‘See, in the summer, a’ thae folk come ower here for the fair an’ I get their nummers,’ piped Alec.
‘Don’t taigle the man, son, just tell him the nummer o’ the big car frae yesterday.’
Alec flicked through his little pad of childish scrawl and with his filthy finger tracing across the last page he proudly declaimed: ‘An Austin 10. SD 319. That’s a Glesga nummer, mister.’
‘So it is, Alec. So it is,’ I replied, only just forbearing to bend down and kiss his nitty head.
We stopped at Brodick harbour and enquired at the ticket office. They kept no record of cars using the ferry unless it had been booked in advance. Most people just rolled up, as we had. The only bookings they took was for sheep especially in the months after the lambing season.
We tried again on the ferry itself as it battled back to Ardrossan. Same story from the purser, but he suggested we have a word with the deck hands who guided the cars on and off. We found a pair of crewmen lurking by the stern on the car deck, grabbing a fag.
‘Ah mind it fine,’ said the short one. ‘A big black Austin wi’ twa men in black suits. Looked like they were undertakers.’
‘Mair like folk that kept the undertakers in business, Bobby.’
‘Is that why you recall them?’ I asked.
‘No’ just that. Ah’ve seen yon car before. An’ this time they kept in it a’ the way to Brodick. Just sat there. Ah telt them they could go upstairs, ha’e a tea and that. But they wurnae interested. Rolled up their window, so they did.’
Lofty wasn’t about to be upstaged. ‘They didnae go back neither.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘Sunday service. We were the only boat coming back in the afternoon.’
We thanked our sharp-eyed sailors and retreated to the passenger deck. Keeping my back to the rail and a roving eye out for thugs with evil intent, I heard myself sounding optimistic to Sam, like with my men just before battle.
‘First, they’re still on the island. And it sounds like they have a base there if they come and go. But it’s a big island. Second, if we trace the car, we trace Mrs Reid’s kidnappers. And I bet we’ll also know who killed Cassidy. That in turn will give us a connection to Rory and maybe the other four missing boys. SD is a Glasgow plate. We can go round to the Glasgow Council offices in the morning and find out who’s the proud owner. Maybe there’s an Arran address? Then, bingo!’
Sam looked less cheery. ‘You make it sound dead simple, Brodie. But Mrs Reid could be dead, and the appeal hearing starts in a week. All I have at this stage is circumstantial.’
‘A dead priest isn’t circumstantial.’
‘He is if we can’t prove he was murdered and can’t link him to your attempted murder.’
‘But you will use it? You will try to make a case out of it?’
‘Of course! God, it’s something! More than I hoped. But I need to prove these allegations or the Appeals Court judges will just smile and ignore them.’
‘But without our witness – Mrs Reid – we can’t link anything?’
‘Exactly.’
TWENTY-SIX
I was at the counter of the Council offices at nine o’clock the next morning. They were helpful in that chatty- I’ll-no’-be-a-minute way that forces you to take a seat and wait till you’ve properly acknowledged the onerous nature of your demand before they hand over the information. Just when I’d reached the last stage of hopelessness and was contemplating throwing my chair over the counter, the clerk came back with the information I’d asked for. But it wasn’t what I’d wanted. The car was owned by a privately held company: Ireland Scotland Shippers. The clerk went the extra distance – it seemed like Edinburgh and back – and found out for me that it was an export/import company headquartered in Glasgow and owned in turn by another unlisted company owned by a certain Miss Elizabeth Reilly.
‘She’s the wife of one of Gerrit Slattery’s henchmen,’ said Sam, putting the phone down in her crammed office. She’d phoned the organisation that registers private and public companies in Scotland. ‘There are no accounts or other company information because it’s not a publicly listed company.’
‘And if I recall, Gerrit Slattery is-’
‘The brother of Dermot, yes.’
‘What else do you know about these characters? I heard of them when I was in Tobago Street nick, but never came across them directly. Just some of their underlings. It was a running joke that if we couldn’t solve a particular crime then we blamed the Slatterys.’
‘Well, you know they’re Irish. Lived in Glasgow for years. They shared a huge house with their mother up in Bearsden. She’s dead now, and not such a happy family, apparently. They say Dermot, the elder brother, did time in Belfast for killing his father. Some sort of drunken fight, I imagine. When he got out, the brothers came here and used their muscle to set up a thriving drugs trade with sidelines in extortion and business insurance – with menaces.’
‘Well, at least we’ve made a connection with the missing Mrs Reid.’ I looked at her arching eyebrows. ‘I know, I know. It’s tenuous and doesn’t prove anything. But we know we’re on the right track.’
Sam ran her hands through her short blond hair and then thrust them out at me as though pushing me away. Which she was.
‘Brodie, I need to prepare this case or we’re going into court next Monday equipped with only a charming smile and a silent prayer. It’s over to you on the follow-up front. What’s your next step?’
‘Maybe it’s high time I visited the brothers Karamazov? Oh, and checked with our local sleuths how far they’ve got with the murder of Patrick Cassidy. Lastly…’ I paused at this; the prospect wasn’t something that made me glad and happy. ‘I’ll try to have a word with Fiona McAuslan.’
Sam looked quizzically at me over her glasses. ‘I assume you mean Hutchinson? Is that wise? What will you get from her?’
The question made me feel guilty. Which was ridiculous. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea. But no stone unturned, eh?’
As I walked out into the hard daylight of a cold Glasgow morning I was replaying Sam’s question. I hadn’t told her about my boyhood romance. I assumed Hugh hadn’t mentioned it either, otherwise Sam would have been even more inquisitive. Questioning my motivation. Like me. I mean what the hell was I up to talking to Fiona? Was this some faint echo of our teenage fling? That I had to see her one more time to get her out of my system? God knows, the world had changed since those torrid but simple love affairs at the local dance hall. She’d lost her husband in the war, and then lost her wee boy to a maniac, who might or might not have been my former best pal. She’d found Hugh again but he was the ‘x’ rated version of the boy she’d jilted me for. Was it prurient curiosity to see if Fiona still looked the same or had turned into some haggard old bird that I was glad not to be tied to? Or, daftest of all, did I secretly nurture a hope of starting something again now that all the competition was out of the way?
Idiot.
I ducked the whole thorny question by heading first to Tobago Street nick. I marched up to the front desk. The automatic smile of the desk sergeant froze when he saw who it was.
‘It’s yoursel’, Brodie,’ said Sergeant Alec Jamieson.
‘It is, Alec. How’s it going?’
‘Aye, fine. What can I do you for?’
‘I want to talk to one of your detective pals. White or Kerr. Silver even. I want to hear how they’re getting on with the murder of Father Cassidy.’
Alec’s bland face screwed up to show he was thinking. ‘Murder, you say? That’s no’ what I hear. Killed himself, poor bastard. Seems he was a bit doolally, you ken.’
*
I left a short while later, with the supercilious grin of DS Kerr following me like the Cheshire Cat. As far as
