The Ardmore Inheritance, Rob Wyllie [best novels for students TXT] 📗

A few moments later she emerged wearing a perplexed expression.

'There's no-one in there sir.'

'What?'

'No sir, no-one. Perhaps she's popped outside for some fresh air or a cigarette?'

'She doesn't smoke, but thanks, I'll take a look.'

He pushed open the door and stepped out onto the pavement. The restaurant was tucked away on a quiet side-street just off the Fulham Road, and at just past nine o'clock it was deserted. He looked up and down but there was no sign of her. And then he had a thought. An embarrassing thought.

He turned on his heel and went back inside. The young waitress was standing just inside the doorway, apparently awaiting his return. He smiled at her and said, 'Just one thing before I let you get back to work. Can I ask you, where do they put the coats?'

'There's a couple of hangers beside our little bar sir. I'll show you.'

'Ok, thanks.'

He wasn't exactly sure if he could remember what Elspeth's jacket looked like. Short-ish, perhaps light grey in colour and silky in texture, that was the best he could come up with. But as he carefully sorted through the dozen or so garments that hung on the pair of coat-stands, the problem resolved itself. There was nothing that remotely resembled hers, which meant his worst suspicions had now been confirmed.

His date had done a runner. And already he was dreading having to reveal the mortifying outcome to Maggie and Frank.

Worse than that, now he was going to be landed with the bloody bill.

Chapter 23

For Frank, it had been a more or less satisfactory day. Satisfactory, insomuch as the ratio between progress and set-back had looked like settling at around two to one in favour of the latter, and after twenty years on the force he recognised that was generally as good as it got. One step forward and two steps back. That was the metronome that guided the rhythm of routine police-work. Day in and day out, you just had to chip away at the tedious minutia of an investigation and then eventually everything would click into place.

Spirits had been raised when he'd got the sensational call from wee Lexy McDonald telling him that she'd only gone and found it, hadn't she? That she'd found that absolutely priceless piece of information that had every prospect of nailing Brian Pollock to the wall and wiping that smug bloody smile off his face forever. The 999 call that had sent Police Scotland scuttling from Helensburgh round to Ardmore must have been made either by the murderer or an accomplice, that was now becoming clear. And now the key to working out exactly what had happened on that terrible evening was to track down who had made it. He knew that the initial call would have come into a British Telecom call centre, these being the guys who asked which service do you require? Then it would have been passed along to the Police Scotland call-handling centre in Govan. And at both stages, it was pretty odds-on they would have kept records. Who called, from which number, and when. That was all they had to find out to settle Pollock's fate, and he was looking forward to getting stuck into that task later that day.

Then not more than an hour later, he received another call, this time from Ronnie French, who apparently the previous day had enjoyed a sneaky day out in Winchester. When Frank had asked him to take a look at the Susan Priest hit and run case, he'd envisaged a couple of phone calls with the local force, but fair play to the lazy shirker, he'd seemed to have come up with the goods. A casual conversation with some youths who habitually hung around the shops where the incident took place revealed that on the day in question, they had noticed an unfamiliar Ford Focus parked up fifty yards or so down the street. An old mark one, on a two-thousand-and-five plate. It was the kind of motor they liked to nick for a swift half-hour's joyride, on account of its hopeless security and tidy handling, but by the time they'd thought about it, their attention had been diverted by the excitement of the hit and run. No, they couldn't say if it was that motor that had done it, and no, they didn't catch sight of the driver, but it was a useful lead nonetheless. Focuses of that vintage were becoming rarer by the day and there was every chance that one of the local ANPR cameras would have picked it up. By any measure, that was progress.

But then came the less encouraging news that tracking down the precise location of Geordie wasn't going to be the work of five minutes as he'd initially hoped. The problem was, the building where he lived was an eighteen-storey tower-block with sixteen flats on each floor. Which flat was his was thus impossible to say, and there was no way they could do a door-to-door, because as soon as Geordie-boy saw a squad of coppers swarming all over the place then evidence would be quietly destroyed and they'd be left without a leg to stand on. No, this had to be approached with stealth if they were going to get anywhere. Luckily, Jayden Henry's clever location software had established his current place of work, an international bank in Canary Wharf, but initial enquiries revealed they employed over two thousand staff at the site, and with data protection laws what they were, you couldn't just ask them to hand over a list of employees, and in any case, he might just be a contractor or something and so not actually on the payroll. The same went for the records of the names of the residents of Geordie's block. The leaseholder would have that data, obviously, but it would need warrants and associated paperwork to get them released.