The Ardmore Inheritance by Rob Wyllie (reading the story of the .txt) 📕

Except that he hadn't done it.

Boxes eight to fourteen were labelled 'investigation notes', and she remembered they were a random collection of notes and observations, along with a regular photo snapshot of the investigation's whiteboard, inexpertly captured by the camera-phone of one of the team was her guess. There was about a dozen of them, and she remembered finding them interesting during her first review because they gave an insight into the thinking of the team as the investigation evolved. She presumed most of the content was just the random brainstorming of team members, scribbled on the board and generally appended with a question mark. Unanswered questions for the whole team to consider and hopefully answer. The problem was, she hadn't counted these whiteboard captures first time round, so there was no way of knowing for definite if any of them had been made to disappear.

She removed them all from the box and laid them out mosaic-style on her desk. They were dated, so she was able to sort them into more or less chronological order, which gave some insight into how the investigation had unfolded. They'd taken a snap-shot generally every two to three days, a good indicator as to how fast things were moving. Comparing one to the next, she saw that usually a couple of items had been erased and a couple more added. Gentle evolution but all moving in the right direction. But then she noticed it. There was a gap. Two and a half weeks into the investigation's timeline, there was a six-day gap between the last whiteboard image and the next. She could feel her heart begin to speed up as she realised the significance of what she had just deduced. At least one of these routine captures had been removed, which meant there was something on them that Pollock didn't want them to see. But what the hell was it? Was there something she remembered first time round, something that had caught her attention as especially significant? Like DI Stewart had said, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. But there was nothing for it but to start looking, because today was the last chance they had before the pile of boxes was spirited away forever.

She realised she needed to look at it from the perspective of back then, when no-one was questioning the time of death and they were dealing with a suspect that had been caught at the scene of the crime. She'd come to like DI Stewart in the short time they had been working together, but she couldn't help but think he was being a bit harsh on her Chief Constable. Putting herself in his shoes, she was pretty sure she would have come to the same conclusion at the time. Means, motive, opportunity. It was all there, neat and tidy. Tidy enough to convince a jury, which it had.

And yet someone had scribbled something on that whiteboard, something that posed a question to the investigating team. Are we sure about this? Something that didn't quite square up, something that didn't quite fit with the facts. Something that Pollock now didn't want them to see.

Then quite out of the blue, it came to her. She was thinking of her visit with DI Stewart to Jess Sinclair and then the drive from Helensburgh to Lochmorehead, most of which he had spent with his eyes closed and his foot jammed down on an imaginary brake pedal. What was it, twenty-five or twenty-six miles at least, and she remembered that she hardly got above thirty miles an hour anywhere along the twisty route. The same route the police had taken that night when they'd answered the anonymous call summoning them to the McKay house on Ardmore base. The same call that saw them arriving at the house just in time to catch Lieutenant James McKay in the act of murder.

And now Lexy could see that the timing just didn't stack up. Someone, a neighbour or maybe a passer-by out walking their dog, hears a disturbance and dials 999. It takes at least five minutes for the operator to establish the facts and decide whether to take action. The call then goes out to Helensburgh police station and a patrol car is sent on its way. Probably just a domestic is the assessment, so there's no undue rush. An hour later the police arrive to find a man holding a knife, a knife that had been used in two murders. Two murders that had apparently taken place just a few minutes earlier. Of course it didn't stack up, and someone on Pollock's investigation team must have come to that conclusion too, causing them to scribble a bloody great question mark on that whiteboard.

So who had made that phone call, scheduling it to perfection such that the police arrived at the scene just a few minutes after Lieutenant McKay? There could only be one answer to that question.

The murderer. And a murderer who knew that at around eight that evening, Lieutenant James McKay would be walking up the hill from the berthing dock of HMS Azure.

Chapter 21

It was the first time Frank had managed to make it back to Atlee House after his Scotland trip, what with one thing or another, and the second thing he was going to do after tracking down a coffee and a Twix bar was to track down the geeky forensic officer, to see if he could work out what the hell she had meant by that bloody emoji-festooned text she had sent him last night. He was hoping it signalled some progress on the Geordie affair, and it couldn't come at a better time too. Because earlier that day he'd been on the end of a bollocking from Jill Smart due to his failure