Screams in the Dark by Anna Smith Page B

class act, Gilmour. I’ll give you that.’
    Rosie smiled. ‘Wait till you hear. Next thing is she opens up. She’s been having an affair with Murphy – hotel rooms in the afternoon – and she made the mistake of falling in love, daft woman. He said he’d leave his wife … same old same old.’
    ‘Yeah. And?’
    ‘Well, she says on the morning he was found, she did take the suicide note meant for his wife, and also another one for Frank Paton. She showed me it.’
    ‘Oh fuck, Rosie.’ McGuire put his head in his hands. ‘You’ve looked at something which is evidence that’s been stolen from what may have been a crime scene.’
    ‘It was a suicide, Mick. Not a crime scene.’
    ‘Well, maybe not when she took it. But I’ve got a sneaky suspicion you’re about to tell me something that will guarantee that Murphy was up to his arse in some kind of crime. That means everything they were doing was a crime scene.’
    Rosie put her hands up.
    ‘You got it in one, Mick.’
    ‘Christ! Go on.’ He rubbed his face. ‘I almost don’t want to hear what the suicide notes said.’
    Rosie told him the contents of both notes.
    ‘Fuck! Murphy and Paton! So you think they’re actually behind this, providing the refugees?’
    ‘So it would seem,’ Rosie said.
    ‘Go on.’ McGuire was on his feet now, walking around the office, concentrating, hands dug deep into his trouser pockets.
    ‘So Tanya told me she went into the office early one morning before Paton came in and looked in a file. A piece of paper dropped out and she photocopied it.’ Rosie went into her bag and took it out. She handed it to McGuire and he looked at it.
    ‘Names of refugees, I guess. Scrubbed out some of them.’
    ‘Yeah, exactly. Scrubbed out. And you see the name of my man Emir? Him and his mate Jetmir – the one he told me about – they’re also scrubbed out. Maybe, in Jetmir’s case, in more ways than one.’
    ‘So you really think Murphy and Paton have been hand-picking these people?’
    ‘Yes, it’s possible, Mick. Maybe they identify the ones who nobody will even report as missing – the ones who are all alone with no family. Sound plausible? Who’s going to give a damn about people like that who end up in a foreign country. They’re just a number in some filing cabinet at the Home Office.’
    McGuire took a deep breath and pursed his lips as he exhaled slowly. He scratched his chin. ‘But why? How the fuck does something like illegal trade in body tissue spring up in Glasgow. This just doesn’t happen here.’ He paused, then asked, ‘And what exactly is body tissue?’
    ‘I checked this out a bit. Body tissue is anything from skin to eyeballs to bone and veins. In other words, anything that isn’t an organ.’
    ‘Right,’ McGuire nodded. ‘So why Glasgow?’
    ‘Don’t know that yet. But it looks like the lawyers are working with Al Howie and Jake Cox’s mob. Except Cox isn’t around now – he’s mostly still in Spain, but you can bet he’ll be pulling the strings. In fact that’s probably where he hooked up with the Eastern Europe connection. This is about the gangsters broadening out to new ways to make money. I’ve had a brief look in cuttings and on the internet at the organ harvesting and body-tissue trade. It’s a billion-pound business and it’s worldwide – particularly in Eastern Europe – places like Macedonia, Ukraine, Russia. In fact everywhere – the Philippines, USA. It’s huge. If these gangsters are working with the hoods in the UK then they’re all at it. They’llhave identified that refugees are easy pickings, with so many of them coming and going. Nobody watches them. Nobody cares, actually. I’ve already been up at the Scottish Refugee Council and established that there’s no stringent check on refugees, so it’s easy to disappear – or be made to disappear. And it looks like that is what’s happening.’
    ‘Fuck me!’ McGuire sighed. ‘Unbelievable, Rosie! It