“Setting the bar a bit low there, Shay.” But he did smile. And it wasn’t as if he spent much time looking at the outside of his generic, modern glass and brick station, anyway.
Up the hill ahead of us, we soon spotted our van in a little roadside parking area with a view down to the sea. He pulled in smoothly alongside the patrol car sitting next to it and popped the boot so I could get my bag out.
“Inspector Keane?” A sandy-haired, baby-faced patroller had climbed out when we did. He couldn’t have been more than twenty. “You made good time getting down here, Sir. Constable MacLean.” Conall shook the offered hand.
“No sign of anyone coming back for the van?” he asked as I handed him a pair of gloves.
“No, Sir. It looks like they might have just abandoned it here. We haven’t laid hands on it, as requested. My partner went back down to the station to get onto the rental company, after we’d called it in. It’s registered to a little outfit in Portree. They’ve been informed and are waiting for permission to come and pick it up. They said they’d send a copy of the documentation over too; it should have arrived by now.”
I’d got the fingerprinting kit out by then.
“I’ll start with the doors,” I told my cousin and switched my glasses for goggles to run the nifty little LED light source over the driver’s door. Oh yes, there were a couple of good prints there. Sloppy of them not to wipe things down thoroughly. Myself, I liked to make sure I erased all traces of my presence, even if I thought I’d got away with something. Alright, cyberspace wasn’t the same as the physical world, but the principle was.
I carefully dusted the prints and took a couple of shots before attaching a magnifier gizmo to my excellent phone camera. That gave me some really good images. I’d set the phone to upload all my shots to my online storage as they were taken too. It was astonishing how many people didn’t back up their files enough. What if you lost or damaged your originals?
Images saved, I then got busy with the adhesive tape and carefully transferred the physical samples onto latent print cards, numbered them and packed them away before moving around to repeat the process with the other doors.
“Rented to a Mr Angelo Barclay,” Conall told me, putting his phone away and pulling his gloves on. “Not that it will do us much good to know that.”
No, it wasn’t that hard to get hold of a lost or stolen licence, and the DVLA just sent out replacements and ‘couldn’t’ cancel the originals for some incredibly dumb reason. Hundreds of thousands of replacements were issued every year, but the originals were still good until they expired, which was great news for the identity thieves. We’d run across plenty of dodgy characters who had a few spares. They just found people who looked similar enough to them to pass a cursory inspection. I never carried mine around without a good reason, because nobody was obliged to. If you were stopped and asked for your documents, you had seven days to produce them.
“Plenty of prints anyway,” I said, numbering another card and packing it away. “Let’s see if they bothered to lock her up.” They hadn’t, which saved me a minute or two. I handed him the light and another pair of goggles and sprayed the nearside floor and the driver’s seat. “Hold the light there, will you?” I asked and snapped a couple of shots, distance and close up, before picking up a hair with my tweezers. “Small tube, please.”
Conall handed me one. I dropped it in, then I sealed and labelled it. We got a few more of those from the cab, and more prints from the wheel, as well as a used tissue stuffed down the side of the driver’s seat. I bagged that up. It was possible that the rental company hadn’t valeted the vehicle properly between clients, but there was a good chance that some of this stuff had been left behind by the men we were after.
“Now for the fun part,” I said, and we went to open up the back.
We’d already seen the piled up boxes back there, while we were working the cab. A load of self-assembly furniture items, according to the labels. I went through my routine with the boxes nearest the doors, and then Conall and I shifted them out of the way so I could get to the ones behind them to do it all over again. It was when we bent together to lift up the next one that we came close to banging our heads on the roof. It was almost weightless, empty. Not only that, but half the box was missing. In fact, a group of four of them had been cut into and pushed together. They’d lifted as one. Simple and clever. Anyone looking in would have seen that none of the boxes was big enough for a full-grown man to hide in. But four of them? Oh yes, and with plenty of room to spare. All the visible parts were still taped up, looking just like anyone would expect them to.
“Well, that clears up the question of how he got on and off the ferry nicely,” Conall said, a little admiringly. “Look, he even had Velcro strips in there to make sure they stayed together properly.” I didn’t think the officers who’d done the vehicle check would be too pleased to learn of this little trick.
“Just hold that up a bit while I take a few shots, nice and still, please.” I then grabbed my spray bottle and light again and added a few more samples to our extensive collection, still meticulously photographing everything as I went along. It was repetitive and painstaking work, but it needed to be done
