From across the room there came the sound of a throat being cleared. Sinead looked up to find Ben and Hamza standing in the doorway, staring down in wide-eyed wonder.
“Um… everything alright here, Detective Constable?” Ben asked.
“Aye, sir,” Sinead said, and she smiled because it was true. “Everything’s just peachy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Logan and Shona stared at the document in the lining of the case, not quite able to believe it was real. There were lucky breaks, and there were lucky breaks, and then there was this.
They had been staring at it for almost a full thirty seconds before Tyler piped up from Logan’s phone. “Hello? Still there, boss? Have I been cut off?”
“What? No. Sorry, still here,” Logan said.
“Good stuff. Thought maybe I’d accidentally hung up with my cheek again. They really should come up with a way of stopping that. It must happen to people all the time.”
“Just you, son,” Logan said. He reached into the briefcase, and carefully took out the stiff-backed little burgundy book that had been hidden away inside it. “It’s a passport. We’ve got a passport.”
“Wow. Seriously, boss? Whose passport is it?”
Logan opened the book and flicked through pages until he found the page with the identifying information. A man stared blankly ahead from the photograph in the corner, face limp and devoid of all emotion other than perhaps the faintest hint of embarrassment.
So pretty standard for a passport photograph, really.
In the picture, he looked to be in his late twenties, although the passport had expired almost ten years previously, so that would fit with Bernie’s estimated age. The date of birth put him as forty-eight. He was born in December, so would have been forty-nine in just a few months.
“It says his name is Alan Rigg,” Logan said.
“Alan Rigg?” Tyler replied. “So, it’s not the victim’s, then?”
“Well, I didn’t think his name was actually Bernie the Beacon,” Logan said. “So, for all we know, this is him. I’ll send a copy to the inbox in a minute, and we can run the photo by Uniform in the local area, see if they recognise him.”
His phone buzzed, and a landline number Logan didn’t recognise came up on his screen. The phone, clever bugger of a thing that it was, told him that the area code belonged to Strontian.
“Hang on, this might be Ben,” he said. “I’ll call you back.”
He prodded the screen, ending one call and answering the other. Ben was in mid-conversation with someone when the call connected.
“Aye, well, I don’t care if your balls are sore. You brought that on your— Hello?”
“Ben. Aye. I’m here. What’s going on?” Logan asked.
“Oh, all sorts, Jack,” the DI replied. “Hang on, I’ll go somewhere private. We’ve got Mr Finley-Lennox here with us. Sinead had a bit of a run-in with him.”
“What do you mean?” Logan asked, leaning closer to the phone.
“Nothing she couldn’t handle. He came in here shouting the odds. Got a bit grabby.”
“Jesus,” Shona said. “Is she OK?”
“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.”