Ava found what she had assumed she would find: a sheet of paper with the heading ‘Registered police informant, initiated November 1997. Contact: George Begbie.’ It was the only reason she could think of for the file being confidential. What she hadn’t expected to find was her own name in the contents. She scanned that document first.
‘Louis Jones – car scrapyard owner operating known car hire scheme without documentation. Utilising vehicles previously deemed scrapped, allowing or causing false number plates to be displayed on hire vehicles. Admits hiring vehicles to Dr Reginald King, denies knowledge of intended purpose. Vehicle hired from Louis Jones used in kidnap of Detective Inspector Ava Turner. Jones assisted in providing details of King’s lock up on Causewayside. Interviewed by DI Callanach, supervised by DCI Begbie. No resulting prosecution.’
Ava closed her eyes. A dangerous psychopath, Reginald King, had pulled her from her car one night, taken her back to a concealed room in his house, and killed a teenaged girl in front of her. The teenager was one of three women who’d died at his hands. At trial he’d mounted a psychiatric defence and been remanded indefinitely for treatment. The hours in captivity had been the worst of Ava’s life, and Louis Jones had profited from lending King a vehicle, yet neither Callanach nor Begbie had so much as mentioned the man’s name to her. She turned the page, forcing herself to keep working rather than be sucked into the black mire that was her memories of what she’d witnessed. Whatever information Jones had provided to the police during his decades-old stint as Begbie’s informant must have been spectacularly valuable.
The type-print was fading on the remaining pages. Ava switched on her desk lamp and settled down. The initial page was a case summary from a prosecution dating back to 1999. The prosecution’s case was that defendants Dylan McGill and Ramon Trescoe, joint heads of a Glasgow based crime gang, had committed an impressive list of offences from theft and conspiracy, to fraud, blackmail and assault. Their targets had been almost entirely banks, using employees to provide confidential information about security systems and performing unlawful money transfers under threat of violence. On the few occasions that the employees had been sufficiently brave to have refused to comply, the outcome was assaults using tools best restricted to farming. The court case had been heavily covered in the press. Ava recalled it in spite of having been only sixteen at the time. A major Edinburgh crime gang had been taken out of action. The trial had been a Scottish spectator sport for the three months it had lasted.
The file contained witness statements, bank documents and the usual previous convictions, followed by a small selection of photos of the defendants and their victims. Dylan McGill was the tallest of the bunch, with a moustache that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a Victorian villain, a cigarette in hand in every picture. Ramon Trescoe was dark skinned, with middle-eastern features and startling green eyes. Not someone you could mistake once you knew his identity, Ava thought. He had been photographed with several extremely attractive women, almost as if he always knew the photographer was around. There were references on file to deaths – rival gang members, henchmen who had defected, and at least one policeman – all of which were well beyond the scope of natural causes. None that had ever left a direct trail to either McGill or Trescoe though. The Procurator Fiscal had settled for putting the pair in jail for less serious offences but the result was almost as good. The sentences had been lengthy.
At the end of the file was a document signed jointly by the Procurator Fiscal and Louis Jones. Jones, Ava read, known then to his associates as Louis the Wrench, had been the provider of vehicles and other necessary hardware. Begbie, then a mere Detective Sergeant, had acquired enough information on Jones’ activities to put him away for an easy decade. Instead, Begbie had approached Jones to provide information about Ramon Trescoe’s activities, victims and movements. Begbie worked with Louis the Wrench for two years gathering intelligence. They must have been tense times, Ava thought, both for Jones and for Begbie. Trescoe and McGill weren’t the sort of people you messed with, and no one seemed to have been beyond their reach. Begbie’s relationship with Jones had ended with an agreement to keep Jones out of court under pretty much any circumstance, and landed Begbie a promotion to Detective Inspector immediately after the defendants’ final appeals had failed.
Now someone driving Louis Jones’ car was missing, although whether it was Jones himself or a random hirer remained to be seen. Ava noted down Jones’ last known address, closed the file and returned it to the envelope, which she sealed and signed, ready to be returned to confidential documents. She picked up the phone to call Callanach then put it back down. Hopefully he was still with his mother. Interrupting them now might bring any progress to an end. Not only that, but she wasn’t at all sure he would take her call at the moment anyway. She had overstepped the mark in setting him up.
Phoning DS Lively back, Ava ordered a tracker dog to the scene of the accident in case the driver had staggered away from the car dazed. Whoever it was could easily still be trekking through the parkland. If they were badly injured, the December weather was going to be the death of them. Not that Ava was sure she cared, if the driver had actually been Louis the Wrench. The thought of him breathing his last, huddled alone in the freezing cold was one she found rather satisfying. Begbie had let Jones go after a brief chat and the provision of an address for Reginald King’s lock-up, knowing Ava could die, aware that other women were already dead. It hardly seemed a balancing of the scales. Whatever Jones had done to assist the police nearly two decades earlier, Ava was certain the Procurator Fiscal could have argued it was of no application to assisting a serial killer so many years later. Begbie would have had his reasons, Ava knew that. The Chief had proved his loyalty to her on more occasions than she could list, but still it stung. It felt seedy, the deal done behind a closed door with no more than a nod and a handshake. She crushed the feelings of indignation and rising anger, reminding herself how much she’d cared about the Chief, knowing it had been reciprocated. He couldn’t have betrayed her.
Ava put a call through to DC Tripp who she’d seen loitering in the incident room.
‘Tripp, I need you to drive me to an address. Has to be an unmarked car,’ she said.
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Tripp replied. ‘I’ll be waiting outside. If you give me the address, I’ll leave a note as to where we’re going.’
‘Not this time,’ Ava said. ‘I’m not sure it’s even relevant to an investigation yet and the address is confidential information.’
‘Okay then,’ Tripp said. ‘Shall I bring you a takeaway coffee?’
‘No. Actually, yes. And you’ll have to be a bit less enthusiastic, Detective Constable. I have a champagne and whisky hangover approaching and anyone smiling will be in the firing line.’
‘In that case I’ll raid the biscuit tin as well, ma’am. Nothing like a few digestives to help cure crapulence,’ Tripp said.
‘Let’s make that no talking in the car at all,’ Ava said.
Cordelia’s son, Randall Muir, set down his pride-and-joy guitar before picking up the pint of cider he’d been nursing for the last hour. He had to go easy on the alcohol if he was serious about getting up to jam with the rest of the musicians in the bar. Tonight, for the first time, he would have the confidence to go through with it. Last time he’d failed to play when nerves had got the better of him. He’d drunk far more than intended then had to perform an Olympic-style sprint to the men’s toilets to lose the contents of his stomach, before staggering home with a mouth tasting like rotting apples. His mother had pretended not to notice, presenting sympathetic eyes and changing the conversation away from what he’d been up to.
The great Cordelia Muir would not judge. She wouldn’t
