few months.’
‘What are they?’
‘That’s the strange thing. I’d say they’re surveillance photos. They’re all of one bloke, and they’re all really boring, just day-to-day stuff: him at work, him with wife and kid, and so on. And then you get to last Sunday morning. Boy, was he busy on Sunday, being photographed through an open window giving a very athletically built young lady a real seeing-to.’ She paused. ‘Is your hair standing on end yet?’ she asked.
‘You’re getting there,’ Pye replied, holding down his impatience. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, here’s the clincher. I’ve seen the bloke, when he did an inquiry at Fettes a couple of months back. He’s the Tayside DCC, Andy Martin. I don’t know who the girl is, but it is definitely not his wife. The images were sent to neboc on Sunday, at half past ten, a few hours before the text message. How’s the hair?’
‘Erect.’
‘Mmm. And how does that relate to your inquiry?’
‘It takes us well along the road. Becky, I’ll tell Ray he owes you a large one.’
‘A large what?’ she murmured archly.
‘A large whatever you fucking like. Got to go.’
He hung up, and looked out into the CID room, where Haddock and Cowan were both at their desks. ‘Who was checking on Ed Collins being at that play on Saturday?’ he shouted.
The female officer jumped to her feet and crossed the office. ‘I was, sir. The people who were on the box office don’t remember him, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t there. The lighting isn’t great, they said; they don’t see faces, just people. But I do know one thing: he definitely didn’t get to Deacon Brodie’s until after half twelve. I found a staff member who was having a fag at the door and saw him come in; he recognised him from his picture in the paper. It appears with his reports apparently.’
‘OK. Ray,’ he called to Wilding, but saw that he had his phone to his ear. He waited until he had finished. ‘Andy Martin?’ he asked, as he hung up.
‘Yes. Our Coben and his are one and the same.’
‘Then he should definitely not have upset him. The guy got even big time, with the help of Ed Collins. Come on, we’re off to the Saltire offices to lift their ace sports reporter.’
Seventy-four
As they approached the ugly grey monolith that was Torness power station, and the even uglier cement factory beyond, Bob Skinner sat in the passenger seat of his car and fretted. ‘This is one single inquiry, Neil,’ he muttered. ‘I don’t know how, but I feel it in my water. The deaths of these two authors and of Asmir Mustafic are tied together, I’m sure of it. The link is General Tadic, indirectly, through the man Coben, and through Hugo Playfair, or Lazar Erceg, as Boras says he’s really called. But I don’t know how they tie together, and I don’t know why they were killed.’
‘Or by whom?’
‘No, that’s easy. Coben’s our man; thanks to the cigar salesman, we know he was in Edinburgh last week and that he bought Henry Mount’s cigar box. We know his background, and that tells me that he’s well capable of rigging that Havana. He’s moving among us, Neil, this fucking man, openly, and yet we don’t know who he is. Come on, chum, help me here. What else don’t we know?’
‘This joint project,’ McIlhenney replied, ‘that Glover and Mount are supposed to have been involved in: we don’t know what that’s about. The only hint is that Glover was asking questions about people in the Balkans.’
‘There you are, that ties in too. Go on.’
‘According to one of young Haddock’s sources, Ainsley said that it was about “The cleaner”, whoever the hell he is, she is, whatever.’
‘More information, good. What else?’
‘There might have been a third person in the project. Sammy says that Mount and Glover asked Fred Noble if he wanted to play, but he said he was too busy.’
‘Did they tell him what it was about?’ Skinner asked eagerly.
‘He says no, that he didn’t want to know, so that he couldn’t let anything slip accidentally.’
‘Noble said that? Can anyone confirm it?’
‘Glover’s agent can’t. All he told her was that they were working on it and it was big.’
‘What do we know about her?’
‘We know she didn’t kill Glover. She was in London when he died. Forget her.’
‘What do we know about Fred Noble?’
‘He’s a best-selling author, the most successful of the so-called Triumvirate, although he hasn’t been around for as long as Glover or Mount. He moved to Edinburgh six years ago, and-’
‘Six years ago? After Frankie Coben was supposedly killed?’