Page 42 of Better the Devil

He sat up straighter as a thought occurred to him.

‘Did you talk to Sinead? Has she asked you anything?’

‘She has,’ Logan confirmed.

‘Oh! Right! Well, what did she ask?’

Logan continued to stare dead ahead. ‘I’m not going to tell you that, son. If you want to ask questions, you need to come up with them yourself.’

‘Right. Right, aye.’ Tyler chewed on his lip for a moment. ‘Or, how about you just give me the same advice that you gave her? Just, you know, what you said to her, word for word. That’d be fair, wouldn’t it?’

Logan made a non-committal sort of groaning noise at the back of his throat, then drummed his fingers on the wheel.

‘Exactly the same?’ he asked. ‘Word for word?’

‘I think that’s fair, boss. I don’t think anyone could complain about that.’

‘OK, then,’ Logan asked. He turned just long enough to meet Tyler’s eye. ‘I said, “Don’t worry about a thing. You’ve got this in the bag.”’

‘Aw, cheers, boss,’ Tyler said, then the smile that had started to spread across his face spluttered and died. ‘Wait, what? That’s what you told…?’

‘Word for word, son,’ Logan said.

Then, with the sound of Tyler’s brain whirring away in the passenger seat beside him, Jack dropped down a gear, put his foot to the floor, and sped south down the A96.

The Belov brothers were clever.Not clever enough to avoid suspicion, granted. Not clever enough to avoid detection entirely.

But clever enough to avoid any possibility of conviction.

There had been a lot of meetings concerning their suspected criminality. A lot of surveillance. A lot of time and money spent on investigations.

They had enough on the brothers to justify it all, but not enough—nowhere near enough—to convince the Procurator Fiscal that charges should be raised.

Any evidence was circumstantial. Any statements that named them—two in the last four years—had both been withdrawn by the people who’d made them.

Reading between the lines of it all told a story of a ruthless Slovakian family that had muscled into Bosco Maximuke’s old territory, quickly established new routes for running drugs into ports at Aberdeen and Mallaig, and from there across the whole north of Scotland.

But reading between the lines would never stand up in court.

‘They’re slippery bastards,’ Dave Davidson said, which quite neatly summed up the whole thing.

Sinead ran a hand down her face, then used it to cover a yawn. Standing, she picked up the most recent stack of papers she’d gone through, folded another sheet of A4 around them, then scribbled her name, the date, and the time on them so she or Dave wouldn’t accidentally pick them up again.

She returned the stack to a box half-filled with similarly annotated stacks, then grabbed a good inch and a half of printouts from the next box over.

To her immense relief, a phone rang, providing a welcome break from the tedium.

‘If it’s for me, I’m not in,’ Dave said, not looking up from the page he was reading.

Sinead looked around at the desk phones until she figured out which one was ringing. Hamza’s.

‘DI Khaled’s desk. This is DC Sinead Bell,’ she said, after picking up the phone. The sound of the voice on the other end made her straighten. ‘Yes, ma’am. No, not back yet, ma’am. Can I…?’

She listened. As she did, her eyes widened. She cradled the phone to her ear, her hands searching the desk for a pencil and pad.

‘Yes, ma’am. Right, ma’am,’ Sinead said.

She found what she was looking for. The pen scratched a spider’s scrawl across the paper.