‘Will you just check, please?’
‘All right, all right.’ He undid his seatbelt and climbed out into the sunshine. ‘Because I’m fairly certain the whole potato-in-the-exhaust-pipe thing’s an urban myth.’
The second his door closed she flicked on the central locking, cranked the engine back to life and put her foot down. Leaving him standing there in the middle of the road.
Sucker.
Who the hell did he think he was, lecturing her about leading Argyll on? Maybe she actually liked Argyll, had he thought about that? Of course not, he was too busy scrambling up on his moral high horse. It wasn’t Lucy’s fault life was complicated.
And yes, she’d probably get a bollocking for abandoning Charlie, but it’s not as if she’d left him in the middle of nowhere, is it? There was a bus stop, right there.
Lucy clicked on the radio, found something cheery to listen to, and sang along.
Charlie would just have to find his own way back to DHQ.
In the same borrowed office as last time, Lucy pulled the room’s manky chair over to the desk, sank into it, and powered up the saggy grey computer.
It’d taken some doing — a lot of fiddling, even more swearing, and a blistering headache — to get her new phone connected to the fancy printer on the fourth floor, but she now had her very own hard copy of everything she’d photographed back at St Nick’s. It sat in neatly stacked piles as the computer chugged and bleeped away to itself.
She knocked back a couple of paracetamol, then logged in. Ejected the CD tray and slipped in the disk PC Manson had dropped off for her yesterday. The one with Benedict Strachan’s interviews on it, and, with any luck, some CCTV footage too.
Clicking on the CD revealed nothing but video files. So no transcripts. And none of the files were named for what they actually were; instead each was marked with the case number followed by a hyphen and a bunch of random digits. Hopefully, ordering them by their last-modified date would put them into some sort of useable order.
She clicked on the oldest file first and a window popped up on the screen, showing grainy, night-time footage, taken from about eighteen feet off the ground. Going by the kebab shops, chippers, and pizza places, it was Harvest Lane — at 03:12:06, according to the timestamp in the bottom right corner. No sign of anyone, just the rain-slicked tarmac, shuttered shops, and a couple of lonely streetlights casting their sickly yellow glow over proceedings. A car slid past in complete silence, its headlights blowing the image out for a moment, but when that passed, two figures were clearly visible, walking across the screen. Not tall enough to be adults, both dressed in dark hoodies, dark baseball caps, dark joggy-bots, and bright-white trainers. Benedict Strachan and his unknown accomplice. They hurried through the shot and off the other side.
End of footage.
Well, that was worth the wait...
She called up the next file in line. The camera was a little further along Harvest Lane: a bookie’s, another chip shop, and a tattoo parlour filling the screen — seen from a weird top-down angle that distorted everything. On came Benedict and his mate, shoulders hunched, walking fast, keeping their heads down. Looking about as suspicious as it was possible to be. They took a right at the junction, fading into the gloom between streetlights.
Her screen went blank again.
The third lot of footage was from Campbellmags Way, opposite Hallelujah Bingo — its shutters down and suspiciously free of graffiti for that part of town. Quarter past three in the morning, but the canopy above the doors was all lit up, the glowing white backboard boasting, in its red plastic moveable lettering: ‘GREAT BIG PRIZES TO BE WON EVERY DAY!’ The only thing out of place was the bundle of rags heaped up in the doorway, not much bigger than a coffin.
Right on cue, the two hoodies bustled into view. They crossed the street, stopping in front of the pile of debris. Stood there, looking up and down the road. Checking the coast was clear, even though there was a dirty-big security camera pointed straight at them from the other side of the road.
Idiots.
Then one of them rushed forwards and swung a trainer at the pile. Then another.
The second hoodie joined in, throwing punches as their mate kicked and stomped.
Jesus...
They were just children.
And it wasn’t debris, it was a person. Liam Hay, thirty-one. Former bus driver for Oldcastle City Council, before depression and supermarket-brand vodka got their claws into him. Father of two — Pamela, seven, and Alex, nine — though he didn’t have visiting rights. Ex-husband of Tracy Hogarth, who hadn’t bothered turning up to identify Liam’s body.
Benedict and his accomplice kept at it for nearly two minutes, then staggered onto the pavement again. Backs heaving, breath pluming above them in swathes of pale grey.
An arm flopped out of the doorway.
One more quick check to make sure no one was watching, and they snuck forward, grabbed hold of their victim and dragged him onto the road, leaving a trail of newspapers and bits of clothes and a sleeping bag and cardboard sheeting behind.
They hauled Liam up, then half carried, half dragged him around the corner of Hallelujah Bingo, onto Brokemere Street, out of view.
Next file: the camera was pointing along Brokemere, past a baker’s, a dry cleaner’s, the entrance to a set of flats, and a little place that did tailoring alterations. A small convenience store sat right at the very top left, its signage disappearing off the edge of the screen so only ‘AMILY STORE’ was visible.
Benedict and his accomplice wrestled Liam Hay along the pavement, then into the small alley that separated Angus MacBargain’s Family Store and the tailor’s.
Then nothing.
A speck of rain drifted by the camera. Then another one. And another. Until a slow steady fall turned the streetlights into glowing spheres of septic yellow.
Four minutes later, the two children lurched out onto the road again. One of them was clearly pumped: bouncing on the balls of their feet and punching the air. The other looked as if someone had just chained a couple of breeze blocks to their bowels.
Four minutes to stab someone eighty-nine times.
They stood on the tarmac, staring back into the alley, then the pair of them hurried away down Brokemere Street and vanished.
And that was it.
The next file wasn’t CCTV footage, it was an interview room in what would’ve been Oldcastle Police Force Headquarters, before the big Police Scotland merger came along.
Benedict Strachan was framed in the middle of the shot — a small, hunched figure with deep dark bags under his eyes, spots on one side of his mouth, blond hair cut in a sensible short back and sides, freckles standing out like blood spatter against his pale skin. Bottom lip wobbling as he pulled off his glasses and rubbed away the tears.
He clearly hadn’t been assigned a duty solicitor — the woman sitting next to him was far too well dressed for that, in her sharp suit and ninety-quid haircut.
Two police officers were sitting on the other side of the interview-room table, but because of where the camera was positioned, only the tops of their heads were showing — one fat and balding, one with a thick thatch of dishwater brown.
The dishwater-brown one did the time, date, and introductions in a hard no-nonsense tone, then she dropped into a much softer voice for, ‘Do you understand why you’re here, Benedict?’
He nodded. Wiped at his eyes again.
‘I’m afraid you have to say something; it’s for the tape. In case someone can’t see, OK?’
A sigh rattled out from the woman in the fancy suit. ‘Can we get on with it, please, Detective Sergeant Massie? My client is well aware of his situation and his rights. He has prepared a statement, so if we can skip the—’