Cold War - Jerome Preisler [73]
“Where are you going?”
“Switzerland. Give me your number.”
Inverness, Scotland
When he hung up with Nessa, Gorrie glanced at the clock. Though he had told his wife he’d be home by eight, he realized there was little sense making it there on the dot; she’d be talking schoolteacher talk with the visitor for hours and he’d only end up brooding in the corner. Better to take the time to work on this tangled knot.
Talking to Nessa made things no clearer, though it was good to hear her voice again. She seemed to be making a splash.
Gorrie’s thoughts returned to Cardha Duff. If the murder had anything to do with the power plant and its waste, the lass didn’t fit—unless Mackay had told her about the goings-on there.
Possible.
He drew out the file on the murder, looking over the report on her belongings. Nothing unusual, but then they hadn’t bothered with an extensive inventory, given the circumstances of death. The apartment hadn’t appeared ransacked. He could go back there and hunt around, but wouldn’t a murderer have done the same?
If it was murder. The lab report leaned heavily toward accident.
If someone intended on killing her—if someone really wanted to do her in—why wait for several days after the others?
Maybe they didn’t know about her until then.
Gorrie went back through his notes to make sure that Christine Gibbon hadn’t given the name during their initial interview. It didn’t appear there—but DC Andrews had conducted the actual interview, and he had not as yet typed his notes for the file.
A week late at least. Nessa would not have been so tardy, even as one of the unwashed.
Gorrie picked up the phone and called the young detective constable at home. Andrews’s wife answered, giving a timid hello.
“Hello, Marge,” Gorrie told her. “I just need a word with your husband. I won’t keep him, I promise.”
“Inspector Gorrie, how are you,” she said loudly, undoubtedly intending her husband nearby to hear and decide whether he wanted to be bothered or not. Their two-year-old cried in the background.
“A quick question’s all,” promised Gorrie again.
“Here, Inspector,” she said as the babe’s cry crescendoed.
Andrews came on the phone with his husky voice. “Inspector?”
“When you spoke to Christine Gibbon, did she mention any of Mackay’s alleged girlfriends?”
“You mean the Duff tart?”
Gorrie didn’t answer.
“She may have,” said Andrews. “Timing blurs a bit.”
“Can you check your notes?”
“Haven’t got ’em, sir,” said Andrews, turning from the phone a moment as the baby continued to cry. “Can you shush ’em?” he asked his wife.
“Never mind, Andrews.”
“That’s it, sir?”
“Good night.”
Gorrie dialed Gibbon’s number, but got only her answering machine; he left a message asking her to call back. Finally he opened another of the files on his desk and fished out the news items on the case. Christine Gibbon had given more interviews after the murder than a movie star promoting a new film. He glanced through the stories, but none included Ms. Duff’s name, only hints that there was “another woman.”
One story declared that the interview had taken place in the “historic taproom of Brown Glen Hall, where the interviewee is a well-regarded raconteur.”
The phone on his desk rang. He picked it up, thinking it was Gibbon returning his call.
Instead, it was a man who identified himself as Phil Hernandez, an executive with UpLink International.
“What precisely is that?” Gorrie asked the man, who had an American accent.
“We’re an international communications concern,” said the man, adding that he was in the security division, filling in for another person Gorrie had never heard of. “One of our people at Glasgow intercepted a hacker trying to break into our e-mail system.”
“Computer crimes are a bit out of my expertise,” Gorrie told him. “And Glasgow—”
“It’s rather complicated.” Hernandez explained that in investigating the attempted hack, they had uncovered possible evidence of another crime. They were alerting Scotland Yard’s computer branch, but some of the e-mail they encountered seemed to pertain to Inverness