Dead And Buried

problems. You got the address?’

‘Seventy-seven three Pound Driveway.’

‘Smashin’! Maybe we should take an armed-response team too.’

Wright drove quickly and smoothly away from the station heading westward along the Waterfront. Eventually he took a left turn off a roundabout, into a street that bore no resemblance to those they had passed before. The buildings were grey concrete, ugly structures that looked more like giant pigeon-holes than homes. Give someone a house in a place like this, and you’re giving him a message. Wilding kept his thoughts to himself. He was new to the Leith office, and Drake and Wright looked as if they might be the sort of old-fashioned coppers who believed that the inhabitants of places like the Wild West were born trying to head-butt the midwife.

Pound Driveway was in the heart of the scheme, a three-storey, flat-roofed block, its walls grimy and weather-stained. Wright parked the car in front of a stairway entrance with the number 77 displayed on a wooden sign. ‘Lucky,’ he said. ‘Most of the numbers have been ripped off to confuse the enemy, namely us.’ He climbed out of the driver’s seat and leaned against the vehicle. ‘I’ll wait by the motor, Mike. It goes best with four wheels.’

Wilding looked around; he could not see a living soul, but he knew that did not mean there was nobody there.

Big Ming’s flat was on the top floor. Drake led the way up the graffiti-lined stairway, past solid, unglazed doors. ‘Dealer,’ he said, pointing to one on the second floor. ‘It’s steel, with an extra big letterbox.’

‘Dealing what?’

‘Grass mostly. There’s a lot grown around here; if we raided every house in schemes like this in Scotland we’d need to build a new jail for the folk with rooms filled with plants and sodium lights.’

Smith’s door was wooden like the rest. There was no sign of extra security, only a Yale lock and a handle. Drake thumped it with his gloved fist. From somewhere down below they heard the sound of a toilet being flushed. The PC grinned. ‘The dealer probably thought we’d come for him. That’ll be him sending the evidence down the toilet.’ He turned to Wilding. ‘You sure the guy’s in, Sarge?’

‘He told me he’d nowhere else to go.’

Drake battered the door again, so hard that it swung open. ‘What the hell? The Yale must have sprung.’

‘He invited us in, didn’t he, Mike?’ said Wilding.

‘Absolutely.’

The detective stepped inside; a door faced him at the end of a corridor. It was ajar and the sound of daytime television drifted out. ‘Ming,’ he called, stepping forward.

He saw the feet before he reached the doorway. They were encased in filthy carpet slippers and the toes were pointing up. ‘Bloody hell!’ Wilding exclaimed, as he threw the door open and stepped into the room. Big Ming was staring at the ceiling; in the middle of his forehead, there was a third, red eye, from which a thin trickle of blood ran down to the carpet.

Fifty-two

Proud took time out for lunch in a small cafe near Wishaw Cross, then followed the directions which the solicitor had given him. In less than three minutes he found himself driving into the retirement community. He parked in an area signed ‘Visitors’, climbed out and looked around.

When it was a family home, Thorny Grove would have been an imposing mansion, in its surroundings, although in Edinburgh terms it was only a little above modest. Still, it looked large enough to have formed half a dozen apartments, with an attic flat above, and its gardens were large enough to have accommodated a further six small red-roofed bungalows. Number three was closest to the main building and to a block of garages; as he approached, Herbert Ward was waiting for him at the front door. He was a small, bald man, stocky like his granddaughter, and with the same inquisitive eyes.

‘Sir James Proud?’ His accent was gruff, and a bit like Bob Skinner’s: Lanarkshire with the rough corners knocked off and polished.

‘Yes, sir; it’s good of you to see me.’

The old man ushered him inside, and into a small but expensively furnished living room. ‘Not at all. I can’t watch the racing channel all the time: bad for me. Take a seat. Can I offer you a drink?’

‘No, thank you; I’m driving.’

‘Of course you are. Sorry, I’m a member of the “just the one won’t hurt” generation. How about tea?’

‘Really, I’m fine.’

‘If you say so. Now, to what do I owe the courtesy?’

‘It’s a complicated story, but I’m trying to trace a seventy-year-old woman named Annabelle Gentle.’

‘I can’t help you, I’m afraid. I haven’t had much to do with the ladies since my wife died six years ago.’

‘I didn’t expect you to know of her, but the connection is with a man named Claude Bothwell, to whom she was engaged to be married over forty years ago.’

‘Good God!’ the old lawyer exclaimed. ‘So she ditched him eventually, did she?’

‘You remember him?’

‘I recall his existence, but little about him physically. We met on only one occasion, after he and Ethel were married when they came into the office to make joint wills. That was a joke: he had nothing, while she had the modest fortune that she’d inherited from her parents.’

‘They died in a boating accident, I’m informed.’

‘You could call it that. They were in Cannes for the winter and they went on a cruise on some sort of yacht: a storm got up, the thing rolled over and everyone on board was drowned.’

‘And Ethel inherited.’

‘She was an only child. To explain my family background, Sir James, I come from the professional side, and Ethel came from the moneyed side . . . through her mother. Uncle Bert didn’t make his money, he married it. The Marshalls, Aunt Meg’s family, owned the steelworks. Bert worked there and became general manager, then managing director, after they were married. Aunt Meg was a frightful snob, and Cousin Ethel took after her. I never did like the wee shrew.’

‘When did Bothwell come on the scene? Had they known each other long, before they were married?’

‘No, only a few months, weeks even; that was part of the scandal. He showed up in Wishaw the year after Uncle Bert and Aunt Meg died, to take a job in the High School. He was a lodger in a house in Caley Drive, hardly Ethel’s social scene, but they met at a Coronation party organised by the parish church. After that they were seen together a lot: Green’s Playhouse was a favourite haunt as I recall, and she had never been seen at the cinema before. She was about ten years older than him, so you can imagine the talk . . . or maybe you can’t, being from the next generation.’ Proud smiled: he liked to be made to feel like a youngster. ‘Next thing anybody knew, they were married. Nobody was invited, not even my mother and father, her closest living relatives. We wouldn’t have known about it in advance, but for a wee paragraph in the Wishaw Press reporting the posting of their names in the registrar’s.’

‘Did you see much of them after that?’

‘Hardly anything; I was busy with work and my family and, like I said, I didn’t like the woman anyway, so our paths never crossed.’

‘How did they come to leave town?’

‘Abruptly, just about sums it up. Ethel came into the office one day, about three years after their marriage, and instructed me to put Thorny Grove on the market. She told me that she and Claude had had enough of Wishaw and were selling up and moving, as she put it, “to more acceptable surroundings”. I wished her all the best and did as she asked. The house sold for what was a hell of a lot of money at the time.’

‘Did you ask her where they were going?’

Bert Ward nodded. ‘That I did. She told me that Claude wanted to go somewhere he could use his French properly. The world was theirs to explore, Sir James. With the sale of the house, Ethel was worth tidily over a hundred thousand, easily more than a million in today’s terms. I’ve often wondered what happened to them, but it’s never kept me awake at night.’

‘Someone must still think of her. Your granddaughter’s name is Ethel, after all.’