Impression (DI Gardener 4)

Vincent nearly fell off his chair as he realized what was happening. The clues were there. Scottish snifter, bullet.

They could only mean one thing.

January 14, 1993

The incident involved a winter’s night, Rushworth’s stables, a champion colt called Bullitt, and three masked gunmen. The result – a stolen horse.

Negotiations were demanded through three horse-racing journalists, one of which was Vincent. Eight phone calls from the kidnappers spread over eight hours, with demands for a ransom from Bullitt’s four owners, each with a share worth £250,000.

The syndicate refused to pay the ransom, fearing it would encourage other kidnappings. Talks broke down.

The following Monday, they received a call saying the horse was dead.

The horse, however, was not dead, as Vincent would find out.

Following the trail all the way from West to North Yorkshire, through the town of Redcar, and eventually to North Berwick, led him to a stable run by a Scottish gang, and the infamous Mad Dog MacDonald. Vincent eventually returned home to the local police station in Guiseley, supplying them all the in

formation he had.

He’d watched the raid on the stable in North Berwick the following night on the news. The day after it was in all the newspapers. The horse had been returned safe and sound.

But Vincent wasn’t safe: he’d made enemies.

After recalling the story, Vincent felt like death.

Many years after the incident, he remembered reading MacDonald’s autobiography. There were clues in the book that led him to think MacDonald had known who was responsible for the horse’s return, and Vincent took them as a warning.

He was in very serious trouble if it was the deranged Danny MacDonald. He wasn’t known as “Loch Ness” for nothing.

He was a monster – a real one.

Chapter Thirty-seven

Gardener and his team had been in the incident room for at least twenty minutes and had gained no ground. The bayonet had produced no results. It had not been bought locally. The task was to keep searching. It was boring and soul destroying, but that’s how they solved cases.

Two of his team had spoken to the National Injuries Database and the Cyber Crime Team on both crime scenes. As yet, those lines of inquiry had yielded no results. They had found no one who had searched on-line for such a specific form of killing. The libraries and the bookshops had managed to come up with a list of people who had either borrowed or bought books covering anything on the subject. The lists were small, kept mainly to professionals, but at least it was an avenue to pursue.

Trying to find the sealing wax was like searching for a needle in a haystack. Of all the shops that sold it locally, no particular sale had stood out. Dave Rawson was also searching on-line outlets, which made the task doubly difficult.

The locksmith had visited the station. He’d taken impressions of the key. He didn’t recognize it at first glance, but said he would report back to them. He was aware of the urgency, but that, too, was another proverbial needle in a haystack.

Paul Benson had remained in the station all day, overseeing the HOLMES team who had yet to come up with anything. There were plenty of murders involving bayonets for the team to trawl through, but the sealing wax was proving much more evasive.

Benson had spent some time having the drugs in Morrison’s flat analysed. The bags were full of cocaine, which had an estimated street value of forty thousand pounds. That raised a question: where was Morrison selling it? It was an awful task for someone, not only because they would need to involve the narcotics team, but the fact that so much of it was going on in Leeds, they stood little chance of ever finding out where it was going.

“Did have one stroke of luck, though,” said Benson.

“Which was?” Gardener asked.

“Morrison didn’t just own the house in Hume Crescent.”

“Really?”

“No, records indicate that he had a couple of small flats in the area as well. I got on to the council for addresses and checked the places out earlier. They were rough. Tried knocking on doors, but not many people home. Those I did speak to reckoned the kids who lived there were on benefits. Spent most of the day in bed, and most of the night out. Neighbours weren’t surprised they were into drugs.”

“Brilliant, Paul. Keep on it. Best thing to do is go back sometime around dawn tomorrow morning, wait for them. Don’t let them get back in to sleep, drag them down here if you have to. If it turns out that Morrison was a drug baron and these were his minions, we’ll turn the whole lot over to the drugs squad. What about the money?”

“A hundred and twenty-eight thousand.”