same picture, that I stopped what I was doing and dug a little deeper into his background. The ‘witness’ had professed no knowledge of the victim, and yet a simple check showed me that when he had served six months in Saughton for assault, the two had been cellmates.
I decided to look more deeply at the victim: I pulled his record and called the detective sergeant who was listed as his last arresting officer. He told me to fuck off if I knew what was good for me. I invited him to say that to my face, then went to Alf and told him what I had discovered.
We pulled in the witness and sat him down in a windowless, airless room in Gayfield Square, my least favourite of all the Edinburgh police stations. His name was Thomas McGraw, and he went down in my personal history as my first ever CID collar. Ten minutes of Alf’s relentless, unblinking interrogation . . . from then on I modelled my own interview style on his . . . and he coughed the lot.
The victim, one Scott Hancock, a recidivist criminal, had been on the payroll of Ernie Lewis, my detective sergeant acquaintance, as an informant, but that relationship had been tarnished when he confessed to McGraw in an unguarded moment in their cell that much of the information he had provided had come from a man called Dougie Terry, also known as the Comedian, and had been designed to incriminate his enemies while protecting his friends.
McGraw had gone straight to Lewis, with a view to securing the DS’s favour, and had been told to prove himself by serving notice on Hancock with the weapon of his choice. It had all gone according to plan, until the two PCs arrived ahead of schedule, having heard the victim’s cries. With his escape route blocked, McGraw had mingled among the growing crowd of passers-by at the scene. When asked for his details he had been foolish enough to give his real name.
Hancock survived, McGraw pleaded guilty to an assault charge rather than attempted murder and both men gave evidence against Ernie Lewis. By the time he came out I was a chief inspector. Alf let me charge McGraw, but he kept Lewis for himself, for he didn’t think it wise for a rookie DC to have another a cop on his arrest docket.
My trawl of the coastal marinas of Britain and Ireland was nowhere near as successful. In fact it was a total bust, as I had feared from the outset. Most of the places told me they couldn’t handle a vessel of that size, and the rest said that if one had turned up, they would have recalled it, but couldn’t. For the sake of thoroughness I checked out the fuelling points at Inverkip and Oban, but had no joy at either.
The only credit I could give myself was for doing something that McGarry hadn’t, but that was offset by the truth that his slackness had actually saved police time.
For the sake of thoroughness, I called the managers of the stolen boats website, but they had no fresh information, and nothing waiting to be added. The Princess Alison was gone, and if Walter Hurrell was right, gone for good.
I was pretty certain that before the week was out I would be reporting back to Eden, recommending that he negotiate the best settlement he could with his insurers, but I still had one place left to go.
Jock Hodgson still hadn’t got back to me. I tried him again, with no more success than before, then I called Luisa McCracken.
‘Jock does other things as well as crewing the Princess, ’ she told me. ‘We have first call on his time, but he does quite a bit of engine maintenance work.’
‘Could he be on holiday?’ I asked.
‘That’s unlikely; being single, he hardly ever takes any. When he does he always gives us plenty of notice. Hold on.’
I did, for a couple of minutes.
‘I have a folder on him,’ Luisa said when she returned. ‘There are no notes about holidays, just timesheets.’
‘When did you hear from him last?’
‘Last October. Walter told him that the boat had been stolen, then I called him to arrange a meeting with the insurance underwriters. There’s an understanding that when the boat’s recovered or replaced, we’ll get in touch with him.’
‘Do you have an address?’ I asked. ‘I won’t be ignored; if he won’t call me back, I’ll go and bang on his