‘Why would McRae put this stuff in his locker when it could have been spotted?’ Cameron asked.
‘More likely somebody would have seen it if he’d had it hanging in his spare room,’ Brodie said. ‘That would have created more attention than he wanted. He could hide it here.’ Brodie leaned in to read the small, precise handwriting: ‘Seven victims, but only three processed through M&S. Why these three? What made them special? Trust no one.’
‘M&S,’ Art said. ‘Mitchell and Son.’
‘So McRae knew about the connection to the funeral home,’ Brodie said. ‘The question is, what else did he know? And what made him think there was anything nefarious going on? I remember Mitchell back in the day. McRae wasn’t wrong. But what if he’s a lot more involved than we think?’
‘We first got interested in him because he approached the family of the first victim. Almost like he was hounding them for business,’ Breck said. ‘Then he got the business for our next two victims. This seemed to get Alan going.’
‘What about these photos?’ Brodie said. ‘They don’t seem like official crime scene photos. Almost as if Alan took them on hisphone and printed them out at home on one of those little photo printers you get just for phones.’
Breck looked closer. ‘Christ. You’re right.’
Brodie felt like he had been punched in the gut. What if Alan McRae wasn’t just interested in the case from a copper’s point of view, but from his own point of view as a killer?Could McRae really be a killer, he thought. Voicing the thought to Breck earlier hadn’t seemed right. No copper ever wanted to think another cop was a crook. Or worse. But things were starting to swing that way.
Breck was photographing everything with his phone, documenting the locker’s contents before they were disturbed further. ‘We need more resources on this. The investigation’s getting bigger than we can handle with current staffing. DC Morven Fraser from my team would be perfect for this, but she’s on holiday in Greece. Won’t be back for another week,’ Breck said. ‘Anyone else from your team who could step in?’
Brodie thought about it. ‘DI Lucy Warren. She’s thorough, good with complex cases. Knows how to handle sensitive material.’
‘Ask your boss and, if he okays it, ask her. Hopefully she’ll agree,’ Breck said. ‘We need someone we can trust absolutely. If McRae was compromised, we don’t know how deep this goes.’ He looked at Art and Cameron in turn then dismissed the two Uniforms with a nod.
As they finished documenting the locker contents, Brodie’s phone rang. Freya’s name was on the display.
‘Freya, what’s happening?’
‘Just got off the phone with Daisy McRae, Alan’s sister. She wants to talk to you.’
‘She knows something?’
‘Sounds like it. She’s at home. Says she’ll be waiting for you.’
Daisy McRae lived in a neat bungalow. She was in her fifties, with the same sharp eyes as her missing brother and the kind of wary intelligence that came from years of being related to a police officer.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, leading them into a living room filled with family photographs. ‘Alan’s been acting strange for months. Ever since he started pulling those old files again. I had forgotten he had done that.’
‘The Embalmer case?’ Brodie asked.
‘Aye. He was obsessed with it, wanting to talk through theories, asking if I remembered details from years ago.’ She gestured to a chair covered in manila folders. ‘He started bringing work home, spreading it all over my dining table. Don’t get me wrong, I loved him living here, but sometimes it got too much. I yelled at him one night, telling him I’d had enough. Then he kept it in his room and didn’t talk much about it with me after that.’
‘Did he ever mention Thomas Mitchell? Or Mitchell and Son funeral home?’
Daisy’s expression darkened. ‘Oh, he mentioned them all right. Said they were the key to everything. Said if he could prove what he suspected about Mitchell, the whole case would break open.’
‘What did he suspect?’
‘That Mitchell was as crooked as the day was long. That someone was using the funeral home for more than just burying bodies.’
Breck leaned forward. ‘Did he have evidence?’
‘He said he was close, but he needed more before he could make accusations.’ Daisy picked up a photograph from the mantelpiece –McRae in uniform, younger, prouder. ‘He was planning to confront Mitchell directly when he came back from holiday. That was the last time I saw him, just before he went to Tenerife.’
‘We’re assuming that he told Pat this. I don’t know why he confided in his ex-wife, but he did,’ Art said.
‘They were still friends. Good friends.’
‘Daisy, we found some photographs in your brother’s locker at work, crime scene photos from The Embalmer case. Do you know anything about those?’ Brodie said.
She sighed. ‘He had copies of everything. Said the official files didn’t tell the whole story, that someone had removed important evidence. He was trying to reconstruct what really happened.’
