“I’ll tell you when I get back. Cover for me. Tell them one of my family’s been taken ill.”
“You’re in Edinburgh, you daft loon!”
“Help me, Jimmy. I’ll come back with the murderer.”
“This once. Just this once.”
Hamish made his way through the quiet streets. When he got to Prosser’s office, he looked carefully to left and right but did not see anyone. He took out a bunch of skeleton keys and got to work. It took him half an hour to unlock the door. A burglar alarm let out a shrill noise. He wrenched open the control box and cut the wires. He had noticed earlier that fortunately there were no CCTV cameras covering the entrance. He sat and waited in case he heard the police arrive and had to make a quick getaway.
After a quarter of an hour, he entered Prosser’s office. With a pencil torch between his teeth, he searched the desk but did not find anything incriminating. He went to the safe, took out his tape recorder, and listened to the clicks. It took him half an hour to get the right combination. The safe swung open. He found a file of letters, two thick ledgers, and piles of banknotes. He took out the ledgers and laid them on the desk. Here were lists of all the companies. He risked switching on an Anglepoise lamp. Taking out a camera, he photographed page after page. Then he opened the file of letters. There was one from the late Captain Davenport saying that he could make them all a fortune. He had employed a geologist, and rich seams of gold had been found in Perthshire. But he needed funding for mining equipment. He would put up most of the money himself but would need an extra five hundred thousand pounds and in return he would make Prosser a majority shareholder. Hamish photographed that as well.
When he had finished, he returned everything to the safe. Before he closed the door, he stared at all that money. He took two plastic bags out of his pocket and stuffed both bags full. May as well make it look like a robbery, he thought, because Prosser would discover the wires on his burglar alarm had been cut.
He let himself out and walked back to the flat. What do I do now, he wondered. If I just disappear, they’ll get hold of David Harrison and sweat my real identity out of him.
He phoned David Harrison. A sleepy David answered the phone. Hamish rapidly explained the situation. “Could you and your family disappear for a week?” he asked.
“I was about to take a holiday. But why?”
“Because if I clear off, these villains will be after you to find out my real identity.”
“What an exciting life you do lead,” said David. “But keep in touch. I’ll want to know when it’s safe to come back.”
“They’re all in it,” said Hamish. “I was with Bromley and Prosser but one of the others must have gone to Drim and tried to set the captain’s house on fire.”
Hamish snatched two hours’ sleep and then packed up everything. He took the pads out of his cheeks and ripped off his fake moustache. He found a pair of sharp scissors and hacked off all his hair, then shaved his scalp. He pulled his cap over his bald head and quietly let himself out. He hailed a passing taxi and asked to be driven to the airport, not relaxing until he saw Edinburgh disappearing under the plane’s wings.
He took a taxi all the way from Inverness airport to Lochdubh, guiltily paying the fare with notes he had stolen from the safe, hoping they would not turn out to be forged.
Once more, he printed off his photographs on the machine in Patel’s. Wearing gloves, he put the pile of photographs in a plain envelope. Then he drove to Strathbane.
Jimmy was sitting sleepily at his desk. “I want you to say this lot landed on your desk and you don’t know who gave them to you,” whispered Hamish. “There’s enough in there for you to pull Prosser in. Now go on as if you’ve summoned me and demand to know where the hell I was.”
“But I told them about a member of your family being ill!”
“Shout that you phoned my mother and that they were all well and call me a skiving bastard or something like that.”
Prosser strode up and down his office in a rage. “Before I call the police,” he shouted at Bromley, “take the ledgers and correspondence and lock them in your safe.”
“You can’t phone the police,” said Bromley miserably.
“Why the hell not?”
“That money was never declared to the tax man. They’ll ask questions about it.”
Prosser clutched his hair. “Phone Sanders and Castle and get them here.”
“What about Diarmuid Jenkins?”
“He’s due here soon. May as well see how much we can get out of him.”
By one o’clock when Bromley had returned after putting the ledgers and correspondence in his safe, Prosser was beside himself with rage. “He hasn’t shown and David Harrison is nowhere to be found.”
Prosser went suddenly quiet. He sat down behind his desk. He said slowly, “I think this Diarmuid is behind all this. Look, he chats us up, he says he’s going to invest, and yet he doesn’t turn up. I’m going to phone round all the hotels and see if I can trace him.”
But no hotel in Edinburgh had heard of Diarmuid Jenkins or had any guest answering his description.
By evening, Castle and Sanders arrived and learned about the robbery. “Thank your stars it was just the money he was after,” said Sanders. “Those ledgers are dynamite. Why the hell didn’t you keep them in a safe- deposit box?”
“Why the hell don’t you shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you permanently,” said Prosser.
They all started as a loud knocking came at the street door and a stentorian voice shouted, “Police! Open up!”
“We’re blown,” said Prosser. “Follow me.”
He pressed a button in the wood panelling, and a door slid open. They followed him down a narrow staircase which led into a weedy garden at the back. He opened a gate in the garden wall. Outside in the lane was parked a four-wheel drive. They all piled in and sped off.
“All gone,” said Jimmy wearily the next day when he called on Hamish. “But we had search warrants for their offices. Prosser owned Scots Entertainment, not to mention other suspicious companies, and Bromley owns Timothy’s in Guildford. But as to the murders, it’s all too circumstantial. They hadn’t time to clear out any of their bank accounts in this country, but they’ve probably got money stashed abroad. We hoped if we’d got them all that one of them would crack and turn Queen’s evidence to get off.”
“I hate this Queen’s evidence,” said Hamish. “I remember a case where two boys murdered an old granny for the few coins in her purse. One held down her head while the other sawed it off. The one who’d held down her head turned Queen’s evidence and walked free.”
“We’ve frozen their bank accounts,” said Jimmy.
Hamish sighed. “They’ve probably got money all over the world. I wonder if we’ll ever catch them. It was vanity on Prosser’s part, keeping those accounts in his safe. I bet he liked to gloat over them. Then along comes Davenport and cons him out of a large chuck of money. There’s no record of how much. I bet it was in cash, too.”
Chapter Ten
—Marjory Fleming
Angela Brodie sat miserably in front of a table of her books in a Glasgow bookshop. As she was damned as a literary writer, interest in her had flared and died even though her book reviews were excellent. In the past hour, she had only signed three books. To make matters worse, she had to share her signing with a well-known detective writer of the slash ’em, torture ’em, and sodomise ’em genre whose queue stretched out across the shop.
