As I looked at him a smile spread across his face. ‘You cracker,’ he murmured. ‘That same day, Hector Mackail paid for lunch in a restaurant called the Rocks, in Dunbar. I checked with the owner yesterday; he matched the payment to the bill. It showed three covers.’
‘Interesting,’ Pye murmured, ‘but he could have been there with Gloria and Hazel.’
‘Sure,’ I agreed, ‘but that’s not the way I’d bet. Mackail and Hodgson served together in Portsmouth for three years. In the last of those years, they overlapped with a sub-lieutenant called David Gates. Trust me on that,’ I added. ‘It’s kosher.’ It had taken Clyde Houseman half an hour to dig out their records.
‘I believe that what they were doing was planning the theft of the Princess Alison from her secure boathouse in the Gareloch. It was handy for Gates,’ I added. ‘The Trident submarine base at Faslane is only a couple of miles up the road. He and Mackail stole the damn boat, I’m certain.’
‘And Eden Higgins found out?’ Haddock exclaimed. ‘Is that what you reckon, boss?’
‘Although I hate to say so, that’s the way it’s pointing,’ I conceded. ‘We know . . . that is Lottie and Dan know . . . that Jock Hodgson was tortured for information before he was killed. You two discovered that shortly afterwards, Hector Mackail died in a hit-and-run. David Gates, however, is untouchable, because of what he does. So instead, this week, his wife was attacked and his daughter was taken, only things went tragically wrong. I believe that the intention was to exchange wee Zena for the Princess Alison.’
‘If she’s still afloat,’ Mann pointed out.
‘Yes, exactly, and that’s what we have to find out.’
‘How?’
‘That part of it is down to me,’ I told her. ‘After all, it’s what I was hired to do.’
I hadn’t worked my way through my agenda, but lunch arrived. It was well timed, giving my four companions the chance to absorb what they had learned about the others’ investigation, and to consider the bigger picture.
It gave me breathing space also, to come to terms with a seemingly inevitable conclusion, one I had fought against: Eden Higgins, my client, my friend, my one time ‘acting brother-in-law’ as he had described himself at a gathering in the dying years of the last century, was a murderer.
He had been assaulted by Hector Mackail; a man enraged and embittered after being cheated out of his business. His boat, his pride and joy, named after his lost sister, had been stolen. Frustrated by an incompetent police investigation that had got precisely nowhere, salt had been rubbed into the wound by his insurance company’s reluctance to settle his claim for the loss of his property.
Eden was a media hero; his PR people worked hard to maintain his image of a benevolent businessman. But nobody achieves what he had by being a soft touch. I knew that from my own experience, from the fact that he had employed private investigators to check me out when Alison and I had started getting serious, uncovering in the process a secret from my private past that I thought I’d buried beyond discovery.
If, as the evidence suggested, he had been offended by Mackail’s reluctance to sell out to Destry Glazing, a Higgins Holdings subsidiary, and had used his power and his influence to ruin the man, and virtually steal his business, well, I shouldn’t be too surprised.
And if, faced by the theft of five million quid’s worth of property, he had displayed the same ruthlessness in pursuing it, if he’d had a blowlamp held to Jock Hodgson’s foot until he screamed out the whole story in his secluded kitchen, signing Mackail’s virtual death warrant in the process, well, that shouldn’t astonish me either.
But if all that was the case, why had he brought me in, on the very day that the nasty, vicious Dean Francey had seized David Gates’ daughter and hospitalised his wife?
That halted my analysis for a while, until I forced myself to take a mental step back and look at the situation objectively. When I did, an unpalatable possibility was clear.
Could it be that Eden had never believed that I would find the Princess Alison, or uncover the secrets of her theft? Was my role quite simple? Was he buying my reputation as an investigator, as he bought everything else, to force the insurance company to settle his claim?
If so the son of a bitch had underestimated me . . . and I wasn’t