The pathologist beamed. ‘I was hoping you were going to ask me that, DCI Mann. The answer is none at all. However . . . I found traces of a circular burn on the neck, just below the point of decapitation. I have only seen something like that in a professional paper authored in Russia, where street crime takes all forms and is rarely constrained in its violence or its imagination. I believe that Homo Candleriggs was subdued by a taser, but not the kind the police carry. This one would require direct contact with the skin, and it would be a type of device that’s absolutely illegal in this country. Lottie, this is as planned and professional a hit as I have ever seen. Whoever did it is special and really needs to be taken out of circulation as quickly as possible.’
Thirty-Four
Alex Skinner looked up as her door opened, her assistant’s head appearing, one hand on the frame. ‘There’s a caller on the landline,’ Clarice said. ‘He’s asking for you, but I’m wondering whether you want to take it or you’d rather be in court.’
‘I am in court,’ she replied, ‘in under an hour. Who is it?’
‘Sir Andrew Martin. That’s not how he announced himself, mind,’ the matronly secretary added. ‘He simply said “It’s Andy,” as matter of fact as you like.’
Alex smiled. ‘You know, Clarice, if Cerberus ever goes down with kennel cough, you’d do as a replacement.’ Then she frowned. ‘No further explanation?’
‘None. It was as if the name itself was enough.’
She drew a deep breath. ‘Tell him to fu—’ She stopped in mid-instruction. ‘No, some things shouldn’t be delegated,’ she murmured, as if to herself. ‘I’ll tell him myself. Put him through.’
Clarice withdrew; she knew her boss well enough to allow her thirty seconds for reflection, and Alex knew that she knew. She waited; when her phone rang she willed herself not to snatch it up, but counted off a further five.
‘Sir Andrew,’ she said, when, finally, she picked up. ‘This is an unexpected . . .’ she paused ‘ . . . moment. I’m sorry, but do you realise I’m not doing criminal defence work at the moment? I have an eighteen-month engagement as an Advocate Depute, so I can hardly appear on both sides of the court.’
‘Something you said you would never do,’ he drawled, ‘when you packed in being a corporate lawyer to go on a crusade against injustice.’
She laughed, icily. ‘There you go, same old same old. We can’t even get past the pleasantries before you’re having a pop at my professional choices. Why did I take this fucking call?’
‘Sorry, sorry, sorry!’ he exclaimed.
Her thumb was poised over the cut-off button but she heard enough contrition in his voice to hold it back.
‘Well!’ she snapped. ‘At least you said it. When we were supposedly together and I made that decision, all I got was silent disapproval. It’s a relief to hear what you really feel. Now, if that’s all you called to say—’
‘It’s not what I feel,’ he said, ‘not anymore. Look, back then, no I didn’t handle it well. I should have said that I was disturbed by the idea of the chief constable’s girlfriend cross-examining his senior CID colleagues in a high-profile prosecution. I should have said it and we should have had it out.’
‘You mean you should have talked me out of it.’
‘No,’ Martin sighed. ‘I should have tried, that’s all. I wouldn’t have succeeded, that I knew, and that’s why I didn’t.’
‘So instead, you took the huff.’
‘I maintained a dignified silence,’ he countered. ‘That’s how I prefer to look back at it.’
‘And now,’ Alex said, ‘when you break that dignified silence you mock me for becoming an AD.’
‘No, I don’t. Please don’t read that into it. You doing that, it doesn’t surprise me at all. You’re your father’s daughter; prosecution’s in your DNA. It was inevitable. I thought it might have taken a bit longer, that’s all.’
‘Something happened to push me in that direction,’ she confessed. ‘More than one thing in fact. An investigator I hired was murdered, and the people who did it came for me as well. It had an effect on me and then, on top of that, a guy I’d been seeing at that time, he was killed too. After all that I had a bit of a breakdown; I came out of it changed. I’d turned down the Crown Office before, but when they asked me again, I said yes.’
‘Sorry, babe,’ he said softly. ‘I didn’t know any of that.’
‘Don’t “babe” me, Andy. I’m not in need of consolation.’
‘I didn’t mean anything by it, honest. We’ve got a long history, you and me. If you’re hurt so am I.’
‘Do you say the same thing to Karen?’
‘I would if it was necessary, but right now, I don’t imagine that it is. I think she’s doing fine for herself in the consolation department. She’s dumped the kids on me for a few days.’
Alex laughed. ‘That’s a charming way of putting it.’
‘I didn’t mean it that way,’ he protested. ‘I love having them. It’s just that there was no notice involved, no advance warning, just a phone call on Monday, saying pick them up from school and keep them until I get back.’
‘When?’ she asked, intrigued.
‘A few days, that’s all she said.’
‘Could it be work? I know what she does now; Uncle Lowell told me.’
‘It could be, but somehow I don’t think that it is. There’s a guy involved, I’m pretty sure.’
‘She’s a free woman, Andy, just like me.’
‘That’s what your dad said,’ Martin admitted.
‘And this is Karen we’re talking about,’ she added. ‘I wasn’t so young back then that I didn’t hear the story about her shagging Sammy Pye . . . God bless and keep him . . . in the bike shed at Haddington nick.’
‘It wasn’t the bike shed,’ he grunted.
‘We’ve all got a past, Andy. Karen, you, me, and if every so often we feel like revisiting it . . . not that that’s a suggestion by the way . . . it shouldn’t be a surprise.’
‘Maybe not.’
‘How are the kids, anyway?’ Alex asked.
‘They’re fine,’ Martin replied. ‘I do like having them at mine, honest. They’re the main reason, maybe the only reason, why I didn’t stay in America. I had serious offers from two different cities to become their police commissioner. Washington was one of them; the way it turned out, am I glad I didn’t take that.’
‘I’ll bet.’ She glanced at her wall clock. ‘Andy, I have a trial this morning, and I need to be getting myself along there. Were you planning to tell me what this call is about?’
‘What? Oh. Sure. You know I’m running for the Scottish Parliament?’ he asked.
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘In that case . . . I intend to be elected, Alex. I’m told I’m a certainty. The SNP will pull two seats from the top-up list, and I will be one of them. That means I’ll be around Parliament from May onwards, and since you live next door, there’s a good chance of us bumping into each other. That being the case I thought I should get any awkwardness out of the way now, clear the air, so to speak.’
‘That’s very thoughtful of you, Andy,’ she said, adding cheerfully, ‘but why are you confusing me with somebody who gives a toss?’
Thirty-Five
‘It’s a weird one, I’ll grant you, DCI Mann,’ Lowell Payne conceded, ‘but there’s been nothing on our radar pointing anywhere near that sort of terrorist outrage. You say Professor Scott reckons the killing took place on Monday. That’s going on forty-eight hours ago. If it was the work of a terror group, I’d have expected them to have claimed it by now, maybe even released a video on the internet.’
‘What if they tried, sir, and it was taken down by the platform?’ John Cotter was the third person in the ACC’s room in the Govan police office.
‘We’d still know about it, Sergeant. The s
ocial media site involved would have made the intelligence community aware of it.’ He glanced at Mann. ‘Yes, Lottie, I will brief my surveillance people about it, but I can’t do much more without specific information. It’s an awkward one, I can see that.’
‘Too right, sir,’ she agreed. ‘There’s been no match for his DNA profile on any database, so far, and that was our best hope of identifying him. We need to recover the head to go any further, but no way am I going to tell the media that there’s one missing.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Head office is still considering whether we should release a statement in forty minutes. If we do, it’ll be bland.’
‘Isn’t there a case for warning the public?’ Payne asked.
‘If there is, it’s outweighed by the media hysteria that would follow. I’ve already had that discussion with Peregrine Allsop, the PR director. He took the opposite view and tried to countermand me, so I took it to DCC McGuire.’
The assistant chief smiled. ‘Oh,’ he murmured. ‘Not our Perry’s biggest fan.’
‘It seems not. We had a three-way Zoom discussion and the boss backed me. Allsop demanded that he should let the chief decide. The DCC told him that Chief Constable McIlhenney was in the middle of a decision about the restructuring of Allsop’s entire department. That shut him up.’
‘I can imagine. I’m aware of that review, Lottie. The ice that Allsop’s skating on is so thin he needs water-wings. Your call on how much information we release is absolutely the right one; he should have known that, but he’s one of those guys who likes to have his stamp on everything.’
Mann frowned. ‘Maybe Bob Skinner will give him a job on the Saltire.’
Payne pointed towards his office window. ‘Look out there. There’s as much chance of you seeing a green flag flying on Ibrox Stadium as there is of that happening!’
Thirty-Six
‘Anything to get out of the office, Noele?’ Sarah Grace suggested in jest as she entered the room where Inspector McClair was waiting. Both women were masked, and in uniform. The pathologist’s was surgical; her hair was still damp from the shower that was part of her post-examination ritual.
‘Witnessing a post-mortem is a shade extreme,’ the police officer remarked, as her friend placed two takeaway coffees on the table and took a seat, ‘but I’ve learned to take every opportunity that arises. I won’t need to do that for much longer, though. I had a call from Sauce on the way here. I’m going back to CID, with effect from next Monday at the latest. He asked for me, and Mario McGuire’s given it the thumbs-up. A year ago,’ she added, ‘if you’d told me this would happen I’d have laughed in your face.’
‘If that’s what you want I’m pleased for you. CID’s more of a long-term condition than a job; once it’s in your system it’s there for good.’
McClair raised an eyebrow. ‘So’s genital herpes.’
‘I hadn’t thought of it that way,’ Grace admitted. ‘It’s not an analogy I’ll take too far, for Bob’s a classic case. He questions everything in life, looking for motive, action and reaction. It’s not just him. Maggie Steele’s another case in point. He told me she’s writing a crime novel. I said he should too, but his view is that one mystery author in our village is enough. He’s very pally with Matthew Reid just now.’
‘Bob led us here in a way,’ the inspector said. ‘It was him who kicked in Mrs Alexander’s door, remember.’
‘Matthew was involved too. He got Bob involved in the resilience group in the first place. If it hadn’t been for that—’
‘Someone else would have found her, and we’d still be here.’
‘True.’
‘So,’ McClair continued, her voice slightly muffled by her mask, ‘was everything as you expected during the examination?’
‘A waste of public money,’ Grace replied. ‘Mrs Alexander died of heart failure, probably caused by the shock of her head hitting the corner of the kitchen table that I saw in the photographs of the scene. As Bob said to me, she had no business climbing those steps. She should have known better. Her medical records show that in addition to her arthritis she was subject to occasional attacks of vertigo, not an uncommon occurrence in someone of that age. She was like the late Mr Stevens in one respect; she shouldn’t have been living at home, not without much more support than it seems she had. At least Michael had a carer.’
‘And a traceable next of kin . . . pain in the arse although his is. I have my keen young constable looking through Mrs Alexander’s recorded life, but she’s having difficulty. I’ve sent her to Gullane to ask the neighbours whether she ever mentioned anyone to them.’
‘Good luck with that.’ The inspector saw Grace’s eyes go somewhere else. ‘That could have been me, you know,’ she murmured, ‘if my life had taken a different turning, if I’d never met Bob and died single and without a family. I have no relations that I know of. My dad was an only child, as am I; my mother was adopted and never knew who her natural parents were. Somewhere down the road that old lady lying dead on her kitchen floor could have been me.’
‘But it won’t be,’ McClair declared. ‘You’ll be cared for by a regiment of kids and grandkids who won’t let you climb up steps in your mid-eighties.’
‘Jazz won’t let me do that now,’ Sarah laughed. ‘Anyway, back to business. There will be nothing in my report that’s remarkable in any way. The nervous fiscal will sign it off as an accidental death and that’s how it will be recorded for all time. Nothing remarkable at all,’ she hesitated, ‘other than that fact itself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Apart from the injury that contributed to her death, the impact with the corner of the table, there were no other marks on the body. I was expecting to find bruising on other areas from the fall itself, and possibly even fractures given her fragility, but I didn’t. However,’ she added, ‘given that death was pretty much instantaneous, it may be that there was simply no time for bruises to become visible before her circulation shut down.’
‘Will you include that in your report?’
‘Yes,’ Grace told her, ‘but I’ll express it in exactly those terms, so don’t expect the fiscal to overreact and for the file to land on your desk when you go back to CID.’
Thirty-Seven
A section of unpainted wood stood out brightly on Mrs Alexander’s door frame. PC Tiggy Benjamin winced slightly as she saw it on her way past as she headed up the stairs to the attic flat. She was naturally optimistic, but even she thought that her mission was a waste of time. Yes, lockdown was in place, but as far as she could see, most people were interpreting the exercise provision fairly freely, particularly in Gullane where most of the population seemed to be dog owners.
The door of the lone apartment on the landing above was painted maroon. A Hearts supporter herself, she took it to be a sign of football allegiance. The man who opened the door appeared distinctly unathletic. He was shorter than her five feet seven, with thinning fair hair, but possessed of wide shoulders and with an ample belly; as she appraised him she had the feeling of looking at an enormous spinning top.
‘Mr . . . ?’ she ventured.
‘Wilson, Mike Wilson,’ he flashed her a toothy cheery smile. ‘How can I help you, Constable?’
‘Benjamin, PC Benjamin. Are you on furlough, Mr Wilson?’
‘I wish,’ he replied, the smile becoming a little rueful. ‘I’m self-employed. I’m a personal trainer; all my stuff’s one-on-one, in people’s homes.’ Mentally, Benjamin recategorised him, from spinning top to kettle bell. ‘I can’t work at all just now, and I’m struggling to get myself on to the Chancellor’s payroll.’
‘That’s too bad,’ she sighed, sympathetically. ‘Maybe you could come to my garden.’ Where the hell did that come from? she thought, as soon as the words had escaped, feeling her face flush.
‘That would be nice, I’m sure,’ he said. ‘Where do you live?’
&
nbsp; ‘Edinburgh,’ she lied, covering her tracks. ‘Of course, you can’t leave East Lothian just now,’ she added, extricating herself.
‘Try telling that to half the people who cycle past my front window every day,’ Wilson chuckled. ‘It seems to be okay to leave your area if you’re on a bike.’
‘I will pass that thought on to my superiors, Mike,’ she said, making a mental note to do no such thing, as his suggestion had already been put into practice. ‘In the meantime, I’d like to ask you about your downstairs neighbour, Mrs Alexander.’
‘Aye,’ he nodded, ‘is the old dear all right? I went out for a long walk yesterday, to North Berwick and back along the seashore and when I got home I saw that her door had been fixed. I never even knew it had been burst. What was that about?’
‘I’m sorry to tell you that Mrs Alexander is dead. She had a fall in her kitchen.’
The trainer’s cheery face fell. ‘Aw, what a shame.’ He sighed. ‘No’ a surprise though, I suppose. She was pretty shaky on her pins. We had this arrangement, she’d leave her rubbish bags from her kitchen bin at the front door and I’d put them in the green bin downstairs, then I’d take it out every fortnight. Same wi’ the bags for the waste food caddy . . . no’ that she wasted much. It took her a month to fill it.’
‘When you spoke, Mike,’ the constable asked, ‘did she ever mention any family? We’re having problems tracing her next of kin.’
‘No’ that I can remember.’ His fair thin eyebrows rose. ‘Come tae think of it she said to me once, after her cat died it was, that now she was completely alone on the world. She’d even left instructions wi’ the minister for her funeral, for she had no family left to bury her. Poor old dear; I offered to get her another cat, but she said she didn’t want to be leaving it behind her. I said I would take it if that happened. She was still thinking about it. I’d found her one, too; a mate of mine’s having kittens . . . well, his cat is anyway.’ He frowned, as a thought came to him. ‘Her door was fixed, so who burst it?’
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