‘If whoever attacked you isn’t in custody, why are you acting like it’s all gone away?’
‘What makes you think I’ve not taken precautions?’
‘And what precautions might those be, Mr Christie?’
He tutted. ‘As if I’d tell you. My mum was livid, you know — she thinks I was condoning Cal’s behaviour. Well, I was doing a lot worse at his age, and at least I sent a chaperone.’ Christie focused his attention on Hodges, who began to look uncomfortable. ‘For all the fucking good that did. Thing about a chaperone is, they’re supposed to be there.’
‘I was hanging back to take a call, Darryl. You know that. They were never out of my sight, swear to God.’
Christie squeezed Hodges’ shoulder, but his eyes were back on Clarke. ‘I’d imagine you’re winding things down, no? Other fish to fry and so forth?’
‘Not until Craw turns up. He’s been charged with assault, remember — your assault. Procurator Fiscal tends to take a dim view when the main suspect vanishes.’
‘Well, good luck finding him. Now, about these gins...’ The uplighters below the bar cast half Christie’s face in shadow, exaggerating the other half so that he seemed to be wearing a Halloween mask. ‘Are you quite sure I can’t tempt you?’
‘I’m sure,’ Clarke said, turning and walking away.
The interviews with Cal Christie’s friends had gone nowhere and the mood in the MIT room was grim.
‘Maybe it’s time to take Rebus’s theory a bit more seriously,’ Fox suggested.
‘Give me a suspect, then,’ Alvin James demanded, not bothering to hide his exasperation. ‘Tell me which of these pensioners was able to overpower a bodybuilder and tip him into the Forth.’
‘We’re talking about people with a bit of spare cash,’ Fox continued calmly. ‘Bruce Collier, John Turquand, Peter Attwood — any one of them could probably dig deep enough to pay someone.’
‘And who would they pay, Malcolm? Give me a list of the city’s hit men.’
Fox held up his hands. ‘I’m just saying.’
‘Saying what, though?’
‘We’ve maybe not explored the possibility as thoroughly as we could. You come up against a wall, the best thing you can do is find reverse and try another route.’
James glared at him. The others in the room were looking away, pretending to be indifferent — Glancey dabbing at the nape of his neck, while Sharpe studied some of the dust he’d just gathered from his desk with a forefinger. ‘What we’re going to do,’ James eventually said, ‘is go back to the very start. Crime scene, autopsy, victim’s associates. We’re going to fill in the gaps in his timeline and we’re going to check the logs and records again. And just to remind you all — the man was a cop most of his life; we owe it to him to pull out all the stops. Got that?’
There were murmurs of acceptance from behind the desks. James flew to his feet and walked into the centre of the room, readying to dish out tasks. Five minutes later, Fox found himself with Chatham’s phone bills — landline and mobile — and the printout of calls made from the phone box he had used after speaking to Rebus. As Rebus had left him, having arranged to meet for breakfast the next morning, Chatham had used his mobile to call his employer, Kenny Arnott. When questioned, Arnott had stated that Chatham had wanted to discuss the following week’s working hours. No, he hadn’t sounded upset or flustered. He had sounded the same as always. And no, it wasn’t so unusual to be called by an employee at 10 p.m. Those were the hours doormen worked, so they tended to be the hours Arnott kept too.
Their conversation had lasted just over three minutes.
As soon as it was over, Chatham had asked a colleague to cover for him and headed to the phone box, this time to call three different bars in the city: Templeton’s, the Wrigley and the Pirate. None of them used doormen provided by Arnott, but as Arnott himself had said when asked, Chatham could have been touting for a bit of freelance work. When questioned, none of the staff at any of the three could remember anything. Hardly surprising: they weren’t the most salubrious establishments, and all had suffered at the hands of the Licensing Board at some point in the past, meaning they had no love for the local police. As to why he had used a phone box rather than his mobile... Well, nobody had a ready answer. The colleague who had taken over for the duration didn’t know. Kenny Arnott didn’t know. Anne Briggs had offered a guess to Fox: battery died. Yes, perhaps. But scouting out new jobs at ten at night, when the pubs would be at their busiest and no manager available to chat for more than a minute or so?
Templeton’s: ninety-five seconds.
The Wrigley: two minutes and five seconds.
The Pirate: forty-seven seconds.
Then back to his post until his shift ended at midnight. No more calls or texts that evening, nothing until the following morning, when, after the meeting with Rebus in the café, he sent the messages to Maxine Dromgoole. And after that... nothing at all.
‘How’s it going, Malcolm?’ Alvin James was standing in front of Fox’s desk, looking as if he’d had one espresso too many.
‘Nothing new,’ Fox conceded.
James spun back into the centre of the room. ‘Give me something, people! We’re supposed to be good at this — that’s the only reason we’re here. If I have to report back to the ACC that we’re achieved the square root of hee-haw, it’ll be the end of us. Somebody threw him in the water! Somebody saw! The whisky — was it bought locally? Check shops and supermarkets. Get the CCTV from the roads along that part of the Forth — they had to have used transport.’ He clapped his hands together like the boss of a football team at half-time in a relegation play-off.
Fox watched as Glancey and Briggs pulled their shoulders back in a show of enthusiasm. Wallace Sharpe wasn’t looking quite so keen. But then, as the surveillance expert, he’d be the one saddled with the hours of camera footage. Mark Oldfield was by the kettle, waiting for it to boil. James spotted him and shook his head.
‘No, no, no, Mark — you get a tea break when I say so and not before. Time you all earned it for a change. Back to your desk, son. Give me names, give me ideas, give me something I can use.’
Fox had the timeline up on his screen. Chatham had headed out of the house without a word to his partner, having told Dromgoole he wouldn’t be seeing her that day. So what did he do instead? He left his car in its usual spot. Liz Dolan had told police he often took the bus, but there was no sign of him taking one that afternoon. If he had been snatched off the street, surely there would have been a witness or two. So maybe he had gone somewhere willingly, in one of the thousands upon thousands of cars visible on the citywide CCTV cameras.
Bloody hell — ‘needle in a haystack’ hardly covered it. No wonder Wallace Sharpe looked so despondent.
Fox picked up his phone, which had started to vibrate. Caller ID: Rebus. He pressed the phone to his ear.
‘Hang on a sec,’ he told Rebus, getting up and moving into the hallway. Alvin James gave him a hopeful look, which Fox crushed with a shake of the head.
‘What can I do for you, John?’ he asked, leaning against one of the olive-coloured walls.
‘The smallest of favours.’
‘I’m not giving you any more business cards.’
‘Business cards won’t help — this bugger already knows I’m not a cop.’
‘That’s why you need me along?’
‘In a nutshell.’
‘Who is he? What do we want from him?’
‘I like that “we”, Malcolm. And to answer your question: he’s a legend. I really think you’ll get a buzz from meeting him.’