“It’s the bleedin’ black hole of Calcutta,” Doyle said, shifting on his chair. Doyle, Greenleaf, and Elder sat on a row of three stiff-backed chairs facing the wall behind Trilling’s desk, where a white screen had been erected, the sort used for slide shows and home movies. Not that anyone bothered with Super 8 anymore; it was all videos these days.
“When does the usher come round?” Doyle asked, changing his metaphor but not the irritation in his voice. He had something to say and he wanted to say it, but first there was all this to be gone through. Trilling was behind them, fiddling with a slide projector which had been set up on a tripod. Its piercing beam shot between Greenleaf’s left and Doyle’s right shoulder and wavered against the screen as Trilling made adjustments to height and attempted to level the slightly askew — “pissed” was Doyle’s word — beam.
“Can I help you with that, sir?” asked Greenleaf, not for the first time.
“Perfectly capable myself,” muttered Trilling, also not for the first time. He was grinding a peppermint to powder between his teeth.
Elder was thinking of Joyce Parry. They were dining out together tonight, a celebration of their morning’s work and, as Elder put it, a chance to relax before the storm came. He’d chosen a small, intimate restaurant near Kew Gardens, and he’d been in luck: a booking had just fallen through, there was a spare table.
He wondered now why he’d chosen that particular restaurant. The answer, of course, was its intimacy. It was a restaurant for seduction. The fact that it was run by an apparently brilliant young chef had little to do with it. He wanted Joyce to get his message, loud and clear, which meant soft lighting and low music...
“That looks about right,” said Trilling.
“Maybe move the tripod an inch to the left, sir,” commented Greenleaf.
Lab analysis of Witch’s letter to Elder had thrown up nothing, not even saliva on the flap: Barman Joe told them she’d dabbed her finger into her drink and wet the seal with that. The lab confirmed that the drink had been neat tonic water with a slice of lemon. Joe’s session with the two Special Branch men had been long, but totally unproductive. She’d only come into the bar the once, and he hadn’t seen her around before or since. An artist drew up a sketch from Joe’s description, and this had been run off for the officers whose job it now was to check hotels, boardinghouses, taxi ranks, and so on. The sketch had been turned into a small wanted-style poster. Information wanted on the whereabouts of this woman. Details were given beneath the drawing itself: approximate age, height, what she’d been last seen wearing.
The van driver, Bill Moncur, who’d given her the lift from Folkestone to Cliftonville said all she’d had with her was the one rucksack of stuff, and it hadn’t looked full, yet already she’d worn two outfits — the one described by Moncur and the one described by Barman Joe. Maybe she’d done some shopping in Cliftonville. Shops, too, would be shown the artist’s impression. The poster would go up in clubs and pubs, on the off chance that some pissed late-night punter had seen her.
The drawing had been shown to Moncur, who had shrugged. “Hard to tell,” he’d said. “Maybe it’s the same woman, maybe not.”
More copies had been made, too, of the drawing of the man Mike McKillip had seen his employer talking to in the bar. To be shown around Cliftonville at the same time as the Witch drawings. Yes, they were going through the procedures, the correct and proper routine. But Elder thought he had something better than an artist’s impression.
Greenleaf had suggested yet another line of inquiry: travel. She’d traveled from Cliftonville to Scotland. How? She wouldn’t still be hitching, not now that the hunt was on for her. Too open, too public. Which left several options: public transport, a bought or hired car, or an accomplice. Train stations were being checked, booking clerks questioned. Bus company offices would be next, then car-hire firms, then car dealers. She would need fake documents for these last two, and Elder reckoned there was a better chance that she was actually using train or bus or plane or, most likely, a combination of these. He didn’t think she’d be using an accomplice to chauffeur her around. She liked working alone too much.
Auchterarder did not have a railway station. However, buses passed through it, and nearby Gleneagles did have its own small railway station, an echo of the days when visitors would arrive by train for their holiday there. Maybe some still did.
It was true that they hadn’t given Auchterarder much thought. They’d been too busy farther south. But the town wasn’t populous, and Elder knew the Scots to be a curious race, in the sense that they liked to know all about strangers. So now a team was being dispatched north — a proper team, not just local CID and the like. They knew what questions to ask, and where to ask them. In a town that small, Elder reckoned Witch wouldn’t have opted for staying at a hotel or B&B. She just about had the cheek to check into Gleneagles itself, and this option would be checked. But he thought the likeliest bet was that she’d slept rough, out in the countryside around the town. Which meant checking campsites, showing her sketch to farmers... She’d traveled farther afield than anticipated. The contact paper she’d used was only available in that part of the world, according to the makers, from a store in Perth. The store had been visited. Yes, they did sell that particular design, but no, no one remembered serving anyone with it, let alone someone of Witch’s description.
Another dead end, but it opened other routes. How had she traveled to Perth? Had she bought any other materials there? Had she stayed there for any time? The local CID were now busy finding answers to these questions. Patience and manpower were the necessities. But they were already stretching things to the limit and beyond. This close to the summit, they should be focusing in, instead of which the hunt seemed to be spreading wider and wider. He thought for a moment of Barclay. He hoped he would be all right. No, that wasn’t exactly true: he hoped he would get results.
The summit started on Tuesday, meaning Witch was probably already in town calculating her plan of attack and her escape routes. She’d have more than one escape route. Unless this really was to be her swan song, her kamikaze trip. Elder was beginning to wonder. He’d stared long and hard at the drawing of her conjured up by the police artist’s hand and Barman Joe’s memory, trying to place the face... failing...
“Here we are,” said Trilling. There was no longer white on the screen in front of them, but color. Greenleaf adjusted the focusing before sitting down. “Thank you, John.”
In focus, the slide showed a man leaving a building. It had been shot with a powerful zoom, looking down from an angle. Probably taken, thought Elder, from the second or third story of the building across the road from where the man was emerging. There was a car standing at the curbside and he was heading purposefully for it, his lips pursed. In the second slide he was looking to his right, and in the third to his left, checking both ways along the street as he stooped to get into the passenger seat. A careful man, quite a nervous man. He had blond hair, but was mostly bald. What was left of his hair he wore quite long, in strands which fell down around his ears and over the back of his neck. His face was pale, cheekbones prominent. He didn’t have much in the way of eyebrows.
“We don’t know his name,” said Trilling. “Or rather, we know too many of them — at least a dozen aliases in the past three or four years, and those are only the ones we know about.”
“So who is he?” asked Doyle, wanting Trilling to get on with it. Trilling did not reply. Instead, the projector clicked its way to slide number four. Same man, at a café table, enjoying a joke with an olive-skinned man.