Free Murder on the Second Tee by Ian Simpson Page B

ken, on his sheet. There wis a long hair, kinda gingery-blonde, on his pillow, and the pillow smelled of perfume – her perfume. Guilty, they call it. I notice these things, ken. I’d seen it in her room yesterday and had a wee fly sniff. It’s sort of flowery. And I liked the way they wrote the Gs of Gucci Guilty on the bottle. Do ye think she did awa’ wi’ her man?’
    ‘I don’t know. Someone did. Exactly when did you see this hair?’
    ‘Ho, you’re as bad as thae polis wi’ yer questions.’
    ‘Sorry, but it’s interesting. Did you tell the police this?’
    ‘Naw. Take me for a grass or something?’
    It was time to move on. After a brief re-cap of East Fife’s problems over the last decade, the drinks were finished. Sharon lived at home in the town. Baggo offered to walk her back.
    ‘Naw. I dinnae need that. Ye may be a Paki, but ye’r a right fucking gentleman,’ she added. He took it as a compliment.
    Chilled to the bone by a bitter wind off the North Sea, Baggo walked briskly back to the staff quarters. Cold, damp weather always made him miss the heat of Mumbai. Images of happy years spent there warmed him. He remembered his first girlfriend, a year older and the most beautiful person he had ever seen. They had done it only once, the evening before the Chandavarkar family moved to Britain. He had written to her but had received no reply. Suspecting that her father had found out, he waited with a mixture of dread and hope for his own father to ask him about her, but the silence had been deafening. After some months he felt relief, and was ashamed of that.
    Then he imagined making love to Sharon and found the notion surprisingly appealing. She was not pretty, but there was a sexy provocativeness about her. A few months earlier his only long-term relationship had ended. The girl could not escape from her own difficult history and his working hours did not make for an easy home life. More upset than he had at first been prepared to acknowledge, Baggo had immersed himself in his cases, in particular the Bucephalus inquiry. As far as sex was concerned, it had been a while … As he tried to get to sleep, the duvet in his narrow bed wrapped round him, he felt uneasy and root-less.

7
    ‘It’s three minutes past nine.’ Jamieson’s opening remark dismayed Flick. Allowing for slippery roads, she had left plenty of time for the journey, but traffic had been unexpectedly heavy for a Saturday, probably due to Christmas shopping, she thought. There had also been an unscheduled stop to bring up her breakfast.
    ‘Sorry, sir,’ she said meekly.
    ‘How’s this banker murder progressing? Sit down for God’s sake.’
    That was more promising. She looked at him, bald and red-faced, across his vast, empty desk. She could almost feel his bloodshot eyes assessing her. ‘It’s difficult, sir. We’re following every reasonable line of inquiry. We have to look at the bankers staying in the hotel, and already we’ve found one who might have been driven to murder by the deceased, who was very homophobic. There’s a lot going on in the bank: electing a new chairman, lowering the wealth threshold for clients …’
    ‘Right. As I said last night, I’ve had Lord Saddlefell on the phone and he’s not happy. Now, this is your first real test up here and I want you to understand a few things.’
    ‘Sir?’
    ‘When I decide whether I want someone from another force, I take the formal references with a pinch of salt. Too many people give glowing references to duffers just to get rid of them. I look at who they’ve learned from, and I see that Noel Osborne was your boss in Wimbledon. He was a great copper in his day. I know he went off a bit, but he got results. And he didn’t get them by sticking to the bloody rule book. I don’t expect you to stick by the rule book, and I’ll back you up as long as I can. If I’d thought you were a girl guide I wouldn’t have let you into my force, but you are going to have to