Free The Orkney Scroll by Lyn Hamilton Page A

will he?”
    “Does this look like a different thief to you?” I said.
    “Hate to think we have two of them,” he said. “But yes, it does.”
    “I’m glad mine was neater,” I said. “And you’re right, it’s a good thing the records were removed yesterday or it would be days before we got them straightened out.”
    “I know it’s a long shot,” Singh said, “but have a look around.”
    As I did so, a piece of paper caught my eye. It was facedown in the middle of the room, but it looked like a check. I picked it up, took one look, and handed it to Singh.
    “Tell me again about how Trevor used the money Blair gave him to pay off the guy with the dog, or rather the man called Dog,” I said. The piece of paper in question was a check, dated the day I’d gone to the store with Blair, payable to Scot Free Antiques and signed by Blair, for eight hundred thousand dollars. It was not the first time I’d thought that Trevor had chosen a very stupid name for his store, unless, of course, he planned to give away antiques, but this was not the issue right at this moment.
    “It doesn’t change anything,” Singh said. It was beginning to sound like his mantra.
    “It does sort of take the edge off the motive,” I said. “If Trevor hadn’t cashed this yet, then why would Blair kill him?”
    “He killed him,” Singh said, simply as he pulled out a plastic bag and put the check into it. “Don’t know how we missed this the first time.”
    “I expect Trevor hid it somewhere until he could take it to the bank, except that he didn’t get there. It just got dislodged, wherever it was, in the break-in.”
    “How long would you hold on to a check like this? It doesn’t do much for your theory that there were two of these desks, either,” Singh said.
    “You’re just bitter.” I could hardly wait to rush home and tell Rob that he’d been completely wrong about Blair having illicit cash hanging about in huge piles, and that he had misjudged the man, as had Singh. My small moment of righteous indignation did not last long, however. Despite what I’d thought, the check made Blair look even guiltier, if that was possible. It turned out the check number was out of sequence: in other words, after Trevor was dead and Blair under suspicion, Blair had signed a check and backdated it to the day he’d purchased the cabinet. The two checks with numbers immediately before it were dated after Trevor died. It looked as if Blair had arranged to have someone break into Trevor’s shop and leave it there in a faked robbery. If so, it had been really dumb of Blair not to think about the numbers on the checks, although he claimed, according to Singh, that he had postdated a couple of checks that he was sending through the mail. The trouble with that one was that when the police went through the recycling bin of one of the check recipients, they found the envelope, postmarked after Trevor had died. It seemed incredibly inept for a man of Blair’s obvious intelligence, but once again the police were back to having no record of the transaction.
    Anna Chan, who continued to phone me from time to time with questions about Trevor’s paperwork, told me they’d caught the man who’d trashed Trevor’s place, although not mine, I’m afraid. His name was Woody somebody or other, some lowlife Blair had successfully represented on a charge of a particularly vicious house invasion. Apparently Woody’s gratitude extended to planting the check at Blair’s request, but not as far as lying about it when caught. It seemed pretty open-and-shut, as they say, at this point, and a rather inept attempt to subvert the course of justice on Blair’s part.
    Percy never showed up again, not even at The Dwarfie Stane. Rendall had promised he’d call me if he did. It was as if he’d never existed.
    I tried just to get on with life, to forget it, but that was very hard to do. For one thing Blair’s journey through the justice system was very big