“Are you sure?” Ben asked. “You’ve never done anything like this before.”
“I don’t care. I’m in,” Dave insisted. He realised he might be coming across as a little too enthusiastic, and dialled it down a notch. “If me putting myself at risk like this is what it takes to help crack this case, then I’ll do it. I’ll take my chances.”
“Well, if you’re sure…”
“I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life,” Dave replied. “Do they have a pool, do you know? It doesn’t matter if they don’t, I was just wondering.”
“No. It’s in tents.”
Dave’s smile almost split his face in two. “Oh, I bet it is! But I can handle it! Is there a pool, though?”
“I mean… everyone stays in tents. Like a campsite.”
“Oh. Right. Sorry, I thought you said…” Dave shook his head. “Doesn’t matter.”
“I’ll have to run it by Mitchell, of course,” Ben said. “Are you sure we wouldn’t be taking you away from anything important?”
Dave sat up straighter in his wheelchair and looked around at the banks of monitors that currently displayed footage from the city’s network of CCTV cameras. “Nothing they can’t dingy off onto some other poor bugger.”
“Good. Right. Leave it with me. We’ll be in touch,” Ben said.
They said their goodbyes, and Dave had barely hung up the phone when his fingers flew to the keyboard of his computer. He tabbed to a browser, typed the words, ‘back, sack, and crack waxing Inverness’ into the search bar, then sighed happily as he hit Enter.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
While Logan had his reservations about sitting down anywhere in Dinky’s house, Ally Bally had no such qualms. He’d flopped down onto the couch after Tyler had led him into the living room. It was apparently not the first time he’d done this, as while the stacks of paperwork wobbled precariously, not a single sheet fell.
The bottom of the old man’s trousers were hanging in rags from where the dog had ripped at them, but he had otherwise escaped unharmed.
Despite dozens of tiny scratches on his face, a few hundred thousand midge bites, and the fact that he was still stuck inside what was now a seriously dishevelled squirrel costume, Tyler looked pleased with himself when he brought Ally Bally in.
Too pleased with himself, Logan thought. The bastard was up to something.
That was a concern for another time, though. For now, he turned his attention to the old man on the couch.
“You must be Ally Bally.”
At the mention of his name, Ally Bally grinned to reveal more gums than teeth, and launched into a slurred rendition of the nursery rhyme.
“Ally Bally, Ally Bally Bee, sitting on—”
“Aye, we get it,” Logan said, cutting him off. He shot a sideways look at Tyler. “This the guy from the caravan?”
“It is, boss,” Tyler confirmed.
“This?” Logan asked again, gesturing to the drink and drug-addled wreck of a man jammed between the towers of newspapers and magazines. “This is the man who evaded capture?”
“He’s faster than he looks, boss,” Tyler said. He was holding eye contact, Logan noted. Not so much as a blink. “We did our best, given the circumstances, but we were on unfamiliar territory, and—”
“Alright, alright, fine,” Logan said, dismissing the rest of the explanation. He turned back to Ally Bally. “Nippy old bugger then, are you?”
“I used to be a sprinter,” Ally Bally said, his eyes wide like he was staring back into the past. “I used to run roond and roond. Roond, and roond, and roond. Whoosh. You know? Just like… whoosh, so I was. Wasn’t I, Dinky?”
“The fuck should I know?” Dinky asked. “You’ve just been an old jakey bastard for as long as I’ve known you.”
Ally Bally’s smile widened and became a dry, rasping laugh that made Logan crave a throat lozenge.
“He’s good, isn’t he? Wee Dinky,” the old man said to the detectives. “He’s a good wee guy.”
“Well, I suppose that’s what we’re here to find out,” Logan said. “See, we’ve got reason to believe that you were at a caravan owned by Bernie the Beacon.”
“Was that yesterday?” Ally Bally asked.
Logan nodded. “Aye.”
The old man’s sun-ravaged brow furrowed into a series of deep grooves, like he was struggling to hold onto some thought. “Aye. No. That wasn’t us. We weren’t there. Were we, Dinky?”
“No,” Dinky confirmed. “We weren’t there.”
“Except you were,” Tyler said, addressing the man on the couch. “Because I saw you.”
“He says he saw me, Dinky.”
“Well, he couldn’t have.”
Ally Bally shook his head. “You couldn’t have seen me.”
“Aye, but I did. You opened the caravan door, and you saw me there.”
“Naw. I’d have minded seeing you, cos you’re a big squirrel,” Ally Bally reasoned.
“I wasn’t wearing this at the time,” Tyler said. “You opened the door, saw me and my colleague, and ran away.”
“Is that the Indian man?” Ally Bally asked. He winced. “Because, like, I didn’t see him either. Did I, Dinky?”
Dinky groaned, looked up at the ceiling, and asked the gods for a strength that apparently didn’t come.
“Right, fine. We were there,” he announced. “We were at the caravan yesterday.”
“You said we weren’t,” Ally Bally told him.
“You fucking know we were!”
Ally Bally folded his skinny arms. He looked genuinely hurt. “You shouldn’t make me confused like that, Dinky. It’s no’ funny.” He shifted his gaze to the detectives. “Were we there, or were we no’?”
“You were there,” Logan told him.
This seemed to please the older man. “I thought we were there, right enough. That’s what I was wondering. ‘Cause wee Dinky said that we weren’t. I thought…” He raised his hands and mimed his head exploding, complete with accompanying sound effects. “Know what I mean?”
“Tell you what, from now on just you tell us what you think happened,” Logan told him. “Forget about what Dinky said, alright?”
Ally Bally frowned. It was quite a slow process, like the signals had to stop for a rest somewhere between his brain and his facial muscles. “What Dinky said about what?” He looked across to the little man in the armchair. “Did you say something there, Dinky?”
Dinky slapped a stubby hand on his forehead, whispered, “Fucking hell,” and then completely gave up. “Fine. You want the truth? Like I say, aye, we were at the caravan yesterday. Alright? No crime in that.”
“Except the arson,” Logan said. “Pretty sure that qualifies as a crime.”
“Arson?” Dinky’s features squished together like his face was made of rubber. “What do you mean?”
“Thought you said we were telling the truth here, Dinky,” Logan continued. “The caravan. You burned it down.”
“What? No, we didn’t. Ally Bally, tell him. Did we burn down the caravan?”