Page 77 of Better the Devil

He listened for a moment, nodding along.

‘Email’s fine. OK. Good. That’s probably the easier option from my end, too. So, no problem, I’ll just…’

He fumbled around in the drawer of the side table, until he found a pen and a small notebook. Both had been acquired from the Gleneagles Hotel during a recent golfing trip, and though he hadn’t asked anyone’s permission to take them from theroom, he was rock-solid certain it didn’t qualify as stealing since everyone else was doing it.

Besides, the hotel’s logos were on both the pen and the pad. He was basically advertising the place free of charge to anyone who came into his house and opened that specific drawer. He should be the one charging them, if anything.

He jotted quickly as Hamza gave some details on the individual and his vehicle.

Shorthand. That was something else he’d learned in that first job. Smiling on the phone, and how to write shorthand.

And not to leave any of the secretaries alone with either of the senior partners. That had been the most important lesson of all.

‘I’ve got it, Detective Inspector. It’s here in my pad, safely noted.’

He pressed the button to retract the pen, and set it on the side table with a firm, definiteclick.

‘I promise, I won’t let you down,’ he said.

Callum waited for the line to go dead, then returned the phone to the cradle.

For a few minutes, he just sat. Just sat there, replaying his conversation with DI Khaled in his head, and maybe just lightly tweaking it to make himself sound better.

He skipped over the bit about tigers, for example, and all that stuff about farting in the bakery.

Then, once he was satisfied with his new, more tightly edited version of the narrative, Callum Walker got up from his chair, fetched his new hi-vis HAWKS vest, and got down to business.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

‘Right,we’re done. I’m calling it for the night.’

Around the Incident Room, pens stopped scratching, keys stopped tapping, and a few groans of relief were heard.

It had, as Logan had warned them it would, been a long day. There wasn’t a lot more they could squeeze out of it. Nothing that would make a difference.

The post-mortem report on Victor Belov had come through from Shona an hour ago. It had contained precisely zero surprises. He’d died in his car due to loss of blood brought on by having his throat slashed from ear to ear. The blow to his forehead was relatively minor. It would’ve hurt like a bastard at the time, but it would have stunned him at most, nothing more.

Sinead had chimed in with a theory then that neatly connected the head injury to the footprint pattern on the muddy verge.

‘Someone was standing there by the driver’s side door. Then we had one other print facing away from the door,’ she’d reminded them, indicating Palmer’s photos on the board. ‘So, what if the driver was trying to get out, then the person standing there hit him, forcing him back into the car?’

‘Then what? They climbed in behind him and cut his throat?’ Tyler had asked.

‘Or someone was in the back seat already.’

‘Victor clocked them behind him and was trying to get away from them, maybe,’ Hamza had suggested, and they’d bounced ideas back and forth from there.

Shona’s preliminary report on Kendrick Crichton had dropped an hour later. That one had also confirmed the suspicion that the man had died on account of seventy percent of his head having been blown off by a shotgun fired at close range.

The one interesting bit of data on Crichton was his estimated time of death, which was somewhere between three and four in the afternoon of the day before, which meant that Kendrick Crichton had almost certainly been murdered before Victor Belov.

That put a dunt in the theory that Victor’s brothers had killed Crichton as revenge for their sibling’s death. It still didn’t mean they were innocent, though. Their mad dash out of town and south towards the Borders heavily implied some sort of involvement.

The team had discussed timelines for a while after that, until the yawning had started and the informed speculation had turned into random bursts of guesswork.

It was at that point, with evening rush hour nothing more than a fading memory out on the bypass, that Logan had taken the decision to send everyone packing.

‘Be back here sharp in the morning. Sinead, Tyler, I know you’ve got your interviews, so we’ll work around those as best we can,’ Logan said. ‘But, if the interview panel asks either of you if you’ve got any questions for them, you can ask them what the fuck they think they’re playing at doing all this in the middle of a murder investigation.’