Bain and McNeill shared a look.
"How did you do it?" asked McNeill.
"Like Cullen said there, I used Schoolbook. It was actually pretty easy. They were all on there. Everyone I needed, everything I needed. All of this led from Rob."
"Was this all about revenge?" asked Bain.
"Yes." Wilson twitched slightly as he said it. "Rob took everything I had. My girlfriend, my job, my whole life. And for what? He just wanted to screw Kim, that's all. I was really happy with her, you know? And then Rob Thomson comes swooping in, steals her from me, sacks me and..." Wilson took a deep breath.
"How did he sack you?" asked McNeill.
"I was on long-term sick from the Bank, struggling with what happened. I had built up a future with her in my head, and this bastard steals it all away." He rubbed the stubble on his head. "One day, I was called in for my catch-up interview - which should have been done at my house - and it turned out it was with Rob. That was totally out of order. I kind of lost it with him. There was another guy there, he witnessed it, had to drag us apart. They had me on a disciplinary by the end of the day. Gave me a month's notice and that was it."
"Tell me about Caroline," said McNeill.
"Caroline was the first one and the hardest. She was very cagey on Schoolbook. I knew her pretty well - we used to double date a lot, you know. It seems funny now, doesn't it?" He took a sip from the glass of water on the table. Cullen had no doubt that Bain would have the glass kept for forensics. "I set up the Martin Webb profile to snare her. Took a few months but I got to her in the end. The messages got quite racy. I managed to skip a few stages from a traditional relationship. We went straight to the meeting in a hotel."
"And this was to frame Rob?" asked Bain.
"Yes." He took another sip. "Kim was the second easiest. I knew that Jenny was going away, so I set that up pretty well. I was hiding in the stairwell, upstairs from their flat, when Rob came in. The police came in just after that. That 999 call was a good effort."
"Who was the easiest then?" asked Bain.
"That'll be Debi Curtis. She just walked right into it. She actually started it, started flirting with Martin Webb. Caroline and I had had the message thing going on and she got involved. She started messaging me. It got pretty intense. I was tempted to let her go, but I thought I should just get some practice in."
"So that was you running away?" asked Bain.
Wilson laughed. "Yeah. Almost got caught there."
"What about Gail then?"
"Gail should have stopped those two getting together," said Wilson. "I was disappointed by her. She had always struck me as being someone with morals. She should have stopped Rob and Kim. And she didn't."
"So you killed her?"
He smirked. "Yes."
"So you knew her?" asked Cullen.
Wilson laughed. "No. I never met her in my life, until I killed her. But the way Kim talked about her... It felt like I knew her."
"Why did you go after Alison?" asked Cullen.
Bain turned round and glared at him. Cullen ignored him.
"She was an insurance policy. You were getting too close. I knew I could get at you through her if things started to go the wrong way."
"Were you going to kill her?" he asked.
"I think so. Probably this evening. Disposing of the body would have been a challenge. But I would have found a way."
"One thing I don't get," said Bain, "is how you managed to do all that stuff on Schoolbook."
"That was the easy part. You just run a daemon that tweaks the audit records. The Schoolbook boys do it themselves all the time, usually as practical jokes, or to cover tracks of some illicit activity."
"What about the CCTV?" asked Cullen.
"CCTV," said Wilson. "You cops love it. I suggested that Gail get Sian to cover for her. It was her that suggested the cover story about the train. That way I'd got you looking in entirely the wrong place for a while."
"That's not what I meant," said Cullen. Wilson frowned. "The CCTV in Tesco, which we thought showed Thomson buying the mobile phone - how did you know that he was at Alba Bank Mortgage Centre, not far from the Tesco."
Wilson nodded. "Oh, yes. Very simple. I called his PA, pretended I worked at the Mortgage centre, and she told me his itinerary. She didn't even check."
"So your entire plan," said Bain, "was to frame Rob Thomson for all of this?"
"It almost worked."
"Why not just kill him?" asked Bain.
"Where's the suffering in that?" said Wilson. "If I killed him it would have been quick. If I'd tortured him, it still would have been quick." Wilson's eyes were on fire as he spoke. "I lost everything. I wanted him to lose everything and have to endure his life without those things."
Cullen sat in the A&E ward, a few hours later. He had just had another x-ray done. Assuming the results were clear he could go home. McNeill had accompanied him to the hospital.
"I got a call from Bain," she said.
"And?"
She bit her lip. "Keith Miller didn't make it."
Cullen looked down at the floor. He felt a tear in his eye. "Stupid bastard."
"He wasn't the brightest," she said, rubbing his shoulder.
"I meant me," he said, looking up at her.
"It's not your fault."
"Feels like it is. I'm responsible for his death. I took him there. I should have stayed with Wilson in the living room."
"Scott, you can't think like that," she said. She blew on her coffee. "You caught the bad guy and rescued a damsel in distress. You saved an innocent man from prison. Who knows how many others Wilson might have killed before he got caught?"
"And got a colleague killed in the line of duty."
She shook her head at him. "I know it's hard, but really, it's not your fault."
"I ordered him to come with me." He bit his lip. "I was running around like Billy Big Balls, off on my mental hunt for the real killer."
"And you got him."
"And I upped the body count by one. Almost by two."
"Keith was just doing his duty, though. He died being a proper copper for once, you know that. Most of Keith Miller's career, he just pissed about and got away with it. That was the first real piece of police work that he'd done."
"I guess," was all he could think of to say.
He tasted the coffee. He remembered drinking that brand when he worked in that life insurance office, all those years ago. They'd installed a machine upstairs and a few of them would go and get a coffee. It used to get him totally wired, but nowadays he drank so much coffee that it barely touched the sides. He thought of Miller, about how he'd worked in the financial services sector as well. If he'd stuck at it, he'd still be alive.
"What's the story with this Alison girl?" she asked.
He evaded her look. "There is no story."
"Come on, there must be," she said. "She said on her Schoolbook account that she's going out with you."
"That was Wilson's doing," he said.
"She must have got the idea from somewhere."
He looked her in the eye. "I pulled her on Friday night, okay? A one night stand."
"I see," she said, voice small.
"She meant less than nothing to me," he said.
They sat looking at each other for a while, Cullen trying to think of things to say that didn't revolve around Alison Carnegie or Keith Miller.
In the end, it was McNeill that broke the silence. "Well, this is some drink."
Cullen frowned. "Eh?"
"We were supposed to go for a drink after work tonight."
"Well," he said, "once I've got my x-ray back, we could..."
Scott Cullen will return in
DEVIL IN THE DETAIL
October 14, 2012
Afterword
Thank you for reading this book. It has been a labour of love for a few years on and off, mostly
off I have to say due to the day job. It has been a real learning experience for me and hopefully the results of it are as enjoyable to read as they were to write.
Scott Cullen will be back in a sequel called DEVIL IN THE DETAIL which I've already written and need to spend a few months polishing. I plan this to be a long running series and I will write as long as people want to read about Cullen, Bain, McNeill and their world.
Many of the settings in the book are entirely fictional. There is no Alba Bank - the head office is still a derelict 60s monstrosity and the mortgage centre now has a Premier Inn on the site. Leith Walk Station doesn't exist and is still wasteland. Most of the pubs and clubs don't exist either. Most of the websites don't exist either, especially Schoolbook.
One final thing, if you liked this, then please leave a review on the site you bought it from (most likely Amazon) - it really helps aspiring indie authors like me.
Again, thanks for reading it.
Ed James, April 2012
About Ed James
Ed James lives in the East Lothian countryside with his girlfriend, six rescue moggies, two retired greyhounds and a flock of ex-battery chickens. He works in IT, but doesn’t wear sandals or have a beard.
GHOST IN THE MACHINE is his first novel. The second book in the SCOTT CULLEN series - DEVIL IN THE DETAIL - will be published in Summer 2012.
Visit edjamesauthor.com for his blog
Follow him on twitter at twitter.com/edjamesauthor
Table of Contents
Caroline Wednesday 28th July, 7.30pm
Friday 30th July 2011
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
Saturday 31st July 2011
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
Sunday 1st August 2011
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen
twenty
twenty-one
twenty-two
twenty-three
Monday 2nd August 2011
twenty-four
twenty-five
twenty-six
twenty-seven
twenty-eight
twenty-nine
thirty
thirty-one
Tuesday 3rd August 2011
thirty-two
thirty-three
thirty-four
thirty-five
thirty-six
thirty-seven
thirty-eight
thirty-nine
forty
forty-one
forty-two
forty-three
forty-four
Wednesday 4th August 2011
forty-five
forty-six
forty-seven
forty-eight
forty-nine
fifty
Afterword
About Ed James