‘Shush! Don’t interrupt. From what young Sauce said I assumed that the driver knew of, or had worked out, the victim’s habits, and knew his route on his way home. I reasoned that he was hardly going to follow him all the way, looking for a chance. No, he was more likely to have waited for him, somewhere along the road. Agreed?’
‘Agreed.’
‘Right. If you remember the location, you’ll recall there’s a wee street joins Station Road from the left, at an angle. I went and had a look there and I found, in the gutter, three cigarette ends. They’d been there for a while, and been stood on, squashed, rained on and run over, but one of them was still recognisable. If a vehicle was parked there, on the wrong side of the road, and the driver was smoking, that’s where he’d have dropped the ends. The brand is Camel, filter tips. Again they could have been left by any bugger, but . . .’
‘Will there still be extractable DNA on them?’
‘I’ll find that out when I get them back to the lab, but in theory yes.’
‘If there is,’ the DCI said, ‘I want you to compare it against a body found on Monday night just outside Edinburgh, shot and left in a car that was burned out. Male, early twenties, went by the name Dean Francey.’
‘Will do. If I do get a match, it’ll be as well he’s dead, for it would be no use as evidence at any trial, any more than the paint scrapes would be.’
‘Don’t be so sure. If we can find the van . . .’
‘Maybe,’ Dorward conceded, ‘but who are you going to try if your prime suspect’s a cadaver?’
‘I’ll tell you that when we catch him. Before you leave North Berwick, I want you to call by the police station. The victim’s coat’s there, waiting to be collected.’
‘How do you know it’s my size?’
‘Fuck off, Arthur,’ Pye laughed. ‘I’ll be back in touch when we have a vehicle for you to examine.’
He ended the call, and turned back to face Haddock. ‘Think back to Dino’s flat,’ he said. ‘There was an empty cigarette packet on the coffee table. What brand?’
‘Camels,’ the sergeant replied. ‘Is that what . . .’
He nodded. ‘This is beginning to pay off. I want Chic Francey’s van impounded for examination, today, and I want Chic, in a room with you and me, tomorrow morning.’
‘North Berwick?’
‘Hell no, even I’ve had enough of the place.’
Fifty
The family dinner was a strange affair. Sarah and I had decided that we were going to say nothing to the kids about the potential extra place at the table until the end of the first trimester, but I found it difficult to look at any of the three of them without a smile spreading across my face.
It didn’t take Mark long to notice.
‘What’s up, Dad?’ he asked, in his newly broken voice. ‘You look like Phil Mickelson.’
Nothing my middle son says will ever surprise me completely, but that came close. ‘Come again?’ I chuckled.
‘You know, the golfer. He’s always smiling, like he sees a joke that nobody else gets.’
It wasn’t an original quote, but Mark has a brain like blotting paper. If he sees something and it registers above zero on his scale of interest, it’s there forever.
‘Or like he’s very happy,’ I suggested, ‘which I’m sure he is. He’s probably as proud of his family as I am.’
‘I like it when you smile,’ James Andrew, his younger brother, chipped in. ‘You didn’t always.’
That almost cut the feet from under me. He’d never said anything like that before.
‘Didn’t I?’ I exclaimed. ‘I thought I was always jolly.’
‘No. Sometimes you were sad. Before Mum came back from America.’
That wiped the smile off my face. Had my marriage to Aileen been so bad that even my younger kids had noticed?
‘I had lots of things to worry me then,’ I said, to myself as much as to Jazz. ‘Now I’m not a chief constable any more I don’t have to look at serious stuff,’ the man who had spent his morning at a post-mortem added. ‘Now I can concentrate on happy things, like you three.’
‘And Alex.’ There’s something ferocious about James Andrew’s love for his older sister. She’ll never be without a champion as long as he or I are around.
I nodded. ‘And Alex.’ I drew Sarah to me and kissed her. ‘And Mum.’