“I’m fine,” Sinead called from the background.
“Which is more than I can say for Mr Finley-Lennox’s groin,” Ben concluded. “Hang on…”
Logan and Shona listened to muffled footsteps, a door opening and closing again, then Ben’s voice returned, a little more hushed than before.
“Right. Aye. So, we’ve got him on a drink-driving charge at the moment. He’s three times the limit, and he drove here from Edinburgh. Half-bottle of whisky in the car. Says he came here to confess.”
“To the murder?”
“Sadly not, no. To shagging the nanny. I think he thought his whole house of cards was going to come falling down around his ears, and wanted to get ahead of it in some way,” Ben explained. “Backfired pretty spectacularly, I’d say.”
“Aye, sounds like it,” Logan agreed.
“Also, he kicked the dog.”
“He did what?” Logan asked.
“What a dick!” Shona spat.
“Aye. Really stuck the boot in, Sinead says.”
Logan slowly rolled his head around on his shoulders until the bones in his neck went crick. “Right. Well, should another opportunity to hoof Mr Finley-Lennox squarely in the Billy Bollocks present itself, you have my full permission to take it.”
“It was a knee, actually, but noted.”
“Is he alright?” Logan asked.
“He’s moaning about the handcuffs and he’s not a big fan of the testicle trauma, but—”
“The dog, I meant,” Logan said. “Is he alright? He’s not… He’s not hurt or anything, is he?”
“Doesn’t seem to be, no,” Ben said, and it was impossible not to hear the note of amusement in his voice. “Why, you’re not actually concerned about him, are you, Jack? You’re not saying you actually like him, are you? Surely that can’t be what I’m hearing, can it?”
“I’m just thinking of the vet’s bill, that’s all,” Logan said.
“Sure you are,” Ben said. “Got a couple of bits of news to share with you, too.”
“Aye, same here,” Logan told him, eyeing the passport. “You go first.”
“That link you gave us to the van on Craigslist? Hamza got stuck in and managed to get the listing back. Somehow. Don’t ask me. Anyway, he found a photo. The van’s a bit of a shitheap of a thing. Listed for five hundred quid. Lot of rust. Wheel arches are nearly eaten through. I’d be surprised if it was road legal, although the ad says it is.”
“Sounds like the van that supposedly picked Bernie up from Westerly Wellness,” Logan said. “Did the ad show the plate?”
“No, that’s blurred out. But we got the seller details. He’s local, so we’re going to pay him a visit in the morning. See what we can find out.”
“Keep me posted,” Logan said.
“Also, hang on, Sinead wants to tell you something she found. Something about a date. One sec…”
The line went muffled again. They heard the creak of a door, and a distant-sounding muttering that sounded like Ben. It was followed by an even more distant-sounding muttering that didn’t, then the phone was handed over, the door was closed, and Sinead’s voice came more clearly.
“Hiya, sir. Just a quick one, really. I was looking through Bernie’s newsletters, and something jumped out at me. A date. Most of the issues were published at random times, but there was always one published on the same date every year.”
Logan looked over to the open briefcase, and the dials of the twin locks. “Twenty-fourth of October, by any chance?”
There was a moment of silence from the other end. The sound of thunder being stolen.
“Eh, yeah. That’s it. How did you know that, sir?”
“Lucky guess,” Logan told her. “I’ll explain later. I’m going to send a photo of a passport to the shared inbox.”
“What? Bernie’s?”
“The name on it is Alan Rigg,” Logan explained. “But might still be him. I want you to run it by those two Uniforms down there. Or, better still, show it to the politician and see if he recognises Bernie from the photo. Might as well get some use out of the bastard.”
“Send it over and I’ll ask him,” Sinead said.
“We’ve also got photos of him at it with the nanny. Well, I assume it’s the nanny, anyway. I’ll send those over, too, and you can use them to beat him with.”
“Will do.”
“And… you’re OK?” Logan asked. “He didn’t… He wasn’t…”
“I took care of it, sir,” Sinead replied. “It was touch and go for a bit, but I should never have let it get that far. My fault.”
“Bollocks it’s your fault,” Shona chimed in.
“Aye, what she said,” Logan agreed.
“Thanks. Either way, I’m fine,” Sinead said, then she neatly steered the conversation away from that particular topic. “Where did you get this stuff, sir? The passport and the photos, I mean?”
“Passport, photos, and a handwritten note from Bernie himself, no less,” Logan said. “It was in the briefcase we got from the loan shark. The one he’d nicked from Bernie’s caravan.”
“And you don’t think he’s a suspect, sir? Bernie did owe him money.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Not really feeling it, though,” Logan said. “Mind you, they’ve had their run-ins before. Bernie failed to pay back a previous loan on time, and earned himself a broken wrist in the process.”
“Definitely sounds suss, sir,” Sinead said.
“Wait, wait. What?” Shona interrupted. “Who told you he broke his wrist?”
“Dinky,” Logan said.
Shona shook her head. “I have no idea who or what that is.”
“Little fella,” Logan said, like that would be enough to explain everything. “He’s like a… a dwarf.”
“He’s a loan shark dwarf?” Shona asked.
“Aye.”
“He’s a little person with a big stash of money? What, is he a leprechaun or something?” Shona asked, then she waved away her own question before Logan could answer. “Forget it. So, he told you that Bernie… what, exactly?”
“Broke his wrist?”
“Bernie broke the little fella’s wrist, or…?”
“Other way around.”
Shona sat back, blinked several times in a row, then hunched over her laptop and started prodding furiously at the touchpad.
Sinead, who had been listening to the whole exchange, asked the question that had just come to Logan’s mind, too.
“Eh, is everything alright?”
“Uh… let me get back to you on that,” Logan told her, watching Shona scroll through a series of thumbnail images on her computer screen. “We’re just… I don’t know what we’re doing.”
“Aha! There. See?” Shona cried, double-tapping the touchpad. The small image grew in size to fill the whole screen. It was an X-ray that showed an arm from the elbow down to the tips of the fingers. “No damage. Not on that one, and not on the other one, either.”
“What?” Logan joined her in perching at the front of the couch. “What are you saying?”
“These wrists have never been broken. Not a break, not a hairline fracture, nothing.”
“Jesus,” Logan muttered. “So…”
“So, either your money lender’s lying,” Shona said, indicating the X-ray. “Or that body doesn’t belong to who we think it does.”
“Teeth,” Logan said.
Shona frowned. “Teeth?”