of his eccentric charm. You’ll be having it well done, I’d imagine, Sergeant.’
He nodded. ‘Absolutely. Anything else is too big a challenge for my teeth these days.’
As I mentioned, Provan and I are around the same age, although I like to believe that I look about ten years younger. Possibly that’s why he shows me less respect than most people do. Even when I was his chief constable it had taken the little toerag all his time to call me ‘Sir’. Clearly there was no chance now I was a civilian. ‘You should get a new set,’ I suggested. ‘The ones you’ve got look a bit yellowed; age and tobacco, I guess. When are you chucking it, Dan?’ I asked.
He nodded to his right, towards Mann. ‘When she does,’ he replied. ‘They cannae kick me out on age grounds now.’
No, I thought, but ‘they’ could make your life a misery if ‘they’ chose.
‘Not if you behave yourself,’ I agreed. ‘Which could be a problem for you.’
‘I know when to touch my forelock,’ he assured me.
‘You couldn’t find your fucking forelock,’ I laughed, not only at his malignant leprechaun act, but also at the obvious puzzlement of Pye and Haddock, neither of whom seemed to know what to make of him. By the way, you might wonder about my industrial language with a female officer present, but Lottie is more likely to be offended by its omission than its use.
The arrival of the waiter cut short the banter. Provan kept his word, ordering steak, ‘Burnt and covered wi’ onions.’ The Edinburgh side both ordered fish. I settled for a York ham salad and was more than a little surprised when Mann asked for the same.
‘Yesterday was a blip,’ she volunteered. ‘This is what I eat normally.’
‘So,’ Provan resumed as soon as the interruption was over, ‘since there’s been nothin’ on our bulletin board about you bein’ seconded to do CID team-building, gonnae tell us why we’re all here?’
He was right; it was time to get down to business. ‘There’s nothing about this on any bulletin board,’ I shot back, with a glance at Lottie. ‘You haven’t told him, then?’
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘I thought I’d leave that to you.’
I knew that she’d had the same call from Mario that he’d made to Sammy Pye. It was one of the things we’d discussed when we’d spoken earlier, before I’d left Edinburgh.
‘Good shout,’ I agreed. ‘You’d have had him in your ear all the way here. Did you bring that stuff I asked for?’
She nodded and took two envelope folders from her briefcase, handing one to me and one to Sammy Pye.
‘This is a copy of the paperwork in the investigation into the murder of Jock Hodgson,’ I told him. ‘He’s the third link in our naval chain.’
‘The dead guy?’ Sauce Haddock asked.
I nodded. ‘The same. He’s dead because somebody shot him.’ I looked at Lottie. ‘Any joy from forensics?’
She smiled. ‘You knew there would be, didn’t you?’ she said.
I smiled back.
She looked across the table at Pye and Haddock. ‘The single bullet that killed Hodgson came from the same gun that accounted for your two victims in Edinburgh the other night.’
‘Which means,’ I declared ‘that you four are all investigating the same series of crimes. And they are all linked, to the matter I was hired to review: the theft of Eden Higgins’ multimillion-pound boat.’
‘How?’ Pye asked. ‘Why?’
‘I believe that the Princess Alison was stolen as an act of revenge, by Hector Mackail, who blamed Higgins for the collapse of his company, and his personal bankruptcy.’
‘And was Higgins responsible for that?’
‘He benefited from it,’ I said, ‘but that’s all I’ll say for now. It’s the consequence of the theft I want to focus on.’ I raised an eyebrow in Mann’s direction. ‘Did you get anything from Hodgson’s card activity?’
It was Dan Provan who replied. ‘There’s one thing that’s unusual. All his shopping was either done online or locally in Ayrshire; with one exception. We can put him in East Lothian, about six months ago. He filled up his car in a petrol station in Dunbar. The day before, he bought his groceries in Tesco in Kilmarnock. The day after, he bought a takeaway pizza in Largs. But that one day he was on the other side of the country.’
‘What was the date?’ Haddock asked. As he spoke he opened a tablet computer.
‘The twenty-second of August; a Saturday.’
The younger sergeant tapped the screen of his device a couple of times.