Текст книги "In Place of Death"

Автор книги: Craig Robertson

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Текущая страница: 17 (всего у книги 23 страниц)

Chapter 42

Saturday morning

Narey had made up her mind to have another chat with Douglas Cairns. The suggestion from his wife’s friend that not only was Jennifer having an affair but that Cairns knew about it made him interesting again. An angry husband and an unfaithful wife made for motivation. He was certainly worth another visit and she wasn’t in the mood to care whether he minded or not.

She made her way to his firm’s offices, and again unannounced pushed through the double doors. The assistant, Chloe, rose to meet her and clearly remembered who she was.

‘Are you here to see Mr Cairns? He’s in.’ Talk of what happened to his wife was clearly the only story in town for the staff.

Narey told her she was and the girl led her to Cairns’ inner office.

Douglas Cairns didn’t seem exactly overjoyed to see her but was polite nevertheless. Dressed in a black suit with a black T-shirt underneath, he rose from his black-leather sofa like a man escaping from a tunnel and asked if he could have anything brought for her.

‘A glass of water, please.’

‘Still or sparkling?’

‘Still.’

Cairns nodded and Chloe left to return just moments later with a decanter of water and two crystal tumblers. Cairns nodded again and the girl left. Narey waited until she had closed the door behind her before she spoke.

‘Thanks for seeing me, Mr Cairns. I realize this is a difficult time for you.’

‘That’s an understatement. Do you have any news on the investigation?’

‘We’re making progress. There’s a couple of definite leads we’re looking at.’

Cairns wasn’t giving much away, no matter how closely she studied him. There was a nervous air about him but that was hardly surprising given the circumstances.

‘What are they?’

‘Well we’ve spoken to some of your wife’s friends to establish a picture of her movements. That’s opened some avenues we’re exploring now.’

She was being deliberately vague, teasing a reaction out of him. His mouth twitched: he was suitably exasperated.

‘And?’

‘Mr Cairns, one of the people we’ve spoken to has suggested that your wife may have been having an affair. Do you know if that is correct?’

He reacted this time okay. His eyes widened, either in shock at what she’d said or that she’d said it. His face darkened and his lip curled in anger.

‘How dare you come here and ask me that at a time like this?’

‘I know this must be upsetting, sir, and I’m sorry for that. But it is something I have to ask. Was Jennifer having an affair?’

Suddenly, Cairns was on his feet and shouting. ‘Who told you that?’

Narey remained calm. ‘Who told me isn’t what’s important. I’d like to establish if it was the case and if you were aware of it.’

‘Don’t fucking tell me what isn’t important.’ Cairns plucked the glass of water from the table and hurled it across the room where it smashed against the Perspex wall. An ugly crack appeared in the black frosted screen and, beyond it, Narey could see shadow figures standing up to see what had happened.

Cairns’ mouth was hanging open, as if he didn’t believe that he’d actually done it. He was shaking with anger or nerves. ‘Get out of my office!’

‘Sit down, please, Mr Cairns.’ She kept her voice as low and as composed as possible.

‘Get out!’

The door opened and Cairns’ partner David McCormack hurried inside looking suitably anxious. He stared at the hairline in the frosting and the shattered glass on the carpeted floor.

‘Douglas? What the hell’s going on? Are you okay?’

Cairns shot him a furious glance, ready to take his anger out on anyone. ‘Yes, I’m okay! I’m just . . . just—’

‘What is all this?’ McCormack waved a hand at the broken glass.

‘I’m asking Mr Cairns some questions relating to his wife’s death.’

He stared at her, as if not making sense of it. ‘Does this really have to be done now? I’d think Douglas has been through enough.’

‘I sympathize with that, Mr McCormack, but I have a job to do. And sometimes, like now, that means asking difficult questions. I’m sure we all want to find out what happened to Mrs Cairns. If you could leave us, please, then I can get on with trying to do that.’

The man looked between Narey and Cairns, clearly unhappy at the situation and unwilling to leave.

‘If you could close the door behind you, please, sir. I won’t keep Mr Cairns any longer than necessary.’

There was a brief stand-off while the two men considered their positions but finally some of the air and defiance went out of Cairns. He nodded at his colleague that it was all right and he should go.

‘Okay.’ McCormack didn’t seem happy at all. ‘But I’ll be outside. Call me if you need me, Douglas. And Detective Inspector, I’d appreciate it if you remembered that Douglas has just lost his wife.’

‘It’s why I’m here, Mr McCormack. You can leave us now.’

The man glared but said nothing. He closed the door and left them alone.

Cairns was dragging his hand through his long, greying hair and looking decidedly agitated. ‘Okay, ask me your question.’

‘Please sit down, Mr Cairns.’

He resisted like a sulky teenager but then parked himself angrily back on the leather sofa.

Narey nodded, satisfied. ‘Was your wife having an affair, Mr Cairns?’

His jaw clenched and he took in a lungful of air. ‘I think so, yes.’

‘How sure are you of that?’

The question made him scowl. ‘I’m not sure. I just . . . I had my suspicions. I want to know who told you that she was. Was it that bitch Carrie Thomson?’

‘I can only repeat what I asked you. It isn’t important who told me. I’m more interested in whether it was true and what you knew of it.’

‘Why don’t you tell me what you’ve been told?’

‘Okay, I will. I am told that your wife had an affair once before. And that she was having an affair at the time she was killed. Does that fit with what you know?’

Cairns gripped the side of the sofa, clawing at the leather with his fingers, and she thought he was going to push to his feet again. He was clearly furious.

‘I told you. I didn’t know. I suspected.’

‘Okay, what made you suspect?’

He huffed irritably. ‘She was out a lot, vague about where she was, dressed up to the nines. She’d be putting her mobile away when I came into the room. There was something different about the way she was acting.’

Narey nodded, making a show of taking it in. ‘The person who told me that Jennifer was having an affair also said that you were aware of it. That you knew.’

‘I already told you—’

‘Okay, if you suspected, was there anyone in particular you suspected your wife was seeing?’

This time he did stand up. ‘This interview is over. You can leave now.’

‘I’d like to ask you a few more questions, Mr Cairns. I’m not—’

‘Get out!’

His shout brought McCormack back into the room at the double. ‘What’s going on? Douglas, are you okay?’

‘No I’m not. This . . . this woman—’

‘Right, I think you should leave. This is harassment. Unless you’ve got some kind of warrant, you need to go now. The man’s wife has just died.’

‘Murdered.’

‘What?’

‘Mr Cairns’ wife has been murdered. I think it’s important that we remember the difference.’

‘Get out! Get out before I throw you out.’

‘I seriously suggest you do not attempt to do that, Mr Cairns. But there’s little to be gained from taking this any further today so I will go. We can take this up another time.’

‘Chloe!’ It was McCormack’s turn to shout. Moments later, the young, black-clad woman reappeared looking quite startled. ‘Chloe, show this lady out, please.’

‘Thank you, Mr McCormack, but I’m no lady. And I can find my own way out. Mr Cairns, I apologize for any distress this has caused you but murder investigations work that way sometimes. And this one isn’t over.’

Chapter 43

Saturday evening

Winter had spent a long, frustrating day chasing sirens but with his mind most definitely elsewhere. None of it had been the sort of thing to get his pulse racing. A break-in at an off-licence, the bruised remains of a mugging and the burned-out shell of a stolen Ford Focus. If the day had had a flavour it would have been vanilla.

The job was beginning to feel like work and he didn’t like it that way. He’d never wanted routine, never been interested in any job that was done by the numbers or meant drowning in bureaucracy. Whether he’d changed or the job had, that’s how it seemed now. Frame a shot, push a button, fill in a form, go home, start again. It wasn’t enough.

He’d just completed the going-home part of his day, albeit that he was still on call, and was ready for something more. The something that had never been more than a thought away the whole time he’d been on the clock. Euan Hepburn. Jennifer Cairns. The Molendinar and the Odeon. Remy Feeks. Rachel.

He was worried, perhaps even scared. He’d been taking a risk from the moment he’d got involved in this but the stakes were getting higher. It wasn’t a game, wasn’t a step into a building where he could back out if he felt unsafe. He was in deep and the door behind him had been locked.

There had been a couple of times he’d felt someone was following him: Friday as he went home after work, and the night before as he’d left Oran Mor. Nothing he could be certain about, just shadows that were there and then weren’t. Footsteps that stopped with his, a feeling that he couldn’t shift. He’d have put it down to paranoia but that was defined as irrational and there was good reason to think he really had put himself in danger.

Not just him, Remy too. Winter worried for the kid even more than himself. He’d take his own chances if he had to but Feeks didn’t seem to be able to look after himself. That was why he’d made the anonymous call to the station, knowing that Rachel would know what to do, knowing she was much more capable of looking after Remy than he was.

Rachel. The biggest risk of all. His greatest fear.

When your mind was as messed up as his was then even doing something good could leave you confused as to why you did it. Like the day before when he’d taken her to the nursing home to see her dad with the old Rangers player. Had he done that because it was the right thing to do, because he loved her, or because he was guilty of betraying her by interfering with the case?

He fired up his laptop and went straight to OtherWorld. There really was no going back so there was nowhere else to go. He had to sort this. Warn the kid to stay out of it, maybe tackle the others he was suspicious of. Something, anything, risky or not.

The moment he’d logged in and the home page had built, he saw that he had a message in his inbox. He went straight there, opening it up as quickly as his fingers could fly.

The subject field contained just one word. URGENT.

He took it all in at once. The sender was Magellan93. It was Remy’s user name. The message was opened in an instant.

He read it twice, blood pumping. Then read it again.

I know more about what happened in the Molendinar than I said. I know why you’re asking and if I’m right then it’s about the Odeon too. Can’t say more on here, too risky.

Meet me at the Gray Dunn building in Kinning Park. The old biscuit factory. Saturday night at seven. I’ll tell you all you need to know.

The message had been sent the night before and it was already nearly six. This meeting, this whatever the hell it was, was a little over an hour away.

What the hell was Remy up to? Why the cloak and dagger routine? The Gray Dunn factory was right up the boy’s street though. Winter had never been there but knew of it – an urbexer’s paradise, all maze and mystery, secluded and vulnerable. It was the last place either he or Remy should be going. The one thing it wasn’t was safe.

Why couldn’t he just have told him in the message? Why was it too risky to tell him? Did Remy think OtherWorld private messages were being hacked? Winter had to wonder who’d be capable of doing that. And he really had to wonder how it could be more risky than pitching up in an isolated ruin like the factory.

No matter, his choice was simple. Go now and meet him or don’t. And that was no choice at all. He had to go.

Chapter 44

Carrie Thomson didn’t look entirely pleased to see Narey standing on her doorstep for the second time. She looked hard at her for a while before nodding silently, mouth tight, and standing back to let her inside.

The woman closed the door behind her then stood with her back to it, her arms folded across her chest and an expression made of ice on her face.

‘I’ve had two phone calls from Douglas Cairns, bawling and shouting and accusing me of spreading rumours about his wife. I assume I have you to thank for that.’

‘I didn’t mention any names to him. So if he thought it was you then he guessed. It didn’t come from me.’

Thomson turned her head and smiled sarcastically. ‘Well he seemed pretty fucking sure when he rang and called me an absolute bitch.’

‘I think it might be better if we sit down and talk about this calmly.’

‘Well I don’t. I’m happy talking about it right here. Why did he think I’d told you?’

Narey wasn’t for giving the woman much room or sympathy. ‘Perhaps because you did tell me. I refused to tell him where my information had come from. I didn’t tell him if it was a man or a woman. He leaped to that conclusion all by himself.’

Thomson simmered, trying to decide whether to believe her. ‘Well he called me a few choice names, including a whore. Said that I’d encouraged Jen to sleep around because that’s what I was doing myself. He demanded to know who it was that she was fucking. His words, not mine.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘Well I told him that it wasn’t me who gave you the information. Although I’d have been as well saving my breath. I told him I didn’t know who she was seeing. Which of course he jumped on as confirmation that I knew she was seeing someone. I hung up on him but he called back about five minutes later.’

‘What did he say that time?’

‘He was shouting. I think he’d been drinking. He said something along the lines of how he’d known all along. He called Jen some vile names too. I told him to shut up and get off the phone. He went on and on, asking me who it was. He started asking if it was the car salesman. He kept saying, “Was it the fucking car salesman again? I’ll kill him if it was.” So he must have known about Phil Traynor.’

‘He said he’d kill him?’

She shrugged. ‘Figure of speech, I guess, but yes, he did.’

‘Did you tell him anything?’

‘No. Nothing. I told him to sober up and that I was hanging up and taking the phone off the hook. Which I did.’

‘Okay. Well I’m going to ask you some of the same questions. We’ve spoken to Phil Traynor and we’re satisfied that he hadn’t seen Jen in over a year. Do you have any idea of who it was she was seeing?’

Thomson looked somewhere between fury and tears. ‘We’ve been through this! I’ve told you all that I know. She only ever called him The Man. It was this big secret. She shut me out of it for whatever reason. Believe me, I’ve wracked my brains and there’s nothing I can tell you or Douglas.’

Narey nodded, believing her. ‘Okay, but if you do think of something, please tell me before you tell Mr Cairns. Okay?’

‘Okay. I’ll be happy if I never have to speak to Douglas again.’

She then threw Narey a look which left no doubt that the same thing applied to her too.

Chapter 45

Even from the other side of Stanley Street, in the industrial warren of Kinning Park, Winter could hear traffic roaring by on the M8. Only the ruins of the biscuit factory stood between him and fifteen lanes of motorway. It felt strange, the silence of redundancy all around him in complete contrast to what was beyond the building.

He knew a bit about the place even though he’d never been inside. There had been a biscuit factory on this site since the mid-1800s. It was eventually taken over by Rowntree’s and they churned out millions of Blue Ribands, caramel wafers and custard creams until the company went bust in 2001. The place had been shut since then and he’d heard it was in a sorry state. He’d soon find out.

He’d taken the subway to Kinning Park and made his way through the industrial estate on foot. There were one or two people about but he kept his head down and avoided eye contact with anyone. Ten minutes later, he could see the motorway elevated on the horizon and a big building on his left. A succession of arched windows on the ground floor were boarded up and the frontage was fenced off. Danger Keep Out, read the sign on the fencing. Sure thing. He lifted, moved, breathed in and squeezed through.

He was inside and half an hour early. He wanted to scout the building out, maybe find a good place to stand where he could watch Remy come in. See before he was seen.

Immediately, he saw that was going to be easier said than done. The factory was enormous, six storeys high, a desolate labyrinth of a place that would have made a good set for a post-apocalyptic movie. It was graffiti central too. Every wall seemed to have been scrawled over with names or drawings. It was a huge, tangled mess.

He found himself standing in a central courtyard area with the building rising high above and around him on three sides; a one-storey building behind him let the rush-hour sounds of the motorway flood in. It was like standing in the worst council housing estate imaginable; somewhere no cop would be crazy enough to come no matter how much trouble was reported. Rubbish and rubble were strewn everywhere, so much so that he could hardly find a spot to stand. There was brick and concrete, broken chairs, twisted metal frames and discarded trolleys. Above him in the darkness, the building glowered down like it was ready to eat him.

Daylight had slipped away but he could still see that almost all the windows on the floors above had been smashed. An army of people could have been standing behind the broken panes and he’d have been none the wiser. He felt small and vulnerable standing down there. He needed to get up higher and out of sight.

The concrete stairs corkscrewed up, past flaking walls painted in battleship grey. He got off on the first level and wandered into a vast, cavernous room with bare concrete floors, a forest of support pillars as far as the eye could see. The floor was damp and cracked in places and nothing seemed particularly safe.

The ceiling felt low even though it wasn’t, dirty white-painted girders over his head squeezing down on him and reducing the feeling of space. He followed the beam of his torch as the room stretched on forever, dotted with empty aerosol cans, broken glass and pieces of wood. He came across an old wooden writing desk and he counted three large Avery weighing machines, two of them tipped onto their sides.

Finally, the level came to an end and he climbed once more, skipping the second floor and making for the top. On the way up, he passed a couple of open lift shafts and couldn’t help but stare down into the gloom. The brick walls dropped straight down away from him, rusting metal rungs descending to the bottom.

The top floor was the same dark concrete that had presumably once been covered in linoleum or carpet. Now cabling snaked across it and loose stones made an untidy line down the middle. Girders ran above his head here too but there was no ceiling and the room rose up past them to the underside of the roof. Further on, a white computer workstation and chair sat isolated in the middle of the room, a monitor perched precariously on the top shelf.

He turned a corner and picked his way through a minefield of half-bricks, his way barely lit by his torch. Stepping in water, he stopped and strobed the area in front of him and saw it was flooded, dotted with discarded metal and planks of wood. He shone the beam on the wall ahead and stepped back. What the hell?

Inching warily forward into the puddle, he cast his torch across the wall and a vicious alien face with sharp teeth appeared out of the gloom. It had large green eyes, pointed ears, dark green scaly skin and drooling jaws. As graffiti went, it was pretty scary in the dark. Scarier than he needed right now.

He moved away from it, eager to get onto the roof and find himself a viewing spot. He breathed what he realized was a sigh of relief when he got into the open air again and stood facing out with his back flat to the wall, the brick shrouding him in darkness and the M8 in front of him. It was stirring to see so many cars rush past, so near and yet no one aware that he was there.

A long-forgotten feeling came back to him. The notion that if he was still enough for long enough then he could become part of the structure. Building and bones and bricks and blood. The factory was part of the city and so was he. It wasn’t easy to separate the people from the place.

It was like the thundering motorway before him. It ran through the city like an artery, pulsing night and day, cutting east to west on the northern fringes then plunging south like a dagger into its heart. The motorway was a stranger to the old factory, a stranger it saw every day. That’s the way it was when a city constantly reinvented itself without moral planning permission.

He shook himself out of it and stepped away from the wall, walking round until he could look down from the roof into the central courtyard. It was pitch black and he couldn’t see the ground below, reluctant to use his torch for fear of giving himself away just yet.

Was that something or someone moving down there? A darker shadow from the left corner. It was under the eaves now and he couldn’t be sure what he’d seen. There was a crash of metal and the noise made him jump. He stood still and listened but could hear nothing.

Another crash. Like metal being thrown onto the concrete. Or the other way round. It was harsh and reverberated through the darkness, even cutting through the noise from the M8. This noise was further to the right, near the stairs. And closer. Then another noise, quieter but way to the left. Two people? Or one moving very quickly?

Suddenly, it all seemed like a bad idea. He didn’t even know where exactly in the vast building he was going to meet Remy, even if he was really sure that’s who the message had come from. Shit, this was stupid. The building seemed even more claustrophobic than it was just a few moments before. He had to make a decision, to stay or go.

There were more noises below, more movement. Maybe the decision was being taken out of his hands. He just had to calm the fuck down. This was what he was here for, to meet the guy and get the information he needed.

Someone screamed. A floor or two below. It stopped almost as soon as it had started. He couldn’t be sure but . . . there it was again. Longer this time. The sound cut through the night like a samurai sword.

Decision made. He was going back down there. He was shaking, balling his left hand into a fist as he walked, the torch in his right. Breathing fast, almost as fast as his heart was pumping. He began down the stairs warily, no idea what was round the next bend, his left leg leading the way but ready to brace and either fight or flee.

There was another noise. Something heavy crashing. It sounded like . . . his mind told him it was like a body hitting a concrete floor but then that wasn’t a noise he’d ever heard before. He reached the second floor and passed one of the open lift shafts. He’d gone a full pace beyond the shaft when an inner voice told him to go back and look in it. Cursing himself, he turned.

He lowered the torch over the edge and sent a beam down the walls towards the bottom of the well. The circle of light began to lose its shape as it went but it still picked out the pale brick and then, finally, lit up the floor. There was a dark shape down there that was separate from the bits of rubbish he’d seen previously. Was it even the same shaft that he’d looked down before? He traced the outline of the object with the torchlight. It was square. Not body-shaped. He followed the outline again to be sure that it wasn’t just wishful thinking but no, it was a table top or a suitcase or a box. It was something, anything, that wasn’t a body. He breathed out hard and ran his free hand through his hair.

That’s when he felt the pain in his lower back. Air rushed out of him and he buckled at the knees, the torch dropping from his hand. The realization that he had been struck hard with something extremely solid dawned on him only as he was falling. The pain became a fire that spread across his back and he had no breath with which to douse it. His legs had gone too, turned into useless rubbery things that couldn’t hold him up.

He became aware, through the soup that clogged his brain, that someone was standing over him. Remy? Surely not. He saw the toe of a black boot just inches from his eyes and, beside it, something metallic scraped the ground. He’d got as far as working out that the metal object had been responsible for putting him on the ground when the thing disappeared from sight. Something inside told him to move and he curled and rolled, throwing an arm up for protection.

A split second later that arm caught a glancing blow that still managed to send pain shooting through him. It had probably saved him though and he rolled again, away from the black boots and the metal pole. There was a clang against the concrete that rang in his ears, missing him by inches. He could hear heavy breathing above him and a muttered ‘Fuck’ as his assailant regretted his failure.

Winter rolled as fast as he could, desperately trying to save himself. It wasn’t quite fast enough as another dull blow caught him on the side, pain flooding his bones and electrifying his senses. He rolled again and heard another miss. To his right he saw the top of the stairwell just a few feet away and made for it – no time to calculate whether it was a good idea or not. He spun across the floor until it fell away beneath him and the spiral of concrete steps took over. He dropped fast and awkwardly, painfully, every edge of step chastising him.

Footsteps sounded as the world tumbled, the noise coming at him as if filtered through a washing machine; it was impossible to tell if they were gaining on him or not. He worried more about tucking his head in and not bashing his brains out.

His initial spill had more or less run its own course but he forced it on, half falling, half jumping, further down the stairs until he hit the landing below. He immediately sprawled in the direction of some half-bricks that were strewn there and began hurling them one after the other at the foot of the stairwell. Not with any real hope of hitting anyone but more as a signal of intent, buying himself time to recover.

It seemed to have worked as no one appeared round the corner after him. Maybe the guy was less keen on a fight when Winter could see him coming. He stood there on shaking legs with an enormous pain in his lower back, his eyes at once on the stairs but also scouring the landing for a weapon. He saw a plank of wood and grabbed that in one hand and a fist of brick in the other.

He held firm, trying to shut out the pain, listening and waiting, ready to fight. Nothing came. No sound from above, none below. All he could hear was the background music of the motorway and the rush of blood in his ears. He waited and waited but his attacker, whoever he was, had either gone or was standing as still as Winter.

It was time to move. Down the stairs and out. The ache in his back was excruciating, dull and debilitating, but he had to get out of there.

He took the steps two at a time, reaching ground level to see the courtyard completely swallowed up by the dark. The walls loomed above and crowded in on him like prison guards. He stopped to listen, for screams, for movement, for sounds of metal. Still nothing.

He went to the middle of the courtyard, his feet stumbling on stone and wood. Then, abruptly, on something softer but still solid. He stopped immediately. Not daring to move. He cautiously put down the wood and the brick and wished that he still had the torch he’d dropped when he was hit. He reached into his back pocket, thankful to see that his mobile phone was still intact, and switched on the flashlight.

The beam of light was thin but strong and yet it trembled as he swung it round to his feet. At once he saw a hand, an arm, blood. He stepped back quickly, tripping over a brick and following it to the ground. The phone slipped from his grasp and he scrambled to pick it up.

On his knees, he could see the body stretched out unmoving. He shone the flashlight on it again and saw it was a man lying on his back, something long and thin driven through his chest. Winter’s mouth was hanging open and he could only stare, hardly believing the horror of what he was seeing. He got to his feet and inched closer, seeing the iron spike spearing the man just below the ribcage, seeing his eyes wide open, his head slumped to the side. He was so pale and skinny. So young.

Remy. Remy Feeks.