Deception (21 page)

‘
I really am sorry about this, Mrs Rafferty. It clearly shouldn’t have happened but I’m new to the job and I wonder if you wouldn’t mind just filling me in on some of the details . . . of the agreement, that is?’

Trish looked Steven for a long moment then said suspiciously, ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘
As I said, I’m from the Sci-Med Inspectorate,’ said Steven evenly. He got out his ID card again but Trish waved it away. ‘You’re not one of them at all, are you?’ she said, anger now being replaced by uncertainty in her voice. ‘Get out!’ she said. ‘Just get the fuck out!’

Steven paused outside to look over the wall of the car park and gaze down at the canal for a few moments. Well, well, well, he thought. What was that all about? It was obvious that Trish Rafferty had had some sort of recent dealings with officialdom and she’d mistaken him for one of them, whoever ‘they’ were. Curiouser and curiouser . . . He hadn’t imagined that Trish Rafferty had been playing any kind of active part in this affair. What was it she’d said? She’d told
them
everything she knew and that she didn’t want to see
them
or
him
ever again. Could the,
him,
referred to, be her husband? If that were the case, it seemed to answer his original question about the possibility of a reconciliation. There wasn’t going to be any. The rest had been a bit of a bonus.

Steven glanced up at Trish Rafferty’s window before he got in to his car. She was standing there looking down at him and she had a telephone to her ear. He would have given a lot to know at that moment who she was calling.

TWELVE

Steven’s phone rang as he was driving back to his hotel. It was Jamie Brown. ‘Where are you?’ asked Brown.

‘
In town. Why?’

‘
Can we meet? I’ve come up with something on Childs and Leadbetter.’

Brown was calling from his paper’s offices on North Bridge. They arranged to meet approximately halfway between them, in Bennett’s Bar at Tollcross. Brown got there first: Steven found him standing at the bar with a whisky in front of him. The place was rapidly filling up with after-work drinkers.

‘
Did you hear what happened at the Ferguson boy’s funeral?’ asked Brown.

Steven said that he had and agreed that it must have been a nightmare for the parents.

‘
The paper’s going to back-pedal on the theatricals as much as possible for the family’s sake,’ said Brown. ‘We’ll have to report the subsequent aquatic adventures of the minister but we’re going to play down his behaviour in the cemetery, drunken sod.’

Steven nodded.

‘
Christ knows what the Clarion will do with it. Jeff, my photographer, says they had two snappers there, using big lenses. If they got a shot of the rat on the coffin, McColl will find some way of using it.’

‘
Surely not?’

‘
Want a bet?’

‘
No,’ replied Steven, remembering what McColl was like. ‘You said you had something on Childs and Leadbetter?’

‘
I told you I didn’t think they fitted the bill as venture capitalists. I know it’s the fashion to go to the gym these days but these two look as if they live in it. Come to think of it, you don't look too much like a couch potato yourself.’

Steven waved away the comment. ‘Go on.’

‘
I had our researchers check on a possible military background for either or both of them and they came up trumps. Both were commissioned in the Royal Engineers and both served nine years. Childs from ’87 until ’96 and Leadbetter from ’88 until ’97.’

‘
Well done,’ said Steven. He felt slightly disturbed at the news but tried to make light of it. ‘So they can build bridges or maybe they were REME accountants,’ he said.

Brown looked at him slyly and put on a Japanese accent borrowed from a Bond film. ‘Not ordinary accountants, Bondo-San, but Ninja . . .
chartered
accountants!’

‘
There’s more?’

‘
Both men have gaps in their service record,’ said Brown. ‘Childs disappears between ’89 and ’91, Leadbetter between ’90 and ’94. Mean anything?’

Steven knew damn well what it meant but he wasn’t sure if Brown did and he wasn’t sure that he wanted to tell him.

‘
It should,’ continued Brown. ‘There’s a similar gap in yours.’

Steven looked at him with an expression set in stone.

‘
Nothing personal,’ said Brown quickly. ‘And nothing I’ll ever use. I just thought as the folks were checking military records they could take a look at who was on my side.’

‘
So we were all seconded to Special Forces,’ said Steven.

‘
Except me, of course,’ added Brown facetiously. ‘I’ve got flat feet and an intense dislike of anything that goes bang. Orders are something I give to Chinese take-aways so I guess I’m more suited to being . . . oh, I suppose, something like a venture capitalist?’

Steven found it hard not to smile. Brown had done well in following up his suspicions. He said so.

‘
So all we have to discover now is why our peasant piss-artist, our would-be organic son of the soil, has two ex SAS men as
business associates
.’

Steven decided that he liked Brown. He was clearly much brighter than he’d given him credit for at the outset. It was time to trust him and give a little back.

‘
The stakes have risen,’ he said. ‘This thing is much bigger than I imagined. It’s not some little dirty trick by one company on another. Her Majesty’s Government, or some part of it, is mixed up in it. They’re definitely the ones pulling strings in the background.’

‘
Jesus,’ said Brown. ‘Why?’

‘
I don’t know,’ replied Steven truthfully.

‘
Christ,’ said Brown. ‘Does this mean that Childs and Leadbetter are not employed as mercenaries? That they’re actually still working for HM government?’

‘
Could be,’ agreed Steven.

‘
Not a happy thought,’ said Brown.

‘
The operation has the code name, Sigma 5, but I wouldn’t start asking too many questions about it if I were you. Apart from unpleasant things that might happen, you’ll get nowhere, just like I did. It has all the hallmarks of being set up as a covert operation so that no one person will ever be held accountable. No paperwork will be kept and no one in power will ever admit to knowing anything at all about it. If anyone at the sharp end hits trouble they’ll be entirely on their own.’

‘
But this is Tony’s World,’ said Brown sarcastically. ‘This just cannot be. Tony wouldn’t allow it.’

‘
Tony will know nothing about it,’ said Steven. ‘The “need to know basis” can work both ways. Some things never change. Politicians only think they run the country.’

‘
That’s certainly true of the Jock parliament,’ said Brown. ‘Just as well, mind you. They couldn’t run a raffle or even spell it in some cases. So where do we go from here?’

‘
As I see it, there are two weak links in the operation,’ said Steven, ‘and they’re both called, Rafferty.’

‘
You managed to talk to Trish Rafferty, then?’

‘
She’s living here in Edinburgh, in a flat in Dorset Place. I was on my way back from her place when you phoned. She’s definitely in on it. She let something slip when she thought I was one of the Sigma 5 lot.’

‘
What did she say?’

‘
Something about her having told them things in exchange for them not bothering her again and
him
not getting into trouble.’

‘
Her husband?’

‘
A fair assumption.’

‘
Do you think she can be persuaded to talk more about it?’

Steven shook his head. ‘She struck me as an intelligent, strong-willed woman who wouldn’t go back on her word unless she had reason to believe that someone had crossed her.’

‘
So we concentrate on Tom for the moment?’

‘
I think so.’

‘
That leaves us with the problem of our two ‘venture capitalists’,’ said Brown. ‘They do a fair impression of being attached at the hip to our hop-loving friend. Mind you, the mere idea of tangling with these two is going to save me a fortune on
All-Bran
. Any ideas?’

‘
I’ve an awful feeling that the next move may come from them,’ said Steven. ‘If Childs and Leadbetter are who you say they are, they will have reported my visit and questioning of Rafferty at Crawhill Farm.’

‘
So what. You had every right to be there and to question him. You’re on official Sci-Med business.’

Steven told him about Sci-Med being warned off and Brown let out a low whistle. ‘It’s that big?’ he murmured.

‘
I thought I was managing to keep a pretty low profile but apparently not. When I went to Crawhill and flashed my ID, I was actually knocking on the door of Sigma 5. I suspect that Trish Rafferty reported my visit too,’ said Steven thinking of her standing at the window with the telephone in her hand.

‘
I see what you mean by ‘their move’,’ agreed Brown. ‘Any idea what it will be?’

‘
I can’t see it at the moment,’ said Steven thoughtfully.

‘
I’m going back to the office,’ said Brown. ‘I’m going to write all this down and leave it in a safe place, then I’m going to write you a letter on Scotsman-headed paper, saying that we know all about Sigma 5 and that if you should be the subject of any “tragic accident” we are going to shake the tree until all the apples fall down. Carry it with you.’

Steven smiled, uncomfortable as always with melodrama but still seeing the sense in what Brown was saying. Publicity was to covert operations as garlic was to a vampire.

‘
I’ll pop it in to your hotel.’

Steven had just got out the bath when his phone rang. It was Detective Chief Inspector Brewer. ‘I’ve got something here that might interest you.’

‘
Where’s here?’

‘
The City Mortuary.’

Steven wrote down the directions he was given and dressed quickly. He drove over to the old town where darkness, dirt and history conspired with a late evening mist to produce an atmosphere appropriate to the nature of his visit. He found the unprepossessing building of the City Mortuary a few minutes after leaving the car and rang the bell. It was answered by an attendant, dressed in white overalls topped by an over-large plastic apron, which came right down to the floor, almost but not quite obscuring the toes of his Wellington boots. The man sniffed loudly and scratched his stubbly chin as he examined Steven’s ID before stepping back to let him come inside to bright lights and the smell of formaldehyde. There was something about mortuary attendants . . . thought Steven, but what it was he had no wish to pursue for the moment. He heard Brewer’s voice and followed the sound.

‘
Ah, Dr Dunbar, I thought you’d be interested in hearing what Dr Levi here has to say about the Rev. McNish,’ said Brewer. Steven had walked into the PM room where the duty pathologist had just finished work on the body of a badly mutilated male corpse. He nodded to an attendant who started threading a suture needle to begin sewing up the long primary incision that extended from throat to navel.

Levi, a small man, wearing heavy square rimmed glasses, which seemed all wrong for his pear-shaped face, stripped off his gloves and tossed them into a pedal bin with an air of finality. The metal lid of the bin fell with a clang like a cymbal being hit by a percussionist at the end of a performance. It was obviously something he’d done many times before. It reminded Steven of a story that said Fred Astaire could walk across stage, throw down a cigarette butt and stamp it out without breaking stride.

‘
This man did not drown,’ said Levi. ‘He died from blood loss resulting from biting injuries: the tooth patterns on these injuries are consistent with rat bites. This is the one that actually did it.’

‘
Levi waved the attendant out of the way and pointed to teeth marks on the side of McNish’s neck. ‘Carotid artery. I hope for his sake that this was one of the earlier bites otherwise . . .’ He looked down at the horrific injuries over McNish’s body. ‘Well, let’s say, he didn’t have the easiest of passages from this life to the next.’

‘
So the rats got him,’ said Brewer. ‘What do you make of that?’

‘
Interesting,’ murmured Steven, still looking down at the corpse as if unable to take his eyes away.

‘
Perhaps you know more about what’s happening up at Blackbridge than I do, Doctor?’ said Brewer.

‘
No, but somebody does.’

Brewer looked at Steven as if not knowing whether to believe him or not. ‘This GM crop business wouldn’t have anything to do with it, would it?’

‘
I don’t see how,’ replied Steven guardedly.

‘
Maybe it’s like they say. There are just too many unknowns connected with something like that. They should have done more work in the lab before they started putting the stuff out into open fields.’