Lucy opened the door and he strode through, into the office, as if the world lay at his feet.
Amazing what a bit of self-delusion could do.
She followed him in.
Operation Maypole filled the big incident room on the third floor. Four mean, narrow windows punctured the far wall — separated by corkboards thumbtacked with memos and mugshots and crime-scene photos — glaring across the potholed car park behind O Division Headquarters to the boarded-up carpet warehouse that backed onto it. Vague hints of Camburn Woods just visible over the rooftops in the distance. Digital whiteboards lined the whole side wall, covered in notes and lines and boxes and process-flow diagrams. A small kitchen area was recessed into the grey rank of filing cabinets opposite the whiteboards, leaving the last wall to pinned-up actions and the kind of posters Police Scotland mistakenly believed were motivational, rather than deeply depressing.
The rest of the room was packed with cubicles, desks, office chairs, and DI Tudor’s team — all two dozen of them. There were even signs hanging from the ceiling, marking out each specialist unit: ‘HOLMES’, ‘FAMILY LIAISON’, ‘SEARCH’, ‘DOOR TO DOOR’, ‘INTERVIEW’, ‘PRODUCTIONS’, and ‘COMMAND’. Which had seemed like a good idea at the time, even if it bore no real relationship to the way things actually worked.
‘All right, people!’ Tudor thumped his stack of paperwork down on the table at the front of the room and the babble of voices stuttered to a halt. ‘Thank you. I’m sure you’ve all seen the papers this morning.’ He picked up a copy of the Glasgow Tribune in one hand and a Daily Standard in the other, holding them up so everyone could see the front pages. ‘OLDCASTLE POLICE “INEPT AND FLAILING” SAY GRIEVING FAMILIES’ and that old favourite: ‘JOCK COPS CAN’T CATCH CREEPY KILLER’.
Someone at the back of the room booed.
‘My feelings exactly.’ The papers got dumped on the floor. ‘As of today, I’ve been placed in sole command of Operation Maypole.’
A few of the older officers made eye contact with Lucy and winced at that, but they kept their mouths shut.
‘I know it feels like we haven’t made a lot of progress in the last seventeen months, but that changes now. Angus?’
One of the officers who’d shared a wince held up a biro in his podgy, hairy hand. He’d probably been clean-shaven at the start of the shift, but now his jowls were coloured a heavy blue-grey, tufts of black sprouting out of his shirt collar. Just a shame he couldn’t grow any of it on his big shiny boiled-egg head. ‘Guv.’
‘Your team goes over the interview transcripts and witness statements. I want everything reviewed.’
A small grimace of pain, but Angus kept it out of his voice. ‘Will do.’
‘Emma? Your team does the same with our twenty-six ex-suspects. Have another crack at their alibis: see if we can’t move a few of them back into the “might-be-our-killer” column.’
A middle-aged woman with an explosion of rusty curls and a hard teuchter accent nodded. ‘Guv.’ But you could tell she’d just died a little inside.
Then, section by section, Tudor handed out all the back-to-square-one assignments — trying to make it sound as if this was a real chance for progress, rather than a massive setback — and sent the teams on their way, until there was no one left but him, Lucy, and the Dunk.
She nodded at the whiteboard, with its list of ticked-off tasks. ‘What about us, Boss?’
‘I need you and DC Fraser to go over all the crime scenes again. Fresh pair of eyes. Start at the beginning and work your way through.’ His smile slipped a bit. ‘There has to be something we missed. Something that’ll—’
A knock on the doorframe and a chubby PC stuck her head into the room. ‘Sorry, Guv, but there’s a visitor downstairs for DS McVeigh? Won’t talk to anyone else. Says it’s urgent.’
Tudor licked his lips. ‘Is it about the Bloodsmith?’
A shrug. ‘Like I say: he won’t talk to anyone else.’
‘I see...’ Tudor’s smile kicked back in again. ‘Maybe our luck’s about to turn after all?’
Or maybe it was about to get a whole lot worse?
2
Lucy followed the PC into the stairwell, making for the ground floor. ‘This visitor: does he have a name?’
‘Lucas Weir.’
Never heard of him.
They clattered around the landing and onto the next flight. ‘And he didn’t say what it was about?’
‘Nope. Just that it was urgent. Oh, and someone’s kicked the living...’ She cleared her throat and they descended again. ‘Sorry, Sarge. I mean: someone’s assaulted him.’ A smile stretched her cheeks, putting dimples in them. ‘He didn’t say that, though, I deduced it from all the bruises and things.’
Hark at Sherlock Sodding Holmes.
She held open the door at the bottom of the stairs, following Lucy into a corridor lined with yet more ‘motivational’ posters and the odd Health and Safety one too. Like the cheery black-and-red ‘UNIVERSAL BLOOD & BODY FLUIDS PRECAUTIONS’. How could anyone fail to be buoyed up by that?
The PC pointed a chunky finger. ‘Your man’s in the Visitors’ Room. Want me to come in with you, in case he kicks off or something?’
Yeah, because she’d be a whole heap of help.
‘Thanks, but I got this.’ Lucy marched down to the last room on the left, the one that lurked just inside the no-unauthorized-personnel-allowed part of Divisional Headquarters.
Lucy straightened the sleeves of her stripy top, knocked twice on the door, and let herself in without waiting for a reply.
She stopped, dead. Blinking. The smell was — bloody hell — it was like being attacked with a deadly weapon. The first thing that hit was the sharp piddly stench of clothes that hadn’t dried properly, followed by the swift one-two of unwashed hair and rancid sweat. But the knockout blow was the eye-nipping reek of sour alcohol, wafting out on an uppercut of halitosis.
The man responsible for the onslaught fidgeted on the other side of the scarred Formica table, his plastic seat creaking and groaning as he rocked back and forth. Scrawny was the first word that came to mind. Scrawny and stinky. Scrawny, stinky, and battered. In a grubby brown hoodie, left arm trapped from elbow to fingertips in a bright-white plaster cast. One side of his mouth was swollen like a bee sting; the eye above it wasn’t any better, the skin a deep mix of blues and purple. The other eye bloodshot, the pupil dark and big and shiny. Nose hooked and discoloured, its bridge covered in surgical strips. More bruising on his knife-sharp cheekbones and pointed chin. His right hand fiddled with the toggles on his hoodie. Well, two fingers and a thumb did — his pinkie and the one next to it were taped together, as if he was practising his Vulcan salute.
But even under all that, he was instantly recognizable.
Lucy pulled out the seat opposite and sank into it, keeping her face still as granite. ‘You told the officer you were “Lucas Weir”. Want to tell me why?’
A sniff. ‘It’s my name now.’ He’d managed to hold onto the posh Castleview accent, but the words came out soft and slurred and mushy, a gap showing where two of his front bottom teeth should’ve been. ‘The court gave me it so They wouldn’t... wouldn’t find out where I lived.’
Clearly stoned. Either high on his own supply, or the hospital had given him some industrial-strength painkillers when they patched him up. Shame they hadn’t given him a bath too.