old sod down there; he was just filling in the years to retirement. The change was a challenge and he embraced it very quickly. It made a new man of him.’
‘Did he talk about his work at home?’
‘When we were in Kelso, never; I knew many of his clients and so it would have been difficult. But here, since he took over the new job, he’s spoken much more of what he’s been doing. Why? Do you think this might have had something to do with . . .’ As she looked across at Rose, it was clear that her emotional strength was all but spent.
‘We don’t think anything at this stage, Mrs Whetstone,’ she answered. ‘We’re a few hours into our investigation, that’s all. I think that we should end this conversation now. You’ve had terrible news, and we should help you to deal with it. You have a son, I believe.’
The woman seemed to be shrinking before her eyes. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, tearful again and no longer fighting against it. ‘Poor Murphy. He’s in the USA; he works there, in the drinks industry. I don’t know how I’m going to tell him.’
‘I’ll tell him, if you like,’ Maggie offered. ‘If you give me a number for him, I’ll break the news.’
Virginia Whetstone reached across and squeezed her arm. ‘That’s kind of you, my dear; I know it isn’t part of the job. But it’s something I have to do myself.’
‘Do you have any other relatives nearby? Anyone who can come and be with you?’
‘There’s my mother, but she’s very old, and anyway, I couldn’t stand her fussing over me. Ivor has a sister in Kirkliston; yes, Aisling and her husband must be told.’
‘Perhaps we could call her husband at work. Then he could go home, break the news to his wife and bring her to see you. I just don’t feel right about leaving you here alone.’
‘I appreciate that. Yes, maybe you could call Bert for me; he works for a finance house, Carpenter Dixon, in Edinburgh Park. His other name’s Reynolds.’
Rose looked round at Steele. He nodded, stood up from the couch and stepped out into the hall, taking a cell phone from his pocket as he left. The dog stirred itself from its place on the hearthrug and padded after him.
As the door closed on them, Mrs Whetstone frowned and looked down, into her hands, now clasped together on her lap. ‘You said something earlier about formal identification,’ she murmured.
‘Yes. It’s necessary, I’m afraid.’
‘When will I have to do it?’
‘It will have to be done as soon as possible . . . but not necessarily by you. The fiscal will accept an identification by your brother-in-law.’
‘Ohh!’ Her hand went to her mouth. ‘I couldn’t ask Bert to do that.’
‘No?’
‘No, really I couldn’t. I have to do it myself. It’s my duty as a wife, isn’t it?’
It was Maggie’s turn to look at the floor, at the space the dog had vacated. ‘When I’d just started going out with my husband,’ she said slowly, carefully, weighing her words, ‘there was an incident, and he was shot. He’s a policeman, and I was taken to see him because everyone thought that’s what I would want. The truth was, I’d rather have been anywhere else. I didn’t want to see that big hunk of a man lying helpless with tubes coming out of him. I wasn’t really given any choice. You have; you can ask Bert if you want, and nobody’s going to think the worse of you. Not for one second.’
‘Thank you, my dear,’ Virginia Whetstone whispered. ‘But Ivor might, and that I could not permit.’
10
Cold had come to New York City, down from the Arctic, banishing fall for the rest of the year. Mario McGuire had been completely unprepared for the change, but Colin Mawhinney had found him a heavyweight over-jacket from his precinct storeroom. The big Scots detective was quietly pleased by the experience of standing at the intersection of Seventh Avenue and Broadway with the letters ‘NYPD’ emblazoned across his back.
He looked around at the sea of neon, bright even in the morning light. ‘Times Square, the centre of the universe,’ said his escort. ‘Tacky, isn’t it?’
‘It’s Piccadilly Circus, mate,’ McGuire retorted. ‘Different shape, overall bigger, but the same idea.’ He pointed along 42nd Street. ‘You’ve even got theatre land going off it, just like in London they have Shaftesbury Avenue.’
‘Do you have anything like this in Scotland?’
‘We light up Edinburgh and Glasgow for Christmas. But we’re too fucking mean to pay the electricity bill for a whole year.’ He glanced up at the banner rolling around a building on the other side of the wide street, headlining the morning’s news stories. ‘Ach, that’s not quite true. The castle’s floodlit all year round, and damn nice it looks, but we don’t have any of that stuff. Wouldn’t be appropriate for my city. Wouldn’t look right.’
‘Edinburgh’s that staid, then?’
‘She’s not as po-faced as she used to be, but compared to this she’s still a tightly corseted old lady.’
‘Sounds attractive,’ said Mawhinney. ‘I really am looking forward to seeing it. Will I enjoy it, do you think . . . as a cop, as well as a tourist?’
‘As a cop you might well be bored. At your rank, in uniform, you’d spend a lot more time in the office than out on the street. The upside is that when you were out, your equipment belt would be a few pounds lighter.’
For a moment the American looked puzzled, until he caught McGuire’s meaning. ‘Ah yes, being unarmed. Do your guys have a problem with that?’
‘We’d have a bigger problem if we were told that we had to be armed all the time. A lot of my friends would quit if that happened.’
‘But how do you get by as an unarmed force in the twenty-first century?’
‘We’re not an unarmed force, Colin. We have more firearms at our disposal than ever before. They’re just not routinely deployed, other than at sensitive sites; airports in the main. We’re as lethal as you lot when we have to be, but we don’t give guns to ordinary uniformed patrol officers.’
‘Doesn’t that put them at risk?’
‘No more than they’ve ever been: not yet, at any rate. Gun crime is a problem, I’ll admit. We have a law in Britain banning the private ownership of handguns, but it was passed to keep them out of the hands of nutters, people who might suddenly go crackers and shoot up a street without warning. It was never thought that it would reduce the incidence of guns in street crime, for one obvious reason . . . criminals don’t obey the law.’
‘Mmm,’ Mawhinney murmured. ‘Interesting.’ He motioned with his hand. ‘Come on, let’s walk up Seventh towards Central Park and watch how our officers handle street patrol. You’ll see plenty of them: we believe in a strong visible presence. As a result, Manhattan is one of the safest tourist places in the world.’
‘Oh, aye? And what about the rest of New York?’
The American grinned. ‘Just don’t get off the subway at the wrong station at night, that’s all I’ll say. Let’s walk, Mario. If we’re meeting Paula for lunch at noon on your last day in town, we’ve just got time to get there. If she’s researching the deli business, she has to see the Carnegie.’
11
Wee Moash Glazier stared defiantly up at the two faces as they towered over him in the Wee Black Dug, the pub he frequented whenever he stopped over with his Granton girl-friend. ‘Ah dinna ken what yis are talking aboot,’ he protested. ‘Me go oot in that fog? Ye must think I’m fuckin’ daft.’
‘No, Moash,’ Detective Sergeant George Regan growled. ‘We actually think you’re fuckin’ clever. You looked at that fog and what did you see? Santa’s lucky fuckin’ dip, that’s what! But you should have kept your sticky wee hand out, because this time it’s pulled you into a murder investigation.’
The little thief’s mouth fell open. ‘It’s you that’s fuckin’ daft,’ he protested.
‘Is that right?’ the sergeant exclaimed heavily. ‘In that case, you come with DC Singh and me, and we’ll all go up to the Torphichen office for psychiatric evaluation.’
‘Are you liftin’ me?’ Moash raised his voice so that the rest of the bar could hear him. He glanced around, in
