but that’s been eliminated. I spoke to the secretary last night, and to the steward and the head greenkeeper. There’s a gate at the top of the road, beside the clubhouse, and it’s padlocked overnight. The greenkeeper’s an early bird: he was there at seven, and he didn’t unlock the gate till eight.’
‘Could somebody have opened it before seven?’ Wilding asked. ‘Picked the padlock?’
‘Then locked it again on his way out? Hardly, but if he’d tried, the steward would have seen or heard him: he was up early too. I showed all three of them the girl’s picture, but none of them recognised her.’ He looked at Singh. ‘Tarvil, if we don’t have her identified by this afternoon, I want you to have some posters done. We’ll put them up in shops, hotels, banks, pubs, clubs and post offices in all the coastal towns.’
‘Will do, boss. Pubs first, though, yes?’
‘Absolutely. I want an identification this morning, if possible. This girl didn’t parachute in here. Somebody saw her before she was killed.’ Steele headed for the door once again. ‘Come on, let’s get to work.’
‘Are you going to help us, sir?’
The DI grinned at Singh. ‘You think I don’t get my hands dirty any more? You two split up: there’s three hotels and one pub in Gullane, two coffee places, and other shops all along the main street, so do half each. I’ll talk to the post office and the bank staff, after I’ve made my priority call on the local VIP.’
‘Who’s that? The wee actor chap?’
‘No, Tarvil,’ Steele chuckled, ‘more important than him, as far as we’re concerned. I’m going to see the DCC, as per the head of CID’s order. He might not have asked to be kept informed, but we’re going to do him that courtesy anyway ... and show him the picture while we’re at it.’
Seven
Alex Skinner was smiling as she replaced her phone in its cradle. Leaning across her desk in her small screened office space, she thought no one had noticed, but she was wrong.
‘That’s the weekend fixed up, is it?’ asked Pippa Clifton, the secretary she shared with two other associates of Curle Anthony and Jarvis, Scotland’s leading business-law firm.
‘Mind your own, woman,’ she replied cheerfully.
‘Come on, spill it. That was him, wasn’t it? Your new Mr Perfect.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘You damn well do. You had your girlie face on, and these days that’s a dead giveaway: it was him.’
‘Pippa, we’re too busy for this,’ Alex protested.
‘It’s now or I’ll hound you after work.’
She sighed. ‘Okay, that was my next-door neighbour and friend, Detective Constable Griffin Montell. As it happens, he was apologising for breaking a date tonight as he’s been roped into a big investigation.’
‘But you were smiling.’
‘Yes, because I didn’t really want to go out tonight.’
‘Ah!’ Pippa’s eyebrows arched. ‘So he’s coming to your place once he’s finished.’
‘No, he’s not. How many times do I have to tell you? Griff’s a friend, that’s all. I like him, he makes me laugh, and that’s fine, for there is no way on this earth that I’m ever getting seriously involved with another copper. I repeat, but for the last time, he’s just a friend.’
‘Mmm.’ The secretary sniffed. ‘There’s nothing in my rule book that says a friend can’t give me one on occasion without either of us assuming that we’re engaged.’
Alex felt her cheeks flush and hoped that her tan disguised the fact: she kept her face straight.
‘Your dad approves of your friend, doesn’t he?’ Pippa continued relentlessly, even as her boss picked a folder from one of her trays.
‘I don’t seek his approval, any more than he seeks mine.’ She almost bit her tongue as she finished the sentence.
‘Which reminds me. I meant to ask you: is it true about him and the new First Minister, Aileen de Marco? The word is out, you know.’
Alex glared across her desk, signalling a jibe too far, and with it, the end of the conversation. ‘Pippa,’ she snapped, ‘there is office gossip, and then there is pushing your luck. Guess where you’re at? Get to work, now.’
As her secretary beat a hasty retreat, the young lawyer focused on the work before her, a study for a retail client on the consequences of a potential acquisition. She sketched out her analysis and her recommendations, then dictated it in memo form into a handheld recorder for Pippa to type and pass to Mitchell Laidlaw, the practice chairman, for his approval. Next she turned to her notes of an early-morning meeting with Paula Viareggio, the chief executive of the company to which she was legal adviser. As she turned them into a formal report, with action points, she found herself thinking about Paula.
The two women had become good friends, although there was the best part of ten years between them in age. They were confidantes: where Alex would not have dreamed of discussing her sex life with Pippa or, for that matter, with anyone else in the office, she was able to be reasonably open about it with Paula, knowing that if she asked for it, she would receive very good and very direct advice.
She smiled as she recalled what her client had said about Griff Montell: in fact, she had expressed much the same view as Pippa. ‘Okay, you like him,’ she had said, ‘but you don’t love him. You don’t want to marry him. You’re not yearning to have his babies. Fine, now we’ve dealt with all that. Do you fancy fucking him? Yes? In that case, if the opportunity arises, so to speak, what the hell’s stopping you? If I was in your shoes, or underwear, or whatever, I bloody know I would.’
In turn, Paula had felt able to discuss her relationship with Mario, confessing that, cousin or no cousin, she had been hopelessly in love with him since her mid-teens, and that she had never wavered in that, not even when he had married Maggie Rose. She had wished them no harm, but she had been sure from the start that they were wrong for each other, and had simply waited them out. Any relationships she had had herself before or during that time, including her brief fling with Stevie Steele, had been short-term affairs, safe and with no chance of permanency.
And yet, that morning, Alex had sensed a difference in her: she had not been the usual razor-sharp Paula, and once or twice, in mid-meeting, she had seemed to drift off somewhere else. It was as if there was something on her mind that she felt unable to discuss, even with a friend. There were no business worries, of that Alex was certain, and so her strange mood had been even more troubling.
Finally, she had asked her. ‘Paula, is everything all right? You and Mario haven’t had a row, have you?’
She had been quietly, and politely, brushed off. ‘Mario and me? Row? No way: he wouldn’t dare. We’re fine, I’m fine. But how about you? What about Griff the friendly detective?’ Subject closed, and not too subtly.
‘Him?’ she had lied. ‘Let’s just say I’m still thinking over your advice.’
‘What’s holding you back?’
‘I don’t want to spoil a nice friendship. You know the trouble with hunks: they have so much expectation to live up to, usually too much.’
Paula had smiled, normal service resumed. ‘Usually, but not always. I used to have a simple philosophy with guys like that. I thought of them as very expensive sports cars, sitting on their lacquered tyres, gleaming in the showroom. You know what I mean: the running costs might be prohibitive but you can always take them for a test drive.’
‘The Ferrari syndrome? Nice one, Ms Viareggio. I wonder if men think about women like that?’
‘Are you kidding? They invented the game. But the great thing is that nowadays, as often as not, the players are women like us. Role reversal at its finest.’
Alex smiled as she finished the report; she dictated it on to the same tape as the earlier document, filled in her time-sheet on her desktop computer, then took the micro-cassette along to the secretarial area. Pippa was absent; coffee break, she guessed. She checked her watch and decided that she too could afford five minutes for a break.
She walked along the corridor to the professional staff rest room, bought herself a diet drink from the dispenser, and picked up a copy of the first edition
