Where the Bodies are Buried (24 page)

He did love the watch. They’d had a curry delivered, split a bottle of wine and had sex; great sex. Hurried, lustful, oh-Jesus-it’s-been-ages
sex, then slow, tender, delicate and ever-so-slightly fetishistic sex. Drew was dopily happy, while Catherine felt the most
precarious relief at her narrow escape. She vowed privately she wouldn’t get so caught up in herself any more, and that it
wouldn’t take a special occasion for her to buy him a wee present or even just to say sod it, let’s have takeaway, wine and
a shag on a school night.

Promises, promises.

It didn’t take much to clear the punters from the shops; as soon as they saw the mass movement outside the windows, most of
them came pouring forth to find out whether whatever was going on was about to bugger up their journey. The staff were the
ones who required more of a strong hand and a stern tone, particularly with regard to communicating that no, they didn’t have
time to secure displays of merchandise, retrieve the keys, set their store alarms, lock the doors or roll down their overnight
shutters.

The assurance that there was going to be nobody free to roam the station other than cops didn’t prove universally mollifying.
By the time the last of the shop staff had been herded out of the main exit on to Gordon Street, Catherine had agreed that
they would be corralled separately and be the first allowed back into the station, in order that none of the local neds could
rapidly improvise a large-scale freebie pick-and-mix.

They set up cordons either end of Gordon Street, clearing all civilians back on to the pavements of Union Street and Hope
Street. This left Gordon Street itself as a staging area for police vehicles, the latest of which to arrive was the sniffer-dog
unit. The van was waved through to the taxi rank, sheltered beneath the glass canopy abutting the first floor of the Central
Hotel, where Cairns was waiting, his phone to his ear.

‘EOD are on their way,’ he told Catherine, meaning the Army Explosive Ordnance Department. ‘I’m gaunny look like such a dick
if this turns out to be nothing. Paranoid side of me cannae help but wonder if this is all my tout’s way of burying me.’

‘You’re a bit long in the tooth for stage fright, Bob,’ she told him, gentle chiding as a form of moral support. He did seem
very nervous, though, which told Catherine she ought to be too.

Cairns briefed the officer in charge of the dog handlers, telling him to task one dog to sniff for drugs, the other for explosives.
The dogs were trained for both, but they needed to know as soon as possible which substance they were dealing with.

‘The likelihood is it will be the former, but we have to rule out the latter,’ he advised. ‘The information was specific to
the left-luggage facility, so we’ll start there, but if we come up blank, we’d better widen the search.’

The two handlers fitted their animals with the bright blue harnesses that communicated to the dogs that it was time to go
to work. They proceeded inside through the main archway, Cairns setting off a few moments behind them.

After a couple of paces he stopped and turned to Catherine.

‘You coming?’ he asked.

‘Sure,’ she replied, though she felt a little apprehensive.

She wondered about this instinctive reluctance. Was she concerned that he was inviting her to ride shotgun so that she would
find herself sharing the blame if it turned out to be a false alarm? Then she passed the hollowed-out World War II bomb that
stood just inside the main entrance and remembered a more prosaic reason for why she might not fancy a trip to left-luggage.

Trying to stay calm and professional, her mind sought out a distracting thought, then promptly wished it hadn’t found one.

She and Drew used to meet at the bomb when they were first going out together, coming off of different trains. She could still
remember how it felt to watch the crowd and suddenly see him appear, walking towards her. The age difference seemed smaller
as they got older, but he really did seem like her toy boy back then: Drew twenty-two and she thirty-one. They both thought
their relationship was frivolous and uncomplicated, neither sizing the other up with a view to long-term suitability: in her
case because he was just meant to be a bit of diversion, a rebound fling; and in his because, well, he was twenty-two. That
was what took the pressure off and let her just enjoy being with him. It was fun.
She
was fun.

Then.

He hadn’t come home last night. He called around seven to say that some of the London office were booked into the Mal in Leith,
and he was going to do likewise so that they could all have a late one. She had told him sure, enjoy yourself, make the most
of it. The irrational side had receded; she wasn’t scared of him getting tipsy and lunging
for someone else – or not
as
scared. But she felt the news that he wasn’t coming home as a blow. He wasn’t doing it to get at her, but her guilty conscience
couldn’t help but interpret it as a deserved punishment, thinking that if she had been a little nicer to him of late, he’d
have taken that last train.

The station was like she had never seen it, a real zombie-movie scene. No people, no trains, no movement. No silence, however.
An alarm was going off over at the row of shops to the right of the platforms. One of those self-important fusspots had ignored
their instructions and set the security system, then one of the uniforms must have tripped it when he put his head around
the door to do a final check.

The left-luggage facility had enjoyed an upgrade a couple of years back, fitted out with new self-operated lockers that were
opened using an electronic keypad. Customers could set their own four-digit code instead of carrying a key around with them,
which meant that if they forgot it, it was a simple matter of the attendant on duty coding an override, thus saving on cutting
replacement keys.

Once inside the left-luggage area, the contrast in the conduct of the two dogs could barely have been more pronounced. One
of them was sniffing methodically up and down with the guarded air of a dog sitting by a dinner table trying not to come across
as too optimistic in its hopes for a few leftovers, while the other zeroed in on a particular locker and began pawing at it
like there was a bitch on heat inside, sitting on top of thirty kilos of fillet steak. Catherine wished she had been paying
more attention to which one had been primed to sniff for which substance.

She got her answer when Cairns sent not for the EOD, but for the attendant to override the electronic lock.

The attendant looked anaemically pale with fear, and it was to avert the threat of him being physically sick that Catherine
corrected Cairns’ omission and informed the guy, ‘It’s okay, it’s just drugs.’

And by God was it drugs. Cairns rolled out a mid-size charcoal-coloured fibreglass pull-along suitcase and placed it on the
floor. He snapped open the catch and flipped up the lid to reveal that it was packed tightly with dozens upon dozens of bricks
of brown powder wrapped in parcel tape.

‘Jesus,’ said the dog handler, whose charge was having to be held back. He squatted down next to the beast and it seemed to
get the message.

‘Jackpot,’ Catherine observed. They wouldn’t know until they got it tested, but she strongly suspected this was pre-cut. In
that form and that quantity, it was unlikely to be just waiting to be divided straight into several thousand tenner bags.
‘I think we’ve just intercepted several months’ worth of a major player’s supply.’

‘Aye,’ Cairns mused. ‘I’d call that explosive.’

‘Do you have any idea who this lot was meant for?’

‘Nothing concrete, but we’ll find out soon enough, because whoever was expecting to pick it up will throw some size of tantrum.’

Cairns told the dog handlers they could stand down, explaining to the one looking for explosives that this possibility had
now been ruled out.

The other dog wasn’t quite ready to jack in its shift. It was now sniffing enthusiastically around the base of another locker,
one that it had rather astonishingly managed to open.

Upon closer inspection, this was down to the lock having been damaged and the door rendered unlockable. The locker itself
was empty, as anything unlockable was bound to end up around these parts.

‘There’s been drugs in here at some point,’ the dog handler said of the broken locker. ‘I’d guess that isn’t the first suitcase
full of gear that’s been stored here.’

‘No,’ agreed Cairns with a grin. ‘But I’m willing to bet it’s the last.’

He let out a sigh that turned into a laugh, a combination of relief and elation. It proved infectious. Catherine laughed too.
This was a result. A hell of a result.

The suitcase was escorted out by two Drug Squad officers and driven off in a van with a couple of motorcycle outriders for
added speed and security. Catherine gave clearance for the trains to resume and the cordons to be dropped, with the shop staff
allowed a head start as agreed.

As they marched on to the concourse, she saw the jeweller’s manageress suddenly up the pace and streak through the pack into
the lead. She was outstripping the rest despite the encumbrance of her stiletto heels, like the fastest yummy mummy at a sports-day
parents’ race.

It was Catherine’s guess that this was whose alarm was still reverberating around the station. On another day, she might have
been inclined to go over and issue a rap on the knuckles for blatantly
ignoring police instructions, but she thought she’d let it slide. It felt like a good morning to be a police officer, and
there was no pressing reason to sour the mood.

The manageress disappeared into the shop but the alarm failed to cease ringing. She re-emerged only a few moments later, looking
as shocked as she was angry, and hurried across to where Catherine stood next to Cairns, subjecting them both to a breathless,
spluttering and livid rant, the gist of which proved that even on a day like today, every silver lining had a cloud.

Her name was Maraidh Morgan, and it turned out she had followed police orders unquestioningly and
hadn’t
set her security system. Inside Coruscate, however, there was a permanently alarmed cabinet displaying their stock of ultra-high-end
watches, and the reason it had gone off was because somebody had taken a power saw to the thing and cleared out the lot.

They arrived at just after one o’clock, as arranged. The address quoted turned out to be a red sandstone terraced house in
Clarkston, to the south of the city, in a quiet neighbourhood a couple of streets back from the main road. There was a little
girl playing in the front garden, strapping two plastic dollies side by side into a toy pushchair. She had black hair in pigtails
and was wearing the skirt, shirt and tie of a school uniform.

Jasmine said hello to her as they opened the gate, but she said nothing and took off inside while they walked along the flagstoned
path. The front door was open, and they could hear the little girl’s voice telling her mum that someone was coming.

Jasmine rang the bell anyway, and waited in front of the stone step. She could see inside along the hallway and found herself
wondering: what’s wrong with this picture? The confusing answer appeared to be: nothing whatsoever. It looked like a shopping-catalogue
picture of domestic contentment. Handsome building, tasteful decor, one cute wee moppet just started school, a stair gate
and framed photos testifying to a curly-topped younger brother completing the family unit.

A door opened at the far end of the hall and Anne Ramsay emerged from an airy-looking kitchen. As she did so, a silver Volkswagen
Passat pulled up in front of the house and its driver emerged briskly, as though racing to be first to reach them.

Perfunctory greetings and introductions were exchanged around the front door before Anne directed them towards the kitchen.
She let Jasmine and Ingrams pass so that she could talk to her husband, asking him with a near-accusatory curiosity what he
was doing home at this hour.

‘I told you I’d wrap up early so I could be here for this.’

‘Yeah, but there really wasn’t the need. I told you I’d be fine.’

Jasmine detected an unusual kind of tension between them and quickly identified it. It was the tension between two people
who didn’t want to admit to themselves or to anybody else that there was
any tension between them. It wasn’t aggro, wasn’t simmering resentment or grudges or huffs, but once you had noticed it, it
was
all
you noticed.

The husband’s name was Neil Caldwell, Jasmine noted from some envelopes on a kitchen worktop. He was wearing a shirt and tie
but didn’t look natural or comfortable in them. Anne Ramsay, for her part, was dressed down but still contrived to look rather
buttoned up. She was in loose trousers and a T-shirt but struck Jasmine as being as better suited to office attire as her
husband was to the informal.

‘So, what do you have for us?’ he asked rather urgently, before Jasmine or Ingrams had been offered a seat around the kitchen
table.

There was the crust of a jam sandwich still sitting on a plate, recently abandoned perhaps by the wee girl. Three Hot Wheels
cars sat in a short queue near the middle of the table, like the sugar bowl was a roundabout.

Anne gave her husband a perplexed look, perhaps telling him to back off, and suggested they take a seat. Jasmine preferred
to remain on her feet when she made her opening remarks, as it made her feel less pathetic.

‘First of all, let me apologise. Jim Sharp was supposed to be in touch earlier this week, but the reason he hasn’t been is
also the reason we’re here. Jim didn’t turn up to work on Monday and we don’t know where he is.’

Anne looked initially crestfallen and then a little concerned.

‘He’s gone missing? Have you told the police?’

‘The police have been informed,’ Ingrams replied, ‘but unless there are suspicious circumstances, they have no remit to investigate.’

He phrased it well, Jasmine thought. Technically, both of his statements were true.