Hit and Run

A Novel by

Michael Rolls

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Dedicated to the memory of my dear wife

Veronica Rolls

15th April 1943 to 23rd January 2018

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Contents

Chapter One – 2009..... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..2

Chapter Two – 2007/2008... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ....3

Chapter Three - 2009.... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... ....10

Chapter Four – 2011, March. ... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... . ... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .11

Chapter Five – 2011, April. . .... .... ... . .... .... ... . .... .... ... . .... .... ... . .... .... ... . .... .... ... . .... .... ... . .... .... ...14

Chapter Six – 2011, June. ... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... ... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... ...18

Chapter Seven – 2011, July and August. .. .... .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... 22

Chapter Eight – 2011, September. .. .... .... .... ..... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... ..... .... .... ... . .... .... .... ..33

Chapter Nine – 2011, October.. .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... ..41

Chapter Ten – 2011, November. .. .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... ..... ....46

Chapter Eleven – 2011, December. ... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... .......52

Chapter Twelve – 2003, October, Iraq. .. .... .... .... .. .. .... .... .... ... . .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ..... .... .... .... ..... .63

Chapter Thirteen – 2011, December again. ... .... .... ... ..... .... ... .... .... .... .... .... .... .... ... . .... .... .. .. .... .... .67

3

Chapter One – 2009

“He was vicious and a killer, though a youth of twenty four, and the notches on his six-gun numbered one and nineteen more”

I stared fixedly at the man in the dock. James Cameron Reese was certainly twenty four years of age.

Whether he was vicious, I had no means of knowing, but a killer he most certainly was. Whether his victims approached the numbers on the Johnny Cash song which kept bouncing around in my brain, again I had no way of knowing. He was a bit below average height, perhaps five foot seven, and slimly built. His light brown hair, worn almost to his collar, looked lank and lifeless, an impression heightened by his pasty complexion and the dull grey eyes which gazed sullenly around the court. He was dressed in a sombre suit of dark grey which, to my critical eye, seemed to fit him not at all well. It had the appearance of having been acquired for the occasion, to present to the jury the most respectable image possible.

I listened to the judge’s pronouncement. For causing death by dangerous driving, for driving without insurance or a valid licence in a vehicle lacking an MOT certificate and, to cap it all, to be drunk at the time, the full panoply of the law descended upon him and sentenced him to – three years in prison and banned from driving for five years.

I listened in sick incredulity. Three years, I was well aware, actually meant eighteen months unless he was stupid enough to misbehave whilst in prison. It was at that point that I decided that whilst the law may have been served, justice had most certainly not.

In the hands of James Cameron Douglas, an elderly Ford Mondeo had been far more deadly than any six gun sung about by Johnny Cash. Charging along a 30mph limit road at over 70 mph, losing control for no apparent reason on a perfectly straight piece of road, he had mounted the pavement and mown down my wife and three other pedestrians. The other three, although badly injured, had all survived.

Fiona, my wife of just twelve months, had not. Neither had the four month foetus that she had carried within her womb.

I left the court seething with rage, rage caused not only by the derisory sentence that he had received, but by the fact that there was nothing that I could do about it.

Ever since Fiona’s death, some six months earlier, the house had seemed to mock me with its emptiness.

Now, as I returned home and let myself in, its echoing silence was worse than ever. There wasn’t even the comfort of a pet; Sandy, our golden Labrador, had died with Fiona as Reese’s Mondeo mounted that pavement.

It was at that moment that I decided that I had been wrong to try to carry on living in our house. The happy memories were overpowered by the horror of what had happened. Fiona’s clothes and cosmetics, Sandy’s dog basket and lead, the unopened tins of dog food, the half decorated small bedroom which was to have been the nursery – I could no longer bear them.

The very next day I put the house on the market, with a deliberately low price to encourage a quick sale. I was lucky; despite the market slump I found a buyer almost at once, and six weeks later the house which had been so central to our dreams was no longer mine. In its place I had acquired a small, isolated cottage, much in need of renovation, out on the B8063, a few miles outside Perth. The contrast between a newish, four bedroomed house in one of the most desirable areas of Perth, and the two bedroomed cottage with dodgy plumbing and heating, could hardly have been greater, but the very inadequacies of my new abode meant that I had to put in a lot of hard work to make it truly habitable – and hard work was infinitely preferable to sitting and thinking. I had made a considerable profit on the sale, so was able to really go to town on renovating my new abode without even having to touch my savings.

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Chapter Two – 2007/2008

So, I was a civilian once more. After twelve years, I was no longer Captain Martin Graham of the Black Watch, but plain Mr. Graham of no fixed abode. The ‘of no fixed abode’ wasn’t totally true; until I sorted out somewhere of my own I was going to stay with the aunt and uncle who had brought me up after the death of my parents when I was a child. Robert and Doreen McLean had taken care of me from the age of six when my mother, Doreen’s sister, took her own life on the first anniversary of the death of my father on active duty in Ulster. Like me, he had been in the Black Watch and, also like me, had been a captain. It was as a captain, leading a patrol on the Bogside, that he became the victim of an IRA sniper.

Robert and Doreen welcomed me home; in my twelve years in the Army I had visited them from time to time, but for never more than a few days at a time, and I wondered how they would take to having me around the place, especially as I had no job at the present so would be under their feet all day – Robert was retired and Doreen had never worked outside the home.

In fact, I need not have worried. They were genuinely delighted to ‘have me back’ as they saw it. Childless themselves, there had been love as well as duty involved when they took me in as a small, frightened boy unable to understand why he had now lost his mother as well as the father he scarcely remembered. I owed them a lot; they had sent me to Fettes College as a boarder when I reached seven years of age, not because they wanted me out of the way, but because – and I feel rightly – they felt it offered me the best chance in life. One of the best schools in the country, I enjoyed my time there immensely. It helped that I proved to be reasonably competent scholastically and an enthusiastic player of all sports. I made a number of friendships there, two of which were to last me into adulthood, although it was some time since I had seen either of them. Bill Howerd, like myself, had gone into the forces, only in his case into the RAF and was currently a Flight Lieutenant flying Tornadoes in Afghanistan. George Kirk had gone for something totally different –

journalism. After a period on small local papers he had gone to Fleet Street for a few years, but was now back in Scotland as one of the senior reporters on The Scotsman.

Robert and Doreen still lived in the house in which I had grown up, a large Victorian pile on the outskirts of Perth. It was big enough to house a large family, a family they had never managed to achieve, but they had never had the desire to move to somewhere smaller and more convenient.

I had been back for a week or so when, after one of Doreen’s tasty dinners, the three of us were sitting in the big lounge. Doreen was sipping on a glass of red wine, Robert and I had moved on to a glass of Talisker malt whisky each.

It was Robert who phrased the question that I had been subconsciously asking myself even before I had left the Army.

“So, Martin, any idea what you want to do with your life yet?”

I shook my head slowly.

“No, Robert – I’ve thought a lot, looked at a lot of adverts, but got nowhere.”

He regarded me cautiously. I returned his gaze, realising as I did so, perhaps for the first time, just how much he and Doreen had aged over the last few years. Doreen had been some six years older than my mother, and Robert was a further six years older still. It came as a shock to realise that he was now sixty-seven years old and that Doreen was over sixty. Sadly, I realised that they both looked a good bit older than their years, Robert in particular, and I wondered uneasily if he was ill. His once ginger hair was now grey and much thinner, his scalp clearly visible through what had once been a luxuriant mane. His face had lost flesh and his cheeks looked sunken in and his collar – he always wore a collar and tie in the house – looked too big for him. Never over-weight, he now seemed positively skeletal.

“Do you still keep up your photography?”

I was surprised at the question. Ever since I had been given a cheap camera as a tenth birthday present, photography had fascinated me, and I rapidly moved on to something more capable. Whilst still at school I had sold quite a few pictures to a variety of sources, including local newspapers.

“Well, I haven’t had much opportunity to practice it of late, although I still have my cameras and other equipment. Last time I got the chance to use them was on leave a couple of years ago now.”

“Do you remember Donald Ferguson?”

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I only had to think for a moment. Yes, I did. A lifelong friend of Robert and a fellow golf enthusiast, he ran a small professional photography outfit in Perth. I hadn’t seen him for some years, but remembered him well.

Whilst I was learning to use a camera, back in my schooldays, he had given me a lot of advice and encouragement.

“Yes, of course I do. How is he?”

“Like all of us, getting older. He is looking for someone to came into his business with a view to taking it over in a year or so, perhaps even less, and allowing him to retire.”

“You mean work for him?”

“Not for – with. He wants a partner. We were playing golf a couple of weeks ago, and when I mentioned that you were coming home, he asked if you were still using a camera. That was when he said he wanted to put his feet up in the near future, but didn’t want to just shut up shop. He has a couple of assistant photographers, plus a couple of other staff, and he doesn’t want to throw them out of work. It used to be a bit bigger, but the advent of digital photography enables him to still keep up the output but with fewer people.”

“But if he wants a partner, surely he is looking for someone to buy into the business – and presumably buy him out in due course? I’ve got my Army gratuity and some savings that I have put by, but I doubt if it would be the sort of money he must be looking for.”

“As I understand it, he isn’t looking for a great amount to buy in. He would like rather to see the business continue and pay him an income after he steps down.”

I thought about it, and over the next few days thought about it some more. I needed to get some sort of a job; my savings and gratuity, unless augmented, would only see me solvent for perhaps twelve to eighteen months if I continued to live with Robert and Doreen, appreciably less if I moved into a place of my own.

I met with Donald Ferguson a couple of times and between us we worked out an agreement that saw me effectively owning half the business – and taking half the profits, with Donald also having half. It worked well; I effectively managed the staff, did some assignments myself, and Donald withdrew completely from active involvement over the course of three months.

Towards the end of August things changed for me. I had already moved out from Robert and Doreen’s, into a two bedroom flat in central Perth. I had the business running smoothly and I had met up with my one time school friend George Kirk again. We had dinner together a couple of times and it was in the course of such a dinner that he made a suggestion that was to change my life.

I had been complaining of not getting enough exercise. The Army had kept me fit, but now that fitness was going. I could always go jogging and the like, but I always found aimlessly running around just for the sake of it a soul-destroying exercise and said so.

George looked at for a moment and then spoke

“What about taking up Rugby again? You used to be pretty useful at school – did you keep it up in the Army?”

“When I could – not that the modern Army gives you the sort of spare time for sports that used to be the case, but I played for the Regiment a few times.”

“There you are then. The local club is always looking for new members, why not join?”

“I’m thirty years old – isn’t that a bit long in the tooth to be starting again?”

“I’m older than you are”

“Only by two weeks,” I protested – it had long been a standing joke between us.

“I’m older than you are” he reiterated, “and I am by no means the oldest member of the side. We’re only talking second fifteen here, not turning out for Scotland. Do you still play stand-off?”

“That or centre – too slow for wing or fullback, too cowardly to play in the forwards.”

So it was that a couple of weeks later I found myself sweating on the training pitch, trying to recover some sort of fitness and, to my horror, found myself selected to play the following Saturday. George was also in the team, playing scrum half and I was down to play stand-off, so we resumed a partnership that we had last had in our final year at school, twelve years earlier. George, like myself, was a bachelor, living in a flat in Perth. Originally from Inverness, where his father still lived, he had, again like myself, been a boarder at 6

Fettes, because his mother had died when he was only six years old and his father, working in the oil industry, often had to be away from the UK for protracted periods. The ideal build for a scrum-half, he was quick on his feet and his five foot nine, eleven stone frame packed a surprising amount of power in the tackle. Blue-eyed and red-haired, with a mass of freckles, he looked Scottish to the core – as indeed he was.

The match was something to forget. My team-mates were, on average, even less fit than I was, with an average age of over thirty. Up against a somewhat younger side, we were run ragged by the sixty minute mark and only some heroic defending by our forwards kept the score to a respectable 13-18. We were proud of the fact that they had failed to score a try against us, all their points coming from the boot of my opposite number as our weary bodies coughed up a succession of penalties in the closing twenty minutes or so. We, on the other hand, did manage a try – Robbie Laidlaw, our left wing, scorching through the opposition in the first ten minutes to give us an early lead and false hope. I was reasonably pleased with my own performance

– I converted Robbie’s try and knocked over two penalties, and in the pub later there was much replaying of crucial moments to convince ourselves that, really, we were robbed.

There were some wives and girl-friends present, so the occasion wasn’t as bawdy as some Rugby occasions I remembered from Army days, but it was very enjoyable for all that. It was the first truly social evening I had experienced since leaving the Army and I was looking forward to the next match, the aches and pains of the body forgotten under the influence of the beer and the craic.

Robbie, celebrating his try, was accompanied by a tall, slim girl who immediately caught my eye. Fair hair almost to her waist, blue eyes in a lightly tanned face, a good figure, I envied Robbie his luck in landing such a beauty.

Our next match was against an Old Boys XV the following Sunday. Some of them truly were just that – old boys. It is a truism in Rugby that the forwards decide who wins, the backs decide by how much, but this game didn’t run true to that saying. Their pack of forwards, whilst not exactly very mobile, were very strong at close quarters, and spent the entire afternoon pushing our eight all over the place. This made life very difficult for us, especially for George and myself – half-backs behind a suffering pack get very little time or space to do anything. The first half saw us run ragged, only the lack of pace in the opposition backs saving us from being slaughtered. Time and again they failed to take advantage of the opportunities created by their forwards, but despite that we turned round at half time trailing 0-12. Two tries by their forwards powering over the line, one converted, one not. I had a couple of penalties to try and reduce the deficit, but both were really too far out for me and my efforts fell short.

The second half started rather better. We had the put in to a scrum and for once our forwards managed to stand reasonably firm against the pressure. George got the ball to me and this time I actually had a bit of time and space in which to work. The opposing flanker was bearing down on me but I had the time to side-step and leave him floundering, then realised that there was a huge gap in front of me, so I went hell for leather for it. All through the game to date I had been passing or kicking – no other option – so my sudden break took them by surprise. I had forty yards to cover and for a moment I thought that I could make it all the way, but quickly realised that I was being chased down. Just in time, Robbie came storming up inside me, screaming for the ball, and I just managed to offload it as the tackler caught me and brought me down.

Robbie left the fullback flatfooted and scored right under the posts, giving me the easiest of conversions. 7-12

Ten minutes later, under a lot of pressure in our half, we conceded a simple penalty which duly went over.7-15.

We fought back desperately and gained a penalty just about on the half-way line. Well outside my range to kick for goal, but a kick to the touchline gave us the throw in about fifteen yards out. For once our line-out functioned perfectly; the ball went to George, from George to me, and again the opposing backs were too slow to react and I was over the line whilst they were still wondering what happened. The conversion wasn’t as easy as the first one, but I managed it. 14-15 and we were only one point behind.

It didn’t last; within five minutes they were driving over our line again as we failed to stop their heavyweights rumbling forward. 15-21.

7

Then, to add insult to injury, we conceded a soft penalty right in front of the posts. 15-24 and the game looked up. However, we had all, on both sides, reckoned without Robbie. We were under pressure again, only yards from our goal line, with them driving us back a yard or two at a time, when Robbie intercepted a pass intended for their own winger. Off he went with eighty yards to go, for one of the best solo tries I have ever seen, leaving three defenders grasping at thin air as he jinked and ran. Another easy conversion. 22-24.

Time was running out fast, We managed a rare incursion into the opposition half and there was a messy ruck about thirty yards out. The referee gave a blast on his whistle and for a sickening moment I thought that he was signalling the end of the game, but no – we had a penalty for one of the opposition drifting offside.

I lined the kick up and turned to the referee.

“How much time left, ref?”

“This will be the last kick.”

Oh, no pressure then.

I struck the ball and for a moment thought that that it would drift wide, but no, it gently curved in and between the posts. We had actually won; 25-24.

The celebrations that evening were even more enjoyable than the previous week. As I sat with George, enjoying a pint of bitter, I looked across the bar and saw that this time Robbie had not one, but two attractive women with him. In addition to the blonde that I had seen the previous week, there was another girl, a girl of considerable contrast. Short, rather plump, with jet-black hair cut short and a dazzling smile, she was a natural centre of attraction.

I indicated the trio to George.

“Robbie seems to have all the luck with those two crackers in tow.”

George looked across.

“Two? Oh, the dark girl is Sarah, his girl friend. The blonde is just his sister, Fiona.”

His sister; that was good news.

Shortly afterwards, I managed to get close enough to talk to her. She was drinking a white wine and her glass was virtually empty. I gave her my most winning smile and asked if I could get her a refill.

“Oh, that’s kind of you. Yes please – it’s their chardonnay.”

I returned a few minutes later with a glass of chardonnay for her, a second pint of bitter for myself. I noticed a couple vacate a table nearby and indicated it with a nod of my head.

“Would you care to sit down?”

“Yes, I think I will – thanks for the drink.”

We sat opposite each other at the small table are regarded each other with mutual interest.

“You’re Martin, aren’t you – but Martin what?”

“Yes Martin it is, Martin Graham – and you are Fiona Laidlaw.”

“That’s right – I’m Robbie’s kid sister. You played well today – everyone is impressed.”

“Thanks, but without Robbie’s efforts we would have been well beaten, That second try of his was an absolute corker.”

“Don’t let him hear you say that – he’s already quite full enough of himself.”

“I promise not to praise him! Do you always come to watch him?”

“No way – I came last week because Sarah, his girl friend, couldn’t make it and I knew you were up against strong opposition, so I thought a bit of moral support might not go amiss. I came this week really because I was at a loose end, it’s been a nice day, and the thought of repeating last week with a drink afterwards with friends was tempting.”

It was getting late and people were beginning to drift away. Now or never.

“Look, I wonder if you would like to have dinner one evening? I would like to see you again, provided that you think you could bear my company for an evening.”

She pondered for a moment, then nodded her head.

“I’d love to – when?”

“Tomorrow?”

She shook her head.

8

“Sorry, I’m working late tomorrow.” My disappointment must have be clear, as she immediately added, “so how about Tuesday?”

“That would be fine. Where shall I pick you up?”

“I’ll jot it down – have you got a piece of paper?”

I fished out one of my business cards and she wrote her address and telephone number on the back. I carefully stowed it in my wallet and then took out a second card, writing my home address and telephone number on the back. I handed it to her.

“In case you have any problems – you can reach me at the business number from eight in the morning until about seven in the evening. If I’m out someone will take a message. After seven I should be at home.”

“Thanks, Martin – I’m looking forward to it.”

It all started as easily as that.

The Tuesday evening was very enjoyable. The restaurant I had chosen was small and quiet and the food good. We spoke mainly about jobs and families. I explained about the photographic business, she worked in Perth library. We discovered that we were both orphans; I told her about my father and mother – her parents had been killed in a plane crash whilst on holiday only just over a year earlier. Her only relative was Robbie, I had my aunt and uncle, Doreen and Robert.

We agreed to meet again and did so that Saturday, driving out into the country for a pub lunch and a slow return to her flat, which, like mine, was in central Perth. I think that we both realised even that early that we were moving towards something that we wanted to last, but we were both anxious not to try to move too fast.

We met because of my playing Rugby, but as it happened I only played two more games for the club. The following week we had a fairly comfortable win against a scratch police side, with Robbie once more scoring a brace of tries. The week after things were going well, when, with only five minutes or so to go, I made a mess of a tackle on the opposing right winger and somehow the two of us ended up in a painful tangle of legs. He got up. I didn’t; I had damaged the ligaments of my left knee and had to be taken to Perth Royal Infirmary A&E.

For over two weeks I was on crutches and for six weeks after that walked with a stick and a bad limp. The doctors told me that under no circumstances should I play Rugby again for at least six months.

That was the end of my season and, indeed, my entire career with the club. Whilst I was hors de combat things moved on. The first two weeks of my absence saw our inside centre, John Jamieson, move to fly-half, but he was not a success and the following week an eighteen year old still at Perth Academy was drafted in.

My leg was good enough, with Fiona’s help, to watch the game and from the outset it was clear that Jamie Muir was a natural. A well built youngster, who looked rather older than his actual age, he was fast on his feet and had a bullet-like pass off either hand and a big boot, either from hand or the kicking tee. Even more important than those attributes, however, was his ability to read what was going on and to seize instantly upon the best course of action. After just two games he was promoted to the first XV, with the former incumbent relegated to the bench and the former substitute taking over the second XV spot. I was now no better than number four in the pecking order, even had I been available, so I hung up my Rugby boots for the last time.

The injury was a nuisance in more important aspects than my Rugby. I had been doing a fair amount of our photographic assignments, and for the first couple of weeks after the injury I was totally out of the equation and even after that I couldn’t really pull my weight. This put a lot of strain on my assistant, and although I upped his remuneration to compensate, he was less than happy at having to work so much more. My attempt to reduce costs was returning to bite me with a vengeance. Ken Lachlan, my assistant, stuck the extra workload for three weeks, then, when it was clear that I wouldn’t be able to contribute fully for at least a couple of months, announced that he had found another job and left. I tried desperately to find new staff, but with no success.

9

The business was now in crisis. We had both short and long term bookings for weddings and similar occasions; whilst the long term jobs might be on, there was no way that I could complete the commissions over the next month or more, and I had to reluctantly cancel them. In each case, before contacting the client, I spoke to one of my competitors and arranged for them take the job on if the client was willing, so at least I wasn’t just leaving people in the lurch, but it went very much against the grain to have to admit failure in such a manner. I spoke with Donald Ferguson, sadly admitting to the mess I had got the business into. He was not pleased, scarcely surprising, seeing that he had been looking to an income from the business as a pension for his declining years, but appreciated that it was horrendous misfortune rather than straightforward incompetence that had landed us in this pickle. He did have one iron in the fire; one of our competitors was looking to expand and had approached him with a view to taking over our premises and outstanding commissions. Here Donald, at least, had something to his advantage. The vast majority of shops and small businesses such as ours operate from leased premises. Donald, however, owned ours. Twenty or so years earlier they had been leased, but the leaseholder had run into financial problems and Donald had been able to buy the remaining eighty-two years of a ninety-nine year lease from him. As a result, he was now able to lease the premises out, thus giving himself an income. To be honest, apart from the premises the longer term bookings which I had not yet cancelled would not amount to much, but it was the best that we could do under the circumstances. Looked at personally, ‘the best’ wasn’t terribly good. I had taken a small, thriving concern and driven it out of business in under six months, and was now out of a job again.

There was one good aspect to my injury; concerned at my ability to cope by myself, Fiona moved in with me. Without her help and moral support, those days would have been very black indeed. As it was, I still had some money put aside so I wasn’t going to starve immediately, and once I could get around reasonably well I was determined to find a job of some sort, somewhere, even if it was stacking shelves in a supermarket.

In the event, it never got quite that bad. Hearing my bad news, George Kirk came up trumps. One of the papers photographers was about to go on maternity leave. She specialised in photographing weddings, Rotary fund raising events, village fetes, that sort of thing. By the time she left to have her baby I should be just about properly mobile again. Was I interested? The answer was yes, without hesitation. It would only be for three months or so, as the girl fully intended to return to work as soon as the baby was old enough for a child minder, but that would give me time to look around for something more permanent.

Despite, or perhaps because of, my uncertain position, Fiona and I married on the 2nd of February, 2008. It was a quiet affair at the local register office and our honeymoon was a few days in Edinburgh. Robbie gave his sister away and George was my best man. At least we now only had one flat to pay for - Fiona had given up hers back in October – and as she still worked at the library, we weren’t going to be totally broke for a while.

Had I but known it, money was soon going to be the least of my worries for the immediate future, but my financial stability was purchased in the most awful way that anyone could imagine. Because I had been very busy working at the paper, I had not seen Robert and Doreen for several weeks, in fact not since our wedding. I was therefore shocked to get a phone call from Doreen to say that Robert was in hospital, and the shock I got when I actually saw him was ten times worse. In just a few weeks Robert had gone from a man who, whilst clearly not in the best of health, looked good for years yet, to someone who seemed unlikely to last out the week.

Doreen was there, of course, looking but a shadow of her normal self. I put my arms round her and felt her sobbing against my chest.

“Doreen, what has happened?”

“It’s cancer, Martin. Nobody knew he had it until just before you and Fiona wed, and we didn’t want to say anything then and spoil things for the two of you.”

“How bad is he?”

She turned a tear-stained face up to me.

10

“Martin, they say there is no chance, that he only has a few days left.”

In fact, it wasn’t even that. Robert McLean, my uncle and best friend, died the very next day. He was just sixty-eight.

Fiona and I moved in with Doreen for a few days to help with anything that we could, which to be honest, wasn’t very much. What can you do in such circumstances other than offer sympathy and cups of tea, neither of which do anything to reduce the grief of the bereaved.

We returned to our own flat, full of unhappiness for Doreen and, to a far lesser extent, obviously, for ourselves.

Worse was to come. Just over two weeks later I had got home little after eight and we were sitting down to dinner when the phone rang. I answered it.

“Mr. Martin Graham?”

It was a woman on the line, a voice that I did not recognise.

“Mr. Graham, we haven’t met, but I am Helen McDonald, Doreen McLean’s neighbour.”

My stomach seemed to give an almighty lurch.

“I’m sorry to phone you like this, but it’s Doreen – she’s been rushed to hospital and she always told me to contact you if anything happened to her – she is in Perth Royal Infirmary.”

We raced over there, dinner untouched. At the A&E reception they told us that Doreen was in intensive care and we hurried up there to be met be a tired looking young woman who introduced herself as Sister Grant.

“Sister, I am Mrs. McLean’s nephew. How is she?”

She looked even more tired, and sad as well.

“I’m very sorry, Mr. Graham. Mrs, McLean has suffered a massive cerebral haemorrhage. I am afraid that it is only a matter of time, perhaps an hour or two.”

“Can we see her?”

“Of course, but I am afraid that she is unconscious – she won’t be able to know that you are here.”

We viewed Doreen from behind a window; she looked just a shadow of herself, far worse even than when we saw her after Robert had just died. A little over an hour later, she slipped away, never regaining consciousness. The medical diagnosis was that she died of a cerebral haemorrhage, but to my mind, with Robert gone, she died of a broken heart.

I was their only relative and under the terms of Doreen’s will, everything that she had – which was what was left after Robert’s will had been probated – came to me. It amounted to far more than one would have imagined. In addition to the large house – even in the depressed state of the market worth well over three quarters of a million pounds – there were stocks and shares. Even after paying inheritance tax, I received some seven hundred thousand pounds. I would far, far rather still have had the love and companionship of my aunt and uncle, but what will be, will be.

The first use to which we put the money was to buy a house. No longer the cramped conditions of my two bedroom flat, but a spacious four bedded house in a desirable area. Now that money troubles were, a least for the time being, behind us, I decided to stop trying to find a job answering to a boss , but set up as a self-employed photographer. I still had contacts from my abortive time ruining Donald Ferguson’s business, and also from my brief time with The Scotsman, and the sort of work I was looking for was commissions that challenged me, not a round of weddings and facile portraits.

One such commission was from a New Zealand firm. There are many links between New Zealand and Scotland and the company produced high quality calendars and cards, in this instance looking to tap into the many Kiwis with family links of one sort or another with Scotland.

It resulted in me tramping round much of the Highlands and Islands, looking for scenes that had not already been done to death, but which were undeniably Scottish. It was a grand experience, which led me to some unbelievably beautiful – and undeniably wild – parts of the country that I would never otherwise have seen.

Another life change for us was the acquisition of another family member – a dog. Sandy was a three year old rescue dog – a golden Labrador who had proved too big and too expensive to feed for an owner who had fallen on straitened times and declining health. The three of us hit it off right from the start and Sandy often 11

accompanied me on some of my photo shoots – even starred in a few of them. Sometimes I would be away from home for a day or two, and at those times Fiona found our canine friend a true friend and companion.

Things looked better and better almost by the day and our happiness was complete when Fiona announced that she was pregnant. After the worries when the photographic business was collapsing about my ears, the sadness of the deaths of Robert and Doreen, everything in the garden really did seem to be coming up roses.

Chapter Three - 2009

I should have known that it was all too good to be true. Our happy existence came to a crushing end on the 7th of February, 2009. It was a Saturday. I was planning my next trip into the Highlands, this time to the northern shore of a tiny loch just a few hundred yards south-west of Loch Morlich, the well known RSPB

osprey centre. I had found it in the summer and even then, despite its nearness to the osprey centre, it had been deserted. Now, in winter, it would be a stunning snow scene, and I was certain that it would, once again, be deserted. Fiona had gone shopping, taking Sandy with her, intending to give him a run on the nearby football field as well.

Engrossed in my planning, I suddenly realised that they had been gone considerably longer than I would have expected. The shops Fiona was going to were just far enough away to justify taking her car, and I began to worry that she might have had an accident or something – but if so, surely she would have contacted me on her mobile?

In a quandary of uncertainty, I wondered if I should go looking for them – but if she had simply taken longer than expected for some harmless reason, I might miss them coming back – but there was an easy answer to that. I left a message on the kitchen table, asking her to ring me on my mobile if I wasn’t back before she was.

I first drove to the football field where she was going to give Sandy his run – and as I approached it, I saw that there were two police cars parked at the side of the road, and then with horror that there was a badly damaged car crushed up against one of the trees bordering the field. It wasn’t Fiona’s, but my relief was short-lived when I saw her Mini parked on the opposite side of the road, but with no sign of her or Sandy.

Feeling sick with foreboding, I stopped the car and hurried over to where two policemen were talking to three or four people, close to the wrecked car.

I interrupted them.

“Can you tell me what has happened, please – that’s my wife’s car over there,” I pointed to the Mini, “but I can’t see her or our dog that was with her.”

The younger of the two turned to me.

“Are you sure of that, sir?”

“Of course I am – what’s happened?”

He studied me for a moment, but before he could reply his colleague, a man of perhaps forty or forty-five, spoke.

“I’m afraid that there has been an accident, sir.” He indicated the crushed car. “It seems that vehicle mounted the pavement and struck some pedestrians. They have all been taken to Perth Royal Infirmary.”

“Oh my God – I’ll go there at once.”

“Just before you leave, could you let me have your name and address, please?”

I gave them to him and as I turned to go, I saw for the first time a pathetic bundle of fur near the crashed car.

“That’s our dog!”

I hurried over, but our poor friend was beyond help.

“I’ve called for a vet to take him away,” the younger constable offered.

“No, no, I’ll take him.”

Before either of them could object, I had our poor dog in my arms and had carried him to the car, where I laid him carefully on the floor of the boot – the car was an estate and the back seats were folded down, so he wasn’t closed away from me, and I carefully covered him with an old blanket that we had kept in the car especially for him.

12

I drove to the hospital as quickly as I dared, but it still seemed to take a life time. At last I arrived and hurried into A&E where I explained that I was looking for my wife who had been brought in by ambulance shortly before.

I was asked to wait and assured that somebody would come and see me in a moment. The ‘moment’ was the longest ten minutes of my life, but at last a young man in a white coat approached me, looking grave.

“Mr. Graham?”

I nodded dumbly, not trusting myself to speak.

“Mr. Graham, I’m Doctor Kerr. Could you come with me please?”

He led me into a small office just a few yards away and offered me a chair, into which I sank with legs of rubber. He looked even graver.

“I’m very sorry Mr. Graham, but I am afraid that your wife received very severe injuries when she was struck by a car. We did all that we could, but we were unable to save her.”

I sat there, feeling faint. There must be a mistake, I told myself there must be a mistake.

“Are you sure it is my wife? There couldn’t be any mistake?”

“The lady was carrying a handbag with her driver’s licence and credit cards. Also in the back there was a shopping list written on the back of a paid bill with your name and address on it. I am very sorry, but I do not think that there is any possibility of a mistake.”

In my heart, I had expected this from the moment I saw how poor Sandy had clearly been thrown yards by the impact which had killed him, but my brain refused to accept it.

We buried my poor darling ten days later on a typical February day, cold and wet, with occasional flurries of snow. There were only a few of us there. Robbie and his girl friend, Sarah, George Kirk, a few of Fiona’s work colleagues and a couple of friends of Robbie’s. I had had Sandy cremated and the little urn containing his ashes was in the coffin with her.

By then I had learned the details of what had happened. A drunk driver, doing over seventy in that thirty mile an hour area, had simply swerved off the road and ploughed into Fiona and Sandy head on, and also side-swiped three other women who had been on the pavement. They were lucky; although badly injured, they had all survived.

And so, some seven months later, I listened in incredulity to the lenient sentence handed down to Fiona’s killer.

Chapter Four – 2011, March

Life goes on, they say, and I suppose that after a fashion, it did. Working on the cottage, undertaking assignments with my cameras, kept me occupied after a fashion, but could not fill the emptiness. I visited Fiona and Sandy’s grave at least once a week; in the early days I sometimes drank myself in oblivion, but quickly decided that alcohol was no answer, and that rendering myself insensible with it was dishonouring Fiona’s memory.

Now, eighteen months on, I had run out of things to do to the cottage or its garden – much as I dislike gardening, at least it helped to keep me busy – and as at a loss to know what to do with myself.

Through all these troubles, George and Robbie proved friends in deed as well as in need. I don’t know what I would have done without them.

In the blackest of days I truly considered suicide, but either cowardice, or a belief that Fiona would not have wanted me to destroy myself, stayed my hand.

I had my memories of her, and of Sandy, and those would have to suffice for the rest of my life, be it long or short. In pride of place on the living room wall was a picture I had taken of them in our first – and only –

summer together. Fiona was half facing the camera, laughing as she held a tennis ball on high, and I had captured Sandy in mid-leap as he tried for it. It captured, at least to my mind, Fiona’s happy personality and Sandy’s manic one whenever there was a ball, or a rabbit, or whatever, to chase.

13

As time went by, so the leniency shown to their killer rankled more and more. I wanted, somehow, to make him suffer for what he had done to my loved ones, but I was at a loss to see how I could achieve it in any practical way. Tracking him down once he was released – now soon to happen – and beating him to a pulp, even killing him, would make me feel happier, but it wouldn’t bring Fiona back and would almost certainly result in me ending up in prison myself. My thoughts on the matter had gone as far as getting out a legacy from Robert – the two shotguns that he had inherited from his father. They had been in the house after Doreen had died and I had simply bundled them up with everything else and given them no more thought. I realised that I should have obtained a licence for them, but had never bothered to do so; indeed I had intended to destroy them, seeing no use for them, but had never brought myself to actually do it. I had got them out and inspected them; they were nothing fancy, just two 12 bore side by side BSA guns, probably seventy or so years old, but still in perfect working order. The more I thought about it, however, the more I realised that there was no way that I was going to be able to carry through with a cold-blooded murder of the man, not really from any noble sentiment, but because I felt that the punishment that I would receive would negate any sense of satisfaction I might get from the deed. Sadly, I put the guns back in the loft.

I had a rough idea of when Reese would be released, but I decided that I wanted to just look at this man who had destroyed my life and that of my love ones. I raised the matter with George one evening when he had popped round for a beer – and to see how I was getting on.

“George, do you think that it is possible to find out when James Reese is going to be released?”

He immediately looked alarmed.

“What do you to know that for, Martin?”

“Don’t worry, George, I don’t intend to do him any harm, much as I would like to. I’m sure if I did, I’d end up inside and he’d probably be able to sue me for every penny I possess. No, I just feel that I want to see the sod’s face – from a distance – and hope that his time in prison hurt.”

George still looked a bit dubious, but in the end I convinced him, and a couple of days later he phoned me.

“Martin, I’ve got what you want. Reese is going to be released on the 28th. They normally release prisoners around half eight in the morning, but that isn’t an absolute certainty – if I were you, I’d be there from a bit before eight onwards and be prepared for the possibility of a long wait.”

“Thanks, George – and don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything stupid.”

Eight a.m. on Monday, the 28th of March, saw me parked opposite the prison entrance. I couldn’t park in the road itself – double yellow lines both sides – but there was a side road almost immediately opposite the entrance into the prison site, offering an excellent view from a distance of about fifty yards.

I settled down to wait. Shortly after nine the main door opened and Reese walked out. I had no difficulty in recognising him and, to my intense disappointment, he looked none the worse for his time inside. He was carrying a small holdall.

He stopped on the pavement outside the prison, dumped the holdall on the ground, took a mobile phone from his pocket and made a call to someone.

Just over ten minutes passed and a deep blue Jaguar saloon drew up by him. The driver got out, shook Reese by the hand, took his holdall and deposited it in the Jaguar’s boot. As he did so, and more from force of habit than for any other reason, I lifted my camera and took a picture which included both men and the rear of the car.

As I lowered the camera, I realised that both men were looking straight at me. The driver said something to Reese, then strode across the road, making for my car. To facilitate taking the picture, I had the driver’s window down and he stormed offer to me.

“Give me that camera, you fucker.”

I looked at him in surprise for a moment before responding.

“Who the hell do you think you’re talking to?”

“You – now give it here.”

I stared coldly at him.

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll back off – now.”

14

Instead, he drew back his fist, clearly intending to punch me through the open window. Fortunately, I had undone my seat-belt due to the length of my wait, so I had a reasonable degree of movement. I was leaning forward slightly; as he threw the punch, I moved my head back, caught his arm, and pulled him half way through the open window.

“Look friend, if you don’t go away now, I’m going to hurt you.”

To demonstrate that I meant business, I wrenched his arm back against the elbow joint, not hard enough to do real damage, but hard enough to be extremely painful. He staggered back, clearly in both pain and shock.

He glared at me, mouthed some more obscenities, and staggered back to his car, clutching his injured elbow with the other hand.

All this time, Reese had simply been watching from the other side of the road, making no attempt to interfere

– which was probably just as well for all concerned. The driver got into the car, as did Reese, and it shot away with a squeal of tyres.

I reviewed the picture I had taken – the miracle of digital photography! Yes, I had captured both men full face. My would-be assailant was a man of perhaps fifty, heavily built and running to fat a bit. Tall, perhaps six foot two or three, and probably around the seventeen stone mark, he clearly thought that his size and manner would win the day. He was wrong. I wondered if he had any idea just how easy a target he had made himself in the way he had acted. Unlike Reese, who was wearing jeans and a leather jacket, he had been dressed in a smart dark blue suit, with white shirt and a blue and red striped tie. His face was florid, with the broken veins of a heavy drinker patterning the flesh of his face and topped by slicked back very dark hair slightly tinged with grey – ‘pepper and salt’ Doreen would have called it. He positively exuded aggression –

aggression which was badly misplaced this morning, in that he had grossly over-estimated himself, and under-estimated me.

Two days later I met with Robbie and George in the bar of the George Inn, and I recounted my experience, and showed them the print I had made with the aggressive gentleman in full face.

The face meant nothing to Robbie or myself, but George took one look and whistled through his teeth.

“Bloody Hell, Martin – that’s Adam Douglas!”

“Who is Adam Douglas?” Robbie and I chorused in unison.

“He is a very nasty piece of work. He specialises in loan sharking, with a nice line in persuasion for anybody falling behind in their payments. He is rumoured to be involved in drugs, although nothing has been proved about that – or at least not yet. He has a record – two stretches for grievous bodily harm about twenty years ago.”

He stopped in mid-flow as a thought clearly struck him.

“I can’t be sure, but Reese, of course, isn’t actually fully released. He is released on parole, and that always comes with conditions. I don’t know what his conditions are, but a common one is that the paroled prisoner must not associate with people with a criminal record – and Douglas certainly has one.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Well the authorities might decide to pull him back in for breaking his parole conditions.”

We all looked at one another. The thought of Reese being dragged back into prison was very appealing to us all.

“So, how do I drop him in it with the powers-that-be?”

George thought for a moment.

“I suppose the most obvious course of action is simply to send a copy of that photo to the Perth police.

Hopefully, they will take it from there. Oh, and one thing I forgot to mention – only just come back to me.

Reese is Douglas’ nephew – only son of his sister, Agatha, rather unkindly nicknamed ‘Baggie Aggie’ by those who do not like her – and I don’t think that all that many do like her. Aggie also has a record – and again it is for GBH – she stuck a glass in another woman’s face in a drunken disagreement, again, about twenty years ago.”

It looked as though I had upset quite a disagreeable sounding family, and I resolved to send the picture to the police straight away.

15

The very next day I sent the photo, with a covering letter, to Perth police station. A few days later I received an acknowledgement which said that it was ‘being looked into’ and thanking me for my public-spirited action.

Several weeks went by without any further news and I finally decided to follow up the matter.

After being shunted around several people on the phone, none of whom seemed to have any idea what I was talking about, I finally ended up with a Detective Sergeant McLaren who advised me that the photo had been sent to the Procurator Fiscal, but that his department had decided to take no further action.

“Why not?”

“I’m afraid you would have to ask them that question, Mr. Graham. It is their decision, not the police’s decision.”

So I tried the office of the Procurator Fiscal, only to be told by some snooty assistant that they did not discuss the detail of their decisions with the public.

Frustrated and angry, I slammed down the phone. Officialdom, it seemed, just wasn’t interested, although I could not understand why. Was it too much trouble? Did they not consider the meeting between uncle and nephew a real breach of Reese’s parole – even if his conditions included non-fraternisation with criminals – I didn’t even know that.

I reported back to George over the phone; he shared my indignation, as did Robbie when I told him.

A week or so later, still unhappy at the refusal of officialdom to do anything about Reese, we meet once more in the George Inn. Robbie was particularly upset about things. He had been going through some of the things in the attic of what had been their parents house and which was now his, and had come across a photo album of he and Fiona when they were children, photos which had reinforced the strength of the outrage he felt over her pointless death.

“Can’t we do anything?” he demanded.

George had been silent for some moments, contemplatively sipping his drink; he put the glass down on the table.

“There is one thing that we might be able to do, you know,” he said “I might be able to persuade my editor to print the picture as part of a sort of ‘miscarriage of justice’ rant. I don’t think that I could get away with just using that, but there have been several cases over the last few years of drivers who were drunk, or driving without insurance, or tax or whatever, causing death and serious injury. The paper could mount it as a crusade – ‘why treat these killers with kid gloves?’ sort of thing.”

The more we spoke about it, the better the idea sounded. Which just goes to show how wrong one can be.

Chapter Five – 2011, April

It took a couple of weeks for George, first to convince his editor, and second, to pull together enough material, but eventually The Scotsman mounted a major article on the subject of drivers who killed or maimed innocent people who were simply in the wrong place at the same time. Foremost amongst the elements of the story was, of course, the death of Fiona, and George’s article high-lighted my picture of Reese and Douglas meeting, together with a ‘we don’t understand it’ slant asking why Reese not only got away with the proverbial slap on the wrist for killing and maiming helpless women out walking on a pavement, but was consorting with a known criminal, the unsavoury Adam Douglas – surely a contravention of any normal parole conditions.

The article clearly struck a chord – letters flooded in to the paper and a couple of local MPs and MSPs, seeing political capital in the aroused public indignation, added their weight to the call for a review of sentencing practice in such cases.

The Procurator Fiscal, however, refused to bow to the public pressure; Reese remained at large.

I met up with George and Robbie at the George Inn a few days after the Procurator Fiscal’s clear failure to have a change of heart. Robbie and I congratulated George on the effect of his investigative journalism, but we all remained frustrated at the failure to change the Fiscal’s attitude. To us, it almost seemed as though the more the public clamour for justice, the less interested the authorities became.

16

A couple of weeks passed. I had received a new assignment from an English calendar firm; they had seen my work for the New Zealand company and had decided that there was mileage in a series of calendars featuring views that had not already been overdone. They could see a market for quite localised calendars, so they had a number of photographers working on it – Welshmen were wielding their cameras in Wales, Englishmen were tramping all over the shires of England; I was honoured to be seen as their sole Scottish photographer.

I returned to the cottage one evening, tired but satisfied with the day’s shooting . I had been away for four days, using as a base a recently acquired small camper van. I had been in fairly remote, wild country, where a mobile telephone signal was totally non-existent. It was therefore no surprise that my answering machine showed a number of messages. I ignored it for the moment, more concerned with sorting out my gear and putting it away, then making a back-up copy of all the pictures that I had taken. Then I poured myself a revivifying glass of Talisker malt and sat down with my feet up on a stool.

At last I played back my telephone messages. The first couple were offers of commissions, which I left on the tape for future consideration. Message number three, however, was one of those moments that change things for ever.

It was Robbie.

“Martin, please contact me – it’s urgent.”

I immediately phoned him, only to be met by his voice mail. Phoning his mobile had the same effect, so I phoned George Kirk.

“George, it’s Martin – Robbie has left an urgent message for me, but he doesn’t answer his phones.”

“Martin – he’s at the hospital – Sarah has been involved in an accident.”

My thoughts immediately flew to Fiona.

“Oh, my God – how is she?”

“She is quite badly hurt, but they say that she will make a full recovery – but it will be several days before she is discharged. But Martin, the real worry is that we think it wasn’t an accident at all. She was hit by a driver who then made off without stopping whilst she was cycling to work. ”

I knew that Robbie worried about Sarah cycling; like me he reckoned that modern town traffic was a death trap for cyclists, but she claimed that it kept her weight down – she had a tendency to put on weight far more easily than she liked – and was quicker than public transport or a car for the journey from their flat to her office.

Half an hour later I joined Robbie at Sarah’s bedside. She looked pale and fragile, a shadow of her normal bubbly self, her left arm in a plaster cast from wrist to elbow, and Robbie was clearly being haunted by demons. I sat down with them and asked what had happened. She smiled weakly.

“It was Monday,” (today was Wednesday) “I was cycling to work as normal and I’d almost got there when this small van simply hit me. He came from behind me, so I never saw any details – one moment I was cycling along, the next I was flying through the air. They say I am going to be all right – a lot of cuts and bruise, and I have a couple of cracked ribs, but nothing serious broken, thank goodness, apart from the arm.

They say I can go home tomorrow, so things could be a lot worse.”

She turned to Robbie.

“Darling, I promise – no more cycling. Oh, I do wish that I had listened to the three of you!”

As well as Robbie, George and I had also begged her not to cycle in the town, but she had been adamant.

When visiting hour was over I waited for Robbie to say goodbye to her, and we walked out of the hospital together. Robbie’s face was set grimly.

“Martin, there’s something that Sarah doesn’t know. The evening after it happened I had a phone call. Don’t know who from., but I can guess who is behind it. A man – and he said ‘tell your friends to lay off or next time your tart won’t be so lucky’ and at that he slammed down the phone. I haven’t told the police about it –

what could they do? They can’t even find who ran her down – according to witnesses, apparently, the van was parked, Sarah cycled past it, and then it moved off, following her quite slowly, speeded up just enough to knock her off the bike, and then accelerated away. It was a small white van, very dirty. One of the witnesses even got the number plate, but it turns out that it was stolen last week and not been seen since.”

17

I was horrified. The inference was only too clear. Douglas or Reese, or both, had decided to forestall any further attempt we might make to bring Reese to justice. Never in my wildest imaginings had I thought that anything like this would come about.

“Martin, I’m sorry, but we must convince these sods that nothing more will happen, that we will leave them alone. I know that it goes against the grain after what happened to Fiona, but I can’t risk losing Sarah as well.”

It was a saddened trio that met, for once not at the George Inn, but at Robbie’s flat, that evening.

We were worried; the campaign that we had effectively started had developed its own momentum, but driven not just by The Scotsman, but by other papers as well, and there had even been questions raised in the Scottish Parliament already. Much as we might like it to, it was unlikely that the campaign would run out of steam in the near future, and it seemed almost certain that Douglas and Reese would blame us for that.

George formulated our thinking.

“The way I see it, there is nothing that we can now do to stop pressure continuing to be applied on the courts and the politicians – things have simply gone too far for us to have any influence on them. It’s no good us contacting Reese or Douglas and pretending otherwise – we have nothing to offer them. All we can say is that we can’t do anything – so it means that it is up to them to decide what to do next, and if they decide to get nasty again, it is difficult to see what we can do to prevent it. We can only react to whatever happens, and by then it could be too late.”

“There is one thing,” Robbie interjected, “I have been thinking of changing jobs anyway, and there is an opportunity for me in a firm in Aberdeen – if I take it and Sarah and I move there, perhaps she will be safe.”

Robbie was an architect and we knew that he had been thinking of leaving his current firm for somewhere bigger for some time now. I voiced what I think that George was also thinking.

“I wonder if that is far enough away, Robbie? If they wanted to, they could be there in a couple of hours or less.”

“Well, it’s all I can think of at the moment.”

“When could you move up there?”

“Well, I’ll need to give a month’s notice and find somewhere to live, but I reckon I could actually look for a flat straight away and if I manage to find one before the new job starts, I could commute down to here for the last few weeks or whatever. I’ll probably keep our house and try and rent it out.”

George chipped in.

“Is Sarah going to be able to cope when she comes out, with you working? I had to cope with a broken arm once, and it’s a right pain. Until you are stuck with it, you don’t realise how many simple tasks need two hands – just doing yourself a piece of toast and marmalade for instance.”

He continued.

“Oh, and one thing. If you do go and get somewhere else, you need to make sure they can’t find you easily, just in case. Tell your current lot you don’t know where you will be staying and that you don’t expect to be settled anywhere for a while, and to forward anything or anyone, trying to find you via me or Martin, or anyone else you feel that you can trust.”

There was an awkward pause before Robbie spoke again.

“Look, I don’t want you to think that I’m running away for the sake of it. I’ve already lost Fiona because of these scum, and I daren’t risk losing Sarah as well.”

He stopped and we both assured him that we totally understood and agreed with what he intended to do.

George and I left Robbie’s flat together and I turned to him as we stepped out into the road.

“George, can you spare a few more minutes? I’d like to pick your brains on a couple of things.”

“Sure, but let’s get off the street.”

Robbie’s flat wasn’t far from the Dickens Bar in Methven Street, so a few minutes later we were closeted together, and I outlined what I had in mind.

“George, I don’t know what, if anything, Douglas and Reese might come up with, but I really would like to be prepared for anything. Now, at the moment I know nothing, really. About either of them. Is it possible for 18

you to use your contacts to build up a fairly in-depth file on them? It might be to our advantage, and can’t do any harm, to know as much as possible.”

George thought about it for a moment before replying.

“Yes, can’t see any problems. I’ll box a bit clever – don’t want word to get back to them that we are still sniffing around.”

I could see the sense of such an approach and went home thinking that at least we were doing what we could to protect ourselves from whatever might come our way.

Adam Douglas, I soon learned from George, was fifty-one years old. He was married to Aileen, née Hodge, forty-six years of age, and they had one son, Malcolm, aged twenty-two. Douglas had two convictions for grievous bodily harm; in 1988 he had attacked John Fisher, a lorry driver, with a baseball bat, putting Fisher in hospital with two broken arms and cracked ribs. Douglas was sentenced to three years, serving eighteen months, and was released in August 1990. Two years later, in July 1992, he was in court for attacking Julie Laing, a receptionist in a hotel. She was punched and kicked, suffering a broken jaw and extensive bruising.

Douglas was once again sentenced to three years. This time a fight with a fellow inmate led to him having to serve twenty-four months, being freed in July 1994. Since then he had stayed out of trouble with the law, but was clearly a man with a violent temper. His attack on Fisher was apparently caused by an argument that started in a pub. Threatened by Fisher, Douglas left the premises, but was waiting outside with his baseball bat when Fisher emerged. Julie Laing had refused Douglas, who was very drunk at the time, a room at the hotel in which she worked.

He ran a business from a shop in South Street, Perth, offering to cash cheques and advance loans to people unable to get credit elsewhere. His charges, on the face of it, seemed not exceptionally excessive for that sort of business, but his methods of ensuring payment where, to say the least, robust. Failure to keep up to date with your payments led to a visit from one of his ‘debt-collectors’ – a polite name for out and out thugs.

He also owned a betting shop in Perth – and betting shops could be a convenient means of accounting for money obtained in all sorts of other ways.

Finally, there was the suspicion that he ran several drug dealers in Perth and Dundee. Nothing had ever been proved against him on this count, but George’s contacts were certain that he doing it – it was just that he hadn’t been caught.

His betting shop was run by a manager, Harry Kincaid, aged forty-three. No criminal record, but rumoured to be a bad man to cross if you valued your health.

Douglas now lived in a large, detached house a few miles outside Perth near the hamlet of Tibbermore. He drove a 2008 Jaguar X350, the car I had seen him use to pick up Reese at the prison, and also owned a 2010

Range Rover. His wife had a 2009 Mazda MX-5 convertible sports car. Judging by his house and the family cars, Adam Douglas wasn’t anywhere near the bread-line.

His wife did not work; his son was currently living in London, where he was employed as an assistant manager in a betting shop run by one John Edward Price, who was known to be a former associate of Douglas, having lived in Dundee in the 1980s and 1990s before returning to London where he had been born some fifty-five years earlier.

James Reese, now twenty-six, had no record other than that for his conviction for causing death by dangerous driving. He worked for his uncle as a sort of general factotum. General feeling was that Douglas regarded the young man as a burden and only employed him for his mother’s – Douglas’ sister – sake. Reese lived in a small flat in Perth and apart from whatever work he did for Douglas, had no other visible income.

Despite that, he drove a 2008 Audi A6, which he had acquired within a week or so of leaving prison.

So, that was our intelligence gathered. What, if anything, would it do for us?

19

Chapter Six – 2011, June

Robbie and Sarah were duly ensconced in Aberdeen by the end of April and I trusted that they would be safe from anything that Douglas might intend. Neither George nor I had received any threats or, indeed, any communication from Douglas, and I was beginning to hope that the affair was fizzling out.

It was Sunday, the 5th of June when the affair flared into live again. The Scotland on Sunday paper carried another story on the inadequacy of the punishment handed out to drunken drivers and had again featured James Reese. This time, however, the reporter (it wasn’t George) had linked Reese to his uncle and gone to town on the connection. He had also identified three or four other drunken drivers who had killed and who had criminal records and/or were members of families with bad records, but Reese and Douglas were his prime targets. He painted them in the blackest possible light, and had found a couple of victims of Douglas’

debt collectors who painted lurid pictures of the violence they had been threatened with.

I phoned George. He had known that the story was to be printed, but he had been away for a few days holiday and had had no idea of just how much it was attacking Douglas, and we both wondered uneasily if there would be any comeback.

We didn’t have to wait for long. One evening the following week I was at the cottage, relaxing after digging out some old shrubs – another of my ‘make work’ projects of no real value other than to keep me occupied, when the phone went. I picked it up.

“Martin Graham.”

“Mr. Graham, this is Staff Nurse McNab at Perth A&E,” my heart sank; somehow I already knew what was coming, “Mr. Graham, we have had Mr. George Kirk admitted as an emergency and in his wallet there is a card saying to contact you in an emergency.”

“I’ll be there as quickly as I can. How bad is he?”

She hesitated and I feared the worst.

“I am afraid that his injuries are very severe.”

I was out of the house and into my car within five minutes and in a replay of my journey after Fiona had been run down, although I drove as fast as I dared, it seemed to take forever before I was at the hospital and in the A&E department. I gave my name at the desk and a young nurse led me to a side office – again the horrible repetition of what had happened before crushed my mind.

I had expected a doctor or a nurse to come and tell me what was happening, but instead it was a middle-aged man in a grey suit who entered the office just a couple of minutes later.

“Mr. Graham?”

I nodded confirmation.

“Mr. Graham, I am Detective Inspector Moss of Tayside police. I take it that you are a close friend of Mr.

Kirk.”

“That’s right – how is he?”

“I understand that he is in the operating theatre at the moment, so I think it will be a little while before we can know anything for certain, but in the interim I wanted to talk to you to see if I can get some sort of a handle on what has happened.”

“What has happened?”

“Mr. Kirk was found in the street about an hour and a half ago, clearly in a bad way. From what I can tell so far, he had been beaten, probably with something like a baseball bat or the like. The doctors can give you a better explanation of his injuries, but I know that they are very severe. Tell me, do you have any idea who might have attacked him?”

“Yes, I do,” and I proceeded to tell him the whole story, even including the threat of further violence to Sarah which Robbie had kept from the police. I left Moss in no doubt that, as far as I was concerned, he need look no further than Douglas and/or Reese, or person or persons acting on their orders.

He made copious notes as we spoke and it was with a shock that I realised that we had been closeted together for nearly an hour when the office door opened and a young man, presumably a doctor from the white coat and the stethoscope round his neck, entered. He looked from one to the other of us.

“Mr. Graham?”

20

“That’s me.”

“Mr. Graham, I am very sorry, but I am afraid that Mr. Kirk died a few minutes ago.”

I had leant forward in my chair as the doctor entered; now I sank back in horror. The young man went on.

“I am afraid that the injuries to his head were simply too severe for him to have survived.”

Slowly, over the next forty-eight hours, a story of sorts emerged. George had been walking from his office to his flat, a route which took him past a small, unlit side street. From his injuries the police deduced that he had been set on by two men armed, as Moss had surmised at the outset, with baseball bats or similar. He had suffered numerous blows to his head and body , with a long list of fractures and bruises, and the fatal blows had resulted in a massive cerebral haemorrhage which had been non-survivable.

The police interviewed Douglas and Reese, both of whom had strong alibis. The investigation dragged on, but it got nowhere. In his heart, I am sure that Moss shared my conviction as to the guilt of Reese and Douglas, but could find absolutely no evidence against them.

I was in the depths of despair, First Fiona, then the attack on Sarah, and now this. Douglas – for I was sure that he was the driving force – seemed to be able to do just as he pleased and the police seemed powerless to stop him.

I wondered why there had been no attempt to attack me, but I was sure that just because it hadn’t happened yet, it didn’t mean that it wouldn’t, and I took extra care over my movements, whether on foot or in the car.

Obviously the attack on George had been aimed at stopping the press stories about Douglas. In that, the attempt failed. The Scotsman, as well as the more local papers, ran furious stories about the murder, coming very close to libel in the process.

After a while the story, as with all story, lost prominence in the press, and it looked as though George’s death marked the end of the matter.

I had, of course, attended George’s funeral, as had Robbie and Sarah, where I met his father for the first time.

David Kirk was a man in his mid-sixties, recently retired from a lucrative career in the oil business. He was distraught; widowed many years earlier, George was his sole remaining relative and heir. He had had a younger brother, James, but James Kirk, together with his wife and fourteen year old son, had been on that doomed Pan Am flight over Lockerbie on the 21st December 1988. He asked himself what he could ever have done to be the centre of such tragedies. Robbie, Sarah and I gave him our sympathy and what support we could, but David Kirk looked every inch a broken man.

It was some weeks later that Douglas struck again. This time I was the target, but the outcome was different.

Unlike George and, for that matter, Sarah, who had a pattern of movement to and from work, I was totally unpredictable. However, over a period of some days I had been aware that a couple of vehicles appeared to be taking it in turns to follow me. One was a scruffy Transit van, the other a equally decrepit Ford Mondeo.

At no time did I give either vehicle the chance to ambush me, and their clear intent enabled me to formulate my own plans.

I was sure that they were either going to have to follow me to somewhere isolated, or attack me at my house.

I had ascertained that the Mondeo always had two men in it; there were also always two men in the front of the Transit, but I had no way of knowing whether there was extra muscle in the body of the van, so my plan was to launch my pre-emptive strike on a day that it was the Mondeo following me.

I was surprised that they simply hadn’t mounted an attack on me at the cottage, but the fact that they hadn’t was very much to my advantage – I didn’t want all the work that I had put into the building negated by a rough house.

So it was that on the 30th of June, a Thursday, I led my followers deep into the Cairngorms, leaving the A9 at Dalwinnie, then striking south again along the west shore of Loch Ericht. I had been there before, using the area for one of my calendar shots. That had been a snow scene in January when, as far as I could tell, I had been the only living soul for miles around. Now it was still just June, but I was confident that the area I had in mind would still be deserted. I was driving my Land Rover, an elderly but still very capable example of that countryside icon, with a full load of camera equipment in the back. It also had something else.

In the UK it is illegal to own, or to use, a shotgun with a barrel or barrels less than twenty-five inches long.

This is for a very good reason; at close quarters a shotgun is an horrific weapon, and one which has been 21

shortened can be easily concealed under a raincoat or the like. For this reason it is a favourite tool for bank-robbers and similar members of the ungodly. As far as I was concerned, all that was academic. It was the sheer lethality of such a weapon that interested me.

That was why I had taken one of Uncle Robert’s shotguns into the garage where I had taken a hacksaw to the barrels and to the stock, so that I now had a vicious looking weapon, a weapon for which its looks were a very accurate indication of its potential. I had created a ‘sawn-off’ although I preferred to think of it by its more sinister Italian name of lupara.

The lupara now rested on the front passenger seat, hidden by an old coat, as I coasted to a stop in a small clearing after following a rough track as it climbed towards the peaks.

The clearing had a sheer drop of perhaps fifty feet on one side down to a small burn which ran between rocky banks, and I had stopped just a few yards away from that drop. I switched off the engine and waited.

My followers took a few minutes to arrive – their aged Mondeo had been less at home than my Land Rover on the rough track with its loose surface and frequent near boulder size stones, but eventually they made it.

I remained seated in the Land Rover until the two men got out of the front seats of the Mondeo. There was a moment’s further delay as they opened the back doors of the car and extricated baseball bats; then they started a purposeful approach towards me. I waited until they were about fifteen yards away and stepped out to meet them. They separated slightly, the bats dangling menacingly from their fists. As they took their next pace, moving in unison almost like soldiers on parade, I swung the lupara up and shot out the front nearside tyre of the Mondeo. They stopped in horror as I then swung the deadly little weapon to cover them.

“OK, boys,” I said, “stand very still. You know I’ve only got one shot left in this, but that means one of you isn’t going home if you try anything. Now, drop the bats and step well back from them.”

Mutely, they did as they were told. I walked over to the nearest baseball bat and picked it up, stepped back and, still keeping the gun trained on them, tossed the bat backwards over my shoulder, to be rewarded with the sound of it falling down the drop behind me. I repeated the task with the second bat.

I examined my would be attackers. It was a warm day and both were dressed in jeans and tee shirts with no signs of any other weapons to back up their baseball bats.

Thug on my right was about six foot three or four, four inches or so taller than me. He was also perhaps four stone heavier, but those extra four stone looked more flab than muscle. Thug on my left – mentally categorised as thug number one – was smaller, a little shorter than me, and probably a bit lighter as well.

Unlike his companion, however, he looked lean and fit.

“Right,” I said, “you’ve been paid to beat me up – why don’t you come and try it?”

They remained static; I looked down at the lupara, still aimed in their general direction, “oh, you’re worried about this? Let’s even things up, shall we?”

So saying, I pointed the lupara at the sky and pulled the trigger. The report made them flinch, then they realised that I hadn’t shot anywhere near them and that moreover the lupara was now empty. I half turned away from them and tossed the weapon back into to the Land Rover.

As I had expected, it was thug number one who reacted the more quickly – he scurried to my right, his companion, a couple of paces slower, coming from my left. I didn’t wait for either of them to reach me.

Instead, I closed with thug number one, feinted to throw a punch, then stab-kicked his left knee. The leg collapsed beneath him and as he was falling to his knees I gave him a second kick, this time full in the face, and with blood pouring from a broken nose and smashed mouth, he pitched forward onto the ground. I turned to meet thug number two as he swung a roundhouse punch at me; slipping inside it, I punched him twice in the belly, short, vicious blows with all my weight and a lot of hate behind them. Gasping for breath, he staggered back and I let him have the edge of my hand across his windpipe in a savage chopping blow that had him fighting for breath and leaving him a helpless target to having his legs swept from under him; as he hit the ground I kicked the side of his head.

I stepped back from my would-be assailants and contemplated their recumbent forms. They were, I was pretty sure, the men who had murdered George, although given their general ineptitude, I did wonder if they had truly intended to kill but had just made a mess of things. It was only that thought that had prevented me 22

from using the lupara on them, rather than the Mondeo’s tyre, and tossing their corpses, rather than their baseball bats, over the sheer drop behind me.

Both were more or less conscious, thug number one snuffling through his wrecked nasal passages, thug number two wheezing like a perforated bellows as he struggled for breath.

“Right,” I said, “listen carefully. If I ever see either of you again, it’ll be you I use the shooter on, not you car. Now, one question before I leave you – who sent you?”

Neither of them spoke, although I felt that it was more to do with their breathing difficulties than through any loyalty to their paymaster.

I gave thug number two a kick in the side.

“I’m waiting for an answer – or do you want me to really hurt you?”

I gave him another kick as an encouragement, and this time he replied.

“It was Douglas,” he wheezed.

“Right, well when you get your breath back, tell him if he ever sends anyone after me again, I’ll go after him.

Got that?”

Silence. I kicked him again.

“Have you got that?”

“Yes,” he gasped.

I left them lying there and drove back downhill. The warning that I had given them for Douglas was actually a smokescreen which might or might not work. In fact, I had already made up my mind to go after Douglas, although just how was something that I still had to work out.

Once back at Dalwinnie I waited in a convenient lay-by. I was curious to see just what Douglas’ hired muscle would do. I had to wait for over an hour for them to collect themselves, change the Mondeo’s wheel and drive back from the track. Once I was sure that they were on the A9 and headed south I followed at a discreet distance, hoping to track them back to Douglas.

I was in luck; once on the outskirts of Perth they turned onto the A85 and disappeared off it in the direction of Tibbermore. I reckoned that the only possible destination that they could have would be Douglas’ house, so followed them no further.

Some twelve hours later I was back in the same area. This time I wanted to check out the Douglas household and try to identify what threats and opportunities it might offer. The house was off the narrow lane that linked the A9 and the A85 with a track of its own leading to the actual house. I had left the Land Rover quarter of a mile away and, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, with a ski-mash to cover my face, I was as near to invisible as I could achieve, but was painfully aware of the fact that in June in this area it is only really dark if it has been a cloudy day – and today had been clear.

I was therefore very glad that the house was surrounded by thick shrubs and a fair number of mature trees, enabling my to flit softly from one piece to cover to another. The house itself sat in a clear area of lawn, with absolutely no cover for a good twenty yards in front of it. Circling the house, I found that at the back the cover provided by a number of waist high shrubs extended to within five or six yards of a back door. At one side there was a detached double garage, with the Range Rover parked outside one of the closed up and over doors. Presumably, but I could not be sure, the Jaguar and the Mazda were locked away inside the garage.

The probability that the Jaguar, at least, was housed within by the presence of two further vehicles parked outside the front of the house. One was the battered Mondeo I had last seen earlier that day; the other was a newish Audi A6, probably belonging to Reese.

There were lights on in the downstairs rooms, so it appeared that Douglas was one who went late to bed, and I wondered if his wife was also downstairs.

The other side of the house boasted a lawn with flower beds, all in bloom at this time of the year and their scent hung heavy in the night-time air. More importantly, there was a large security light high on the wall, next to the outdoor unit of an intruder alarm. If I should want to get inside the house it would not be an easy task.

23

As I watched the big security light suddenly came on, lighting up the front garden brilliantly. I froze behind the cover of a shrub – nothing attracts attention more quickly than movement – but I need not have worried.

The light must have been switched on from inside the house, because the front door opened and one of my two playmates from the morning emerged and made his way to the Mondeo. It was thug number two – the big man, and he was moving with some care, presumably still in pain. There was no sign of thug number one

– the mess that I had made of his face probably meant that he was in hospital having maxilla-facial treatment to repair the damage.

He got into the Mondeo and drove away and I continued to watch the house. About twenty minutes later the security light went on again, and Reese came out and left in the Audi.

The downstairs lights went out soon afterwards and lights came on in the upper storey. Ten more minutes and those were extinguished as well.

As far as I could tell, the house now contained Douglas and probably his wife. I made my way carefully round to the back of the house again; I wanted to check if that also had a security light. I had seen no physical sign of one, but it was always possible that one was concealed somehow.

The back was unprotected; I was able to make my way right up to the back door without anything happening.

If I decided to enter the house, the back seemed the best alternative, although there would still be the burglar alarm to defeat. That, however, was for the future. Tonight was purely a reconnaissance, and I was satisfied with what I had found. I cautiously left the grounds and made my way back to my Land Rover and drove home.

The next day I formulated plans to ease entry into the house should I need to. The plans included contacting one of my former Army colleagues who was able to supply me with a couple of items not in the itinerary of the average burglar, but which I felt might come in very useful in the future.

That evening I took stock of my situation. With Robbie and Sarah safe, hopefully, in Aberdeen, and George murdered, I was on my own in anything I decided to do against Reese and Douglas, but at least that meant that there was nobody whose safety could be used against me, as they had tried to get to us by threatening Sarah.

The dilemma that I faced was, just what I want to do? How far was I prepared to go? What was my ideal scenario?

As far as Reese was concerned, I would be very happy to see him dead for his killing of Fiona. The thought that eighteen months in prison could be claimed to mean that he had ‘paid his debt to society’ cut absolutely no ice with me. And what about Douglas? His hired thugs had admitted to me that they worked for him, and I was sure in my own mind that the same duo had murdered George. I had stayed my hand against them when I had the chance to truly even the score, but if they came after me again the gloves would be well and truly off. So, what about Douglas himself? There seemed precious little chance of the law ever getting to him; they had had numerous opportunities in recent years, but had taken no action. Even when given photographic evidence of Reese and Douglas together, nothing had happened.

So, as far as I could see, unless I did something, nobody else would.

The question that remained, of course, was what?

Chapter Seven – 2011, July and August

My resolve received a hardening a couple of weeks later. I still hadn’t made up my mind what, if anything, to do about Reese and Douglas. On the other hand, they had taken no further action against me. I had been away overnight, staying in a small hotel on Skye after spending the day waiting for sunset over the bay at Talisker – it was a scene that I had noticed a long time ago whilst spending a few days leave touring round the island and which had stayed in my memory. It was too isolated a spot, and the weather always too uncertain, to have ever made a specific journey to capture the scene, but I had a commission for some general shots of the island, the weather had cooperated, and so I had captured a view with which I was very 24

happy of the globe of the sun slipping down over the horizon, slashing the waves with gold, red and orange highlights, with the low cliffs in stark, dark contrast providing a dramatic framework.

I had enjoyed a leisurely breakfast and, in no great hurry, had driven home. As I approached my cottage, however, I realised that things were wrong. Where it had stood there was now just a blackened shell. The roof was totally gone, the walls still stood, but without windows or doors, and streaked with thick swathes of soot. A police car was parked in my drive and I hurriedly drove up behind it, got out of the Land Rover and walked over.

A young police constable got out of the vehicle to meet me.

“Mr. Graham?”

“Yes, that’s me – what happened?”

As though it wasn’t perfectly obvious what had happened.

“Well, sir – as you can see, I am afraid your house has suffered a fire. It happened last night – a motorist driving past called the fire brigade, but by then the fire had taken a real hold and there wasn’t much that they could do. They did call us, however – they think that the fire was started deliberately.”

I looked in horror at the mess. It was clear that the whole interior had been gutted. Anything that I wasn’t wearing or carrying in the Land Rover was gone. All my books – and those that had been Fiona’s.

Mementoes that I had of our all too brief time together. The bed that had been ours – the only physical reminder that I still had of the joy of sleeping with her.

“Is it safe to go inside?”

“I wouldn’t advise it yet, sir – there are still some areas which are pretty hot. The firemen said to best leave it for twenty-four hours before venturing inside. As it looks like arson, my chief would like to talk to you as soon as possible.”

“Yes, of course – who is he?”

“He’s Inspector Harris, and he’s at Perth. I’ll call him up.”

So saying, he stepped a few paces away from me and used his radio. It was quickly settled. I was to meet with Inspector Harris at four o’clock, giving me a couple of hours to kill.

I used the time to book into the George Inn and to buy some essentials – a change of clothes, underwear and the like. Fortunately, my insurance policies, passport, and similar documents were in a fireproof safe, so once I could get back into the house they should be OK. I had my cameras with me, plus my laptop computer, which had a full back-up on it of my correspondence on it. I had long had the habit of not only keeping copies of letters that I wrote on the computer, but also scanned copies of incoming correspondence of any importance, so I could still function. Thankfully, it also had back-up copies of all my personal pictures, so the images of Fiona were still there, even though the pictures which had graced the sideboard and mantelpiece had been reduced to a few ashes.

The only thing that might have caused me concern was the shotguns. I had worked out that not only had I never gone to the trouble of getting a licence for them, neither had Robert. They had belonged to his father, and had come to Robert on his father’s death – so effectively nobody knew of their existence. Even so, I would just have left them in the house but for the fact that I had converted one of them into the strictly illegal lupara. Had that been found in the wreckage I would have had a lot of questions to answer, but it wasn’t there to be found, and neither was its companion.

The garden to the cottage was quite large – nearly an acre – and it had an old, dried up, well at the bottom.

The well still boasted its original winding gear and at the end of its chain was a bundle containing the two weapons. The well itself was overgrown with nettles and ivy and very clearly no longer in use, so there would have been no reason for anyone to approach it the previous night – indeed it was very unlikely that anyone would have realised its existence. Hopefully, the weapons were still there, still safe.

I duly arrived at the police station for four o’clock. Inspector Harris proved not to be alone; a uniformed officer, he had with him Detective Inspector Moss, who had been in charge of the investigation into George’s death.

The two policemen explained that a quick check on their system had flagged up my name in connection both with George’s murder and Fiona’s death, hence the joint approach.

25

Moss took the lead.

“Mr. Graham, it is clear that your house was deliberately torched – the fire brigade found traces of petrol and were able to identify the source of the fire as being in the middle of your living room where it would appear that furniture had been pulled into a heap, doused in petrol, and ignited.

“Now, we are fully aware of the part you played in starting the recent media campaign against the lenient treatment, as some see it, of drunken drivers and that in particular you and the late Mr. Kirk identified the link between James Reese, the driver who killed your wife, and Adam Douglas. Now, we looked at those two after Mr. Kirk’s death, but there was no evidence to link them to the murder.”

I shrugged.

“I don’t suppose that they actually did the killing themselves.”

I wondered whether, at this stage, to tell the police about Douglas’ two heavies and their attempt to attack me, but decided against it. I didn’t know their names, nor where they could be found and the only link to Douglas was the fact that I had beaten his name out of them. If it ever came to court, that episode could go very hard against me – using an illegal, and illegally held, firearm to threaten, beating up the two men – a lawyer would doubtless harp upon my Army training and paint me as a dangerous psychopath attacking wholly innocent members of the public out of a sense of paranoia.

“I agree – their alibis make that impossible. Whether they had any indirect part in the crime is unproven and, I am very much afraid, likely to remain so. Now, in the matter of the fire at your house – I have already had one of my officers check on the whereabouts of both of them last night – and once again they have alibis.

They were both at the Drummond Arms in Dundee from before eight in the evening until eleven at night, with numerous witnesses to support their story. Given the extent of the destruction to your house, the fire brigade reckon that it must have been started around nine o’clock. The motorist who saw the blaze and called it in did so just before ten.”

So, just the story as before – nothing would happen. Oh, the police would go through the motions, but with nothing to link anybody to what had happened, that would be it, and Douglas would have got away with arson in addition to murder.

I left the police station after politely thanking Moss and Harris for their efforts and expressing the hope that they would catch the perpetrators, but knowing full well that nothing was less likely. Inwardly, I was seething.

The next couple of weeks were a whirl of re-establishing my life. I had to base myself at the hotel, thankful that at least I could afford so to do; the fireproof safe lived up to its reputation and my documents within it had survived without damage.

I met with my insurers; clearly it would take months to restore the house to a habitable state and we haggled over how much they were willing to pay for me to live in an hotel in the interim. Builders were appointed, estimates prepared and finally, on the last day of July, work started, with a target completion date of sometime in November.

Before work started, however, I had decided to retrieve the shotguns. Whilst I felt that they were unlikely to be discovered where they were, there was always that chance. Furthermore, there was always the possibility that I might actually need them at some time. Obviously I could not keep them at the hotel, but I had a simple solution. I wanted to be able to move back into my cottage as soon as it was habitable; at the moment I did not possess a single stick of furniture, nor kitchen equipment, so I hired a secure storage facility and arranged for beds, chairs, fridge, etc., to be delivered there. The bundle containing the weapons was simply another item under lock and key.

I still had a few outstanding photographic commissions, and these kept me reasonably busy. Thankfully, the miracle of digital photography meant that I could produce my work with just my cameras, my computer and a high quality printer, the only item, apart from paper and the like, that I needed to buy to keep going. A far cry from the days of film, when I would have needed a full darkroom and all its equipment.

Throughout this period, one question nagged at me Was it chance that I was not at the cottage when it was burnt down, or had Douglas’ man or men waited until I was out of the way? On balance, I felt that it must be the former. I had not told anyone that I would be away – nobody to tell. That being the case, what would 26

have happened had I been at home? The more I thought about it, the more I felt that had I been home he or they would have tried to ensure that I perished in the blaze.

I decided to reconnoitre Douglas’ house again, so one cloudy night saw me again creeping around the outskirts of his property in the small hours. One immediate difference was apparent; there was now an additional security light at the rear of the house, so the whole place was ostensibly secure against unannounced intrusion.

Closer examination revealed another change. It was a big house – five bedrooms at least – and it looked as though one of those rooms was now in use, as a strange car was in the drive. As before the double garage doors were closed and the Range Rover sat in front of one of them. Now, however, there was an additional vehicle next to it, a recent Kia Sedona, a big 4x4 capable of seating up to seven people.

One thing to my advantage was that the cameras for the security lights looked as though they would not cover the garage area, so I very cautiously crawled to the strange vehicle and had a good look inside. Only the front two seats were in use; the others had been folded flat to maximise the load that could be carried.

Who, I wondered, did this vehicle belong to? It was some three years old, but looked hard used, certainly not as well cared for as the Range Rover. Could Douglas’ son, Malcolm, be visiting? When George had dug into the family’s background, Malcolm had been working in a betting shop in London, but that was now some months ago; things might have changed. If it was Malcolm, all I knew about him was that he was in his early twenties.

I decided that further surveillance could be advantageous, but that it would need to be done when people were up and about, which would increase my knowledge of the household, but greatly increase the possibility of being discovered.

I returned to my car; in it were my cameras, including a small video camera and a device that I had put together – a timer which would allow me to set the camera to record at a set time and for as long as I desired within the capacity of its battery and recording card.

I shinned up a tree which gave a view of the front door of the house and carefully located the camera and its timer so that I would have a record of who went in and out the next morning.

Twenty four hours later I returned and retrieved my equipment and took it back to the hotel. I decided to have a few hours sleep before looking at what I had recorded so it was after breakfast the next day before I settled down with my computer and camera.

The results were interesting. At about eight thirty Douglas emerged from the house, accompanied by two men that I had not seen before. They got into the Sedona, Douglas got the Jaguar out of the garage, and the two vehicles disappeared from my view. Shortly afterwards a Ford Fiesta drove up and a woman got out and rang the doorbell. I had a brief glimpse of a second woman, who I assumed to be Mrs. Douglas as the door opened and the Fiesta driver disappeared into the house.

My assumption seemed to be shown to be correct when, some twenty minutes later, the woman who had opened the door came out, crossed to the garage, and minutes later was driving away in the Mazda sports car that I knew belonged to Mrs. Douglas.

The Mazda was back half an hour later and this time was left in the drive rather than being put back into the garage.

The Fiesta driver left shortly afterwards; presumably she was a cleaner or similar – she surely wasn’t a guest or would not have been left to her own devices. Even if Mrs. Douglas had suddenly realised the need for some urgent shopping, it would have been natural for two friends to go out together or for her to wait until her friend had gone. Also Fiesta woman had been in the house exactly an hour. No, she was a cleaner.

I had decided that normal time to leave for work and the evening would be the most likely times to see anything interesting, and had programmed the timer accordingly. As a result I had nothing from late morning until early evening, but my hunch seemed to have worked; just after six Douglas returned in the Jaguar and shortly afterwards the Sedona, with the same two men in it, followed.

Shortly before ten o’clock Douglas again left the house, but this time the two men accompanied him in the Jaguar, leaving the Sedona in the drive. All three returned just after one in the morning and all went into the house and stayed there, at least until I recovered my equipment.

27

So, the two men appeared to be staying in the house. Why? Perhaps Douglas was concerned that I might come after him after the burning down of my house. If so, I was flattered that he was so concerned as to what I might do.

Perhaps it was time to try and live up to his expectations. His original two thugs were nowhere to be seen at the house. Not too surprising; thug number one had a pretty damaged face and was unlikely to feel up to much for a while, whilst number two was definitely follower material, not leadership. I wondered who the new men were and how capable they might be.

The next day I parked opposite Douglas’ loan shop before it opened; no sign of my two targets. Instead, the shop was opened by a tall, thin man of about thirty, dressed in scruffy jeans and trainers, topped off by a tee shirt claiming, improbably, some connection with Yale University. It was still a little before nine, the declared opening time on the door, and I waited. It seemed hard to believe that such a shop, which by its very nature, held large amounts of cash, would be so lightly staffed.

Sure enough, a few minutes later the Douglas Jaguar rolled up and briefly double parked, as Douglas and his two heavies got out. Douglas opened the car boot and the men lifted out a large, and clearly heavy, metal box and took it into the shop.

It made sense; leaving large amounts of cash overnight would have been asking for trouble, and it wasn’t just the tee-shirted fellow who would be in the shop, because when Douglas came out, only one of his heavies was still with him, the other clearly to provide security inside.

I wasn’t in my Land Rover. Douglas undoubtedly knew the number and I didn’t want to risk coming to his attention, so I was driving a hired silver-grey Ford Focus, hopefully an anonymous choice.

I already knew where Douglas’ betting shop was and drove to it, taking a slightly different route to that of the Jaguar to further lessen the chance of being noticed. Sure enough, the betting shop performance was repeated, except that this time the cash was in a suitcase rather than a strong box – presumably the interior had a safe or something which was felt not to need any further physical security.

Douglas emerged alone and drove off in the Jaguar, with me following at a discreet distance, wondering what he would do with the rest of his day.

He drove right out of Perth, looping round to take the A90 towards Dundee. Once on this major road, I was able to drop well back with no fear of losing him, and eventually he swung off onto a minor road towards the prestigious Caird Park golf club. I groaned inwardly. Surely he wasn’t just going to pass the time belting a small ball around the golf course? I kept on driving – there was no way he would fail to make me if I followed him to the golf course. Unfortunately, there was no way to stop on the road just there, but a few hundred yards further on, I was able to use the junction with the A972 to retrace my course back to the next roundabout towards Perth, turn back on myself again and turn up towards the golf course, confident that the five minutes or more which had passed would prevent Douglas from realising that he was being followed.

Once on the minor road I was able to do a U-turn and pull into the side and review matters. If Douglas was indeed playing golf I was in for a long wait. On the other hand – suppose that he was simply meeting somebody at the club house? I decided to wait.

About thirty minutes later the blue Jaguar reappeared, followed by a white Bentley. Both cars swept past me and went onto the A9. At that point he A9 is dual carriageway, so they had to turn left. I gave them a moment, then followed.

A few hundred yards on, the A90 turned sharp left towards Forfar. The Bentley made the left turn, the Jaguar went straight on towards Dundee town centre. Acting on an impulse, I decided to follow the Bentley. I was intrigued to know what Douglas was up to and who he had been meeting. After a couple of miles, with the A90 running through rich farmland on either side, the Bentley suddenly swung off onto a minor road which had a cul-de-sac sign to it, so I kept on. Either the Bentley driver’s destination was up there somewhere, or he had suspected that he was being followed and wanted to be sure.

I returned to my hotel; one of the skills, of possibly dubious legality, that George had passed on to me was how to identify the registered keeper of a vehicle from its number plate. The Bentley belonged to one Harold Gordon, with an address nowhere near where the Bentley had pulled off the A90 but back on the outskirts of Dundee. I looked up the address on Google Maps and in Street View found myself looking at a high wall 28

pierced by a pair of ornamental iron gates set back from the road, with a glimpse of the upper storey of what must be a large detached house beyond. The overhead view was more revealing. The house was indeed large, perhaps five or six bedrooms, and set in a large garden which boasted what looked like a hard surface tennis court, flower beds, and a fairly large outhouse.

All very interesting, but it got me no farther. How I missed George; without a doubt, if Gordon was of any significance, he would have ferreted out his life story. Without George, however, I was at a loss. More in idle curiosity, I entered Gordon’s name and address into Goggle and to my surprise found myself looking at several websites which seemed to relate to ‘my’ Harold Gordon.

Gordon, it transpired, was the owner of a medium sized transport company with a fleet of vans which covered all of the UK and was based at Perth in the Inveralmond industrial estate. He was also a local councillor and chairman of the local Rotary club. Quite the upstanding citizen, so why was he consorting with the likes of Douglas?

I began to wonder about the suspicions that Douglas was running a number of drug dealers – suspicions which, according to George, nobody had been able to prove. For Douglas to be able to run drug dealers he had to have the basic commodity to supply to them – and he in turn had to obtain that commodity from somewhere and someone. Just suppose that Gordon, with his fleet of vans, somehow fitted into that chain of supply and demand?

Like most people, I was aware that drugs came into the UK from a variety of places, and that one of those places was from Rotterdam. The Dutch seaport had particularly caught my imagination because on Gordon’s company website there had been a picture of one of his vans. Emblazoned on the side, as you so often see on commercial vehicles, the names of the centres served, or at least some of them. In this instance what caught was the words Hull and Rotterdam. Just suppose, I mused.....

I went to bed that night with my mind in a whirl of half-imagined possibilities, of ways that I could somehow hit back at Douglas in revenge for George, and at Reese in revenge for Fiona, because the puzzlement that I had felt over Reese, straight out of prison, promptly acquiring quite an expensive car, and living in a flat with a rental that couldn’t not have been met from benefit payments – always assuming that he received any such

– could well be explained if he was part of Douglas’ drug enterprises.

In the cold light of day the next morning my possibilities seemed to have vanished like so many puffs of smoke. I did think of seeking out Inspector Moss and telling him what I had discovered and surmised, but the more I thought about it, the less convincing what I could tell him appeared to me, let alone how it would appear to him.

A sudden thought struck me. Reese was driving a car – but at his trial he had, in addition to his prison sentence, been banned from driving for five years – a ban which should see him off the road until 2014. I couldn’t understand why I had failed to spot it before. I knew the registration of the Audi he had and quickly checked on it. I found that it was registered not in his name, but in that of Douglas. Unlike the car with which he had killed Fiona, this one was fully insured and totally road legal. I also began to wonder why, back in 2009, he had been driving such a very illegal vehicle. Whilst I could see that he might have stolen or

‘borrowed’ a car not knowing it to be uninsured, the lack of a driving licence puzzled me. I hadn’t noticed the fact at the time, but it seemed worth checking now. To do so, I tried looking back – via the Web – at reported driving convictions in our area and eventually tracked down the answer. In 2006, just before his twenty-first birthday in March, James Cameron Reese had been convicted of dangerous driving which had resulted in a three vehicle pile-up on the A9 just south of Pitlochry. He had escaped prison on that occasion, but had been fined and banned from driving for thirty months – so when he killed Fiona he was already driving whilst banned. It made his sentence seem even more derisory. Now he was at it again, on the road despite his ban.

That made an attempt at causing trouble for him relatively simple. Surely, all I had to do was to bring the matter to the attention of the police?

My mind was made up. For the next three days I scoured the area around his address and took a number of pictures of him in the Audi, including a short video, demonstrating beyond any shadow of doubt what he was doing. I made the lot up, together with a written statement, and posted it to the police at Perth.

29

A few days later I received a letter of acknowledgement which promised that ‘the matter was being looked into’.

I gave them a fortnight, then phoned the police station, asking to speak to the signatory to the letter. After being passed around a number of people, none of whom seemed to anything about the matter and clearly weren’t all that interest, I eventually ended up with a Sergeant Keller, who at least had the papers in front of him.

“Ah, Mr. Graham. Yes. We have raised the matter with he Fiscal and he has decided not to take any further action.”

I was incredulous.

“No action? Why not? I’ve given you clear evidence that Reese is breaking his driving ban. What more do you want?”

Keller went into defensive mode.

“Mr. Graham, the decision lies with the Procurator Fiscal, not the police. However, to save your time, and everybody else’s, I can tell you that the Fiscal felt that there simply isn’t enough evidence. The photographs and video you supplied could be claimed to merely be of someone resembling Mr. Reese..”

I interrupted him.

“But you also have my written statement – I know Reese by sight very well indeed.”

“I have no doubt you do, but you must know that under Scot’s law witness testimony has to be corroborated

– just one person’s word against another’s isn’t likely to result in a conviction. There is also the fact that you have personal animosity against Mr. Reese for the incident in which your wife died – defence counsel would make much of that.”

I was actually shaking with rage when I slammed down the phone. Clearly a man who had killed by his dangerous driving, and was now driving illegally, wasn’t seen as much of a priority. In fact, I wondered if the police were actually miffed at my having the nerve to try and do their job for them.

Once again, it seemed that Reese would be able to do just as he pleased, despite the evidence against him. I am a competent photographer. I knew damn well that any impartial observer would have no problem with identifying Reese as the subject of the pictures I had provided to the police.

The stills might be claimed to simply show him in a car rather than driving it, but the video was totally damning. It showed Reese emerging from his flat, getting into the Audi and driving off. He was the only person aboard – so he must be driving.

Be that as it may, he was getting away with it again and I was powerless to do anything about it – or was I? I suddenly remembered the fact that George hadn’t been the only reporter who had written about Douglas and Reese. The story which had effectively led to his murder hadn’t been written by George at all, but by a colleague. Maybe that was a way forward, although, seeing what had happened to George, it would have to be handled carefully.

First things first – I had to get in touch with the reporter who had written that fatal follow-up story. I went to The Scotsman’s website and scrolled back to the issue of Scotland on Sunday where it had appeared. The story appeared over the by-line of one Robin Jackson, so I clearly needed to get in touch with him.

I phoned the paper, only to be told that Jackson was away from the office and unlikely to be back that day –

try tomorrow. I thought of asking to be phoned back but decided against it – how many times does a request like that get ignored?

The next day I had better luck. I asked to be put through to Robin Jackson and a moment later a voice on the other end answered.

“Robin Jackson.” Something was wrong – it was a woman’s voice.

“Robin Jackson – the reporter?”

“Yes,” I could hear a touch of impatience in the voice, “I’m Robin Jackson, who are you?”

“You wrote the article back in June about drunk drivers?”

“Yes – but like I said – who are you?”

“I’m Martin Graham.”

There was a pause.

30

“Martin Graham as in husband of Fiona Graham and friend of George Kirk?”

“Yes, that’s me.”

Another pause, then,

What can I do for you, Mr. Graham?”

“I wondered if you would like some evidence that could justify a follow-up to the story you wrote?”

“Depends on the evidence – what have you got?”

“You remember Reese, the driver?”

“Of course I do – what about him?”

“At his trial he was banned from driving for five years – but he is driving at the moment. I’ve got photographs proving it.”

“Why don’t you take them to the police?”

“I did - but they say that the Fiscal isn’t going to take any action.”

I could detect a quickening of interest at the other end of the line.

“That might be interesting – I’d like to see what you have.”

“I’d like you to see it – when can we meet?”

“I’m tied up until about seven – how about the George Inn?”

“That’s fine – I’m actually staying there – meet me in the bar?”

“OK – how will I know you?”

“I’ll be wearing a short sleeved red shirt, light grey slacks – that do?”

“I’ll find you – see you a bit after seven.”

At shortly after seven fifteen that evening, as I worked my way slowly towards the end of a pint of bitter, I was pleasantly surprised to be approached by a young woman. About five foot three tall, with glistening black hair cut in a page boy style with a fringe across her forehead, bright blue eyes swept the bar, fastened on me, dressed as promised, and she advanced with her hand outstretched.

“Hi, you must be Martin Graham – I’m Robin Jackson.”

I rose and took her hand, feeling her cool flesh in my own far larger grip.

“Yes, that’s me – can I get you a drink?”

“That would be a life saver – white wine, please.”

I returned swiftly, bearing a cool Chardonnay for her, a second pint for myself, and resumed my seat opposite her. She wasted no time on preliminaries.

“So, what have you got?”

I laid the stills in front of her and she quickly riffled through them.

“Well, these look convincing to me, although I suppose that a defence brief might try to claim that they only show Reese sitting in a car, not actually driving.”

I nodded.

“I agree, that’s why I also shot a video.”

I bent over and retrieved my laptop from beside my chair and fired it up. Then I ran the video I had shot and she watched avidly, slowly shaking her head in disbelief as it ended.

“And the fiscal won’t touch it?”

“So I am told by the police.”

“Typical – bloody typical of the jobsworths we have over there at the moment. Scared of their own shadows, and far more interested in not being seen to put a foot wrong than getting this sort of scum punished. Can I have these?”

“Yes, of course – I’ve got copies, so do anything you like with them.”

I paused for a moment.

“Just one thing, though,” I said as she looked at me quizzically, “do be careful, won’t you? Remember what happened to George.”

“Don’t worry about me,” she said sharply “I can take care of myself. And because of what happened to George, I’ll make sure this really hits the street. He was a good bloke, and I loathe the idea of the low lifes responsible for his murder getting away with it.”

31

It was at that point that I began to wonder if I had done the right thing in approaching her. I had assumed that I would be dealing with some hardened male reporter, not a petite, attractive young woman. I decided to take her into my confidence and told her about the meeting between Douglas and Gordon and my suspicions as to what it might have been about. The deeper I went into my story, the more engrossed she clearly became. The possibility of a respected business man and local councillor being mixed up in something as nasty as drugs obviously got her reporter’s juices flowing.

“Now this,” she enthused, “could be something really big. What have you found out about it all?”

“Only what I have already told you. It’s only a couple of weeks or so ago that I saw them, and to be honest, I’m more interested in seeing that Reese gets his just desserts.”

She looked at me sympathetically.

“Yes, I can understand that, but don’t forget that Douglas must have had George killed, whether it was meant as just a beating or not. Reese is a total piece of crap, but he’s small fry. Get Douglas and Gordon and Reese will come as a bonus, I’m sure of it.”

She looked at her watch.

“Heavens, I must fly. Look, Mr. Graham,”

“Martin, please,” I interjected,

“Look, Martin, I want to know more about the Douglas/Gordon tie-up before I print anything. Tomorrow I am going to do a bit of digging, and I’d like to share what I find with you in case you can come up with a fresh angle on anything. How about we meet here, let me see, today’s Friday – say Wednesday? Same time?”

And with that, scarcely pausing to hear my affirmation, she was off, and the loss of the sense of urgency and determination she radiated left me feeling a bit flat.

True to her word, Robin breezed into the bar just after seven the following Wednesday, to find me, once again, working my way through a pint of bitter, but this time with a glass of Chardonnay already waiting for her, which she accepted gratefully.

Straight away I could see that she had news to impart.

“Right,” she said, “it looks as though you were on the right track in thinking that there is something going on which involves Gordon’s trucks. I managed to have a quiet word with one of his staff who is less than happy at the way that she has been treated by the firm, and from her I got a copy of the movements of the various vehicles over the last twelve months.

“Now, he has twenty-four vehicles, mostly big artics, and a number of contracts with supermarkets to ferry stuff around for them – we aren’t talking Tesco or Sainsbury here, but smaller outfits who find it more cost effective to use somebody like Gordon rather than run their own fleet of big vehicles. He does, however, have a couple of smaller vans, and it is one of those – a Transit - that is really interesting. It is registration KV52CLX and it is the only vehicle that goes to Rotterdam on a regular basis. Other vehicles go over from time to time, but with no pattern to their visits. This one, however, goes over on the 4th of each month and returns on the 6th, regular as clockwork.”

I mused over what she had found out.

“It does look a bit odd, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t you have thought, though, that Customs would have picked up on it?”

“I thought about that – if you look at the calendar, several times one of the date falls on a weekend. Because the trip lasts effectively for three days there is never an outward and an inward trip over a weekend, so there will be different staff involved. Unless they have a reason to look, why should customs notice? It’s not as though it is the only Gordon’s vehicle going over, so it doesn’t really stick out.”

I was impressed. In just a couple of days Robin had already made a lot more progress than I had managed on weeks.

“So what are they transporting and how do they fool the sniffer dogs?”

“Would you believe that they are transporting spices in sacks? The vehicle must reek of them – seems enough to overcome the dogs’ sense of smell?”

“But wouldn’t carrying something like that also make customs suspicious?”

32

“According to my source the van was searched really thoroughly on several occasions, and came up clean.

They even checked that the fuel tank was the right capacity in case something had been pushed into it.”

“So how are they doing it?”

“Search me!”

I looked at my watch to check the date.

“It’s the 31st today – so the 6th is next Tuesday. Fancy a trip to Hull? I’d like to see where that van goes after it leaves the port.”

“But why go down to Hull? Surely you can just intercept it on its way up?”

“Two reasons. Firstly, it might not follow the logical route up. Secondly, whatever they do to hide and then recover the drugs might not be done when they get up here – it might be done en route. After all, they can hardly do it at Gordon’s depot unless every employee is on it – and he has about seventy or eighty staff.”

Robin nodded thoughtfully.

“I see what you mean – but isn’t it going to look a bit obvious trailing the van all the way from Hull up to here?”

“I was thinking that we could take a car each, chop and change, hopefully not be spotted that way.”

“Well, one can always hope – but it seems a long shot.”

“Right at the moment, long shots are all I have.”

I changed the subject.

“I’ve a thought as to how they may be transporting those drugs. Your contact said that customs checked the capacity of the tank – but I wonder if they checked its actual size?”

Robin shrugged.

“I don’t know.”

“I’m willing to bet that they didn’t. I wonder if anyone apart from the Ford manufacturing set-up actually know what size it should be, anyway. I mean, if a garage had to replace a tank in a Transit they would order part number whatever, not ask for a tank x by y by z inches. They could be using two tanks – the normal one on the way out and a bigger one coming back, with the excess side holding the drugs.”

Robin looked excited, leaning forward with eyes glittering.

“Something like that could very well be the answer, couldn’t it Martin?”

“Well, I think that it is a distinct possibility. With the drugs stowed in the tank, and the bagged spices to make a distraction, I think that such an idea could well be how they are doing it. The sniffer dogs wouldn’t have a chance of finding anything under those circumstances. I wonder what drugs they are smuggling in?”

Robin looked mildly triumphant.

“I’ve also been talking to some of my other contacts. They are pretty sure that Douglas specialises in cocaine. I also asked about prices and costs. Apparently the street dealers are selling it for around thirty pounds a gram...”

“Thirty pounds a gram?” I demanded incredulously. She nodded in confirmation and continued.

“which means that a kilo of the stuff would fetch thirty thousand pounds. Apparently normal margins, if you can call anything like this normal, mean that out of that thirty pounds they have had to pay Douglas probably fifteen. He has his overheads, and has to buy the stuff in the first place, but in the quantities that he would probably be dealing, he is unlikely to be paying more than a thousand pounds a kilo.”

“So a kilo of cocaine means an operating capital for him of perhaps fourteen thousand pounds. He has to pay Gordon for his operation, but even so , that must represent a fair amount of money each month. I wonder how much is being brought in?”

“It must depend on how much space he can make available in the van – and presumably that means in the tank.”

I pondered on the logistics for a while.

“Hmm, cocaine is a powder, so it would take up the same sort of space as flour, or sugar – that sort of thing.”

She nodded.

“So, how much space would be needed?”

Robin thought briefly.

33

“Well, a one and a half kilo bag of flour is about eight inches high by five by three.”

I pulled out a pen and my diary and did some rough jottings; after a few minutes, I pushed the diary towards her.

“Right, this is guesswork as best, but I reckon to give it a reasonable range, a Transit must have a petrol tank of about twelve gallons. That’s about fifty-five litres. For all I know the tank might be a good bit bigger, but I can’t see it being much smaller. A tank of fifty-five litres means, in inches, about three and a half thousand cubic inches, which sounds a lot, but only translates into a tank, say, twenty by twenty by eight or nine inches. Not all that big at all, so I suspect that I am under-estimating what it might actually be, but again, let’s stay with that as a working hypothesis.

“Now, if they were to fabricate a tank half as big again, just increasing its depth, because it would have to fit into wherever the normal tank goes horizontally, as it were, then they only need to increase the depth for four inches or so to have enough space for around twenty kilos.”

We looked at each other as we mulled over the implications. Twenty kilos represented around six hundred thousand pounds, and also twenty thousand individual doses of potential death and misery.

“If we are anywhere need right in all this,” Robin said slowly, “this is very big business indeed. Between them, Douglas and Gordon could be making anything around a quarter of a million pounds a month profit.

No wonder Douglas is unhappy at anybody getting interested in any of his activities – he’s scared of what they might turn up.”

I agreed; suddenly our digging around in this didn’t seem a very wise course. ON the other hand, I felt, more than ever, that I owed it to Fiona and George not to let up. That, however, didn’t apply to Robin. There was no reason for her to get involved in something which was potentially dangerous.

I said as much to her, to be met with indignation.

“Martin, I am a reporter – and this could be the biggest story to hit this area in years, decades even. And anyway, I know George was your friend, but he was also my colleague, and a nice bloke whom we all liked.

No, I’m in on this – and anyway, without me he wouldn’t be anywhere at all on it, now would you?”

I had to agree to her last point – it was all down to her contacts and her digging that we had got this far.

“Robin, that’s all true – but don’t forget just how dangerous all this might be.”

“Don’t worry – I will be very careful.”

“OK – now, what about trying to track that van on Tuesday?”

“I’m up for it – how do we go about it? I’ve done a bit of digging and the boat arrives around eight forty five in the morning. It will take a while for everyone to get off, and we have no idea when the van will actually leave the dock. I suppose we need to be somewhere the van has to pass.”

“Yes,” I agreed. As at our previous meeting, I had my laptop with me, and I put it on the table between us and delved into Google Maps. Within minutes we had identified a lay-by from which traffic leaving the ferry port could be observed and followed.

“We are in luck. All traffic that isn’t purely local has to head west along the A1033 to the big roundabout –

and a car here” I jabbed at the screen to indicate where I meant, “ can see every vehicle as it passes and is pointing the right way to follow.”

“Won’t two cars pulling out and following look a bit odd?”

“We don’t do it like that. One of pulls out, the other stays put for ten minutes or so. We use hands free phones, so the lead vehicle can tell the other one the route the van is taking. The best route looks to be to take the M62 to the M6, but they might have their own reasons to take the M1 or the A1 instead.”

Robin nodded again.

“Sounds OK to me – who leads?”

“I’m easy,” I lied, not really wanting her possibly to risk exposing herself right at the start.

“Toss you for it?” she suggested.

“OK”

We tossed. I lost.

“Right,” I said. “You lead, I follow. Don’t use your own car – if they make the number plate they will be able to trace you – and that could be nasty. Hire something, and don’t hire in Perth or Dundee in case they 34

can trace you that way – for all we know they may have contacts in some or even all of the hire companies locally and Sod’s Law says they would find you.”

Shoe thought for a moment.

“I’ve got a better idea. My ex..” she stopped at my look of surprise, “Don’t look so surprised, Martin. I was married for a couple of years before we decided it was a mistake. Divorced two years ago and David now lives in Australia with a new wife. However, one of the things he left behind was his car and I never got round to advising anyone of the fact. I just paid his road tax and insurance when it came due,” she hesitated,

“OK – I know that isn’t strictly legal, but I’m not daft, Martin, and I sometimes feel happier using a car that can’t be traced back to me – I reverted to my maiden name when we broke up, and always used it at the paper anyway, so as far as the world is concerned, that car is owned by David Collace, with the address where we used to live – we sold the house when we broke up and split the proceeds. The insurance is for any driver, so it isn’t really very illegal, and I don’t use it more than perhaps half a dozen times a year.”

“What’s the car? Nothing too noticeable, is it?”

“No, a 2008 Ford Focus, dark blue. Nothing out of the ordinary at all.”

“Good – do you have a hands-free set up for it?”

“Not at the moment, but I can soon sort one out.”

All in all it sounded ideal from the point of view of distancing her from any attempt to trace her by the car’s number plate.

Chapter Eight – 2011, September

So it was that on the Tuesday morning we were waiting in our respective cars in the lay-by off the A1033 as the vehicles steamed out of the port. In view of the need to be in place at so early an hour, we had travelled down the previous day and booked rooms in the Holiday Inn on Ferensway, a bit over a mile from the Ferry port. I had offered to pay for Robin, but she assured me that her accommodation would be set against expenses, as would the hands free mobile phone set-up that she had installed in her ex-husband’s Focus. I had a similar set-up in my hired Mondeo, and we had tested our communications the previous day and satisfied ourselves that we would be able to keep in touch whilst on the move.

At last our target van came along and Robin smoothly inserted herself into the traffic a few vehicles back.

Scant minutes later she confirmed that the Transit was, indeed, following what we had felt to be the most obvious route, and was on the M62 heading towards the M6. I started up and followed the same route myself.

From Hull to the M6 is a hundred and seventeen miles and the van clearly wanted to make good time because it maintained a steady seventy wherever possible, leaving no opportunity for me to leapfrog Robin without driving at a speed that would make me conspicuous. I had no qualms about being booked for speeding, but the prospect of being stopped and delayed was just not acceptable.

I therefore had to bide my time, hoping that the van would slow or stop at a service station. So far I was not worried; Robin’s constant updates confirmed that she was having no trouble in keeping the van in sight, even though she was well behind it.

At last she conveyed what I had been hoping to hear; the van was pulling into Lancaster services, and Robin did the same. Some ten minutes later I did likewise.

“Where is it, Robin?”

“Driver just getting back in, so they are ... no, wait a minute, now his mate is leaving the van and going into the services.”

“Makes sense. They wouldn’t want to leave the van unattended.”

I coasted gently round the parking area until I saw the Transit. I drove past it as far as I could and parked.

Now he would have to pass me to get back on the motorway.

“Robin, how are you for fuel?”

“I’m OK, but I’ll fill up and go to the toilet now that you are here.”

35

A few minutes later I saw the van passenger re-emerge from the service building and get back into the vehicle. They waited for several minutes for some reason, then drove to the filling station. I could just see them from where I was parked, so I waited until the van actually drove away before starting up and following them.

As had Robin before me, I found following them a piece of cake. They were keeping to the speed limit which meant that I could match their speed whilst hanging well back without appearing in any way out of the ordinary amongst the many vehicles on the road.

I followed them for nearly an hour, then as we approached Gretna I called up Robin to let her know that I was peeling off for petrol.

“OK, I’ll close up a bit.” Ten minutes later I heard her voice again.

“I’ve got you in sight – how far behind are you?”

“About four hundred yards.”

“OK, I’m on them.”

I pulled into Gretna services, filled up, dashed to the toilet, and was back on the road as quickly as possible. I pushed the speed up a little; traffic was less heavy now and there was no sign of any traffic police, so I felt safe enough in nudging eighty. After perhaps twelve minutes I saw Robin’s Focus up ahead and I slowed to match her pace.

“I’m back on station.” I told her.

“OK, I’m dropping back.”

I passed her and settled down about four hundred yards behind the Transit. We were lucky in that it was easily spotted. Gordon had not been content with the basic white you see on so many Transits. Like his bigger vehicles, it was painted in the company livery of orange and bright blue, with bold white lettering outlined in black. Even from half a mile away it would be easily seen, so as we were now on a stretch of motorway with no junctions for a while, I allowed myself to drop a bit further back.

Now that we were back in Scotland the road was no longer the M6 but the A74(M), but that was the only difference as we ploughed steadily northwards. I was wondering if the Transit would make any more stops when Robin came back on the air.

“Martin, there’s a police car coming up fast.”

I looked in my rear view mirror and, sure enough, perhaps a mile or more back, I could see the flashing blue lights and blazing headlights of a fast moving car. I wondered uneasily if it had anything to do with us or our quarry as it rocketed past me only moments later and disappeared from sight, showing no interest in the Transit.

A few miles further on and the reason for the police car’s haste was obvious. A tail back of stationary traffic brought everything to a grinding halt. The gaps between vehicles closed up and I found myself now no more than forty yards behind the Transit with just five or six vehicles between us. I choose to stay in the middle lane, as had the Transit driver. Very often in such circumstances the lanes will move at different speeds, then one will be stopped whilst others move, so you will often pass and then be passed in your turn by vehicles in the other lanes. I did not want that to happen to my relative position to the Transit. Robin, on the other hand, hand chosen the inside land and several times she came up level with me, but never actually passed the van.

After ten minutes or so the reason for the jam was in view – a nose to tail collision between a lorry and a family car. Fortunately, nobody seemed to be injures as what looked like the two drivers and a woman were talking to the driver of the police car, whilst two young children gazed out of the rear windows of the damaged Volvo estate.

The second policeman from the police car was directing traffic past the bottleneck, which had reduced the effective width of the road to a single lane, and soon afterwards we were past and on our way again.

And so we went on in our convoy, with Robin and I never nearer to the Transit than four hundred yards or so and changing places as unobtrusively as possible from time to time, until we were on the A9 headed for Perth and, presumably, Gordon’s depot. The van must, I kept telling myself, go somewhere else first. Surely the removal of the drugs wouldn’t take place where all Gordon’s staff would be wandering around?

36

I was proved right when, just past Aberuthven, and still a few miles short of Perth, the van turned off the A9

onto a small minor road with some buildings just yards away from the main drag.

I was far enough back to be able to stop before the turn off and a few moments later Robin drew up behind me.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“The van pulled off into that side road and I am sure that it is now at or in one of those buildings that we can see. If it had driven past them I would have been able to see it going down the road.”

I pointed to where the little road, having passed the buildings, swung sharp right and ran parallel to the A9

for as far as one could see.

“So what do we do?”

“We have a look see. Lock your car and we’ll drive past in the Mondeo.”

I drove slowly down the minor road past a couple of houses and some farm buildings, the last of which stood alone and had four cars parked outside it. There were no windows at normal level, just high up ones to light the interior, so nobody could see in. More importantly as far as we were concerned, nobody could see out. It had a pair of sliding doors and could swallow a vehicle the size of the Transit and have bags of room to spare.

I looked at the cars as we passed and one immediately caught my eye. It was an Audi A6.

“Look! I exclaimed, “that Audi – that’s Reese’s car.”

We drove on for half a mile, then I turned in the road and returned to the A9, reversed out of the entrance against all Highway Code advice, and parked in front of Robin’s Focus.

“Now, I suppose,” she said, “all we can do is wait.”

We both sat in the Mondeo, expecting a long wait, but to my astonishment the Transit emerged almost immediately. It could not have been in the barn above ten or twelve minutes, surely nothing like enough to have swapped fuel tanks. I was about to start up and follow it, forgetting that I had Robin aboard and her car empty when she stopped me.

“No, Martin, that’s not the same van!”

“Are you sure? It’s the same registration.”

“I know – but it’s a different Transit. I got a good look at the back of it when we were in that traffic jam, and the colour scheme is the same but the lettering on the back, although it is the same words, is different. Where it says ‘Gordon’s Transport’ the letters are higher up on the doors, and the telephone number is in bigger characters and spaced out more.”

I leant back in my seat.

“That makes sense – two vehicles with the same registration. It means that they can take their time over recovering the drugs without anybody in the depot wondering why the journey has taken longer than it should. So, we are just going to have to wait and see what happens.”

Robin returned to her own car and we settled down. Nearly two hours went by before anything did. The Audi A6 which Reese drove appeared from the minor road and drove off. Because the A9 is dual carriageway at that point, he had to turn left and head north towards Perth, even if that wasn’t his intended destination. As I thought about it, I wondered if he intended to make for Douglas’ house, the turning to which was only a couple of miles or so further on. Surely he wasn’t going to take the cocaine to his uncle’s house for keeping?

We let him get out of sight before setting off in convoy after him. I wasn’t worried about losing him for the next couple of miles, as there were no turn-offs other than into farmers’ fields.

However, I did start to speed up in time to see him before we reached the Tibbermore turn off, which he would take if he was going to the Douglas residence. Sure enough, as I trailed nearly half a mile behind him, he turned left and disappeared from view.

I slowed down and pulled up onto the verge and moments later Robin pulled up behind me. Her voice came over the phone.

“What’s happened?”

“He’s taken the turn to Tibbermore. We’ll give him a few minutes, then follow.”

37

After what I reckoned to be a reasonable interval, we proceeded cautiously down the narrow lane, and drove past Douglas’ house. There was no sign of the Audi, and it couldn’t have been in the garage as both doors were open; Mrs. Douglas’ Mazda was in one half, the other was empty. Where had he gone?

I kept on driving and half a mile or so further on I had my answer. The Audi was just pulling out of a gap in the hedge which allowed access to a small barn standing a little way back off the road. I drove past as Reese waited to get onto the road, studiously avoiding eye contact and hoping against hope that he would not see and recognise me.

Robin and I drove in convoy to the A85 and on a whim I turned left towards the village of Methven, rather than right for Perth.

It was past opening time and I stopped outside the Methven Arms. Once Robin had joined me, we trooped inside for a sandwich and a drink – Coke for Robin, a pint of weak shandy for me – and reviewed the day’s events.

All in all, we agreed that we had made a lot of progress. We didn’t actually have hard evidence – at no time had we actually seen any drugs, but what else would explain what had happened? The next question was what should we do now? If we went to the police with what we had and they acted swiftly, they might find drugs in that barn at Tibbermore. On the other hand, it was quite possible that it was a very temporary location and that by the time the police arrived the evidence could be long gone. Despite all this, however, we were agreed that we needed to involve the police straightaway. No time like the present. I got out my mobile and phoned Perth police station, asking for Inspector Moss. He was unavailable. I left a message asking that he phone either myself or Robin as soon as possible, and emphasised that we had evidence of a major crime being committed.

It was mid-morning on the 7th before Moss got back to me. I told him all that we had seen and he listened patiently, then suggested that Robin and I came to the station later that day to make a formal statement.

Robin and I arrived separately, but at just about the same time, and were shown into an interview room where Moss was waiting. There was another policeman with him, whom he introduced as Inspector Frank Cowell of the Drugs Squad. Cowell was a big man, perhaps six feet five or six and something like eighteen stone. Perhaps forty-five years old or so, he had grizzled grey hair cut en brosse and a swarthy complexion hinting perhaps at Mediterranean ancestry. Deep set, dark eyes regarded us from under heavy eyebrows of the same grey hue as his hair.

It was Cowell who took over once the introductions had been effected.

“Captain Graham, Miss Jackson, I must thank you for your efforts and for bringing all this to our attention.

We have had Mr. Douglas on our radar for some time, but there has never been any link between him and the dealers on the street. This might well be of considerable help. What I would like you to do now is to dictate and sign formal statements to one of my officers and we will take matters on from here. I must impress upon you both that it is of the utmost importance that you say nothing about what you have seen, or that you have told us, to anyone. Confidentiality is essential in all of this.”

As he paused for breath, I interjected.

“So, Inspector, does this mean that you are going to investigate Douglas and Gordon right away.”

He frowned.

“I think that you must leave decisions as to just how and when we proceed to us, Captain Graham. Don’t worry – these men won’t escape justice.”

I tried pressing him, but he refused to be drawn, and with that we had to be satisfied. Robin was very unhappy at having to sit on her story for an indeterminate length of time, but reluctantly accepted that there was no alternative.

Cowell and Moss left us and we were joined by a Detective Constable Elizabeth McNulty, a good looking blonde of about thirty, with hair cut in a pageboy style contrasting with a deep tan and startling blue eyes.

Dressed in a simple black trouser suit, the jacket open over a white silk blouse, she exuded efficiency and typed out our statements at impressive speed as we dictated them. We checked them over and signed them, then left and went our separate ways.

38

That was the Wednesday. It was the following Monday, the 12th of September that both Robin and I were asked to meet with Inspector Cowell again.

We met in the same interview room as before, but this time Cowell was accompanied not by Inspector Moss, but by the DC McNulty who had taken our statements.

Cowell looked at us for several moments before speaking.

“Captain Graham,” I interrupted him.

“I’m no longer in the Army, Inspector, so I don’t use my old rank anymore – it’s really just plain Mister now.”

“Ah, very well then, Mister Graham. Miss Jackson, I’ve asked you in because I need to through some elements of your two statements with you both.

“Now, you say last Tuesday you followed a Ford Transit van, registration KV52CLX from Hull to just outside Perth on the A9. Furthermore, you say that the van you followed pulled off the road just short of the Tibbermore turn off and was driven into a large barn and a second van, bearing the same registration, left that barn shortly afterwards. I have that right, yes?”

We both looked at him in puzzlement for a moment before we answered “Yes” more or less in unison.

Cowell went on.

“You didn’t follow that van; instead you followed an Audi A6, which you say was driven by James Reese, to another barn, this time on the outskirts of Tibbermore. Right?”

This time we just nodded.

“Now, I have a problem with all this. Acting on your statements, I obtained a search warrant for the two barns, the vans and the A6 you say was driven by Mr. Reese. Both barns were empty. If you were correct in what you say you saw, there second van might well be expected to have been in the barn you say you saw it enter.”

I interrupted him.

“No, that’s not quite right. Neither of us saw the van actually go into the barn, but there was nowhere else that it could have gone. As I said in my statement, the road was clear – there was no sign of the van and it hadn’t been out of my sight for long enough to have vanished down that road. The barn was the only building there big enough to hold one van, never mind two. Miss Jackson arrived a few moments later.

However, we both saw the second van leave the barn. If it had been the same van we would have followed it

– but it wasn’t, so we waited to see what would happen, and we saw Reese drive off in the Audi.”

Cowell nodded.

“Very well, but again – it would have been reasonable to expect the original van – if there were two of them

– to remain under cover, wouldn’t it? It would have been risky to have two vehicles in the locality with the same number plate, surely?”

“Yes – but it doesn’t mean that it would necessarily have been left there for any length of time. When did you search the barn?”

“Friday morning.”

“So, Inspector, there would have been plenty of time for it to have been moved.”

“Yes – but why should it have been? Your theory is that there are two vans. Van number one has drugs on board. It drives into the barn. Van number two then leaves and returns to Mr. Gordon’s depot. It is totally innocent so can be left there until next needed, when presumably the procedure would be reversed.”

I nodded.

“Now we come to the difficult bit. We examined both barns and the van at the Gordon depot and found no traces of any drugs anywhere. The fact that no traces were found isn’t a one hundred per cent guarantee that none were ever there, but our forensic people are very good and if they couldn’t find anything, then it is highly probable that there was nothing to find. We spoke with Mr. Reese. He denies driving the Audi at the time that you claim to have seen him and he has witnesses to back up what he says – that he was actually in Perth, in the Grampian Hotel. He also denies ever having driven any vehicle since his release from prison as his ban still has nearly a year to run.”

“But I have photographed and videoed him driving,” I protested, “I gave that evidence to the police.”

39

“Yes, I’ve looked at that evidence, Mr. Graham. The still photos don’t prove that Mr, Reese was driving, just that he was sitting in a car.”

“And the video?” I persisted.

“I’ve looked at that and Mr. Reese has been asked about it. I accept that the driver resembles Mr. Reese, but he states that it was his cousin, Kenneth Collyer, who had stayed overnight with him in his flat and drove off in the morning. One of my officers, the same one who spoke with Mr. Reese, checked with Mr. Collyer, who confirms that it was he, and not Mr. Reese, who drove the Audi in your video. My officer also confirms that the two men do have a close resemblance one to the other, so it is entirely credible that the man in your video is actually Mr. Collyer.”

By now my head was in a whirl and I could sense that Robin was in much the same state.

“Did you talk to the men who were in the van? What do they say about stopping at that barn?”

“They simply deny that it happened the way you say. They say that one of them had an urgent need to urinate, they pulled off the road, he found a convenient hedge, and they then went on their way. The barn, by the way, is owned by a local farmer who doesn’t actually use it for anything, and he claims that it is months since anyone was last inside it and even then only to check its condition.”

Cowell continued.

“Now, Mr. Graham, I am really at a loss to understand all this. You, and Miss Jackson, claim that you have uncovered an operation involving Mr. Douglas, Mr. Gordon and Mr. Reese to bring drugs into Perth by van, a van which picks up the drugs in Holland and then drives all the way up here with them. You say this has been going on every month for at least the current year and possibly for longer. Now, I know that there have been suspicions regarding Mr. Douglas, but suspicions aren’t evidence and at the moment there is n evidence at all against him. On the other hand, there has never been any trace of suspicion against Mr. Gordon for any sort of illegal activity at all. Regarding Mr. Reese; I am aware, of course, that he caused the death of you wife by driving in a criminally reckless manner. However, he says that he bitterly regrets his actions that day and he has, in any case, served his time in prison as a result, so his debt is paid, hard though I am sure that you find that to accept. I can well understand that you are not happy at the state of affairs and that you would like to see him suffer further for what he did – but that isn’t going to happen. It is over and you must accept that.

“I am sorry, but I feel that your loss has clouded your judgement and you are tilting at shadows – shadows that don’t even exist. I must, therefore ask you, formally, to desist from hounding these men. I can find no evidence that they have done anything criminal. If you continue, then I may have to consider charging you with wasting police time.”

He turned to Robin.

“Miss Jackson, I can understand Mr. Graham’s part in this. As far as I can see your involvement is simply in search of a story – well, no story exists that I can see, so I would advise you to be very careful as to what, if anything, you print. Thank you both for your time. I am sure that we won’t need to meet again.”

He rose and left the room, leaving the DC to escort us from the building. Once outside I turned to Robin.

“Is he mad, or are we?”

She shook her head.

“Martin, I just don’t understand it at all. We saw Reese in that car. If we are wrong about the vans being used for drugs, then what the hell were they actually doing playing around like that? Do you believe that tale about one of them needing to take a leak?”

“No way – we’d have seen the van parked off the road and probably the man himself. So, what do we do now?”

“Have lunch and a drink.” She said firmly.

We took our time over lunch, going over and over again everything that Cowell had said.

“No matter what anyone says,” I ground out through gritted teeth, “I know that I saw Reese drive from that barn and also he was the driver I photographed and videoed earlier. That cousin tale, and the witnesses he so conveniently has – it’s all bullshit.”

40

“Well,” Robin said sadly, “it looks as though there is nothing more that we can do. If anything does crop up, you will let me know, won’t you Martin? I’ll do the same, of course.”

It came as a shock to realise that as well as reaching a dead end over my attempts to bring Reese, Douglas and Gordon to justice, it was also a parting of the ways between Robin and myself. Suddenly, I didn’t want our ways to part, at least not just yet.

“I wonder,” I said diffidently, “if you would like to have dinner one evening. Not to rehash things – just to have dinner together.”

She hesitated for a moment as she thought it over.

“I’d love to – in fact, what about tonight?”

“That would be great. If I call for you about seven thirty, would that be OK?”

“That’s fine – I’ll look forward to seeing you.”

At just before eight that evening, I escorted Robin into the dining room of the George Inn. I was still living there – the return of my cottage to a habitable state was still two months or more away.

The meal was a success. The food was good, and we talked about everything except the drug case (as we mentally pigeon-holed it).

I learned that, unlike myself, Robin’s parents were still living. Her father, George, was a history lecturer at St. Andrew’s University, whilst her mother, Helen, was the senior maths tutor at the prestigious St.

Leonard’s school in the same town. She had one brother, Michael, a couple of years older than herself, who was a doctor; not just any doctor, but a Captain in the RAMC currently serving in Afghanistan. He specialised in trauma surgery and was due to come home on leave towards the end of the year.

She had been a reporter ever since leaving St. Andrew’s University, where she had read economics and economic history. Her parents had wanted her to follow them into the academic world, but she had other ideas and as soon as she graduated had landed a job as a very junior reporter with the local paper, moving to The Scotsman after just eighteen months. She was modest about her achievements, but she was clearly a high-flyer.

She was clearly fond of her family, and worried about her brother being in harm’s way in Afghanistan. Then she stopped, almost in mid-sentence and frowned.

“But we’ve only talked about me – what about you, what do you want out of life.”

I was tempted to say ‘You’ but it felt too soon. I shrugged.

“To be honest, I don’t really know any more. I had wanted to stay on in the Army, but the cuts and the general uncertainty changed my mind for me and I got out as soon as I decently could. Then I met Fiona and we married...”

I stopped.

“Sorry, that would lead back to the drugs case.”

With an effort, I changed tack.

“No thanks to anything on my part, but I’m quite well off. I inherited from my aunt and uncle, and then there was the insurance on Fiona. I do work a bit, as you know, self-employed, with my cameras, but it’s more an extended hobby than anything else now. I did run a small photographic business for a few months and made a total mess of things, so I don’t think that I am really cut out to be a captain of industry of any sort. But what about you – where do you want to be in, say, five years time?”

Her answer came without the least hesitation.

“A senior economics reporter and columnist for The Scotsman. Oh, I know that the London papers are seen as the top of the tree by most in my profession, but things are changing in Scotland. If the SNP have their way, things will change out of all recognition and it will be an exciting time for a reporter up here.”

“Would you welcome independence?”

She shook her head.

“No way – it’s potential suicide in economic terms. Oh, it would be nice for the tartan terrors to strut their stuff and proudly scream ‘Freedom’ at every opportunity – but it’s stupid. With all the economic troubles in the world at the moment, for a nation of five million to suddenly cast itself adrift is sheer, unadulterated 41

madness. It might be a sensible aim for perhaps twenty years from now, but that wouldn’t suit the Anglophobes in Holyrood.

“Still enough of the distant future. What are your plans for the next week, never mind the long term?”

I thought for a moment.

“I haven’t really got any plans as such. I might go back to Skye – I love the island – for a few days walking and photographing, but I haven’t arranged anything.”

She looked across the table at me.

“Now that we’ve been warned off the drugs case that we’re not talking about, I want to do a bit of digging into the Scottish Government’s economic policies and write up a piece for the paper. It’s going to need a fair bit of digging and talking to some people in a variety of businesses to see how they see the effect of the SNP’s policies on their particular company. It’ll take me a week or so to gather together everything that I will need, but unlike a lot of what I do, it is going to be mostly office based until I know what I want to ask people. Then I’m going to have to dash about the country a fair bit, as I want to get reactions from a variety of sources.”

She hesitated.

“Look, I know that you are independent and can pick and choose what assignments you take on, but I wonder if you would be willing to help me on this? It’s an assignment that I’ve set up for myself. My boss is happy with me doing it, but not happy at me taking too much time over it, nor using a lot of the paper’s resources. I could, however, swing a small commission fee on expenses.”

I leapt at the chance.

“I’d love to help if I can – but what would you want me to do?

“What I would like is the view of someone coming to the question with an open mind – no pre-conceived opinions – and look at the various policies that have been issued over the last two years since the Nats took power, and look for inconsistencies and contradictions. Believe me, there are a good few of them, but I want to concentrate on the economic side of the policies; over and above that, however, is the practical side – if, for example, they say that they are going to provide more teachers – where are they going to come from?

How long will it take to train them? Have they thought those aspects through and demonstrated the fact?

That sort of thing.”

I thought about the idea.

“Well, I’ve never done anything like this before, but in the Army you had to get used to balancing needed action against resources available, and it sounds rather similar. I’ll give it a go, but if you aren’t happy with what I produce, no hard feelings.”

So, for the next week I buried my nose in a vast array of papers issued by the government, looking for things that seemed no more than pipe dreams because they didn’t examine the true practicalities of things.

Robin was pleased with what I came up with and used my work as a feed into her own analysis of the government’s plans and towards the end of the month a really hard-hitting article appeared in the paper over her by-line. That, however, was in the future.

As far as I was concerned something much more important happened during our week of joint research.

Robin was working long days and we had fallen into the habit of her popping into the George Inn, where I was still in residence, for a nightcap before going home to her flat only a bit over five minutes walk away.

It was the fourth such evening, the Friday; she arrived later than usual and looking tired out. I got her the usual glass of Chardonnay and she leaned back in her chair and took a large mouthful of the wine.

“Thanks, Martin – that was really needed.”

“Hard day?”

“Not really, just long and frustrating. I’ve been ploughing through governmental department budgets and trying to relate the pattern of expenditure with outcome. You know, did an increased spend of X percent lead to a corresponding improvement in the service at which it was aimed. All fascinating stuff, but a real grind.”

She finished her wine more slowly, then put the glass down on the table and looked at her watch.

“God, look at the time. I suppose that I ought to be going, but I don’t really have the energy.”

I decided that it was time to offer more than just support and friendship.

42

“You don’t have to go if you don’t want to, you know.”

She looked at me steadily.

“You mean stay with you.”

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

“Yes.”

She sat very still for what seemed an eternity.

“Let’s go upstairs, then.”

In a way it was the first time for both of us. Not just the first time together; for me, it was the first time I had slept with someone since Fiona’s death. For Robin it was the first time since her divorce.

My own feelings were mixed. I was very happy to have found at least the possibility of somebody to love again, but on the other hand I could not avoid a feeling that I was betraying Fiona and her memory. I avoided making any such comment to Robin, however; it would make it seem as though she was in competition with the ghosts of the past.

The next morning Robin left before breakfast, saying that she needed to change her clothes for the day at the office. She also suggested that we meet again that evening, which was a relief; I feared that she might decided that a one night encounter was all that she wanted. It was Saturday, and I did suggest that she was in need of the weekend off after working so hard the previous days, but she said that she couldn’t let up at the stage she had reached. A few more days, and she was sure that she would have all the background that she needed and could start in her interviews. Whilst many would be conducted over the telephone, a good few were likely to entail travelling, especially to Glasgow and Edinburgh.

That evening, by unspoken but mutual consent, we ended up in bed together again, and this time Robin had brought an overnight bag and a change of clothes, so didn’t have to rush off at cock crow.

She did, however, once again return to the office, so I was at a loose end for the day and decided to drive to the coast at Lunan Bay and enjoy a walk on the sands and perhaps take some photos. In the event, there were a number of seals in evidence, so I added a few shots of them for my files – it is surprising how often, if you keep everything worthwhile and index it decently, you can find something to satisfy a commission without even having to stir from the house. In the old days of film and paper all my work would have been lost in the house fire, but modern digital processes meant that everything I have is always saved in several places, one of which is a series of external hard discs which I take around with me, so even after the fire, all I needed to access any of my work was to load the files onto a computer – and again, a laptop always travels with me.

Back at the hotel, I was idly flicking through photos for no particular reason other than to pass the time, and found myself looking at the picture which had started all this – the shot I had taken of Reese being met by Douglas outside Perth prison. I stared at the images of the two men, thinking about what they had done to me, my loved ones and my friends.

It was at that moment that I decided to ignore Inspector Cowell’s warning to leave the thing alone. Even if the police, in the form of Cowell, weren’t interested in bringing these two down, I was. For me, it was personal.

Chapter Nine – 2011, October

The next week or so saw Robin spending much of her time in Glasgow and Edinburgh, interviewing people for her forthcoming article, so I saw nothing of her until the beginning of October. The first was a Saturday, and at last Robin decided that a little time off was called for. I picked her up from her flat and we drove to Skye, crossing the bridge in glorious weather. Once on the island, it was just a short journey to one of my favourite hotels – the Talisker House hotel. It had been a favourite of Fiona’s as well, and I did have some initial reservations over staying there again with somebody else., but decided that life must move on.

We stayed there for the Saturday and Sunday, leaving after a substantial breakfast on the Monday morning.

The relaxing atmosphere, coupled with some invigorating walking, had done wonders for both of us. Robin 43

had been looking distinctly tired after the hard slog of the previous two weeks and I had been feeling frustrated and listless. Skye had worked its usual magic and we arrived back at Perth in the late morning ready for anything.

Robin went to her office and threw herself into the final preparation of her article; I went down the A9 to where the van swap had taken place. Cowell had said that the barn was owned by a local farmer who had no connection with either Douglas or Gordon, but I wanted to be sure.

The barn was near the Broom of Dalreach, where a few small cottages clustered by the turn-off from the A9, and it was on the door of the nearest of those cottages to the barn that I knocked.

The door was answered by a plump, pleasant faced woman whom I guessed to be in her mid-fifties. Grey hair was pulled back into a tidy bun and the smear of flour on one cheek indicated that I had interrupted her whilst baking. I gave her my most winning smile.

“Hello, I’m very sorry for disturbing you, but I was wondering if you know who owns that barn.” I indicated it with a vague wave of my hand. “Thing is, I’m looking for somewhere to store a caravan in the winter and that looks ideal, and it doesn’t look much used.”

She surveyed me for a moment, probably wondering what sort of idiot had turned up on her doorstep, then seemed to decide that I was harmless.

“Why, that belongs to Mr. McNab – he farms over the hill.” She waved in the general direction of a ridge about half a mile away.”I don’t think you’ll have any luck, mind. There’s a van gets stored there from time to time.”

I did my best to look disappointed, but in fact I was excited. If this lady, a near neighbour of the barn, knew that a van was there sometimes, how come Cowell seemed not to?

I thanked her profusely and made my escape.

Once back at the hotel, a quick perusal of the phone book turned up a W. McNab with an address that seemed to match my informant’s description of his location. I rang the number listed and was rewarded with a man’s voice at the other end of the line.

“Dalreach Farm.”

“Is that Mr. McNab?”

“Aye, who is this?”

“Mr. McNab, my name is Jamie Ferguson. I stay just outside Perth and I’m looking for somewhere to rent to house my caravan over the winter. I saw your big barn and wondered if it would be possible to rent it?”

“No, sorry, Mr. Ferguson, but it’s in use for the farm.”

“Oh, well, I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“Nae bother.” And at that he put the phone down. I was making progress. I could hardly have expected him to say ‘sorry, it’s used for drug smuggling’ but the fact that he had lied was a step forward. That barn clearly was not in regular use – the weeds in front of it bore testament to that simple fact.

So, how come Cowell had missed out with McNab as well- for I was sure I knew what the real use of the barn was, so surely Cowell and his team should have come up with something? I was beginning to get a very bad feeling about Inspector Cowell.

I did not know it at the time, but my telephone call to McNab had triggered another phone call, a phone call which was to have very serious consequences.

Back in the hotel I ruminated over what I had now learned. Cowell, for some reason, wasn’t telling the truth

– or at least not the whole truth. I wondered if he was being bribed – or even blackmailed - by Douglas or Gordon. On the face of it, it seemed unlikely, but stranger things had been known to happen and there was a lot of money sloshing around in this operation if my estimates were even remotely near the mark. Once again I found myself raging at George’s murder. He had had his finger on the pulse of everything that happened in Perth and the surrounding area. Hard working and bright though she was, Robin simply didn’t have anything like his contacts. Somehow, I vowed, I would avenge his murder.

I fell to thinking about the logistics of the operation once the transfer of the vans had been effected. What would have happened next. We had seen Reese drive away to that barn near his uncle’s house in Tibbermore and had assumed that the drugs were in the car, for why else would Reese have driven to that barn, but we 44

had proof that that was the way it had happened. What would have happened to the drugs after Reese left the barn? I could not imagine that, having gone to the trouble to take them to the bard, they would then have been taken to Douglas’ house – where would have been the point?

Cowell said that the barn had bourn no traces of drugs – but given the cock and bull story that he had fed to us, I was very reluctant to accept anything that the man said at face value.

So, a barn out in the sticks with a potential small fortune in drugs in it, but those drugs only had that value once they went onto the streets. Or did they? Right at the beginning, George had said that Douglas had been suspected of being involved in the cocaine trade only. Cocaine was the drug of choice for those with a lot more money than sense; they tended to use it but not the street addict’s favourite of heroin. As I had understood it from George, currently cocaine was pricier than heroin and the well-off idiots who used it were mostly too scared of the lethal qualities of much of the heroin on the streets, heroin which had been cut with anything from chalk to rat poison, to want to touch it. One tended to think – or at least I did – of drug dealing taking place on street corners between seedy sellers and desperate buyers, but for the affluent that was an unlikely scenario. Douglas was well-to-do, one only had to look at his house and his cars to know that. So was Gordon.

Were they avoiding the ‘street scene’ and supplying to a more selective clientele? And if so – how? I needed more information on the drug scene amongst the wealthy and stupid.

I turned to that source of all information, the Internet and after an hour or so of searching, I had the beginnings of an idea. For a start, there was a discouragingly short list of people convicted for using cocaine

– and only two of them were in the Tayside area; the others all came from Edinburgh or Glasgow. The names of the two from our area were initially completely unknown to me, so I researched them both more deeply.

Alisdair Browne, aged twenty-seven, unmarried, lived in a flat in Dundee in the exclusive McVicars Lane area. He had been arrested following a fracas at a night club and found to be in possession of cocaine. He was lucky; possession of cocaine carries a maximum prison sentence of seven years plus an unlimited fine (intent to supply, on the other hand, also carries an unlimited fine but also up to life imprisonment) but he was given just six months and a fine of £5,000. The other person was Georgina Laine, aged nineteen. She had been arrested after police were called to a party in a private house following noise complaints from neighbours. At the time she had lived with her parents in a large house just outside Perth, but was about to go to St. Andrew’s University. Presumably receiving leniency in view of her youth, she received a suspended sentence of twelve months and a fine of £2,000.

Obviously, in both cases the police had attempted to trace the source of the drugs; both Browne and Laine had claimed they had been supplied by ‘somebody at a party’ name unknown.

I wondered if it would be worth trying to talk with either, or both, of them. Was there any likelihood of me succeeding where the police had failed? Why should they talk to me at all?

Later that evening I talked over what I had found out with Robin. Like me, she doubted the two would talk to me, but she had another idea.

“The girl, Georgina Laine, was reported as being about to become a student at St. Andrew’s. I wonder if she made it or whether her conviction got her rejected? If she is there, perhaps my father might be able to find out more about her for us.”

“Would he do that?”

“You bet! It would have to be all on the qui vive but he and mum are both very down on the way students are targeted for this sort of thing – a lot of them succumb. Away from home for the first time, meeting a wider range of people than ever before in their lives, the sense of freedom – it can be a pretty tragic combination for some of them. A couple of years ago, one of mum’s brightest maths students was due to go up to St.

Andrew’s to read maths. Instead, she ended up dead in the toilet at a party from using adulterated heroin.

When she died she was just two weeks past her nineteenth birthday.”

“So, if we can get hold of her, how do we persuade her to talk to us when she wouldn’t talk to the police?”

“Don’t know – but the first thing is to see if she is still at Uni.”

Robin phoned her father straight away and explained what we wanted. He promised to do some checking and to come back to us the next day.

45

True to his word, George Jackson got back to Robin and his news was encouraging. Georgina Laine was indeed a student at St. Andrew’s; there had, apparently, been serious consideration given to rejecting her, but it had been felt that she had suffered enough and, following an interview with the head of her proposed faculty, she had been allowed to enrol at the University. Another interesting fact was that she had been in the same year at St. Leonard’s as Sandy Lowell, the promising student of Helen Jackson, Robin’s mother, the girl who had died of an overdose.

The next step was to try and talk to her, As a second year student she lived in rented accommodation in the town, so early that evening we knocked on the door of the house which she shared with three other girls.

She greeted us with surprise, but invited us in. A tall, slim girl with shoulder length raven black hair framing an attractive oval face dominated by startlingly deep blue eyes, she was dressed in the almost obligatory jeans and tee-shirt, this one bearing the legend ‘Elvis Lives!’ across her breasts, and Doc Martin boots.

She looked at us quizzically.

“What can I do for you guys?”

Robin took the lead.

“Georgina, we want your help.”

“In what way?”

“Do you remember Sandy Lowell?”

I could see Georgina’s immediate reaction, a mixture of fear and defiance.

“Yes, but what about her?”

“Then you know Sandy died of an overdose, yes?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, we have come to ask your help in trying to stop something like that happening to other students. You see, I am a reporter and, together with Martin here, my boyfriend, we think that we have found a dealer who specialises in targeting students.”

Georgina was clearly nobody’s fool. She looked at the two of us with unconcealed hostility.

“So you want to see if I can provide you with any leads, don’t you? Well, forget it. I said all that I am going to say to the police and that’s it. Now, I think that we are finished here, don’t you?”

“Georgina, please – anything you tell us will never be revealed. You must have seen that there have been reporters who have gone to jail rather than reveal sources – and I’m just as ready to do that as they were”

“Look, you don’t know anything about all this. Sure, I told the police nothing – and I had a bloody good reason for keeping my mouth shut.”

“You mean that you were threatened?”

“Too right I was. I was told in no uncertain terms that if I named names I would be cut up so badly that my own mother wouldn’t recognise me. And even if I had been willing to risk that – what would have happened? Nothing – that’s what. The dealers would keep on dealing. Oh, the police might get one or two of the small time people, but that would have been it.”

In my heart I could both understand what she was saying and knew that she was correct in her assumptions.

On the other hand, if we could tie in Douglas and Gordon, that would be a lot more than just a few small timers.

We tried the best we could, but Georgina was adamant; she absolutely refused to tell us anything. She was clearly very frightened at the prospect of giving any information, and in view of the threats she had received, I found it hard to blame her.

Alisdair Browne was the other possible contact, but in view of Georgina’s reaction, I had little hope of getting anything from either. Still, we were agreed that the attempt had to be made. Rather than just roll up at his door and hope, Robin phoned him and, very much to our surprise, he agreed to talk to us.

We arrived at McVicar’s Lane in the early evening. Browne lived on the top floor of a modern block and, after we had buzzed on the security entry system and been let in, a lift whisked us up to a modern, and clearly expensive, penthouse flat with views out over the Tay.

Alisdair Browne proved to be a tall, well built man. Twenty-seven at the time of his conviction, he was now about thirty. Short, fair hair was neatly styled and he had a healthy tan which accentuated blue eyes set 46

beneath a heavy brow. He was dressed casually but, like the flat, his clothes were clearly expensive, and what looked like a gold Rolex watch adorned his left wrist.

He welcomed us and offered a drink. As I was driving, I settled for a coke, but he and Robin had a glass of Chardonnay each.

We all sat down, and he surveyed us quizzically.

“So, what can I do for you? You,” his attention turned to Robin, “said that you wanted to get my comments on what the drug scene can mean to those caught up in it. It’s no secret that I was ‘caught up in it’ but my story is pretty mundane. I tried cocaine a couple of times, liked the buzz it gave me, bought a third line at that club and got caught in possession of it. I’m not stupid. A six month prison sentence, even if I was only actually inside for three, was a very rude awakening and I haven’t had the urge to use the stuff again – it cost me too much.”

“What actually happened?”

“Well, it just over two years ago. As I said, I had had cocaine a couple of times before – each time at a party in a friend’s house – oh, and not the same friend – and I had gone to this club and saw the guy I had bought the previous lines from there, so I decided on the spur of the moment to get some more. I bought it from him, intending to save it to use later, when there was a disturbance – four drunks tried to get into the club, a bouncer tried to stop them , there was a bit of a fight, nothing too serious, until one of them pulled a knife.

The bouncer was wounded, the fight spread to other staff members and before we knew it the police were there. I made the mistake of getting involved in the fight – tried to protect a guy who was getting thumped by one of the drunks. Trouble was, the police only saw me piling into somebody and swept me up along with the about seven or eight others whilst they sorted out who were the good guys and who the bad guys. They found the dope on me and that made me one of the bad guys.”

He paused briefly, then laughed bitterly.

“That will teach me not to try and be a Good Samaritan. As a result of that impulse to help, I lost my job, my fiancée left me, and I now have a criminal record. What really pisses me off is that the guy I bought the dope from was still there when the police arrived, but had kept well out f things and they never touched him – and he was loaded with the stuff.”

Robin broke into his tale.

“Did the police ask you who you got the stuff from?”

“Of course they did.”

“But presumably you didn’t tell them? Were you threatened?”

He hesitated briefly.

“No, not myself. What happened was that the police released me after a couple of hours – I think that they had their hands really full that night – with instructions to return to the police station to give a full statement the next day. It was already late – about four in the morning, so really it would have been the same day –

anyway, I got a phone call at about seven in the morning. Didn’t recognise the voice, but I was told that if I named any names they wouldn’t touch me, but that Susan, my fiancée, would get a face full of acid. They knew her name and where she lived, so I treated the threat very seriously indeed. So, when I was questioned at length that morning, I said that I bought the dope from someone I didn’t know by name at a party a few days before. They didn’t seem very interested, to be honest. Certainly they never followed up on the party –

which had actually happened –where I pretended I had bought the coke, at all.”

“Do you know the name of the man you bought from?”

“Oh yes, he’s called James Reese – not much later the sod mowed down some women whilst drunk driving.”

I caught my breath, and Browne caught my reaction.

“Does that mean anything to you?”

“Oh, yes. One of those women was my wife. She died.”

He looked appalled.

“Good God! I had no idea..”

“How could you – but you can see why I have an interest in all this.”

47

“Yes, I can. Look – when I had Susan to protect, I dare not say a word – but she left me anyway, so now I don’t give a shit about them. If I can help, just say the word. I’d love to get my own back on those bastards.

Oh, I know it was my own stupid fault – but if they hadn’t been around I couldn’t have given in to my stupidity and none of what happened would have occurred – I owe them. I owe them my job, and what was going to be my marriage, so if I can hit back in any way, I will.”

At last we seemed to have found a willing ally in our endeavours, so we told him everything we knew. In return, Alisdair told us a bit more about himself. The job that he had lost had been with an investment banking company and had been very well paid, hence the expensive life style. Now, he was self-employed and whilst the earlier affluence had been wisely invested so he was in no immediate danger of joining the breadline, his income had been greatly reduced and some of his rich man’s toys – a motor cruiser and an Aston Martin among them, had had to go, and he was gently advised that his continued membership of a couple of the more prestigious golf clubs in the area was no longer seen as appropriate by the relevant committees. He was now a self-employed financial advisor and was clearly good at the job as he had an expanding client list, but he admitted that he was having to work far harder than before for a lot less money.

At last we had a definite link between Reese and drugs, but that in itself was not enough. Reese was small fry compared to his uncle and we were still unsure of how much weight Gordon pulled in the set-up. We needed another step up the ladder in some way.

As we took our leave of Alisdair, with mutual agreement to keep in touch, I wondered, but not aloud, if it would be possible to get my hands on Reese and force some sort of confession out of him incriminating Douglas and Gordon. However, even if I were to achieve it, what weight would it bear? A lawyer would claim it had been obtained under duress, and the only probable outcome would be that I would find myself charged with kidnapping.

The more I thought about matters, the more depressed about it I became. I could see no way of really getting back at the men who had had killed Fiona and George. I was tempted to go back to Inspector Cowell and tell him that we now had a witness to Reese’s involvement in drugs, but in view of his attitude the last time we had spoken, I wondered if that would do any good. After all, Alisdair was a convicted drug user – I would not have been at all surprised if Cowell would simply dismiss his evidence as sour grapes or a falling out amongst the drug fraternity.

Chapter Ten – 2011, November

The days drifted from October into November, and at last my cottage was ready for occupation again. I had hoped to persuade Robin to move in with me, but she made it plain that she preferred to stay in her flat with the nearby amenities of Perth city centre rather than an isolated cottage where even to get a bottle of milk meant a nine mile round trip to the nearest shop.

We had made no progress in our crusade against Douglas and company and I could feel that Robin was losing heart in the endeavour. Her article on the economies of independence for Scotland had been published and had attracted a lot of interest, with the anticipated opposition from some quarters, support from others, very much in evidence and she was kept busy writing up an analysis of the various counter-arguments that the opposition had brought up. As a result I scarcely saw her for some three weeks and what had seemed to be the start of a long-term relationship seemed to be in danger of fizzling out.

It was therefore a pleasant surprise when, one evening when she phoned me. I had been idly looking through some of my photographs of the Highlands, seeking a single picture I wanted to offer to a publisher who had asked if I could provide an illustration for the dust jacket of a proposed book on the Munros – mountains over three thousand feet, so I gladly changed mental gear.

“Hi, Robin, nice to hear your voice again.”

“Martin, I have been very busy of late. And I want to apologise for seeing so little of you. I was wondering if you are free this weekend.”

“Certainly – nothing planned at all at the moment.”

48

There was a pause at the other end. I had been hoping that she would suggest a weekend together, so what she had to say came as a surprise.

“Martin, Councillor Gordon is making noises about me to my editor, and I have been told to either come up with something really concrete against him, or to drop the matter entirely. David, that’s my editor, has told me that unless I come up with something by the end of next week, The Scotsman will drop any interest in the crusade against drunk drivers.”

“Hang on a minute,” I objected, “you didn’t write anything about Gordon, just Reese and Douglas.”

“I know – but Gordon claims that I have been snooping around his business – the girl who gave me the details of his lorry fleet has been persuaded to say that I got it from her by intimidation, and he knows about us following his van. Gordon’s claim is that I am harassing his business and if I don’t stop doing it he will sue me and the paper.”

“That’s ridiculous –on what grounds? Unless and until you actually print something, what could he sue for?”

“After the News of the World fiasco, papers are very cautious about how reporters get information –

amongst other claims he made, he said that, and I quote ‘he had reason to believe that his phone had been hacked into.’”

“But that’s even more rubbish!”

“I know, but how do you prove a negative?”

“I see what you mean, but surely a paper like The Scotsman isn’t just going to roll over on the say-so of someone like Gordon?”

“There’s a lot of uneasy people in newspapers at the moment, worrying at any more scandals perhaps leading to the government, either Holyrood or Westminster, deciding to get involved. I’ve got nothing against Gordon that we can print and at the rate things are going, it doesn’t look as though I am likely to, so I want us to get together for what will probably be a last look at everything we have to see if there is any way at all that I can put something together.”

“OK, do you want to come out here?”

“Could you come to me? I’ve got other things to do as well on other stories, so I don’t want to be away from my flat.”

With some disappointment, I agreed, and that Saturday morning saw the two of us reviewing, yet again, all the evidence that we had accrued. Whilst we were doing so, I brought up a thought that had been niggling at me ever since our phone conversation.

“How come Gordon knows about us following his van? Only you, I, and the police know about it, surely?

Have you told anyone at the paper?”

“Only David, my editor, and only then not until after Gordon had made his complaint.”

We looked at each other with dawning awareness.

“There’s someone in the police who has tipped him off – must be.”

Robin bit her lower lip and nodded.

“Must be – so that makes it even more difficult. Thank goodness we didn’t tell the police about Alisdair.”

It was my turn to nod in agreement. Given what had happened to Sarah and George, if Douglas and Gordon had known about Alisdair’s change of heart, I felt sure that they would have been after him as well.

I developed my thinking.

“This is beginning to look very iffy. The police ignored pretty conclusive evidence against Reese driving despite being banned. Cowell’s team failed to come up with the fact that the barn we saw being used to switch vans was actually used for anything at all, even though that woman I spoke to knew that a van used it from time to time. The man who owns that barn – McNab – lied to me and said it was used by the farm, but Cowell failed, or said that he had failed, to find any link between McNab and what was going on. The whole thing stinks, Robin. I think that we are seeing police corruption somewhere in all of this.”

“So do I – but where?”

“Cowell,” I said firmly. “either him himself or someone on his team, but my money is on the Inspector himself. What do we know about him?”

49

“Nothing, really, but I can try and find out – but what can I look for? I don’t have the sort of contacts that George had – there is nobody I can go to and ask if Cowell is known, or even suspected, for being bent.”

Robin made an immediate start. She was able to log into her office systems from her home computer and ten minutes spent trawling through The Scotsman’s archives produced a slim dossier on Inspector Frank Cowell.

Born in 1965, so forty-six years old, he had been in his present post for nearly four years, having previously been a detective sergeant on the drugs squad in Glasgow. His move to Perth had been reported in the local papers at the time; the only subsequent mentions of him were relating to a couple of trials of drug dealers which he and his team had put out of business. He had been born in Perth and had started in the police there, but went to Glasgow after only a short time with the Tayside police force.

If Cowell was indeed corrupt, it made any move against Gordon and Douglas even more difficult as we couldn’t rely upon the police to act against them. Or could we?

“I’ve had a thought. Let’s assume Cowell is bent and we daren’t take anything to him. As he is in charge of the drug squad, and what we have been looking at is the drug side of things, that really ties our hands in many ways. However, he doesn’t have anything to do with investigating George’s murder. That’s Inspector Moss, the chap we met back at the beginning. Surely he won’t be bent as well, so assuming that he is honest, perhaps if we somehow concentrate on what happened to George and lay it on him, it might drag the drug side in as a side issue – and Cowell would have difficulty in doing anything about it.”

“Sounds good, but how do we go about it? The police found that both Douglas and Reese had alibis for the time George was murdered, so how do we get anywhere when they couldn’t?”

“We need to get hold of the thugs who actually killed George – and I’m pretty sure that they are the same men as the ones who tried to attack me.”

“So where do we find them?”

“Hopefully, through their car. When they came after me they were driving an elderly Mondeo. Perhaps it wasn’t owned by either of them, but it’s worth a try as a means of tracing one of them at least.”

I thought to the fracas in the Cairngorms. The Mondeo had been driven by the smaller of the two men – the one whom I had mentally tagged as ‘Thug Number One’ and whose face I had rearranged. It was now just over four months since he had lost that argument with me, so his face should just about be healed by now.

Pity.

A quick search revealed that the Mondeo was registered to one William Cowrie, with an address in Perth., so that evening I was parked outside Cowrie’s address in the hopes of catching sight of him. I had high hopes, as the Mondeo was parked outside the block of flats in which Cowrie lived. I was in luck; just after seven the man himself appeared. He ignored the Mondeo and walked briskly towards the town centre. I got out of the hire car I was using and followed him on foot. He made his way to the betting shop owned by Douglas and disappeared inside. Fortunately there was plenty of pedestrian traffic in the area so I was able to keep an unobtrusive watch on the premises. Cowrie remained inside for about half an hour and when he eventually emerged he hurried back towards his flat. I was surprised; I had assumed that he was out for the evening, but obviously not so. I followed him back to his front door and watched as he vanished inside, leaving me wondering what to do next. At least I had definitely identified him; there had always been the chance that the Mondeo wasn’t his.

I decided to wait a little longer and ten minutes later my decision was rewarded as Cowrie re-emerged. This time he got into the Mondeo and drove off, with me following. He drove to a block of council flats, one of several such blocks built in the 1960s and showing their age. He vanished inside the front door and I waited, wondering how I could work out which flat he was visiting.

In fact, it was easy. The communal entrance, lifts and stairs let out onto open walkways serving the front doors of each flat, so I could follow his progress without difficulty. The first front door upon which he knocked was on the second story; his knock was answered by a middle-aged woman who, after only the briefest of conversations, handed Cowrie something which he put in his pocket, turned away and made his way to the stairs again. He re-emerged on the fourth floor walkway and knocked on another door. At the greater height it was difficult to see exactly what was happening, but he spent considerably longer this time and I could vaguely hear raised voices. I made a mental note of the flat involved and waited for Cowrie to 50

make a further appearance on a walkway. He didn’t; instead, he came out of the front door, got into his car and drove away.

I waited a few minutes more, then made my way over to the block and entered the front door. As such blocks go, it was worse than some, but better than many. No discarded bottles or cans and the lifts actually worked.

So I made my way to the fourth floor flat Cowrie had visited and knocked on the door.

It was opened almost immediately by a young woman who started to speak even before it was fully open.

“Look, I told you, I can’t....”

She broke off in confusion. Clearly she had been expecting Cowrie to be at the door again and my presence totally threw her.

She was young, perhaps twenty, and normally attractive, with short blonde hair framing a pretty face from which light blue eyes surveyed me in confusion. She was small, no more than five feet tall and slimly built, but with a good figure accentuated by tight fitting blue jeans and tee-shirt with the word ‘Acapulco’ and a picture of palm trees and a beach across her chest. As I said, normally attractive, but her attractiveness was currently marred by a livid mark on her left cheek; she had clearly been slapped hard across the face in the very recent past.

“It’s all right,” I told her in my best reassuring tones, “I’m nothing to do with that man.”

She viewed me suspiciously.

“Then why are you here?”

“I’d like to talk to you about him, if you will let me.”

“Are you the police?”

“No, I’m not the police, but I think he is responsible for an attack on a friend of mine and I want to try and get the police interested in him.”

She was clearly both suspicious and worried, and I wished that I had Robin with me to give her some reassurance, but I was just going to have to do the best I could.

“Look,” I said, “I can quite understand that you don’t know me and have no reason to trust me, just coming knocking on your door. If I give you my card, would you ring me? I really do want to pick your brains about Cowrie.”

She looked up at me, thought for a moment, then said.

“You’d better come in.”

I was surprised, pleasantly so, that she had decided to take me at face value, and I followed her into a small entrance hall, and then into a kitchen, a kitchen so clean that it positively sparkled.

She waved me to a chair beside the small kitchen table, and as I sat down she sat opposite me.

“Let me introduce myself,” I said, “I’m Martin Graham. I stay outside Perth and I’m a self-employed photographer. As I said outside, I think that Cowrie beat up a friend of mine and I want to be able to get some proof of it. That’s why I am trying to find out as much as I can about him.”

She had relaxed considerably.

“If you can get that swine put away, Mr. Graham, you’ll be doing a lot of people a big favour. Oh, I’m Jenny, by the way, Jenny McCauley. So, what do you want to know?”

“I know he works for a man called Douglas and acts as a debt collector for him – and I believe he is also a violent thug who doesn’t hesitate to use violence on those who don’t pay up to his satisfaction. But that’s all I know – what else can you tell me?”

Jenny was clearly pleased to have someone to talk to and she unburdened herself at length.

Despite her age (and she was a bit older than I had thought at first sight – she was twenty-four) she was a mother and a widow. Her husband, Malcolm, had died in a road traffic accident at the beginning of the year.

He had been a self-employed builder and decorator and had earned enough for the three of them to live in a semi in one of the better parts of Perth. Their little boy, Timmie, was coming up to his second birthday when his father died and Jenny’s world fell apart. Neither Jenny nor Malcolm had parents around – hers had both died young, just three or four years earlier, whilst Malcolm’s had moved down to England and he had lost touch with them – Jenny didn’t say so, but I sensed a family quarrel of some sort. As a result, when 51

Malcolm died, she was left with no money and no prospect of getting a job because Timmie was much too young to leave and she couldn’t afford a child minder for him.

Social Services, she said, had been very helpful and very supportive, but, she said sadly, so slow. They had arranged the flat for her – the house was simply too big and in any case Malcolm had been in the course of doing work to it, work uncompleted and making it scarcely habitable until it was completed, hence the move, but by the time everything had been sorted she was flat broke and had gone to Douglas’ loan service.

“That was my big mistake,” she said bitterly, “until Malcolm died, I have never really had anything to do with money. Until we married I lived with mum and dad and dad took care of everything, Then I married Malcolm and he took care of everything. Then I was suddenly on my own and responsible for everything myself. Social services were working out my benefits and the like, but it was taking forever. I realise now that I should have gone to them, but I was horrified that I had bills I couldn’t pay so I took out the loan from the Douglas shop.

“I only borrowed a thousand, and the repayments seemed to be something that I could cope with from my benefits – but there was some sort of delay on my benefit payments and I couldn’t meet the first repayment. I went back to the shop and explained, and they were as nice as pie. This was always happening with Social Services, they told me. No worry, they would delay when I had to start repaying. Of course they would have to charge a bit of interest, but that was only fair, wasn’t it? And the way they said it, it all seemed OK. But it wasn’t.

“I still don’t understand how it worked out, but from borrowing a thousand pounds, despite having already paid them nearly that, I somehow owe over three thousand still. That man you saw...”

“Cowrie,” I added.

“Yes, him, he started coming round every week and I never had enough money to get ahead of what I owed.

I went to social services to see if they could help, but they said I had taken out the loan, so it was up to me to sort it out. To be honest, I think they just saw me as a stupid little girl who was too much trouble.”

She stopped, and sat there for a while, with a tear rolling unbidden down her cheek.

“At first, even with him coming round every week, at least it was amicable. But two weeks ago it changed.”

She stopped again, gathered her breath, then continued.

“Two weeks ago, he came round as usual. Again, as usual, I didn’t have enough money for him for me to able to get ahead of the interest. Before then, he had just sort of shrugged his shoulders and said something like he realised that I was doing the best I could. This time, however, it was different. He looked at the money I had handed him and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Jenny’ he said. And then he punched me. Just here.”

She pointed just below the base of her sternum.

“It hurt, it hurt so much that I couldn’t believe. For what seemed an age, I couldn’t get my breath – I honestly thought that I was going to die. At last I could breathe again and he stood over me – I had fallen to the floor-and said that I could expect a lot more of that if I didn’t get my act together. Then he just walked away. I still couldn’t believe it. Nobody had ever hit me before. Mum and dad didn’t believe even in smacking. Oh, OK, at school, like every other kid, I’d had the odd thump from another child in an argument, but nothing remotely like this.”

She stopped again, fighting to keep the tears at bay, then continued.

“Then there was tonight.” She indicated the mark on her cheek which, whilst still clearly visible, had faded to a degree.

“He said,” she hesitated and her cheeks coloured up, “he said that he would knock a hundred pounds off the bill if I went to bed with him.”

She lifted her chin, looked me full in the eyes, and continued.

“His exact words were ‘give me a good shag, hen, and I’ll knock a hundred quid off for you.” I told him that I wouldn’t go to bed with him if he was the last man on the planet, and he gave me the back of his hand.”

She touched the mark on her cheek.

“He hit you with his left hand, then?”

She looked puzzled.

52

“Yes, is it important? He had his tally book in his right hand.”

So Cowrie was ambidextrous, at least to a degree; when he had come after me with his baseball bat he had attempted to attack with his right hand dominant. A little nugget of information to file away for future reference.

“Not really; I just want to know which hand to watch for if I come across him in an aggressive mood.”

“So,” she said, helplessly, “what do I do now?”

“Have you thought of going to the police and reporting his attacks on you?”

“I daren’t – it would be my word against his and I’m worried he might turn on Timmie as well as me.

Timmie’s all I have...”

More tears trickled down her cheek and she fumbled in the pocket of her jeans for a handkerchief to wipe them away.

“Sorry.”

“Don’t be. So what are you going to do?”

“Somehow I will have to pay him as best I can. The trouble is, although I only borrowed a thousand, and I’ve paid off as much as I can afford, because of the extra interest they added when I couldn’t pay at the beginning, I just don’t have enough money to get ahead of what I owe – every week the outstanding balance goes up. I now owe over three thousand pounds.”

I’d heard of this sort of thing about loan sharks, but this was the first time I had actually come across it, and Jenny’s story made my blood boil.

“Have you thought of going away somewhere?”

“If I did that I would lose what I have here, and I’m sure that he would find me somehow – he actually told me not to think about running away once. He said that the Douglas organisation had contacts that would let them track me down.”

I wondered about that. Another link to a bent policeman? Or a contact in social services? Douglas was beginning to seem more and more like an octopus, with tentacles everywhere. It was at that point that I made up my mind about several things. My first priority, however, was to help this victimised young woman.

“Jenny, please don’t misunderstand me, but I am reasonably well off and I have very good reasons for wanting to get back at these people.” I hesitated, unsure of how much to tell her, then made up my mind and ploughed on.

“I am certain that it was Cowrie and a friend of his who beat a friend of mine so badly that he died. Another of the set-up, whilst driving whilst drunk, ran down my pregnant wife and killed her. So you see, I have very, very good reasons for wanting to do them harm. Now, you need to get out of their clutches as quickly as possible. I will pay off your loan so that you don’t need to worry anymore about them.”

She had been watching me with growing horror as I spoke; now she shook her head.

“No, I can’t let you do that – we’ve never met before, why should you pay for my mistakes?”

I was sure that she was worried at the idea of being beholden to me in such a way, and I could well understand her concern.

“I can understand your feelings, but believe me, it is worth every penny to me just to get someone out of their clutches.”

I looked at my watch and saw with surprise that it was after eleven.

“Look, tomorrow I will call round with the money in cash and a friend of mine will go with you to the loan shop and make sure that they don’t try any funny business. Will you do that?”

She sat in silence for some moments, then slowly nodded.

“My friend is a reporter for The Scotsman, and she knows all about what is going on. You can trust her.”

So that is what we did. The next day I drew out the cash and Jenny, accompanied by Robin, paid off what she owed. Robin had queried my decision to pay Jenny’s debt off, but when I explained that I now had another witness to what was going on, and regarded that as worth every penny of what it was costing me, she saw the merit in what I was doing. Slowly, we were building some sort of evidence against Douglas even though it was still very tenuous at this stage.

53

Chapter Eleven – 2011, December.

It was now the first of December; 2011 was fading into history, but I was determined to complete my campaign against Douglas and his cohorts before the year was out. Robin had, reluctantly, accepted her editor’s diktat that she had not made enough progress on what we were attempting to justify spending more of the paper’s time on it, so although I saw her for dinner a couple of times, we were continuing to drift apart. That was another reason for my determination to reach a speedy conclusion. One thing that she did do, however, was to check on Jenny McCauley a couple of times and reported back that Jenny was doing all right now that the spectre of Cowrie had been lifted.

It was a Thursday and I was now ready to implement the first stage of my concluding gambit. I knew where Cowrie lived, as indeed I knew where Douglas, Gordon and Reese lived, but I knew nothing about his companion in the murder of George. It was time to find out.

I had made some preparations. The previous week I had gone to Glasgow on the train. I had found an advert for the private sale of a small van – an elderly Ford Escort – which I examined carefully and then bought for cash. I gave the seller a false name and address and drove the vehicle home. For the last few days it had been parked behind my cottage, out of sight of any passers-by. I had also taken a further precaution. A careful application of black tape had changed the apparent registration, so if anyone – namely the police – had any reason to try and trace it, they wouldn’t be led back to the chap from whom I had bought it, but would go knocking on the door of a perfectly innocent man owning a similar van in Inverness.

Darkness comes early to Perth in December and it was full night when I parked near to Cowrie’s flat just before six in the evening.

From previous reconnaissance I knew that I could expect him to leave the premises at around seven to do a round of his debt collecting duties and that he was likely to return around nine. He then sometimes, but not always, went out again, presumably to a pub or to meet up with his criminal associates. Tonight was going to be different.

Sure enough, at just before seven o’clock, I saw Cowrie leave via the front door, get into his car, and drive away. I gave him fifteen minutes in case he suddenly realised that he had forgotten something, then made my own way to that front door.

It opened straight into a common entrance hall,, with lifts and stairs opposite. Cowrie’s flat was on the third floor. Unwilling to risk meeting anyone using the lift, I took to the stairs, and moments after I let myself in, courtesy of a course on illegal entry that one of my soldiers had given me back in Army days.

I went through the flat very carefully, finding several items that Cowrie would not want others to know about. Foremost amongst them was a large stash of cocaine and a pistol. The latter I found in the bedside cabinet; Cowrie would appear to suffer from either paranoia or lived in a state of justifiable caution, which I had no means of knowing.

The pistol was a Colt .45 automatic, the famed model 1911 which has served thousands of American servicemen through the two world wars and Korea and which even now, one hundred years after its introduction, is still a favoured firearm for many American civilians and some of their police forces. I checked it over thoroughly. It was loaded and I emptied the magazine, checking that the spring which fed rounds to the chamber was working properly. There was also a spare magazine and a small cardboard box, originally holding twenty-five rounds of ammunition for the pistol. Eleven were missing; allowing for the eight in the pistol itself, it looked as though it might have been fired three times on some occasion or occasions, but had subsequently been cleaned. As far as I could tell, and I have considerable experience of small arms, the weapon was in good working order. I reloaded it and slipped it into my belt at the small of my back.

Once I had satisfied myself that there were no further weapons in the flat that Cowrie might be able to use, I settled down to wait.

An hour passed, then another and another. At last I heard a key in the door. I held my breath anxiously.

During my surveillance, Cowrie had always returned to the flat alone. My nightmare scenario was that this night of all nights he might have somebody with him. I pulled the ski mask down so that only my mouth and eyes would be visible and drew the Colt, resting it on my thigh.

54

Cowrie came into the room, snapping on the light as he did so, and came to a halt as he saw me sitting at my ease in one of his chairs. I raised the Colt and aimed it at his face.

“Come in, Billy, and close the door behind you. Oh, and no sudden moves.”

He closed the door and advanced a pace or two into the room.

“Far enough, Billy. Sit down in that armchair.”

Ashen faced, he did as I bid him.

“Now, Billy, you and I are going to have a talk, and whether you survive the night depends on what you have to tell me. Now, first question. Do you still work for Adam Douglas? Oh, and don’t lie – it’s a test because I already know the answer.”

He was recovering from the shock of finding me in his sitting room and simply glared at me.

“Billy, we both know that I’m not going to shoot you unless you absolutely make me. This cannon,” I waved the Colt negligently, “makes far too much noise to be used here. It would be heard all over the place.

However, I do have other means of persuasion.”

So saying, I rose to my feet, tucking the Colt back into my belt as I did so.

Cowrie was fast, I’ll give him that. As the Colt disappeared from view he hurled himself from the chair. Fast is useful, but not much use by itself; you need knowledge and experience to back it up and Cowrie had insufficient of both.

I half side-stepped, allowing his momentum to carry him forward into the path of my right leg as I swung it in an arc into the space he had just invaded. My heavy boot, rubber-soled for quiet progress, but heavy and hard enough to make a formidable weapon, connected with his kidney, and he went down in agony, all aggression temporarily driven from his thoughts.

As he lay gasping on the floor, I stamped on his left knee, doing a fair amount of damage to the tendons and ligaments there. I stepped back and looked at him.

“That wasn’t very bright, now was it, Billy? Now, get back on the chair and settle down. Like I said, I want to talk to you, not take you apart.”

With some difficulty, he resumed his place in the chair, and I repeated my question.

“So, are you still working for Adam Douglas?”

“Yes.”

“You see, that was easy, wasn’t it? Now, the next question. Who was the big bloke with you in the Cairngorms and where can I find him?”

He hesitated, but only for a moment.

“He’s Liam O’Connor. He stays in Methven, but I don’t know his address. I always meet him either at Douglas’ house or one of the shops.”

His answer had the ring of truth to it; Methven was a small place and I had no doubt of my ability to find O’Connor there.

“O’Connor – is he Irish, then?”

“His folks were – they came to Glasgow to get away from the troubles, then Liam moved this way.”

“Right. Now, Douglas has got a couple of other heavies working for him – they stayed at his place a while back – who are they, and where can I find them?”

“They’re Graham Anderson – he’s the redhead – and Dougie Carlyle. Don’t know where they live, mind – I only meet them at the shops.”

“Why were they staying with Douglas back in the summer?”

He looked embarrassed.

“Adam reckoned that after Liam and me failed to sort you out, you might come after him. Liam and me was out of action for a while, so he had them stay with him for a couple of weeks.”

That made sense, but I was disappointed not to know where I could find the other two heavies; it meant more surveillance and more following, neither of which I was keen on. The more I did that sort of thing, the more chance there was of being identified.

“So who is at the Douglas house now? What about his son, Malcolm – where’s he now?”

“It’s just Adam and his missus at the house now. Malcolm’s still down in the Smoke.”

55

I reckoned that I had got as much information out of Cowrie as I could expect, so it was time to move on to the next phase of my plan.

“Right, Billy. Now, what would you normally be doing tomorrow?”

“I’d go to the loan shop about ten or so, see if there was anything needed doing during the day, then round to the betting shop – same thing. I usually do an evening round of people what owes us – most of them pay up OK.”

I’ll bet they do, I thought, thinking of Jenny McCauley.

“And what about your mate O’Connor?”

“Same sort of thing – day time to catch those not at work, then in the evening to catch up with anyone not in during the day. Look – what is all this?”

“So what will happen when you don’t turn up?”

His eyes widened in alarm.

“Whatya mean, I don’t turn up?”

“Quite simple, Billy – you’re leaving Perth. In fact, you are leaving Scotland altogether. Now I don’t mind where you go, or what you do, but if I ever see you again, I’ll kill you. You remember George Kirk, I hope?”

He passed his tongue nervously over his lips.

“Yes.”

“George was a very good friend of mine, Billy – and you and Liam killed him. Be grateful I don’t do the same to you right now. No, you are going away. In fact, I’ve already packed a bag for you.”

I pointed to the corner of the room where, true enough, a large suitcase stood against the wall.

“It wasn’t me what killed your mate – it was Liam. We were only supposed to give him a beating to remember us by, but he kicked Liam in the balls and Liam lost it – smashed him on the head.”

I wondered if Liam was the sole killer; actually, I doubted it, as George had taken several blows to the head and probably from both sides as though two assailants, standing one to his left, the other to his right, had landed blows. That, however, was largely academic.

“Don’t worry, Billy. I’ll be talking to friend Liam soon. Now, time for you to leave.”

“How? Do you want me to drive away?”

“No, Billy – in your car you might get second thoughts – think that if you all ganged up you wouldn’t need to worry about me carrying out my threat. No, first off you are coming with me. So, pick up your suitcase and we’ll leave .”

He got painfully to his feet, limping badly from the effects of the stamp on his knee, and picked up the case. I followed him through the door and he made for the lifts.

“No, Billy, not that way. We’re using the stairs – I don’t want us bumping into any of your neighbours.”

We made it out to the road, and to my anonymous little van, without meeting anybody. I unlocked the van and opened the rear doors.

“Right, Billy – in you get.”

He turned towards me, perhaps intending to protest, but I gave him no chance to demur. A quick push on his chest and he staggered back. The floor of the van caught him at mid-calf height and he fell over backwards into the body of the van. I followed him in, landing a solid blow to his solar plexus and as he fought to regain his breath, turned him over onto his front, pulled his arms behind his back and fastened his wrists together with a plastic cable tie I had brought for that very purpose. A second tie secured his ankles in similar fashion and that I gagged him with a length of duct tape over his mouth. He could breathe, but that was about all apart from creating a noise by kicking at the van’s panelling.

I was, as I had said, determined that Cowrie would leave Scotland – but not just Scotland.

I drove the van back to my cottage. I had no wish to put the final stage of my plan for Cowrie into motion during the night. I left him in the van overnight, caring nothing for the discomfort he would be suffering.

After breakfast the next morning, I checked on my prisoner, wrinkling my nose at the stench in the van. He was awake and clearly unhappy with his lot. He had cause to be and would soon have cause to be even more unhappy. I drove the van out of my gate and turned left for the A9, joining it at Luncarty and heading north. I 56

drove for some fifty miles to the little village of Dalwhinnie, were I left the main road and headed into the Cairngorms, following the route I had used to ambush Cowrie and O’Connor (as I now knew them to be) back in the summer. Now it was December and there was snow on the ground, but fortunately the winter had, to date, been much milder than the savage winters of 2009 and 2010. The snow and ice then would almost have defeated any attempt to get up the rough track in the van – the Land Rover might well have struggled – but this December the going was easy.

Once I had made it to the same spot as in the summer, I braked to a halt and pulled Cowrie out of the back of the van. Bending over him, I ripped the duct tape from his mouth, eliciting a cry of pain. Rolling him over onto his stomach, I cut the cable ties securing his wrists and ankles and watched as he slowly took in his surroundings.

He glared savagely at me.

“What now, you fucker?” he snarled.

I pointed to the sheer drop just a few yards away.

“I’m going to throw you down there.” I told him. His belligerence faded immediately.

“No, don’t do that – I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll testify against O’Connor – Douglas too, if you like.”

“Oh, I’d like that very much indeed. Trouble is, with the screwed up legal system we have, it’s never work.

I’d end up inside for wrongful imprisonment or whatever and you and your mates would be laughing your heads off. No, Billy, it’s time that you had to face up to the consequences of what the two of you did – oh, and don’t worry about Liam O’Connor – I’m going after him as well, so you won’t be lonely in Hell.”

He backed away from me – but that only took him a bit nearer to the drop.

“Now come on Billy – at least you have a chance. I’ve set you loose. You never know what your luck might be. You might be able to throw me down there.”

“I’ve been tied up for hours. I can hardly move my arms and legs. What sort of chance is that?”

“A much better one than you and O’Connor gave George Kirk – two of you with baseball bats against a man with no weapon at all.”

I moved towards him, expecting him to make some sort of move to attack me, but instead he took another pace back, and then another. He had his attention fixed on my eyes; doubtless he saw death in them, for he took another step back, without any heed of where he was.

And he fell backwards over the edge.

He gave one terrified scream and then I heard him crashing down through the small shrubs and heather that somehow clung to the precipitous slope.

Then there was silence.

I had reconnoitred the area more thoroughly since my summer confrontation with Cowrie and O’Conner, and knew that there was a path down to the burn below. Peering over the edge I could see Cowrie’s body in plain view, so I made my way down to him.

He was dead; the fall had done a lot of damage to him, including a massive head wound that must have been instantly fatal. I dragged him away from the edge of the burn into a small hollow where the rapid waters had undercut a softer area of the bank, and tumbled him into it, wedging his body in place with some large stones. The area was desolate, isolated even by Highland standards, even though only a few miles from the hustle and bustle of the busy A9. With luck he might never be found. Snow was forecast for the next few days and if that forecast was accurate his tomb would be further concealed.

I climbed back up the path, got into the van and drove back to the main road. Instead of heading for home, however, I drove further north, another sixty miles or so to Inverness, where I left the van, with the keys in the ignition, the doors unlocked, and the number plates wrenched off, in a side street near to the railway station and returned to Perth by train. From the railway station a taxi took me to Luncarty and I then walked the three miles along the B8063 to my cottage. It was nearly dark by the time I reached it at just after three in the afternoon and I went inside with a feeling of satisfaction.

I felt no remorse over Cowrie. A cold-blooded murderer, a man who beat up helpless women, I felt that in getting rid of him I had done the world a good turn. I was particularly pleased that I hadn’t actually had to lay a finger on him at the end; his own cowardice had led him to take that fateful backward step. Who 57

knows, if he had fought it out, he might just have got lucky. It might have been me hurtling down that sheer drop to oblivion.

Now it was time to move on, to plan how to cope with my next target, the brutish O’Connor.

In the event, finding him could hardly have been easier. Now that I had his name and general location, all I had needed to do was look in the local phone directory. Methven is a small place; there was only one L.

O’Connor listed and the next day I cruised past his house, which proved to be a small, detached two storey cottage on the outskirts of the actual village.

It had immediate problems for me. Roaming the pocket handkerchief front garden were two Alsatians.

Compounding the problem was the fact that there was also a woman in the garden with them. I had no intention of risking harm coming to any third party, whether human or canine, so a direct assault on the place was completely out of the question.

That meant that I was somehow going to have to waylay him away from his home. I had given some previous thought to such a possibility and had concluded that my best chance would be to ambush him whilst he was on his rounds collecting debts for Douglas. First, I had to know what vehicle to look out for. Second, I had to identify it in Perth before he left on his rounds.

When I had driven past his house I had seen that, although it lacked a garage, it did have a bit of hard-standing where a vehicle clearly stood when the lord and master was home. Accordingly, early the next morning I drove through Methven again. Sure enough, a vehicle stood in front of O’Conner’s house. To my surprise it was the aged Transit that had alternated with Cowrie’s Mondeo when they were trailing me back in the summer.

I drove home and spent the rest of the day making my preparations.

Just before seven that evening I was parked across the road from the Douglas loan shop, attracted by the sight of O’Connor’s Transit parked right outside it.

Ten minutes later O’Connor emerged from the shop, got into the van and drove away, with me following in yet another hired car, this time a Vauxhall Corse in anonymous dark blue. O’Connor followed a circuitous route round Perth’s poorer areas. Each time he stopped I reviewed the situation, discarding one after another as too open, too overlooked, too brightly lit; at last, however, he stopped outside a block of flats similar to that in which Jenny McCauley lived, but in a poorer state of repair. The streetlight opposite the entrance door was out, smashed by vandals to whom, for once, I gave thanks. I drove past, turned the corner, and parked.

Locking the car and hoping that it would still be there when I returned, I hurried back.

I was only just in time. O’Connor was coming out of the entrance to the flats as I hurried towards him. I had surmised when he and Cowrie tried to set about me back in the summer that O’Connor, as I now knew him to be, but whom I had mentally tagged ‘Thug number two’ at the time, was not exactly the sharpest blade in the toolbox, and his slow reaction as I came towards him justified my assumption.

A couple of minutes later and the first stage was over. Taken totally by surprise, O’Connor had been felled with ease and now reclined, unconscious and with wrists and ankles secured by cable ties and mouth gagged with duct tape, in the back of his own van. The most difficult part of the exercise had been hauling his seventeen or eighteen stone off the ground and into the back of the Transit.

I drove to my cottage, parked the Transit out of sight, and returned to Perth by taxi, which I had drop me five minutes walk from where I had parked the Corsa. I was in luck – it was still there and unharmed, so I drove home again without further incident.

The following morning I made an early start; dawn was only just breaking as I turned off the A9 at Dalwhinnie once more. Dawn in the Cairngorms in December is, however, not until around quarter past eight, with actual sunrise a further half hour later. By that time there is a fair amount of traffic on the main roads, including the A9, which served my purpose quite well. A lone vehicle was more likely to be noticed and remembered than one which was merely part of the morning rush. In addition, I needed some daylight once I was going to my secret place as headlights blazing away would have been seen for miles and might just be remarked upon.

58

I stopped the Transit where, just the day before last, I had stopped with my briefly owned Escort van and pulled O’Connor out.

I undid his bonds and removed the duct tape from his mouth to be greeted by a string of mindless obscenities. I waited patiently, and at last he stopped for breath. He glared savagely at me and spoke coherently for the first time.

“I’m going to tear you apart, you bastard.”

I smiled at him.

“You are welcome to try.”

He lurched towards me, still handicapped by the effects of being tied hand and foot for so long, but at least displaying brute courage, unlike his late colleague. He came too rashly, lunging out to embrace me in a bear hug, confident that his size and strength would prevail. Clearly, he had forgotten the outcome of our previous meeting – or if he remembered it, was paying it no heed.

I transferred my weight to my right leg, swaying right as I did so, and he followed the movement. A mistake.

I lashed out with my left foot, aiming at, and connecting with, his left kneecap and he went down like a sack of cement as the leg collapsed under him. I kicked him in the side of the head as he attempted to get to his hands and knees and he went down again.

He had courage, one had to give him that. Despite the pain and disorientation he must be suffering, he once more attempted to rise. I kicked his legs from under him and dragged him by his collar to the sheer drop. At the last moment he realised what was about to happen and screamed for mercy, but I had none to give and tumbled him over the edge.

Ten minutes later I had secured his corpse with that of Cowrie and was back in the Transit. As before, I drove to Inverness and left it, unlocked and with the keys in the ignition, near the railway station. The Escort, I note without surprise, had gone. As before, I returned home by train, taxi and Shank’s pony. I had left the number plates on the vehicle this time,; I had no concern about the Transit being traced – it would add to the confusion that both Cowrie and O’Connor had disappeared and that the latter’s transport had been found in Inverness.

As I poured myself a glass of Scotch, I reflected upon what I had done. I knew many people – perhaps most

– would abhor my actions. I had no right, they would claim, to act as judge, jury and executioner. On top of that, Britain had long abolished the death penalty even for the most heinous of crimes. What right did I have to impose it.

It was an attitude with which I had little sympathy. Those same people were presumably quite happy with the thought that, as a serving soldier, I had killed my country’s enemies and, as an officer in charge of other soldiers, had ordered them to kill our countries enemies. An odd outlook. To the average man or woman in the street, the likes of Cowrie and O’Connor were a far greater threat to their health and well-being than the soldiers of Saddam Hussein I and my men had killed.

George had been avenged, not that it did him, nor his father much good. George was still dead; David Kirk was still without his son.

In a way, I was more happy for the likes of Jenny McCauley; no longer would those two particular thugs come knocking on their doors with menaces. I realised that others would take their place in time, but at least the scum on top of the pool had been thinned a little.

Now I had to decide what to do about the remaining villains. Douglas’ two remaining heavies – Anderson and Carlyle – had done nothing to incur my wrath, unless it was one or other, or perhaps both, of them who had burned down my cottage. Douglas, to my mind, was equally culpable with Cowrie and O’Conner. It was, after all, Douglas who had ordered them to attack George. Reese – again I had a score to settle, and that was the biggest score of all. George had been my good friend, but Fiona had been my wife. Gordon remained an unknown quantity; obviously he was involved in the drug trafficking, but whether he had a finger in the other pies I currently had no way of knowing.

I wanted to hit at Reese next. I had been tempted to leave him until last, to make him realise that a Nemesis was on his trail as the others disappeared, leaving him alone, but there was always the danger that I would slip up somehow and, in pursuing Douglas and perhaps Gordon, I would let Reese slip through my fingers.

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That was something that I had absolutely no intention of allowing to happen. One thing I needed to take into account. Whilst there was no obvious link between myself and Cowrie and O’Connor, the police, in the persons of Moss and Cowell, were perfectly aware of my feelings about Reese and Douglas. Given my misgivings about Cowell, it was imperative that I leave no trace of my involvement in anything that happened from now on. I couldn’t repeat my performance with Cowrie and O’Connor; my ‘body store’ was too small to accept another corpse, and to just leave him in the open, even in that desolate spot, chanced early discovery.

I knew where he lived; it was in a block of flats, the scene of my filming him driving away, the film which had failed to convince Inspector Cowell. Unlike Cowrie’s flat, which had offered quite easy access, this block was similar to, though rather up-market from, the block in which Jenny McCauley lived, with all the flats on each floor having an open walkway in front of them. Anyone calling at the front door of one of the flats could be seen from the street, and was also totally exposed to anyone in a neighbouring flat who happened to open their front door, and as each flat also had a window onto the walkway, could also be seen walking along it. As a scene for an abduction, it was an absolute nightmare.

That left grabbing him off the street somewhere, or finding a location in which he would be isolated and which would itself be secluded. The problem was that I had no idea where such a favourable location might be found.

I needed to work out where Reese might be at any given time, whether he had some sort of fixed routine.

And then it hit me. Reese had been involved in the drug switch the previous month. Now that I had failed to get the police to believe what had happened, might Douglas and company simply go back to their routine? It was now the fourth of December. The day after next would be the sixth when, if normal service was being resumed, Reese would drive from the switch point near the Broom of Dalreach and take the drugs to the barn in Tibbermore that they had used for short term storage.

As a result, in the evening of the 6th I had set my trap. I was fully aware that it might be a total waste of time; after my approach to the police, Douglas and Gordon might have decided on a totally different modus operandi. They might be miles away from where I hoped to intercept Reese; they might have decided to have more than just the one man in the car. They might... the possibilities were almost endless; I just had to go with my best guess as a starting point.

The barn was fairly well shielded from the road and the road itself was narrow, bordered by a ditch and hedge on each side. There was nowhere to park a vehicle without it sticking out like a sore thumb, but I had not parked anywhere near. My car was over a mile away, parked in a small pull-in and I had made my way over the fields as dusk was falling. Last time Reese had reached the barn around six o’clock. At six o’clock in September it had still been reasonably light; in December it was pitch dark, which is why I had made my progress over the fields some hours before.

I was now holed up in the hedge, about fifty yards from the barn, with a clear view of it. All I could do was wait and hope.

Sure enough, just after six a car pulled into the entrance to the barn. That was the good news. The bad news was that there were two men in it. One was Reese; the other was the red-headed heavy whom Cowrie had identified as Graham Anderson. Now what? Taking them both on was out of the question. Although I had no doubt of my ability to cope with them both – the presence of the Colt tucked in my waistband helped assure that –I wanted Reese on his own.

Anderson got out of the car - a Mondeo, not the Audi Reese had driven in the past – and opened the barn doors. The Mondeo disappeared inside and one of the men closed the barn doors behind it. I waited in the dark; after ten minutes or so, Anderson opened the barn doors, went back inside, and a couple of minutes later emerged again, this time at the wheel of a rather scruffy Land Rover, almost as old and scruffy as my own. That meant that Reese and the Mondeo were still inside. The cocaine might still be there, or alternatively it might have gone in the Land Rover with Anderson.

I left my hiding place and cautiously made my way to the barn, slipping the Colt from my belt as I did so.

The barn doors had been closed again, but I could see light leaking round the edges of them. The doors seemed to be the only way into the barn, so that was the way I was going to have to go in; I could not risk 60

waiting for Reese to come out in case he did so in a way that evaded me, perhaps by opening the doors by driving the Mondeo at them. Unlikely, but patrolling Iraqi streets had taught one extreme caution, no matter how low the apparent risk.

I had got to within five yards of the doors when the nearer one opened outwards, concealing whoever was opening it from my view. The single door was easily wide enough to permit a car to drive through without the need for the second door to be opened. I quickly stepped round the door, the Colt held in front of me.

Reese looked at me in astonished horror.

“What the fuck...” he started.

“Quiet.” I ordered, “Step back from the door.”

Still clearly in a state of shock, he obeyed, backing away until further retreat was blocked by the front of the Mondeo.

“Turn round,” I said, “Place your hands on the bonnet of the car and spread your legs.”

He turned around but stopped short of leaning over to place his hands on the bonnet of the car.

“Look, what is this?”

I stepped a little nearer, but not near enough to be within reach of hand nor foot.

“We are going to have a wee chat, Jimmy, but first spread your feet out like I tell you, or this is going to hurt

– a lot.”

Slowly he obeyed me, and I slipped the Colt back into my belt and frisked him for weapons, finding none.

He started to relax as I finished searching him, so it came as a surprise when I swept his legs from under him, sending him tumbling face down on the concrete floor. I followed him down, with my knee in the small of his back as I pulled his arms back and secured his wrists with a cable tie, then did the same with his ankles.

I turned him over and pulled him into a sitting position against the car. He glared at me.

“What’s all this about?”

“Don’t you remember me, Jimmy?”

He shook his head.

“Well you should, you bastard. Four years, nearly five years, ago, drunk driving, mowing down pedestrians –

ring any bells?”

He began to look worried – very worried.

“That’s right, Jimmy. I’m Martin Graham. You murdered my wife and now I am going to pay you back for her death.”

He was sweating now.

“Look, mate, that was an accident. I never meant to hurt anyone, it was just bad luck, and I’ve done me time for it.”

“Two years inside? You think that’s enough for what you did? Oh, no, Jimmy. I’ve got a much more appropriate punishment planned for you. Now, I’m going to leave you here for a few minutes whilst I fetch my van, then you and I are going to take a little journey.”

He was still pleading for mercy as I left the barn, closing the door behind me after switching off the lights. It would be more than a few minutes before I returned in the van, another anonymous purchase like the one I had used to dispose of Cowrie. I could have saved time by driving the Mondeo to my parking spot, but I had a very high regard for the police scene of crime specialists and there was always the danger of them finding traces of my presence in the car and I had every expectation of being a subject of interest to the police when it was realised that Reese had disappeared.

It took nearly quarter of an hour to walk to the van, a torch my only aid in the pitch black of an overcast countryside night. I drove back carefully and arrived just in time to see the Mondeo come screeching out of the entrance, turn away from me, and go tearing down the road towards the A9 and safety.

I was horrified. What could have gone wrong? I had left Reese secured; the cable ties had worked with Cowrie and O’Connor – I knew how strong they were and how cruelly they cut into your flesh if you attempted to break them.

More in hope than anything else I followed the Mondeo, but at a more cautious pace; I had enough problems mounting up without breaking my neck by over-cooking my speed on one of the sharp corners in the lane. I 61

had only driven quarter of a mile or so when, entering a rare short straight stretch, I saw that there had been an accident in front of me, the road blocked by two vehicles which had apparently met head on. One of them was Reese’s Mondeo. The other was a far larger vehicle.

The John Deere 7200R tractor is a big machine. Just over eight feet wide, ten feet high and seventeen feet long, it weighs some ten tons. It isn’t fast, but it certainly has presence, and is a fairly frequent sight in rural Scotland. Hamish Jackson had been moving bales of hay all afternoon, working by the tractor’s powerful headlights as darkness fell. Finished at last, he had turned out of the field and had made no more than a hundred yards along the lane before a car, driven at maniacal speed, drove full tilt into the front of the tractor. Seated high above the impact point, Hamish was shaken by the collision, but unharmed. When he recovered himself enough to climb down and look at the crumpled remains of the car which had hit him, it was clear that its occupant had not been so lucky. Hamish paled at what he saw in the driver’s seat, but his years in the Royal Marines had hardened him beyond the norm to such sights. He got out his mobile phone and rang for the emergency services.

I had stopped as soon as I saw what had happened and made a very careful three point turn and headed away from the scene.

The next day the local news carried the story of the tragic accident which had cost the life of one James Reese, aged 26, of Perth. Driving too fast on a narrow lane, he had been unable to stop in time when meeting an oncoming tractor. He had been pronounced dead at the scene by the paramedics. Police wished to speak with the driver of a vehicle, type unknown, which had been seen near the scene of the accident but which had driven away. They could wish all they wanted.

It was ironic that Reese should die in such a way; his escape from the barn puzzled me, but not for long. The cable ties I had used to secure him were from a different batch from those that I had used on Cowrie and O’Connor and when I inspected them fully, I discovered that they were faulty. They tightened down all right and appeared secure, but it was possible to make them slip open by employing enough force, and Reese would have used all the strength he possessed to escape.

From my point of view, things could not have worked out better. Reese as a missing person would have made me a suspect; I was confident that I could have survived any police investigation, but I was grateful that the prospect had disappeared. Reese, driving in defiance of his ban, dead in a road traffic accident for which he was totally to blame, had no link to the would be avenging Martin Graham.

A few days had gone by; it was the 11th and I was mooning around the cottage, feeling down. The previous evening Robin and I had had dinner probably for the last time. She had been offered a new job at The Scotsman’s headquarters in Edinburgh as an economic correspondent – one of two, with the senior one due to retire in the near future. It was a considerable advancement for her and she was thrilled at the prospect. I congratulated her – what else was I to do? We had, in any case, been drifting apart over the last few weeks.

Her early enthusiasm for tracking down a story involving drugs and a leading citizen had faded in the light of the exposure her financial piece had gained her and she was clearly headed for pastures new, pastures I would not be sharing.

I was alone again, and not enjoying the prospect.

It was something of a relief when the doorbell rang. Too late for the postman, so who might it be?

It proved to be Inspector Moss, who asked if he might come in and talk to me. I stepped back and waved him inside.

“So, Inspector, what can I do for you?”

“Mr. Graham, I suppose you saw the reports of the death of James Reese?”

“Yes, I did, and I won’t pretend to be sorry about it. I only wish that the scumbag had killed himself years ago, then my wife would still be alive and so would our child. That bastard took everything from me, he even killed our dog, so I’m glad that he’s dead. To be honest, if I had got the chance, I would have killed him myself and taken the consequences gladly.”

Moss looked at me calmly.

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“I can understand your feelings, Mr. Graham. However, in view of your known antipathy towards Mr. Reese I need to ask you a few questions.”

I sat back in my chair, looking puzzled.

“What about, Inspector?”

“Well, first of all, where were you when Reese died?”

“Here I expect. What time was it? I think the paper said about seven, is that right?”

“Yes – about then.”

“Well I was definitely here. Earlier in the day I drove into Perth and did some shopping, but I was back before dark and stayed in the rest of the evening.”

“Alone, I presume?”

“Yes, absolutely.”

He pondered for a moment.

“Tell me, Mr. Graham, do you remember that Mr. Jackson, the tractor driver, said that he saw a van nearby which turned around and drove off?”

“Yes, the paper reported it.”

“Was it you in the van?”

“No, I told you – I was here.”

“But can I believe you?”

“That’s up to you – but that’s how it was.”

“Do you own a van?”

“No, just the Land Rover outside.”

“Never owned a van?”

“Not recently – I used to own a Transit, or rather my business did when I ran it a couple of years ago. But now, all I have is the Land Rover. Look, Inspector, what is all this about? I’m glad Reese is dead – make no mistake about that, but I didn’t kill him. He killed himself.”

“That van that drove off – why do you think that happened? Why didn’t the driver stop and try to help?”

“How should I know? I can think of several reasons – he might have been the sort who just doesn’t want to get involved, he might have had a couple of drinks and didn’t want to risk being breathalysed at the scene, he might have told his wife he was somewhere else – I’m sure that you can think of even more reasons.”

“Yes, I suppose that I could. Bear with me though. You have a very good reason for wishing harm to come to Reese. Lo and behold, harm does come to him in a pretty spectacular fashion. Our traffic people estimate that he was doing over seventy miles an hour on that short straight – far, far too fast for the conditions. As a result he had no chance of braking in time when he saw the tractor.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Good riddance.”

“But why drive so recklessly? Perhaps he was being chased – chased by that mysterious van.”

“Perhaps he was, Inspector. Frankly, I couldn’t care less. One thing though. You remember that some while back I presented the police with evidence that Reese was still driving in defiance of his ban – evidence which your colleagues chose to ignore? If you people had followed up on that, Reese might have decided not to continue driving. He might still be alive if the police had done their job.”

Moss was a bit taken aback, although he tried not to show it.

“But the decision not to proceed would have been taken by the Procurator Fiscal’s people, not the police.”

I shrugged again.

“The fact remains that the opportunity to stop Reese driving was presented to you on a plate and nothing happened.”

“Well, that doesn’t alter what happened on the 6th,” Moss was a bit rattled and trying to get back in control of the discussion, “Reese died in strange circumstances and I intend to get to the bottom of them.”

It was bluster. In the Army I had been subjected to hours of training in interrogation techniques from both sides of the desk and I recognised an inquisitor who had realised that his hand had been played out. Moss took his leave of me and I showed him out, wondering if he had been in the loop that had looked at my 63

pictures of Reese breaking his driving ban. From the man’s reactions, I thought that the answer was probably not.

After he had gone, I wandered uneasily around the cottage. Until it seemed certain that she was going, I hadn’t realised how much I had become attached to Robin. I wished her well in her new life in Edinburgh, but I wished that she wasn’t going. Still, no good crying over split milk.

What should I do next, I asked myself? George’s murderers and Fiona’s killer were now all dead. I was still of the opinion that the order to attack George, and which had resulted in his death, had come from Douglas.

At the start I had determined that he should meet the same fate as his henchmen; now I wasn’t so sure. Moss was clearly unhappy at the way Reese had died; in his mind I had something to do with it, and had probably been chasing him in the mysterious van. In fact, I hadn’t, of course, but I might as well have been. Reese had been driving like a lunatic to escape from me. That worried me not in the slightest, but if something were to now happen to Douglas, it would heighten Moss’ suspicions against me. Above all, I was unclear as to how I could move against Douglas in any case. With his wife in the house any direct assault there was out; I refused to countenance any action which could result in harm to innocent parties. Unlike his associates, Douglas didn’t go out and about much. He tended to stay in one or other of his two shops or return home after the initial business of the day. I had done a little more watching of his movements, but had been unable to ascertain any weak points that I could use to my advantage. Furthermore, since the disappearance – as far as he was concerned – of Cowrie and O’Connor, Douglas often had one or other of his new heavies with him when he moved around. Clearly he suspected that his men’s disappearance was not a coincidence and was worried about his own security. The presence of a bodyguard didn’t worry me – I was confident in my own ability to cope with both of his heavies if needs be, but neither of them had done anything to warrant harm at my hands. Douglas alone was my target, and I could see no way of getting at him.

It was at that point that I realised that I was missing a lot of information. Douglas was importing drugs, using Gordon’s transport facilities. Those drugs ended up on the streets (or at parties and clubs) in Perth and Dundee and for all I knew further afield. But how did they get to the users? The bulk cocaine which came over from Holland had to be broken down into tiny packet lots – who did that, and where? There must be literally several thousands of such packets prepared every month.

Something that had puzzled me back in September when we had followed Gordon’s van, and again this time, was why the barn at Tibbermore featured in proceedings. Each time Reese had driven from the barn at the Broom of Dalreach to the Tibbermore barn. Why? What part did that barn play? I had been too busy to think of searching for the cocaine when I captured Reese; could it have still been there? The barn was isolated, standing off a lane which was little used, but which had several houses along its length between the A9 and the A85, houses whose owners would surely have noticed if there had been a lot of unusual traffic to the barn.

The actual task of preparing all those tiny packets of cocaine must be quite labour intensive. Surely it would not be done by just one person? I hadn’t given the logistics of the operation any consideration at all and I didn’t know where I could possibly start. It was now the 11th of December. The drugs had been deposited in the barn on the 6th. Surely in the interim whatever normally happened would already have occurred? The more I thought about it, the more I came to the conclusion that using that barn was a sort of cut-off process.

In September, when Robin and I had tailed him, Reese had stayed in the barn for a matter of a few minutes only. This time Anderson had left after about ten minutes, leaving Reese still in the barn. I had no way of knowing how long he might have stayed there had I not intervened. If anyone had been following him – as indeed Robin and I had been – leaving the drugs in the barn would give him a clean vehicle should he be stopped. It would also be a simple matter to keep the barn under surveillance subsequently, to be sure that nobody showed any interest in it.

At that thought my blood ran cold. The barn was near to Douglas’ house. Suppose he, or someone working for him, kept a watch on the barn after Reese made his stop there? Given the layout of the area it would be simple enough – after all, it was precisely what I had done myself. Suppose I had been seen? I mulled the matter over in my mind. If there had been a watcher, surely he would have come to Reese’s assistance, either whilst I was in the barn with him, or after I had left it to fetch my vehicle? A watcher, whether or not he 64

recognised me, might have been reluctant to come to Reese’s aid whilst I was inside, as I was an unknown quantity and possibly dangerous, but surely there would have been no cause for caution after I had emerged?

The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that there had been no watcher at the crucial time.

What, I wondered, would be the procedure now that Reese was dead? Who would pick up the drugs; where would they take them? It was going to be impossible to undertake a useful surveillance by myself. Any vehicle near the barn would stick out like a sore thumb. On the other hand, I would have to be near enough to the barn to observe. If anyone did call there and pick up the drugs, they weren’t going to do it on foot –

they would have a vehicle, a vehicle which would need to be followed. At least once leaving the barn there were only two routes that could be taken immediately – north to the A85 or south to the A9, although to the south the lane formed a crossroads with another, even smaller, lane before reaching the A9 itself.

I needed help if I was to try and follow what happened to those drugs. Even if we had still been together, it was not the sort of help that I could have asked of Robin. I did know of one or two people who would be ideal for the task I had in mind, but whether I could reasonably expect them to help me, and whether it would be wise for me to involve anyone else was a moot point.

Perhaps I could seek the help of just one person, a man that I knew that I could trust implicitly.

Chapter Twelve – 2003, October, Iraq

The battalion’s task was simple. A battered Iraqi force, of roughly battalion size, had retreated away from the main site of the fighting around Fallujah and the Black Watch had been tasked with destroying or capturing that force.

The Iraqis had taken refuge in a small town, perhaps more accurately described as a large village. My company had been sent round behind their line of retreat to prevent them from withdrawing further, whilst the rest of the battalion pinned them down, inflicted casualties, and convinced them that discretion was the better part of valour.

I had deployed my company on a wide front, the better to give the impression, should the need arise, of a larger force than I actually had. The village was approximately a thousand yards away and the ground sloped down towards it, giving me almost a bird’s eye view of its layout. I could see enemy soldiers occasionally scurrying from one building to another.

I had with me a sniper team – two men whose task it was to offer me the opportunity of selecting identified enemy personnel such as officers or senior NCOs and kill them to cause confusion and lack of clarity amongst the enemy. I was lying on my stomach, viewing the enemy through my binoculars, trying to identify suitable targets. Thirty yards to my right, Corporals Home and Nairn were similarly employed. Both were trained snipers; they worked together, one acting as the shooter, the other keeping a general watch around to prevent them from being surprised by enemy activity. They alternated roles over time to combat the mental fatigue of staring through a telescopic sight for long periods.

To my left, just a few feet away, my Company Sergeant Major, Warrant Officer Hector McLeish, was also viewing the village through binoculars.

I turned my head towards him.

“What do you think, Sarn’t Major – the white building to the right of the cattle pen?”

“Looks good to me, sir.”

We had seen several men enter and leave that building during the half hour we had been watching. It seemed almost certain that it housed the enemy command headquarters. The structure was reasonably substantial for the area, with walls of what looked like breeze block painted white to reflect the merciless sun.

I keyed my radio; Corporal Home, currently the spotter of the sniper team replied. Even though we were only sixty yards apart, it would have been stupid in the extreme to move over to them. Even at a thousand yards such movement might well be spotted and betray our presence.

“Corporal, the white building right of the cattle pen – looks like their command centre. Knock over the next target you see, then put two magazines through the walls.”

“OK, sir.”

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Corporal Nairn was the present shooter. He was armed with the British Army’s favourite sniper rifle, the L115A3, a typical military designation destined never to come trippingly off the tongue, but the name of an extremely powerful, incredibly accurate rifle, designed to engage targets out to a mile or more in the right hands – and Corporal Nairn’s were very much ‘right hands’.

We only had to wait for three or four minutes before a soldier emerged from the door. As he took his second step, I heard the whiplash crack of Corporal Nairn’s rifle and an instant later saw the man thrown back against the building wall, to end up in a heap at its base. Nairn then fired four more shots at intervals of a few seconds, then paused to reload – the rifle’s magazine only holds five cartridges – and then emptied the second magazine into the building.

Folk who believe what Hollywood shows them will assume that a brick wall – or, in this case, more likely to be breeze block – will offer protection against rifle fire. That is true to a degree; at one thousand yards the normal infantryman’s rifle – the SA80 – would probably fail to penetrate that wall. Nairn’s rifle, however, was a far more powerful weapon. Each of those rounds would have punched a hole clean through the wall.

Although the bullets themselves are a fraction less than a third of an inch in diameter, the nature of the material they were hitting would produce holes a couple of inches across, with fragments of the blockwork hurtling across the room beyond. Anyone in there would be having a most unpleasant experience.

We waited to see what would happen. After several minutes the inhabitants decided to seek safer quarters and suddenly five men raced from the door, seeking the sanctuary of the far side of the next building. The crash of Nairn’s rifle ensured that one of them failed in his endeavour.

Quarter of an hour passed with no further movement within our field of view. The ridge that we lay concealed behind was an obvious location for a sniper and I decided to pull the company back from it, to the next ridge a further a hundred and fifty yards or so back, keeping just myself and CSM McLeish in position to continue observing and the sniper team to maintain an offensive presence.

It was one of my better decisions. Within minutes four enemy soldiers appeared briefly, scuttling, bent low from the waist, from behind the second building and disappearing again behind the first building. Minutes later there was the sound that infantrymen in fixed positions hate to hear – the cough of a mortar. Mortars, unlike any other modern weapon, throw their missile high up into the air in a giant parabola, meaning that they can hit targets behind shelter and can themselves be fired from behind shelter.

The Iraqis were firing blind. Over the next ten minutes they lobbed fifteen rounds in our direction. None came anywhere near the four of us, most landing short, well in front of us, although a couple went well over our heads to strike just in front of the rear ridge to which I had withdrawn the company. Three, however, landed right on our ridge, off to the right of us, just where one of my platoons had been previously. If I had not ordered them to fall back they would certainly have suffered casualties.

Then the mortar fire stopped. Perhaps they were preserving ammunition, perhaps they felt that they had done enough to discourage us.

We could hear firing from our front as the battalion attacked the Iraqi position and suddenly a couple of jeeps appeared from behind the white building and started to race over the sand towards us. Nairn needed no orders from me; a single shot from his rifle saw one jeep suddenly career to the side, the driver dead at the wheel. The second vehicle, however, had a machine gun mounted on it and it sprayed our ridge with bullets, forcing us to keep our heads down. The driver had his foot hard down; the thousand yards between our ridge and the village was covered in well under a minute, and it was headed straight for McLeish and myself.

Nairn fired at it, but his shot failed to stop its onrush – we discovered later that his bullet had seriously wounded the driver but not killed him. As the vehicle got within fifty yards of us the machine gunner swung his weapon towards where Nairn and Home lay; seizing my chance, I rose to my knees and sprayed the jeep with gunfire from my SA80. The results were gratifying; at that point the ridge was quite steep and the jeep swung violently round, so violently that the slope caused it to overturn, pitching two of its occupants out onto the ground.

Silence descended, seeming unearthly after the noise of the gunfire and the jeep engines. The further jeep, the one stopped by Nairn’s rifle, had five Iraqi soldiers standing clear of it, their arms raised in surrender.

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The nearer one was a mess. Two men were on their hands and knees in the sand, another could be seen to be trapped under the vehicle, whilst on the far side of it a man, clearly wounded, was crawling away from it.

I called my second in command to send a squad forward to secure the prisoners, whilst McLeish, Nairn, Home and myself remained ready to resume hostilities at the slightest sign of belligerence from the enemy.

I need not have worried; the Iraqis had had all of the fight knocked out of them. In all, the jeeps had held twelve men. The driver of the first jeep was dead, killed by Nairn’s first shot. Of the occupants of the second, two were shaken but unharmed, one was badly wounded – the man crawling away from the scene, the man we could see as having been trapped was dead from the injuries he had sustained as the vehicle overturned, and, surprisingly, two further men were trapped under the jeep but suffered only minor injuries.

What was even more surprising was the make-up of our prisoners. Clearly the Iraqi unit the battalion was attacking must have been the remnants of several battalions, even a brigade, for the twelve men numbered one brigadier general, a colonel, two lieutenant-colonels, five majors and three captains. They were the senior peoples of that Iraqi force and had attempted to run out to save their own skins, leaving their men to whatever mercy the Black Watch might feel inclined to offer. Of the enemy officers, the two dead men were a major and a captain, the wounded man – who later died of his wounds – was another major.

About an hour later our commanding officer called up on the radio. Leaderless, the Iraqis had surrendered.

Amazingly, the Black Watch had not suffered a single casualty in the engagement; the Iraqis had suffered twenty three men killed and a further thirty wounded, some of them seriously. In total, there were just over six hundred prisoners.

We rejoined the rest of the battalion, carefully shepherding our prisoners, whose presence delighted our colonel.

“Martin, well done by you and your chaps – the intelligence wallahs will love to get their hands on this lot.

Now. I think that we had better get them over to HQ as soon as possible. Perhaps Mr. McLeish would be kind enough to escort them?”

Hector nodded his assent.

“Very good, sir – may I take one of the APCs?”

“Yes, of course, Sarn’t Major.”

The APC – or Armoured Personnel Carrier - was just what its name suggests, a vehicle proof against small arms fire for transporting soldiers around under hostile, or potentially hostile, conditions. The vehicles we had were the FV432 – another uninspiring military name – which looks like a tank without a gun turret. It has a machine gun to discourage troops in the open, but needs studiously to avoid artillery or enemy tanks or the like. By 2003 it was supposed to have been replaced by far more capable successors, but typically the Blair and Brown government had never found the money for the Army to have those successors fast enough, and in sufficient quantities., so we had to make do with the old kit – the story of the British soldier’s life in the 21st century.

Normally the vehicle would carry its own crew of two, plus ten infantrymen, but Hector squeezed all nine captives, himself and two privates into the interior without too much difficulty, and if the Iraqi officers were unhappy at the overcrowding, they were wise enough to say nothing about it.

The delivery of the prisoners went smoothly enough. Brigade HQ was some seven miles away and Hector’s APC made the outward journey without any problems. The problems came on the return.

I was at battalion HQ, talking to one of the other company commanders when the radio operator interrupted us.

“Sir,” he said, addressing me, “Mr. McLeish is on the radio – they have problems.”

I was at his side at once, taking the proffered microphone.

“Hector, it’s Martin – what’s wrong?”

His voice sounded weak, quite unlike his normal self.

“We hit an anti-tank mine on the way back, sir. We are all wounded, and the vehicle is drawing small arms fire from a nearby ridge.”

“What’s your position?”

He gave me a map reference which placed him about two miles away.

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“Right, I’m on the way. Keep on this channel.”

Within minutes I had commandeered the nearest APC and loaded myself and a rifle section of eight men into it. Between us, we carried two light machine guns and two rifles also capable of firing grenades. Provided that we managed to avoid any more anti-tank mines that might be around, I was confident of our ability to rescue Hector and his companions.

All the time that I was preparing things (the easy bit – I told the corporal in charge of the section to carry on) I was in contact with Hector. Their APC was disabled and could not move, but it was continuing to protect them; so far the enemy had used nothing heavier than rifle fire.

The actual rescue was even easier than I hoped. Avoiding the road – there might have been more mines planted – we came up behind the ridge from which our men were taking fire. The enemy proved to be a group of about twenty men, some in Iraqi army uniform, but most in civilian clothes.

They were taken by surprise as our APC breasted the ridge behind them and immediately our gunner opened fire with his machine gun. Several of the enemy fell, the others ran for their lives, disappearing over the ridge on front of us.

I ordered the driver to take us over the ridge and there before us was Hector’s vehicle, looking like a discarded toy. The mine had blown off the tracks on the left hand side , with the result that the vehicle was tilted well over to that side. We drove up to it and, whilst my section dispersed around the site to give a secure perimeter, I and the gunner went to see what needed to be done.

It was immediately obvious that to move the vehicle some heavy equipment was needed; fortunately, although the explosion had buckled the rear exit door and rendered it inoperable, the forward hatch was still usable and the five men crawled out via it. Last out was Hector and I could see at once that he was badly hurt. All of them had been thrown violently around by the explosion; he had suffered numerous cuts and bruises and his left arm was clearly broken.

We got them back to our own vehicle and, heavily over-crowded, returned to the battalion. Hector was whisked off to base hospital and it was some weeks before we saw him again, but, being the man that he was, he was back on duty at the earliest possible moment.

We had by now crushed the Iraqi army’s resistance and there was the early rejoicing the politicians had predicted, and the stark dangers posed by the discontented, which they had not.

The battalion had been set the task of patrolling the city and the companies were taking it in turns; today it was the turn of my company and I sent out several patrols in platoon strength – thirty soldiers at a time, a force large enough to discourage any spontaneous attack by all but the most suicidal.

On our second day as duty company, I decided to lead one of the platoons myself, giving its commander a break and taking hector McLeish with me. With both their CO and CSM with them, the troops were eager to demonstrate even more alertness than normal and it was as well that they did.

We were stalking down a narrow street, with eyes skinned to search the house, including their roofs, for possible signs of danger, when a youth screamed abuse at us from an upstairs window. It was a diversion; he, and his colleagues, clearly expected all eyes to turn towards him, but the Black Watch soldiers were far too well trained for that to work.

“Roof top left,” I head Corporal Weir, the section leader of three section, scream out. Within a split second his shouted warning was followed by the crack of his rifle, echoed by that of one of his section and I turned that way in time to see a man topple from the low parapet of a building some fifteen yards away. A small object fell with him, and as both hit the ground, the grenade, for that is what it was, exploded.

Instantly, our eyes scanned the other roofs, in time to see two men hurriedly pull back out of sight. Corporal Weir had seen them as well and his section kept their weapons trained on the roofs where the men had been seem whilst I assessed what had happened. The grenade had caused us three casualties; Privates Lamont and Ferguson had suffered slight wounds to their limbs, but nothing serious. Their body armour and riot visors had saved them from anything else. More serious was the wound to Hector McLeish; already his left trouser leg was soaked in blood and as I hurried to him I could see blood pulsing from a rip in the trouser leg. I knelt beside him, found the wound in his thigh and plunged my fingers into a hole in the flesh the size of a golf ball. I kept my fingers firmly pressed down, whilst yelling for somebody t bring me the medical supplies 68

carried by the platoon’s first aid trained member, Private Ferguson, currently a casualty himself. Hurriedly, I searched one-handed through the pack and found and applied a tourniquet to Hector’s leg and to my relief, the pulsing flow of blood stopped. The man who had hurried over with the medical pack looked in horror at the amount of blood which had saturated Hector’s uniform trousers and puddle on the ground beneath him.

“We’ve got to get him to field hospital, sir – this is a serious wound.”

I nodded and called up on the radio for an ambulance – there was no question of being able to call on a med-evac helicopter in those narrow streets, but the ambulance, which arrived about ten minutes later, was able to take him to a clearing a mile or so away where the chopper was already in position to whisk the CSM to the base hospital twenty miles away.

I was subsequently assured by the battalion medical officer that I had saved hector’s life. A few more minutes of blood loss and he would have died in that scruffy backstreet.

As a consequence, I knew that Hector and I could rely upon each other absolutely.

Chapter Thirteen – 2011, December again

It was now the 12th; I had to assume that whatever normally happened to the drugs would have happened by now and that my best chance of making any progress was to wait until the January shipment was in transit. In the meantime I had some recruiting to do.

Hector Mungo McLeish, my former Company Sergeant Major, had retired from the army in 2008 on his forty-fifth birthday – the 22nd of November. He now lived just outside Montrose off the Dubton Road. I knew the address – we had kept in touch since I left the Army – but had never visited the house.

Like myself, Hector was a widower; his wife, Mary, had died of cancer in 2008 at the tragically young age of forty-two. It was her illness that had caused him to leave the Army earlier than originally intended, still aged only forty-five. Unlike me, he had a son, Hamish, who had followed his father into the Black Watch and was now a corporal, aged twenty-four.

A telephone call had earned me an immediate invitation to visit, and as a result we now sat opposite each other whilst I explained all that had happened and what I was trying to achieve. I left out nothing at all; Hector’s only reaction had been a slow nod of approval at the fate of my enemies.

“So you see, Hector,” I concluded, “I can’t keep tabs on everything single-handed – I need help.”

He shrugged his shoulders,

“You’ve got it, you know that. What do you want me to do?”

“Somehow we need to find out where those drugs are being taken and link Douglas and Gordon into it. I’ve no real beef against Gordon – but I’d like to see him inside for what he’s up to. Douglas is another matter –

I’m sure it was his order that resulted in George being murdered, although I don’t know if that was his actual intention rather than just a beating.”

Hector, like myself, had only himself to answer to. His army pension was adequate to live on – about fifteen thousand a year – but not enough for luxuries, but he supplemented it quite a bit by writing. Even when still in the army he had written, and had published, a couple of thrillers, and he had kept it up since demob. He made no claims to be another Alistair MacLean, but he was popular enough to more or less double his pension income.

“Even with two of us, it’s going to be difficult to keep tabs on what is going on, Martin.”

“I know, but I don’t want to bring anyone else in – what I have done isn’t very legal, even if it is justice, at least in my eyes. I don’t want to put anyone else in risk of having a crisis of conscience.”

Hector shrugged his shoulders.

“It’s your show, so it’s up to you, but if you change your mind, I’m still in touch with a few of the lads now in civvy street and who might be very useful.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I promised him, “but let’s hope that it isn’t necessary.”

Hector thought for a moment before speaking again.

“You know, trying to track the drugs is going to be difficult, even with two of us. Why not just nick them?”

“Eh?”

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“Well, we know that if they stick to their existing routine, the drugs will be in that barn for a while –

probably not more than an hour or two, I would imagine, whilst they make sure that they aren’t attracting any attention from anybody. That gives a window of opportunity to get into the barn and make off with the e cocaine. That will really start things humming – the people expecting to get supplies to sell on are not going to be happy – with any luck they might bump Douglas off for us – they aren’t the sort of people known for their tolerance.”

It was an approach that had never occurred to me, but the more I thought of it, the more I liked it. As Hector had said, and as I well knew, it would be very difficult to keep tabs on the drugs’ movements – really such a task called for a big team, not just two people.

We spent the next hour thrashing out details until we were happy that we had a workable plan.

“One thing,” Hector added. “These people know where you live and are sure to suspect you. I think that you should stay here, or at least somewhere other than your house until it is all over, whenever that might be. Oh, and something else – they probably know your Land Rover, so you need to hide that away somewhere and hire something else. I wouldn’t put it past them to try bobby-trapping your car if you leave it where they can get at it.”

It all made sense, and we sorted out the details, going over them with extreme care. This was not the sort of exercise to be entered into lightly, nor without proper planning, including contingency plans if things did not work out as expected. One thing that possession of the drugs would give us – we could use them to incriminate Douglas directly by planting them in his car or in his house and tipping off the police.

“There is one possible problem there,” I mused, “I’m not sure, but I have an uneasy feeling that Inspector Cowell of the Drug Squad is bent, and if that is the case planting drugs on Douglas might not work – he would be in a position to warn him, delay acting, and then claim the tip-off was a dud.”

“What about making the tip off to that other policeman – Morris is it?”

“No, Moss – but even if we do that, I imagine that he would pass it on to the Drug Squad, so back to square one. No, we somehow need to make it impossible for Douglas to be warned in advance. I suppose that there is also the thought that Moss and Cowell both know of my problems with Douglas, so might well assume that I had something to do with any tip-off and might start looking more for proof that he was being set up than proof that he is a major drug supplier.”

I sat back, thinking hard about the problem – then the answer came to me.

“Got it! We don’t tip off the police about the drugs – we tip them off that he has a pistol – the Colt – and let then find the drugs as a bonus. That way Cowell won’t be in the loop until after the drugs are found, so no chance to warn Douglas.”

“Good one, Martin. Right – where do they find it all?”

“It’s got to be his car. The police are much more likely to react quickly at the thought of him driving around with a pistol, than having to search his house.”

“So how do we get it into his car? Has to be a secure location and one that won’t let him know that it is there.”

“I think that we attach a metal box to the underside of the Jag, fixed with magnets for ease of attachment and renewal. The gun and the drugs go in there and we tell the police roughly were to look.”

So, that was agreed. Now all we had to do was to achieve it.

There was another thing we had to sort out in advance of taking action. The barn that Douglas’ people used as a sort of deposit box had to be investigated. Assuming that they were still going to use it, we would probably have only a narrow window of opportunity to rob them of the drugs, so we couldn’t afford to just wander in and play things by ear.

For that reason, a couple of nights later saw the two of us, dressed in black from head to foot, ski masks concealing all but our eyes and mouths, waiting patiently in the hedgerow a hundred yards from the barn with its doors in plain view. It was a fairly dark night, a tiny sliver of moon and the stars providing too little light for moving around without a torch – which is where one of my acquisitions back in June came into play. I had a pair of Army issue night vision goggles, through which I could seen a clear, although ghostly green view of everything. In the interim between deciding on our course of action and at presence that night I 70

had obtained a second pair for Hector, so the dark night was to our advantage and a handicap to anybody not similarly equipped.

We waited patiently, scarcely moving a muscle, for over two hours. It was now one in the morning and we were satisfied that there was nobody watching the barn; no way would an amateur have remained in position for that length of time without revealing his presence to us. The only possible danger now was someone deciding to visit the barn for some reason – but the possibility seemed unlikely in the extreme at such an hour.

We rose from our hiding place and crept cautiously to the barn. The doors were unlocked – not as strange as might be thought. Why lock the doors of an unused barn? Locked doors would advertise that there might be something inside worth stealing and there was a steady, and maddening, incidence in rural areas of farmers’

barns being robbed of anything valuable, so either high security or none was the usual order of the day.

Once inside, we made our way around, looking for some sort of hiding place in which something like a package of drugs might be concealed.

It only took a few minutes. In one far corner there was a piece of rusty, clearly broken, farm equipment – it looks like part of an old plough – and a pile of rotting canvas sacks. Pulling them to one side revealed a small steel box, bolted to the concrete floor. The box itself had a combination lock and was clearly relatively new.

We had, I was sure, found where the drugs were kept.

I noted the size of the bolts securing it to the floor; all that was needed to remove it was a suitable size spanner, so we would need to be equipped with one when we returned.

The next task was to fabricate some sort of box that we could attach to the Jaguar for the police to find when we tipped them off about Douglas’ illegal firearm ownership. It proved quite simple. A metal cash box type of thing with strong magnets bolted through its lid proved to be the answer. It hung grimly to the metal under-surface of my car, a hired Jaguar similar to the one driven by Douglas. I drove for several hours over a selection of rough lanes, with Hector following me in order to retrieve the box should it fall off, and it behaved perfectly, despite containing a considerably heavier weight of scrap metal than the Colt and the drugs would represent. The adhesive power of the magnets was proved, and driving around gave the box an authentic patina of dirt from the road; to have presented the police with a spotlessly clean box would have looked extremely suspicious from the start.

All was set. Now it only remained to await the 6th of January and hope that Douglas and company would stick to their tried and trusted routine. If they changed anything we were back to square one.

Chapter Fourteen – 2012, January

It was four o’clock on the 6th of January and already nearly dark. I had moved into position in the hedgerow just a few minutes earlier – to have done so whilst it was still light would have been risky.

A mile away, Hector sat in his car in a lay-by, waiting to hear from me when, and if, anything happened.

Once more I was within a hundred yards of the barn; all I could do was wait.

It was a long, cold wait and I was beginning to worry that the routine had changed when, at last, a familiar vehicle passed me and pulled into the barn entrance. It was the tatty Land Rover that Anderson had driven on the night that Reese had managed to kill himself. He stopped right outside the barn, got out and opened the doors, then returned to the Land Rover and drove it inside. A minute or two later the doors were closed.

I keyed the two-way radio.

“Car inside” I said quietly.

“Roger,” came Hector’s reply.

About ten minutes later the doors opened again and Anderson drove out, stopped, emerged from the driver’s door and shut the barn up behind him, then drove off.

Minutes later Hector joined me and we entered the barn. The box proved simple to remove and no more than ten minutes later we were driving away with a locked box, presumably containing a fortune in drugs, sitting on the back seat.

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Once we got back to Hector’s we opened the box, using an angle grinder like a glorified tin-opener to simply cut the lid off. Inside was a package wrapped in heavy black plastic, about the size of a two kilo bag of flour.

On cutting the black plastic we found four smaller packages, each presumably a half kilo of cocaine. We had hit pay dirt.

My original thought was to put all of the cocaine, plus the Colt, in our box for sticking on Douglas’ car, but after thinking about it I decided to keep two of the four packets back. I had a feeling that it might be useful to have a second string to our bow in case something went wrong with the first attempt.

The next night saw us waiting patiently in the woods outside Douglas’ house. It was a hive of activity, even at well after midnight. A succession of vehicles had come and gone in the two hours that we had already waited and I was beginning to think that we might as well slip away and try again another night when the driver who emerged from the latest car made me change my mind. It was Inspector Cowell, and he was greeted at the front door by Douglas himself. Cursing the fact that I had no camera with me – but how could I have anticipated such an opportunity? I watched in helpless frustration as the two of them disappeared inside the house. At least this surely proved my suspicions about Cowell, but I could see no way of taking advantage of the fact.

Cowell left about twenty minutes later, and at last the activity died down. We waited another half hour to be on the safe side, then, taking the route that, back in the summer, I had found to be shielded from the sensors for the security lights, I made my way on my stomach to where the Jaguar was parked outside the garage; presumably Douglas had been too busy to put it away, which made things easier for me. It took only moments to attach our incriminating box, and then I retraced my progress back to Hector and we slipped away into the night.

At ten o’clock that morning I phoned the police and managed, after some initial obstruction, to speak to Inspector Moss.

“Inspector Moss.”

“You don’t know me, Inspector, and I’m not giving my name, so don’t bother asking. I just want you to know that Adam Douglas is on the warpath after someone –doesn’t matter who – and he’s got himself a pistol for the job. He’s a dangerous bugger, so go careful. I know he keeps the pistol out of sight in his car somehow.”

And at that I put down the phone, not giving Moss a chance to question me.

The short term result of my phone call was gratifying in the extreme; I later learned that Moss and several colleagues descended on Douglas with search warrant to the fore, and had no difficulty in finding our metal box. The result was that Douglas was arrested on two counts – possession of an illegally held firearm and possession of Class A drugs with intent to supply.

What did surprise me, however, was that less than forty-eight hours later Douglas was out on bail. I had assumed that, given the seriousness of the charges, he would have been remanded in custody and stayed safely locked up until he stood trial, but not so.

With Douglas out on the streets again, I considered my own position very carefully. I had heeded Hector’s advice and had been staying with him, but I felt that it would be sensible to get away completely for a while.

I had done all I could for the moment; if, given all they had on him, the law couldn’t now cope with taking care of Douglas, there was precious little more that I could do to help things along.

I therefore decided to treat myself to a short holiday in Paris. It was years since I had visited one of my favourite cities and I felt that it was high time to renew my acquaintance with the jewel on the Seine.

Accordingly, the very next day saw me fly from Edinburgh to Charles de Gaulle airport, and booking in to a small, but very comfortable, hotel just off the Champs Élsées. For January, even allowing for being several hundred miles further south than Perth, the weather was unseasonably warm, and I enjoyed strolling leisurely around. I visited the Louvre for the first time in ten or more years, finding it as mind-blowing as ever. An evening trip down the river by Bateaux Mouches, followed by a luxurious dinner was a treat to be remembered.

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I had been in Paris for four days when everything changed. I was sitting outside a small cafe in the Avenue Friedland, enjoying a coffee and a small cognac as digestives following a simple lunch, when my mobile rang. I looked at the display; it was Hector calling.

“Hector, how goes it?”

“I don’t know if this is good news or bad. Douglas is dead.”

“Dead? What happened?”

“Murdered. Somebody ambushed him in his Jaguar about half a mile from his home and used a shotgun on him.”

I was stunned. I felt no sorrow over the man’s death, not after what had happened to George, nor when you thought of the misery that went hand in glove with his drug dealing, or the intimidating of helpless people like Jenny McCauley and her little boy Timmie. I was, however, taken aback at trying to think through what this turn of events might mean. Presumably he had fallen foul of one of the people in the drug supply chain, although it seemed a very drastic reaction to the cessation of supply.

My first reaction was to fly home at once, but second thoughts persuaded me to hold my hand. I wasn’t due to return for another three days; if I hurried back home now the police might feel that my early return – easy to confirm with the airline – and Douglas’ death had some form of connection, and that was a line of thought that I could well do without provoking.

So I swanned around Paris for three more days before flying home.

When I walked into the cottage the telephone was blinking away, indicating that I had messages. Hardly to my surprise there was an insistent series of messages from Inspector Moss, insisting that I got in touch as quickly as possible.

I fired up my computer and checked the local pages – sure enough, there was a report of Douglas’ murder and I read it carefully before ringing Perth police station and asking to be put through to Moss.

“Inspector Moss.”

“Inspector, Martin Graham. You left messages on my answer phone asking me to get in touch.”

“I did indeed, Mr. Graham – why haven’t you phoned me earlier?”

“I’ve been on holiday – only just got back.”

“Oh. Well, we need to talk.”

“What about?”

“Adam Douglas.”

“Why? I see from the local news that somebody shot him – good riddance as far as I am concerned,”

“I have no doubt that you won’t lose any sleep over Mr. Douglas’ murder, but I am looking for his killer, and in view of your past comments about him, we need to talk. I’d like you to come into the station, preferably this afternoon.”

“Inspector, I’ve only just got it,” I paused and checked the time, “It’s now nearly three o’clock. Can’t it wait until tomorrow.”

“Mr. Graham, this is a murder enquiry – if you are reluctant to come in, I can always send a car to bring you.

Please don’t make me do that.”

Feigning bad grace, I huffily agreed to come into the station and thirty-five minutes later Moss and I were facing each other across the table of a dingy interview room. Moss was accompanied by a young woman whom he introduced as Detective Constable Ross. I smiled at her and was rewarded with a frosty glare in return. Clearly not amenable to the Graham charm. Moss spoke first.

“Mr. Graham, I have asked you to come in because, from earlier discussions, I know that you held Mr.

Douglas responsible for the death of your friend, the journalist George Kirk.”

“Quite right, Inspector, and I would like to make it clear right away that on hearing of Douglas’ death my reaction was one of pleasure. He was a waste of space and I am glad that he is gone.”

“Did you kill him, Mr. Graham?”

“Much as I might have liked to, no, I did not.”

Before I could say more, he had another question.

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“Do you own a shotgun?”

“No,” I answered in more or less perfect truth. After all, the shotgun and the lupara, whilst in my possession, had never been bought by me, nor given to me. I had simply acquired them.

“So if we were to search your house and garden we wouldn’t find a shotgun.”

I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders.

“No, and if you want to search, go ahead. There is nothing for you to find.”

And nor was there. Before leaving for France I had entrusted both weapons to Hector and they were currently hidden in his loft.

“So, for the record, where were you on the day Adam Douglas was killed?”

“I was in France all of last week and part of the week before. As I understand it Douglas was killed on the evening of last Saturday, the 14th. I don’t know what time he was killed, but whenever it was, I didn’t do it and can prove it.”

“How can you do that when you don’t know the time it happened?”

“Inspector, I was in Paris. That day I breakfasted at my hotel, I walked beside the Seine after breakfast, I had lunch in a small bistro near Notre Dame. Can’t remember its name and paid cash, so I don’t have a bill or anything, but what I do have is the bill for dinner that evening. I dined at Les Quatre Frères, a rather nice restaurant near my hotel. I paid by credit card and left at about eleven o’clock, returned to my hotel and went to bed. So, there is no way I could have done all that, yet somehow got back to Perth, killed Douglas, and returned in time for dinner. My receipts prove it.”

The gorgon-like constable Ross spoke for the first time.

“I’ve been checking airline schedules, Mr. Graham. Allowing for breakfast in your hotel, you could still have been in plenty of time to catch the Flybe flight which leaves Paris at twenty to ten, getting in to Edinburgh at half past one, and returning from Edinburgh to Paris, leaving at half past five and getting there at quarter to nine. Without any proof of where you where between breakfast and eleven at night you could have made the round trip and killed Mr. Douglas.”

I looked at her with incredulity.

“Is that supposed to be a serious comment? What about checking in time? What about getting from Charles de Gaulle to the centre of Paris?”

She glared harder.

“It could be done,” she insisted.

I shrugged my shoulders and turned to Moss.

“Inspector, if this is your idea of a serious interview then I’m not saying another word without a lawyer present. This delusion of Constable Ross is the most stupid cock and bull story I have heard in a very long time. What she is suggesting is patently absurd, as anyone with half a brain would realise immediately.”

The Gorgon flushed angrily, the flush sitting poorly with her pale complexion. She opened her mouth to continue, but Moss cut across her.

“Mr. Graham, we accept that you were in Paris some time that day and that the scenario laid out by Constable Ross would have been extremely difficult to accomplish, but we are not convinced that it would have been impossible – the timed payment at your restaurant could have followed no more than a quick sandwich....”

I interrupted him.

“A quick sandwich? I happen to have the bill in my wallet.”

I got out my wallet and withdrew the crumpled piece of paper, smoothed it out, and read its contents slowly.

“A Fino sherry whilst I read the menu. Pate de Maison to start, followed by Sole Meunière, a lemon sorbet to cleanse the palate, then as a main course Lapin de Beaujolais. Tarte de framboise, then cheese and biscuits.

Coffee and cognac. Wine to accompany the fish – a half bottle of Puilly Fuissé, and with the main course a half bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape. Scarcely a quick sandwich, Inspector. I live alone and dinner is normally something simple and uninteresting. I was on holiday and decided to indulge myself. I spent about two hours over that meal, so bang goes any shred of credibility in your theory. Oh, and if you think that it is suspicious that I should have chosen the very day Douglas was killed to use a leisurely dinner to provide myself with an 74

alibi, I was so pleased with the meal that I went back there the next night, the Sunday, as well, although that meal was a bit less self-indulgent. I have that bill here as well if you would like to see it.”

I handed both bills across to him and, after a brief examination, he handed them back to me

“Oh, and another point occurs to me. Constable Ross’ scenario would have me on the five thirty plane from Edinburgh. To drive from the Tibbermore area to the airport and find somewhere to park takes the best part of an hour - and that’s assuming no hold-ups. Forget the fact that for international flights you are supposed to check in two hours before take-off. Let’s say I made it at the last gasp – which would be when they closed the gate about quarter of an hour before take-off time. That means that the very latest that I could have killed Douglas would have been something like four o’clock – and that is really, really stretching things. A much more credible time would be something like half past three. I know that road – most folk around that side of Perth will as well. It’s not very busy, but no way is it deserted. Is it likely that I – or for that matter anybody

– could have shot Douglas in broad daylight and just left him sitting dead in his car without him very quickly being spotted? No – I know you are coy about saying just when you think he was killed, but I am willing to bet that it was after dark – and that makes it absolutely impossible for me to be your killer.”

And basically, that was it. Constable Ross continued to glare at me, Moss plugged away for a few more minutes, but my alibi was unshakable and he knew it.

As I drove home, I wondered if I was glad or sorry that Douglas would now never stand trial. As I had said to the police, his death caused me no sorrow whatsoever; on the other hand, had he appeared in court he might have incriminated others such as Gordon and even Cowell, for having seen him at the Douglas house I was now no longer simply suspicious, but quite certain that the man was crooked. I wondered who had killed Douglas and why, and the more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that it wasn’t a disgruntled cog in the drug supply chain who had taken him out, but somebody who wanted to make sure that he did not incriminate anyone else. Someone like Gordon. Or Cowell.

If that was the case, was there anything that I could do about it? Was there anything that I should do about it?

After all, both George and Fiona had now been avenged. Surely it was now up to the police to work out who had removed the unpleasant Adam Douglas from the face of the earth?

I got home and made myself a scratch meal, then checked out the security system that I had put in place when I went to stay with Hector. Although I say it myself, I was rather proud of it. The basis was the night vision goggles (NVGs) that we had used when planting our ‘evidence’ on Douglas’ car. They were linked to pressure pads inside the front and back doors and under the ground floor windows. Once the system was set, anyone stepping on one of those pads would turn the NVGs on and their images would be recorded on a computer’s hard disc. The computer was out of sight – I had placed it in the loft. The NVGs would give me images of anyone coming in at night; also linked into the system were a couple of normal CCTV cameras which would capture any daytime intruder. Once the system turned on, it switched itself off again after five minutes to preserve the batteries of the NVGs and only came back on again the next time there was a footfall on a pressure pad.

I retrieved the computer from the loft and set it running. What I saw made my blood run cold.

The image showed a date time group on the screen; at 23:08 on the night of Douglas’ murder someone came in through the front door. The image wasn’t good enough to identify the intruder; in any case, his face was concealed by a ski mask, but two things were obvious. It was a man, and a very big man, and he was carrying a sawn-off shotgun. For a stupid second I thought that it was my own lupara, but obviously that was not the case – that weapon was safely hidden away in Hector’s loft. Further examination showed that this weapon wasn’t quite as shortened as the lupara, but it was still an easily concealed, and very deadly, weapon.

I felt sure that had I been in the house that night, my chances of survival would have been slim. The intruder had somehow picked the front door lock without leaving any traces when I had opened it today, he was armed – what other reason could he have had than to kill me? I was certain, given the man’s size, that it was Cowell, although the image could never be claimed to prove it was him.

Cowell – for I was sure that it was him, disappeared from the camera’s view as he went into the lounge.

Presumably he was already confident that the house was empty, for his progress wasn’t particularly quiet. He 75

went all through the house, spending a long time in my little office, which was out of shot for the NVGs, probably searching for something – perhaps to find out where I was.

As I thought that, another unpleasant thought struck me. Why was he after me? I now believed that he had killed Douglas and it seemed that he had intended to kill me as well. What reason he could have for that? I could think of two. Firstly, I knew about the way the drugs were brought up to Perth. By shutting me up there would be no chance of what I knew resurrecting itself in the detailed investigation that was bound to follow Douglas’ murder. Secondly, by killing me, he was perhaps looking to make it seem as if everything was drug related and deflect any investigation from other trains of thought. Then I realised that it was probably both strands – shutting me up and muddying the waters.

Then another thought struck me. There was another person fully au fait with the drug run - Robin. From his point of view what could be worse than that person being a reporter on a major newspaper? She must be in as much danger from him as I was. I reached for the phone to call her, then stopped. Cowell had been in the house for almost half an hour. The phone couldn’t be seen from my cameras. Might he have bugged it? By now my paranoia was working in overdrive. I got out my mobile and phoned Robin. She was staying, I knew, in a shared flat with two other girls whilst she hunted for a place of her own. With three of them in the flat Cowell would be unlikely to risk an attack there, but there was nothing to stop him going after her as she went around the town. An image of Sarah being knocked off her bicycle as a warning to us all those months ago shot into my mind.

She answered on the second ring.

“Martin, how are you?”

“I’m fine. Robin, this is very important. Where at you?”

“I’m having a cup of coffee in Starbucks before going back to the flat. Why?”

“Robin, you know that Douglas has been murdered?”

“Of course I do. If I’d still been based in Perth I would have been reporting it.”

“Robin, I am convinced that he was killed by Cowell...”

“What? Are you serious? Why?”

“To shut him up – I know now that Douglas and he were in cahoots over the drugs someway – I think Douglas was killed to make sure he didn’t incriminate Cowell – but there’s more. That night he broke into my house whilst I was away in France – I’ve got him on my CCTV, although you can’t actually see his face.

He had as shotgun with him. If I had been there, I don’t think both of us would have survived the night – and he was armed, I wouldn’t have been. That’s by the way – you know as much about what happened as I do. If he wants to silence me, I think that logically he will be after you as well. I want you to finish your coffee, get in your car and go to this address,” I gave her Hector’s address, “and I’ll meet you there. Be very careful, I have no idea where Cowell might be at the moment – by now he can easily have found out where you are staying and be waiting to waylay you.”

There was a long silence whilst she mentally processed what I had told her.

“OK, I’ll see you there. I’ll not go back to the flat. Take care.”

“You too – be careful – I love you.”

I hadn’t realised that I was going to say that. There another pause at the other end.

“I think that I may love you as well, Martin. See you soon.”

I sat back and reflected on what I had said to her. Was it true? Did I love her? We had got an well together for a few weeks but then drifted apart. It wasn’t until I experienced the gut-wrenching terror when I realised that Cowell was probably after her as well as me, that I discovered how deep was my feeling for her.

I was a good bit nearer to Hector than was Robin so I had to wait for nearly an hour before she got there, an hour in which my imagination had her run off the road by a vengeful Cowell, or the victim of a drive-by shooting as she went to get in her car, or.....

‘Stop being stupid’ I told myself sternly, but I couldn’t help it. I was reliving the awful day when Fiona died.

At last she arrived, safe and sound, and put me out of my misery. To my very pleasant surprise, and despite the presence of Hector, she threw her arms round me and kissed me fiercely.

76

“Now that,” Hector observed mildly, “is what I call a welcome.”

Robin broke free from my embrace, really only then noticing that we were not alone.

“Oh, you must be Hector?”

“Aye, that’s me – Hector McLeish at your service, ma’am.”

Robin treated him to a dazzling smile.

“I’m so glad to meet you at last – I’ve heard such a lot about you.”

“Some of it good, I hope.”

“No, all of it good.”

I ushered her into the lounge before the mutual admiration society become insufferable. Once we had all sat down, with a drink – Scotch for Hector and myself, Chardonnay for Robin - and I outlined my fears about Cowell.

“I think that he is very dangerous. I am sure that he killed Douglas and I believe that he broke into my house to murder me as well. Hopefully, he won’t know where we are now, but we have to decide what we can do about him.”

“We could take him out.” Hector suggested. Robin started to laugh, then realised that he wasn’t joking.

“What, kill him, you mean?” she asked in horror.

“Well, I’d rather kill him than have him kill us,” I said grimly.

Robin looked from one to the other of us. Until that moment I don’t think that she had really appreciated just how serious our position was. To be fair to her, it wasn’t the sort of situation that any normal person expected to find themselves in. To Hector and myself, however, it represented a problem that was old hat –

kill or be killed was a code we had lived under in Iraq, just like millions of soldiers before us, and millions who would doubtless follow us.

“Surely there must be some other way,” she protested, “can’t we go to the police?”

“And tell them what?” I asked, “my suspicions and some CCTV footage that doesn’t identify him? They won’t do anything – and he will be forewarned of what we are up to.”

We all fell silent whilst we each mulled over matters in our minds. What should we do, I wondered. Killing Cowell was an option, a task that Hector and I could manage without any difficulty or, for that matter, any compunction given what Cowell was up to. The problem would be getting away with it. Disposing of Cowell wouldn’t have achieved anything if we ended up in prison for it.

“What do we know about the man?” Hector asked, “do we even know where he lives? Who he lives with?

Anything useful at all?”

I shook my head. Apart from meeting the man at the police station I knew nothing about him.

“First task,” I said, “is to find out more about him. We obviously can’t get at him in the police station, or in the town where there are people about. If we are to take him out, it will have to be somewhere where there will be no witnesses and the certainty of being able to get away with it. He knows me and Robin, so we can’t afford to let him see us.”

“That makes it my job,” offered Hector, “I’ll see if I can follow him home, although given how the car park at the police station works, I’m not sure just how I will be able to pick him up.”

A moment’s thought, however, showed Hector’s idea to be a non-starter. There was simply nowhere anywhere near the police station where anybody could legally park and observe it. It was Robin who had the next idea.

“ I know that seems too simple – but what about the electoral roll? Cowell isn’t a very common name, so it is worth a try, surely.”

We all agreed that it was worth trying and half an hour later we had a list of eight men named Cowell and living within ten miles of Perth. Three we were able to eliminate as too old, to as too young, leaving just three names to be checked out. All three lived at addresses where there was also a woman registered; each woman also had the surname of Cowell so we were presumably looking at husbands and wives.

“We are going to have to find which one of these is the right one, and as you say, Hector, that’s a job for you

– he’d recognise Robin or me.” I turned to Robin.”Robin, this is really dangerous – you can’t go back to 77

Edinburgh for the moment and mustn’t go to your flat. How can you arrange to stay here until we have sorted this out?”

She was still having difficulty in coming to terms with the situation.

“well, I can’t just not turn up at the paper, Martin, and all my clothes are in the flat – I must get at least some of them.”

It was then I asked Hector if he minded letting me use his computer to check the latest news on the BBC’s website.

Two items immediately caught my eye – and in a way changed everything.

Under a big headline ‘Couple dead in blaze named’ was a report of a fatal house fire outside Dundee.

However, what really caught my attention were the names of the couple and the fact that the police were treating the blaze as arson. The names were Harold Gordon, aged fifty-six, and his wife Elizabeth, aged fifty-three. The fire had occurred on the night of Monday the sixteenth, but the couple had only now been formally identified.

The second item reported the death of a man after a street mugging in Perth. Graham Anderson, aged forty-one, had been found dead in a Perth backstreet in the early hours of Tuesday morning. He appeared to have been robbed and had died from a single stab wound.

“It’s Cowell,” I said. “He’s silencing anyone who might be able to incriminate him.”

Robin was ashen faced. Until that moment I think that she couldn’t accept the terrible danger that she was in; now it had struck home with stunning force.

“I’ll phone in tomorrow and say that I’m sick,” she said shakily, “and I’ll phone the flat and tell them that I’m away for a few days on a story.”

She phoned the flat straight away and spoke briefly with one of her flat-mates. After a minute or so, she scribbled something down on the notepad that Hector kept beside the phone. When the conversation ended, she replaced the handset slowly with a trembling hand.

“He knows where I live,” she said faintly. “That was Moira, who actually owns our flat. A man phoned just an hour ago asking if I was there. When she said no, and could she give me a message when I got home, he said ‘tell her I’ve got a story for her about Adam Douglas’ and I want to meet up with her. Ask her to call my mobile’. He gave her his number - I’ve written it down.”

We looked at each other. Only Cowell would have any reason to use the name of Douglas to excite Robin’s interest. Doubtless the next step would have been to arrange a meeting – a meeting that she would not have survived.

We quickly evolved a plan of action and as a result, ten minutes later Robin phoned the mobile number that she had been given. She had the phone on speaker so that we could all hear what was said.

“Hello.”

“Hello, this is Robin Jackson – I got your message about the Douglas story.”

“Ah, thanks for phoning back. Look, I know that you did a story about him a while back – you know he’s dead, I suppose?”

“Yes, I heard – but what’s the story?”

“Well, he was murdered to shut his mouth. He was a dealer in drugs in a big way and had some very important clients, including some politicians – quite big names. I know the names and can prove it, and I reckon that one of them probably arranged for him to be killed.”

It all sounded good; just the thing to whet a journalistic curiosity.

“Sounds very interesting, Mr. ?”

“Let’s just say Rabbie Burns for the moment, shall we?”

“OK, Rabbie Burns it is,”

“So, when do we meet?”

“Rabbie, I’m away on a story at the moment – I only got your message because I phoned the flat to let the other girls know that I’m away for a few days.”

“Can’t you nip back just for a few hours? The story’s big, believe me, but it won’t last forever.”

She forced a laugh.

78

“Hardly – I’m in Brussels following up a European Union scandal. I won’t be back until at least the weekend, more likely Monday or Tuesday, but I tell you what – I’ll phone again as soon as I’m home. How’s that?”

“I suppose that will have to do – but don’t forget – this story will be good for you.”

Robin put down the phone and looked at us both anxiously.

“How did I do?”

“You were great. He’s hooked. Now, we want to know where he lives so that we can make our own plans.”

We had agreed that we still needed to find out where Cowell lived – a raid on his house, if it was suitable, was the preferred way of dealing with him.

The next day Hector took a look at the properties we had identified from the electoral roll and was able to eliminate a further possibility – one of the Cowells was a wheelchair user; Hector saw him being pushed out of the house and down the street by his wife. Two left.

It took a further two days to identify ‘our’ Cowell but at last we did so. Hector, parked a few yards up the street from the house, which was a nice looking four bedroomed detached property just on the edge of the small village of Wolfhill, saw Cowell return home. There was no mistaking him; at six feet eight inches tall he was unmissable.

That evening we gathered round hector’s dining room table whilst he went over what he had found out.

“The house is one of five in a short cul-de-sac; the houses are arranged in a semi-circle round a turning area.

They all have good sight lines of each others’ front doors. The cul-de-sac has open farm land behind it. It has a burglar alarm box on the front wall. Like the other four, it has an attached double garage. Whilst I was there a woman, presumably Mrs. Cowell, drove away from the house in a dark blue Astra estate with 2009

plates. She returned twelve minutes later – probably nipped out for a pint of milk or the like. She put the car back in the garage and didn’t reappear, so there must be a connecting door between the garage and the house.

That impression was strengthened when Cowell returned home half an hour later. He put his car away and I didn’t see him again either . His car is a Mondeo, again with 2009 plates on it.”

We sat for a while, ruminating over what we had learned. As a site for getting to Cowell, his house was a total no-go area. Even if it hadn’t been for the presence of his wife, the house’s location was just too open and over-looked to be credible for what we had in mind. It was now Saturday, the twenty-first. Amazingly, only just over two weeks had elapsed since Hector and I had planted our evidence on Douglas’ car. Since then, Cowell, clearly panicking, had murdered four people, tried to murder me, was hunting for Robin and, for all we know, might also have found the last of Douglas’ heavies – Dougie Carlyle.

The next day was Sunday. Hopefully, Cowell would be at home and we would be able to dictate his movements, using Robin’s apparent willingness to meet as a bait. We needed a quiet location, but one which would not arose his suspicion. A long study if the map of the area failed to bring up anything suitable; he was only a minute or two drive from the A93 and his logical route to Perth and the main road itself was too busy for a kidnapping location.

There was also the fact that Robin now lived in Edinburgh to take into account. A remote location on the further side of Perth from the capital city might well make Cowell suspicious. The obvious location, had Robin really been setting up a genuine meeting with an informant, was somewhere in Edinburgh itself, or failing that, somewhere between Edinburgh and Perth. That latter would have been reasonably logical; the Douglas story and its various ramifications all centred on the Perth-Dundee axis, so somewhere towards there would be a natural location as opposed, for example, to somewhere between Edinburgh and Glasgow.

It was Hector who came up with the idea that we eventually decided to follow.

79

Chapter Fourteen – Conclusion.

We had thought long and hard on the way forward. The obvious idea would have been for Robin to set up a meeting with Cowell in a secluded spot and for Hector and I to jump him as he arrived. That had a clear drawback. Cowell was no fool and would doubtless reconnoitre the proposed meeting place before hand. If he didn’t like what he saw, he could simply not turn up and demand somewhere else. Any reluctance on Robin’s part would sit badly with the image of a reporter on the trail of a hot story.

An even more worrying scenario was that if we allowed a suitable spot for the meeting, Cowell might even resort to a drive-by shooting, something we would be totally unable to guard against.

Hector’s idea worked round all these problems, so, at nearly eleven o’clock that evening, Robin took up her mobile again and phoned the number she had been given.

“Hello.”

“Mr. Burns? This is Robin Jackson.”

“Ah, at last – ready to meet me?”

“Well, not tonight, I’m still in Brussels, but I’m getting back tomorrow. My flight gets into Edinburgh at quarter to four tomorrow. Let’s meet in the arrivals hall and we can talk over a cup of coffee.”

“Sounds OK to me – see you at about four then.”

“Yes, but just a minute, how will I know you?”

“Oh, don’t worry – I’ll hold up a card like I was a driver waiting for you.”

“See you tomorrow, then, Mr. Burns.”

She wouldn’t be there, of course. Not in a million years was she going to be anywhere near Cowell, at Edinburgh airport or anywhere else. We didn’t suppose for a moment that Cowell would actually declare his presence to Robin in the way that he had said, after all she knew what he looked like and would be instantly suspicious to see him holding up a card. Our assumption was that he would wait until he had visual contact of her and somehow work an abduction from that point, probably by following her car – possibly even using a marked police car for the purpose and stopping her on the road.

The next day we swung into action, making our preparations for what I sincerely hoped would be the closing action of all this. I wondered idly how long Cowell would wait at the airport before deciding that Robin wasn’t on the plane. Would he, at that point, become suspicious, or would he simply conclude that she had missed her flight? Only time would tell.

The first stage of our plan went smoothly. Hector was waiting on the A93 just a little away from the road to Wolfhill and at a minute or two before three o’clock the radio came to life.

“He’s on his way and driving the Mondeo.”

That was a relief. Given the time he must be driving straight to the airport and he wasn’t in a marked police car which would have possibly caused us problems for the rest of the plan. Now we had to wait.

Darkness was near as we moved into our planned positions. It was a little after five thirty when Robin’s voice came over the radio.

“He’s just passed me.”

Robin was stopped in a pull-in on the A93 a few miles south of Guildtown, through which Cowell would pass before taking the turning to his house. He was about five miles away from me; in under ten minutes this should all be over.

Five minutes later Hector’s voice came over the radio.

“He’s taken the home turning.”

I started up my vehicle and edged out of the field where I had been waiting and turned left towards the A93.

The road to Wolfhill is really just a narrow lane. For most of its length two cars can pass each other with a little care, but if anything bigger is involved one or the other driver has to pull up onto the verge for them to pass each other.

80

My vehicle was considerably bigger. The John Deere 6230 tractor which I had ‘borrowed’ from the field is a big vehicle; with the attachment it had on it, and the trailer behind, it weighed something like four tons. I had seen it the field the previous day and had hoped that it would still be there when I needed it, although had it not been I had a plan B if needed.

I drove a couple of hundred yards to where the road took a sharp bend and turned off the tractors engine and lights, got down, hurried off the road into the hedgerow, and waited.

I didn’t need to wait long. No more than three minutes passed when a car took the corner travelling too fast for an unlit road, the driver assuming, as so many do, that there would be nothing in his way.

But there was; coming round the corner the unlit tractor would have been visible only at the last moment. I heard the squeal of brakes and then an almighty crash as the Mondeo ploughed into the tractor whilst still doing thirty miles an hour or more.

I rushed over, the lupara in my hands to finish off the job, but there was no need for the firearm. Once glance was enough to show that Cowell was dead, his head flopping at an unnatural angle on a broken neck. I ran down the road to where Hector was waiting, his car in the middle of the road to prevent any other vehicle getting by until out task was finished. He had turned so that he was facing the way to the A93 and I leapt into the passenger seat and he immediately drove off. We passed Robin a few minutes later and she tucked in behind us and the two vehicles drove in convoy to Hector’s house.

Once there we flopped into chairs. Robin was looking stained, which was hardly surprising. Hector and I had been in many more difficult situations than tonight, but for her it must have been an awful experience.

I looked across to her.

“It’s over, darling. No more fear about Cowell hunting you.”

“He really is,” she hesitated over the word, “he really is dead then?”

“Yes. The crash killed him, so it is just another example of a driver going too fast for the conditions.”

“You didn’t shoot him, then?”

“No, thank goodness. My days of having to shoot bad people are over here and now.”

She sat back in the chair, the strain still clear on her face.

“We had to do it, didn’t we?”

“Yes, we did,” Hector cut in grimly. “If we hadn’t done what we did, he would never have rested until the two of you were dead. Four murders already – and that’s what we know about – there may have been even more – he wouldn’t have hesitated for a moment. Just think of the Gordons – no matter what Gordon did, odds are his wife was totally innocent, but that didn’t save her from Cowell.”

The follow up on the local news earlier that day about the house fire story had revealed that not only was it arson, but that the Gordons had been shot dead before the house was torched.

“And don’t think that we should have gone to police and looked to them to protect us. For a start, would they have believed us? And secondly, Cowell would have known what was going on and reacted accordingly.

Long before the police made up their minds about what, if anything, to do, he would have acted.”

That night Robin had nightmares; I held her tight and tried to calm her, but they kept coming back. The morning saw us both hollow-eyed and exhausted and breakfast was a very subdued meal.

I began to worry. I was convinced that the course of action that I had instigated was the only way to have kept her alive, but had I, in the process, frightened and alienated her? Could she cope with the thought that I had arranged Cowell’s death and that she had been a part of it? She was unaware of what I had done to Cowrie and O’Connor and I had no intention of he ever finding out. They did not weigh heavily on my conscience at all. In my own mind I felt that nothing that I had done warranted me reproaching myself. I had avenged the deaths of my wife and my friend and had protected the woman I loved. I had gone far outside the rules of normal society – but where were those rules when Fiona and George needed their protection?

Robin didn’t go into work that day, nor the next. She phoned her boss, claiming illness, a claim that was in part true, for she was far, far from her normal self. I had taken her back to my cottage; the nightmare had returned that first night and now that it was time for bed again, she was clearly dreading them returning yet again.

81

She looked a shadow of her normal self. She had scarcely eaten since the Sunday morning; it was now Tuesday night.

It was time for bed, but she sat in her chair, aimlessly inspecting the carpet. At length she spoke.

“Martin, I’m sorry, but I need to get away from everything. I can’t get Cowell out of my mind. I know that we had to do what we did to protect ourselves, but I keep thinking that it was wrong to take the law into our own hands the way that we did. Surely, there must have been some other way?”

“If there had been, if we could have thought of another way, believe me we would have followed it. If we hadn’t got rid of Cowell he would not have rested until we were dead – and he had already demonstrated how ready he was to kill and how good he was at it. The police have no idea who killed Douglas, nor Anderson, nor the Gordons. Cowell would have got clean away with their murders – and with ours if we hadn’t stopped him.”

She looked across at me as though to speak, then hesitated, then did indeed speak.

“Martin, when you were in the Army, did you kill anyone?”

“Yes. I was in Iraq in the war. I killed a number of enemy soldiers – and the men I commanded killed more at my orders. It’s what happens in a war – and Cowell had effectively declared war on us.”

“Didn’t it trouble you?”

“Yes. I would far rather not have had to kill those men, but I had no choice – and I’m not claiming that ‘I was only obeying orders’. If I had not killed them, they would have killed me. It’s the same with Cowell.”

“Yes, I understand that, and I suppose that I am being foolish. I suppose that I should be grateful that I am still alive, but I can’t put Cowell out of my mind. Why didn’t I just run away somewhere, anywhere where he couldn’t find me? I could have gone to London, or even abroad. Surely he wouldn’t have followed me that far?”

“Possibly not – although have no doubt, with his police facilities he could certainly have found you anywhere in the UK or the EU and quite possibly much of the rest of the world. You would never have been able to be sure that he wouldn’t still be after you. Even though you had left the area, the danger that he felt you posed to him would still remain. There would have been nothing to stop you telling everything to the police, even perhaps using it in your paper. I could be wrong, but I think that even if you had left Scotland he would still have tried to track you down and silence you.”

I might have convinced her logically, but I had clearly failed to convince her emotionally. She slept in the spare room that night and in the morning she left for her own place in Edinburgh.

It seemed that I was alone again.

Chapter Fifteen - Epilogue

Three months passed. I had neither seen nor heard from Robin and I had reluctantly accepted that our relationship was over before it had ever had a chance to establish itself. I kept myself busy, after a fashion, by wandering around the Highlands with my cameras, although in truth I was just filling in time with no idea why or what I was waiting for.

Cowell’s death had been fully reported, of course. It was seen as a tragic accident, claiming the life of one of Tayside police’s finest officers. There was fierce indignation in the reports over the unlit tractor that he had hit; the general consensus was that somebody had taken it from the field were the farmer had left it, either for a lark or, much more likely, to steal it, and had run off when Cowell drove into it. There no progress reported in the investigations into the deaths of Douglas, Anderson nor the Gordons, and the stories had faded from the news.

I had received one pleasant surprise during the period. One day I was finishing a simple lunch of bread and cheese when the doorbell rang. I answered the summons and there on the doorstep was a young woman. It took a moment for me to place her, and then the penny dropped. It was Jenny McCauley, but a Jenny McCauley far removed from the downtrodden, anxious girl that I had last seen in November.

“Jenny,” I exclaimed, “this is a nice surprise – won’t you come in?”

“If I may – but I’ve got Timmie in the car – can I bring him in as well, please?”

82

“Yes, of course – I’ll help you.”

Between us we extracted Timmie and his buggy from the Fiesta at my gate and I installed then both in the lounge whilst I made coffee for Jenny and myself.

“So, it’s really nice to see you again – and may I say that you look really good.”

“Thank you. And thank you for what you did last year. I will truly never forget it – paying my debt off like that was the kindest thing that anyone has ever done for me.”

I waved a hand dismissively.

“Don’t worry about it – as I said at the time it was worth every penny to give me the opportunity to get some of my own back on those people.”

“Even so, it was really, really kind of you. Now, that’s why I ‘m here. I promised you that I would pay you back and now I can.”

I was too wise to tell her that she needn’t pay me back at all, but I did demur.

“Jenny, there’s no hurry about it, really.”

“No, I can pay you back right now.”

“But how – it’s a lot of money to find in just a few months.”

“It’s Malcolm’s parents. He had a falling out with them before we married – I never really found out what it was all about, but it must have been serious. Well, last month they got in touch with me. They had never seen Timmie, and only met me a couple of times – they weren’t even at our wedding, but they had a nasty shock just before Christmas. Donald, that’s Malcolm’s father, had a sister, Moira. I never met her, but Malcolm used to say that she was part of the reason, perhaps the main part, of the falling out between himself and his folk. Well, Moira died in early December, but before she did she spoke with Donald, saying that her conscience bothered her. Apparently – and I still don’t know the ins and outs of it, nor do I want to – well, apparently, her part in the argument was all her own doing and was the real reason for the falling out. Donald was horrified, as you can imagine. All this time he and his wife had cut themselves off from Malcolm because of Moira’s lies, and now it was too late to make things up – Malcolm was dead.”

She hesitated; the memory of her young husband’s death clearly still hurt, just as Fiona’s death still hurt me.

She took a deep breath and plunged on with her story.

“Well, anyway, they decided that even if they couldn’t make it up to Malcolm, they could make it up to Timmie and me. So they got in touch. I never realised, but they are pretty well off and they own several houses in Manchester. They’ve given me one, would you believe and when Donald heard how kind you had been to me, he insisted on giving me the money to repay you –so here it is.”

Triumphantly, she opened her hand bag, drew out a slip of paper and handed it to me. It was a cheque for the amount that I had given her to pay off the debt to Douglas’ loan company.

“Jenny, this is really great – and I am so pleased that things are working out for you. Have you moved done to England yet?”

“No – but we are going down the day after tomorrow. The furniture is all packed, the house down there is ready, oh, I am so happy!”

She looked it and I wished her well as she departed. After she and Timmie had gone, the house seemed emptier and quieter than ever. I looked at the cheque; so much had happened since I had paid off Jenny’s debt. I wondered what Robin was doing; whether she missed me the way I was missing her. I decided to do a bit of shooting; the lupara had been thrown into the Tay one dark night very soon after I had engineered Cowell’s death, but I had decided to keep the second shotgun, mainly in memory of my uncle Robert, and had acquired a licence so it was now a perfectly legal weapon.

I tramped the fields behind the cottage and brought down a couple of pigeons and knocked over a rabbit.

Between them they formed the basis of a very palatable game pie, even though I say it myself, and that evening I enjoyed half the pie and half a bottle of a heavy Burgundy to go with. It was still just filling in time.

A couple of weeks passed. I met up with Hector and his son Hamish, on leave from the Black Watch and we had an enjoyable evening comparing war stories and war lies as soldiers do all over the world, but then I had to return to the empty cottage. It was still just filling in time.

83

More weeks passed. In was now four months since Robin had left me and I had accepted in my mind that it really was over.

One morning, much like any other, I was pottering around the house, trying to get up enthusiasm for another photographic expedition. It was something to do, but I knew full well that it was only ‘something to do’. If I went, nothing would change. If I didn’t go, things would stay the same. I was inwardly debating whether I could really be bothered with getting my gear together, loading the car and driving off, when the doorbell rang. I answered it.

Robin was at the door. I looked at her as though I had seen a ghost. She was the very last person that I had expected. She looked at me warily.

“Martin, can I come in?”

I stepped back in confusion.

“Yes, of course, come in, come in.”

I led her into the lounge and sat her down.

“Martin, I want to apologise for the way I behaved to you.”

I shook my head.

“No, no, you don’t have anything to apologise for.”

“But I do. You saved my life and Iran away from you as if you were some kind of monster. I just couldn’t come to terms with the idea that you were able and willing to kill people. It just seemed awful. Well, after I went back to Edinburgh I had an awful time. I couldn’t sleep – the nightmares kept coming back until I dreaded going to bed at night. Sometimes I didn’t. I just sat in a chair until it was time to start the day again.

At last I decided to see someone – a doctor. She listened to what I had to say. Obviously I couldn’t tell her everything and I am sure that she realised that I was holding a lot back, but she didn’t try to get it out of me.

Instead she helped me to realise that I had to face what had happened and accept it and move on. It took some time, but at last the nightmares stopped and I realised that running away from you was the most stupid thing that I have ever done in my entire life. So, I wanted to come and see you again and apologise for the way I behaved and ..”

She hesitated, and I could see the agony of uncertainty in her features.

“Martin, I don’t know how to say this, nor if I even have any right to say it – but can we start again? Will you have me back?”

There were no words I could say to express my delight. Instead, I pulled her up from her chair and enfolded her in my arms, hugging her in a grip that I was determined that nothing would ever loosen again. Through tears and laughter in equal measure, we kissed in reawakened passion.

I was no longer alone.

The End

84

Table of Contents

Chapter Three - 2009

Chapter Fifteen - Epilogue