Fire in the Blood (Scott Cullen Mysteries) Read online

  "Sundance," said Bain, smiling at Cullen, though without a hint of warmth, "glad you could finally join us."

  Cullen didn't bother rising to the bait.

  Bain pointed to the man with the red face. "This is Alec Crombie," he said, rubbing at his moustache, "the distillery owner."

  Crombie was a thin man in his mid-60s, wearing full Highland dress - kilt, sporran, jacket, the works. His grey hair was pulled over in a tight comb-over, though Cullen spotted a few loose strands that curled away to freedom. Crombie turned his nose up at Cullen, then looked away. "This is an absolute nightmare," he said. "I'll lose hours of productivity and I have twenty people booked on a distillery tour this afternoon. It'll have to be cancelled and refunded."

  "So what's happened then?" asked Cullen.

  "I wish you'd listen to your voicemails," said Bain in a harsh undertone.

  Cullen only ignored his voicemails if they related to one of many missed calls from Bain - especially if they were followed by another call less than thirty seconds later. Cullen still hadn't bothered listening to the first message.

  "One of Mr Crombie's men was testing a whisky barrel they were just about to blend," said Bain. "He found a body in it. Definitely male. IC1. Not in a good state by the looks of things. The skull is all smashed in, all the teeth are gone."

  "Any idea who it is?" asked Cullen.

  Bain shook his head. "That's why we're here, I'm afraid," he said. "No chance of a dental records search, either."

  "Is the man who found the body still around?" asked Cullen.

  "He is, aye," said Crombie. "He's in shock, as I'm sure you can understand. I'd rather you left him be for the time being."

  Crombie spoke in a deep, rich baritone. It was the sort of voice that would be on a regional Scottish radio station, lining up folk music in the wee small hours. His accent was also very distinct - one that Cullen had heard only occasionally and usually in men who'd attended one of Edinburgh's many private schools.

  "Have you spoken to him?" asked Cullen, looking at Bain.

  "Not yet," replied Bain. "As I said, he's been in a state of shock. Everything we've had so far has come from Mr Crombie here."

  "Come on," said Cullen. "Let's see if he's a bit more communicative now."

  Crombie looked reluctant but eventually led them over to the corner of the room. "This is Doug Strachan," he said. "He's the chief Foreman."

  Strachan sat on a chair just by the open window - Cullen figured that it would have been easier to have gone outside but then it was more crowded than inside. Strachan looked to be of an age with Crombie senior and was heavily overweight. He had a bright red nose and his head was entirely bald - Cullen couldn't quite work out whether it had been shaved at the sides. He wore black trousers and a black Dunpender Distillery-branded polo shirt. A blue overcoat was cast aside on the back of the chair, a leather tool belt at his feet.

  Standing by him was a tall man with a rugged dark beard, wearing the same clothes as Strachan.

  "This is Fraser, my number two son," said Crombie, pointing at the man.

  Fraser Crombie was bulkier than his father and about the same height. His dark hair was thinning and greying, but he looked like he could still play rugby. His dark eyes avoided contact with anyone in the room.

  "He's the Master Cooper here," continued his father.

  Cullen looked blankly at Bain.

  "He's in charge of the barrels," said Bain, glaring at Cullen.

  "Fine," said Cullen. "Can you go through what happened, please?"

  Strachan rubbed his hand over his red face. Cullen could see sweat on the man's face - he figured that Strachan had been drinking, and not just a cheeky pint with lunch. That said, Cullen couldn't work out where the nearest pub would actually be - East Lothian was largely bereft of the traditional country pub. The closest he could think of would be the Castle Inn in Dirleton, a few miles away on the coast, or one of the three on Garleton High Street, up in the hills - certainly, there were none in Drem and the other towns were at least three miles - and a drive - away.

  "I was just taking a sample of the special edition," said Strachan, staring into space, "before we start blending it." His eyes suddenly locked onto Cullen's, full of lucidity. "We check it for colour and aroma, and a few of us sample it before we approve it."

  "I thought you did single malts here," said Cullen.

  "We do," said Fraser Crombie. "But we blend different barrels together to get the right texture."

  "Not a lot of people know this," said Alec Crombie, "but we water the whisky down from the distilled spirit. It starts out about 70 or 80 percent. Here, we get it down to an even 42 percent."

  "Thanks for the trivia," muttered Bain.

  Hearing Fraser and Alec's voices together, Cullen was amazed by the similarity in both voice and accent.

  Crombie nodded at Cullen, then looked at Bain. "I can tell your Constable here has noticed as well," he said, grinning.

  "What?" asked Bain.

  "The family trait," said Crombie. "Generations of Crombie have been schooled in a particular way of speaking, father to son. I run a poetry recital group in Gullane, you know. Our family, before we started on the whisky, used to run public houses in the area. We were noted for holding court, but mostly for the rich voice. We would be asked to recant the verse of the day - Burns, mostly - and people would travel from miles around to hear my grandfather orate. I've made sure that Fraser here received the same training that I did, and that it's passed down through the generations."

  Cullen caught the grin on Caldwell's face and had to look away to avoid laughing. Instead, he focused on Strachan, who looked increasingly agitated. "How many barrels were you sampling downstairs?" he asked, desperate to change the subject and just stop Crombie talking.

  "Just the two," said Strachan.

  Alec Crombie stepped forward, distracting attention from Strachan. "It was a Special Edition," said Crombie. "My distillery celebrates its centenary this year and we were planning on launching this exclusive bottle with a crystal quaich and an engraved hip flask to our loyal customers."

  "I see," said Cullen. He glanced at Bain - it was obvious from his sour expression that the DI had heard a lot of this already. "DI Bain is a big fan of your whisky."

  Bain grunted at Cullen. "It's one of my more favourites, put it that way."

  "I hope you're not angling for some free whisky," said Crombie, his expression more disagreeable than Bain's.

  "Perish the thought," said Bain. Cullen read his expression as a mixture of frustration at getting knocked back on the freebie and in irritation at Cullen for setting him up for the fall.

  Cullen looked at Strachan again. "Was it the first or second barrel that you were sampling when you found the body?" he asked.

  "Second," said Strachan. "The first looked very good. It's a shame."

  "Where's the barrel now?" asked Cullen.

  "Downstairs in the barrel room," said Bain. "James Anderson and a few of his boys are already going over it."

  Cullen briefly closed his eyes. Anderson wasn't exactly one of his favourite Scene of Crime Officers.

  "Now, any more from you, Cullen?" asked Bain.

  "Yes," said Cullen. "Any idea who it is in there?"

  Bain glowered at Cullen. "I really wish you'd been here the first time we'd asked that," he said, in an undertone. "We have a possibility."

  "Indeed we do," said Alec Crombie, again stepping in. Cullen caught a look from Fraser Crombie to his father - he didn't know what to make of it. Crombie senior cleared his throat. "The prevailing theory is that it's the remains of an Irish worker we had here in the early 90s called Paddy. If memory serves, his full name was Padraig Kavanagh. He went missing around the time that those barrels were filled."

  "Any idea how he got in there?" asked Cullen. "I would suggest that we can rule out suicide."

  Crombie gave a shrug. "That is exactly what we would be looking for you to find out," he said. "This is a mystery
to me. If you can do your job properly, then you may be able to enlighten us."

  "You done?" asked Bain, looking at Cullen, but clearly infuriated with Crombie already.

  "For now," said Cullen, not willing to test Bain's patience any further.

  "Right, Cullen and Caldwell," said Bain, "I want a word with the pair of you outside."

  four

  They moved away from the buildings, over towards the pebbles of the car park. Cullen's knackered old green Golf was one of the many cars spilling onto the grass overflow car park. He reckoned that most of them would belong to the distillery's workforce - Bain's purple sport Mondeo sat on the pebbles next to three squad cars.

  At the far side of the car park was a large, neatly trimmed leylandii hedge - through the gaps, Cullen could see glimpses of a garden across the stream. An attractive woman in her 30s was sitting there reading a book, occasionally sending them furious glances through the hedge. Cullen reminded himself that he was in a relationship and should stop looking around like that.

  "So what do you think?" asked Cullen.

  "Hold on," said Bain, pointing over Cullen's shoulder, back towards the buildings. "Don't want to spend all fuckin' afternoon repeating myself to DCs."

  Cullen frowned and thought back to the conversation he'd had with Sharon at lunchtime. He was becoming too cynical to think that Bain might be referring to making him an Acting DS, so he turned around and spotted DC Stuart Murray walking over - a Volvo from the Haddington pool headed off out of the car park.

  Murray was a local CID officer based in Haddington - they had all worked with him before in January, along with PC Watson and they had got on well enough. Murray grinned at Cullen and Caldwell as he caught up with them. Protocol dictated that local DCs and DSs would be allocated to the Senior Investigating Officer - Bain in this case - but Cullen reckoned that Bain was getting a DC and a PC and that would be his lot.

  "How's it going?" asked Cullen.

  "Nice to see you pair," said Murray, nodding at Cullen and Caldwell.

  "What about me?" asked Bain.

  "The pleasure's mine," said Murray.

  Bain scowled. "What took you so fuckin' long, McLean?"

  Murray grinned at Bain. "It's Murray," he said. "I've just left McLean to head back to base. We've been looking into an assault in Gullane, some boy got battered on the way home from the pub."

  "And Lamb's got two DCs lookin' into that?" asked Bain.

  DS Bill Lamb was Murray's boss, and a recent addition to the catalogue of enemies that Bain had accumulated over the years. Cullen got on well with him. He was beginning to harbour suspicions about some sort of romantic involvement between Lamb and Caldwell - Mrs Angela Caldwell - hence his cheeky comment to her earlier.

  Murray shrugged. "It's as close as we get to a proper case without you being involved," he said.

  Caldwell burst out laughing.

  Bain scowled at them all.

  "Come to think about it," said Murray, "how come you're out here and it's not us local boys?"

  Bain ignored him. Cullen knew the real answer - Turnbull was both playing for control of a wider remit and trying to find something to occupy the time of one of his more useless DIs.

  "Right," he said, rubbing his hands together. "This is looking like a fuckin' puzzle. First things first, I want to know who the fuckin' body in that barrel is. They seem to be jumping to conclusions a bit too soon for my likin'."

  "Who's they?" asked Murray.

  Bain rubbed at his moustache - Cullen hadn't seen Bain for a few days and noticed a red rash on the top lip. "The fuckin' distillery owner," he said. "Fuck sake." He took a deep breath. "Just found out that Jimmy Deeley is out in Bathgate at a murder scene, so he won't fuckin' be out here till later to identify the body and work his usual magic."

  Deeley was the Edinburgh Coroner who performed the function of Medical Examiner on cases like this, but Cullen knew that the department was inundated due to a freak onslaught of deaths with suspicious circumstances.

  "What about Sweeney?" asked Cullen. Katherine Sweeney was Deeley's Deputy - under Scots Law, all of his postmortems had to be attended by Sweeney to ensure corroboration. Cullen had only met her once and that was just recently - he'd often wondered if Deeley even had a deputy, other than the male assistant that lurked in the basement of the Leith Walk police station's mortuary. When he finally met Sweeney, he recognised her face from the station canteen.

  "You know as well as I do how often she leaves the lab, Sundance," said Bain.

  "I don't think we need to wait for someone to declare the body dead," said Caldwell.

  Cullen and Murray laughed.

  "Less of that, Batgirl," said Bain. "At some point," he said, "Deeley will get the body out of the barrel and we can compare it against MisPer reports. This barrel was filled 18 years ago." He looked at Caldwell. "Can you get us a list of disappearances from then?"

  "Will do," she said. "I'll dig up any case files that are still open. IC1 males, right?"

  "Put a few months around either way, aye?" asked Bain.

  "Obviously," she said.

  Bain looked at Murray. "Can you look into this Paddy Kavanagh boy that Crombie mentioned?" he asked.

  "I'll need to have a word with him, of course, but aye," said Murray.

  "We'll chin when we get back upstairs." Bain eyed Cullen. "Now, Sundance, I want you to look into this barrel," he said. "Who filled it? How did the body get in there?"

  "I get all the great jobs," said Cullen.

  "Sundance," said Bain, his eyes screwed up, "if you want to wash my car, I've got a bucket and a sponge in the boot - I'm sure they can give you some water and soap in there."

  "Sorry, sir," said Cullen, closing his eyes, "I'll see what I can find out."

  "I want you to get as much out of these boys regarding that barrel and the whisky," said Bain. "And check that the body hasn't been chucked in there recently."

  "Isn't Anderson supposed to be doing that?" asked Cullen.

  Bain smiled, though there was no warmth in it. "Aye, well, I want you to make sure that he's fuckin' doin' it properly. As you well know, half our fuckin' time is spent checkin' other people are doin' their jobs properly."

  "Fine," said Cullen. He took a deep breath. "Crombie seems like such a nice man."

  Bain laughed. "Aye, well, I've got suspicions about him already, put it that way."

  "Would those suspicions be allayed by a bottle of whisky?" asked Cullen.

  "Watch it, Sundance."

  Cullen smiled. He was finding it easier and easier to wind Bain up - time was he would have shat himself at the merest mention of his name, but now winding Bain up felt like shooting fish in a barrel. "Are we going to get any more help?" he asked.

  "I've asked," said Bain. "We'll see what happens. As it stands, it's just us four and that plonker Watson." He looked at each of them in turn. "Right, it's just before two now. I want progress updates from each of you by four."

  five

  Cullen sat with Fraser Crombie and Doug Strachan in the stock room, located just off the main office. It was a small dusty room with no natural light. Several sets of shelves lined the walls, filled with paperwork in various styles of ring binder. They sat around a fairly old computer, the grey case on the old CRT monitor had long since yellowed. Cullen thought he recognised Windows 95 - he would be surprised if the machine could even go on the internet.

  Fraser was trawling through the computer records, tracing the barrels' stock record history through an old database package that Cullen imagined should have long since been integrated into something newer, faster and which worked without a PhD in Computer Science. Fraser had been swearing under his breath continually - Cullen knew from personal experience that having someone looking over your shoulder when using a computer was seriously off-putting, but he imagined that the antiquity of the software wasn't exactly helping. That said, he was keeping a close eye on what was going on in case there was any funny business attempted.


  Cullen checked his watch. "Okay," he said, "that's half an hour that you've been at this. What can you tell me about this barrel?"

  "As young Fraser's father mentioned earlier," said Strachan, cutting in, "this pair are an 18 Year Old edition - one sherry and one oak cask - which we blend together to get the correct texture, colour and flavour for the single malt. We barrelled them on twelfth June 1994, exactly 18 years ago to the day."

  Cullen scribbled the date down. "I wasn't aware that you would pre-mark a Special Edition like that," he said.

  Strachan frowned. "Normally we don't," he said.

  "How do you know at the time that it's going to be special?"

  "We have learnt to recognise a special harvest," said Strachan. "We normally do a fourteen year edition, otherwise an eighteen, but I would suggest that Fraser's father was thinking ahead to the centenary when these were pre-marked."

  "So was 1994 particularly special?" asked Cullen.

  "You're going back quite a while," said Fraser in his deep syrupy voice. "I think it was a decent year - the fourteen year old editions we did in 2008 were pretty good if I recall correctly. And these are for the distillery's centenary. My father is nothing if not forward-thinking."

  "Has the distillery always been based here?" asked Cullen, wondering if they could have been moved.

  "It has," said Fraser. "Our family had an illicit still in Gullane for years before my great-grandfather set this place up."

  Cullen noticed that he used the much-maligned pronunciation of Gillen rather than the more common Gullen - it showed which side of the tracks you were from in the town.

  "Don't worry," said Cullen, "I don't think we'll prosecute you on that illicit still."

  Fraser didn't respond to the joke. "It was pretty successful," he said, "and by the 30s he was doing fourteen year editions, so him and his son - my grandfather - bought this place off the landowner. It took a while until we started using it fully, but we're at a comfortable size now."