4
The other accountant introduced himself as Lawrence Marshall. He looked a little younger than Scott, but not by much. He had the same air of health and prosperity about him, dressed in a charcoal pinstripe suit with thinning hair swept back on his head.
The two men sat together on the near side of a table in the office boardroom. It was on the ground floor and had two long windows which looked out towards the motorway in the distance. They were both doing their best not to look at Irvine’s bruises.
‘Can we get you anything to drink?’ Scott asked.
‘No thanks,’ Irvine replied, sitting two seats away from them.
Armstrong walked around to the far side of the table and sat opposite Irvine. Scott looked from Irvine to Armstrong and back.
‘What can we do for you?’
‘You own a property company. ScotLets. Is that correct?’ Irvine asked.
‘Yes. Is there a problem with it?’
‘Not that we’re aware of, no.’
‘You have a flat in Bridgeton?’ Armstrong said.
Both men looked at him.
‘You rent it to a couple of women.’
Scott shifted in his seat. Marshall remained still.
‘Is that what this is about?’ Scott asked.
‘You know what they do for a living?’
‘I do now. But not when we rented to them.’
Irvine raised her eyebrows.
‘Come on. Is that the best you can do?’
‘It’s the truth. I mean, we have an agency that rents all the properties for us. We trust them to get all the references and stuff.’
‘So long as the money rolls in you don’t care.’
‘That’s not what I said. It’s a respected agency. We don’t have the time to do all of that ourselves.’
‘It’s true,’ Marshall added.
‘But you know about these particular tenants. About what they do to earn a living and pay your rent?’
‘We started getting complaints about them from one of the other tenants in the building,’ Scott said. ‘They got the company name from the lease and called here direct to complain rather than going through the agency.’
‘And you didn’t do anything about it?’
‘We left it to the agency.’
‘It’s been tough in the property market,’ Marshall said.
‘So any tenant is a good tenant?’
‘Something like that.’
Irvine believed what they were saying, didn’t see any ‘tells’ to indicate that they were lying.
‘Can you give us details of the agency?’ she asked.
‘Sure, I’ve got it here.’
Marshall reached into his jacket and took out a business card which he handed to Irvine. She looked at it briefly, saw that it was one of the big commercial agencies with an office in the city centre.
‘One of the women died,’ Armstrong said. ‘Joanna Lewski. We’re treating it as murder.’
‘My God,’ Scott said, his tanned face going pale.
‘Is that why you’re here?’ Marshall asked. ‘You think we had something to do with it?’
‘We follow all lines of inquiry. This is one of them.’
‘If we knew anything, we would tell you.’
‘That’s terrible,’ Scott said, almost as though he was no longer listening.
‘You seem awful upset about a woman you didn’t know,’ Irvine said.
Scott looked at her.
‘It’s just … I don’t know.’
Irvine stood.
‘We’ll be speaking to your agency.’
Outside in the car, Irvine asked what Armstrong thought about Scott’s reaction to the news of Lewski’s death.
‘Yeah, I saw that.’
‘What do you think? Did he know her?’
‘It’s funny. His reaction. Those two uniforms we spoke to.’
‘I know. This girl seemed to have an effect on men.’
‘Difficult to tell why from the way we found her.’
‘I didn’t get the impression he was lying to us.’
‘I agree. So what do you want to do about it?’
‘It wasn’t the reaction of someone who had anything to hide. More like he was shocked. Like he just found out about it.’
‘Yeah.’
‘If we can get the lab results and look at the CCTV recordings and then go see this agency …’ She waved the card Scott had given her. ‘Something’s going to break on this. I can feel it.’