What Will Burn by James Oswald (ebook reader web .txt) 📕

James ‘Jimmy’ McAllister had been twenty-six years old when he died. Average height, a skinny sixty-five kilos, he had the pasty white complexion of a north Edinburgh housing estate and a surprisingly clean criminal record. He’d been cautioned a couple of times as a youth, both for joyriding offences, and then from his eighteenth birthday until the day of his death he appeared not to have put a foot wrong. He appeared not to have had a job either, or paid any tax. And yet his address was one of the modern apartments in Fountainbridge. Not somewhere you’d live if you were eking out your dole money.

‘That’s pretty close to where he crashed,’ McLean said, all too aware that he was stating the obvious. ‘Do we know where he was going? Not home, I take it.’

Ackerley tapped his keyboard again, and the screen changed to an Edinburgh street map. A red line from McLean’s police station to the point of the accident took an odd, circuitous route first north, then west, and finally south again.

‘That’s what we can’t work out. From the reports we’ve had, and the CCTV we’ve managed to collate, he came roaring up the Lothian Road from the Princes Street end. But if he’d been heading from your station car park to Tollcross, he’d have gone across the Meadows. It’s a stupid route the way he went. Makes no sense.’

‘And I had to come all the way here to be told that?’ McLean spread the question between Ackerley and the chief superintendent. ‘Could you not just have phoned? Or maybe sent me a copy of the report?’

‘Well, I was hoping you could answer a few questions about your daily use of the car, where it’s parked at night, that sort of thing. We need to work out how McAllister knew where to find it.’ Ackerley’s tone was one of mild confusion rather than annoyance, which made things worse as far as McLean was concerned.

‘I don’t know if you’re aware, Detective Inspector, but I’m currently SIO on a murder investigation and my team is looking into two other suspicious deaths that will probably turn out to have also been murders. We’re short-staffed enough as it is, without my being dragged across the country to deal with this. The theft of my car is quite low on my list of priorities right now.’

Ackerley looked across the room at the chief superintendent, who shrugged unhelpfully. This really wasn’t how policing was supposed to be done.

‘OK.’ McLean conceded defeat. He was stuck here anyway, might as well make the best of it. ‘I’ll answer your questions as best I can. But I’d like something in return, if it’s not too much to ask?’

‘Name it,’ the NCA man said, which was perhaps a little foolish of him.

‘Your vast database of stuff.’ McLean waved a hand at the big screen. ‘I’d like you to run a name through it, see what pops up.’

‘Shouldn’t be a problem.’ Ackerley stepped up to the keyboard again, flexing his fingers like he was expecting a fight. ‘What’s the name?’

‘Slater. Lady Cecily Slater.’

‘You didn’t need to be quite so hard on Maurice, you know. The NCA can be very helpful when you’re nice to them.’

Much later, and McLean sat next to the deputy chief constable as they drove back to Edinburgh, wondering how he was going to catch up with a wasted day. He’d climbed into the back when they were finally ready to leave the Crime Campus, thinking that the same two constables would be in the front seats as before. To his annoyance, only the driver reappeared, and now he eyed up the front passenger seat with deep longing. Anything to get away from the too-close proximity of Gail Elmwood.

‘Everything we did today could have been done in an email,’ he said. ‘There was really no need for me to travel halfway across the country for any of it.’

‘And would you have dealt with that email straight away? Or would it have lain unread in your inbox for a fortnight?’

McLean didn’t want to admit that she had a point there. ‘A phone call, then. Or sending a constable over with some questions. Instead I’m stuck in a car in traffic when I should be . . .’ He stopped speaking, aware that he’d been about to say ‘out there investigating a murder’. That would have left him open to the accusation that as SIO he should most certainly not have been ‘out there’, but back at the incident room co-ordinating his sergeants and constables to go ‘out there’ and do the job their pay grade demanded. And which they had no doubt spent the whole day doing. Without him.

‘You did OK out of it though, didn’t you?’ The chief superintendent nodded towards the brown folder McLean held on his lap like some kind of protective ward. It contained a printout of everything the NCA database had spewed out for him about both Cecily Slater and her nephew, the eleventh Lord Bairnfather. Ackerley had even promised to send more over if he turned anything up about the Bairnfather Trust and the hotel, although he’d admitted there was nothing on their radar he was aware of.

‘Again, if I’d needed it I could have emailed them or picked up the phone. I only asked face-to-face because I was already there.’

‘Relax, Tony. You can’t be fighting crime all the time. You have to let others deal with all the details, sort and sift the information they bring to you. Delegate, in other words.’ The chief superintendent took her own advice literally, loosening her collar and leaning back in her seat as if she were a vacuous celebrity in a stretch limo on the way home from some gaudy awards ceremony, and not one of the most senior police officers in the country, on duty.

‘With respect, Gail, that’s not the way I work. That’s not the way murder investigations work either, especially not ones