‘We’ve got a possible grainy sighting of the victim heading for the crime scene last Sunday,’ a keen young detective constable named McGuigan suggested.
‘Very good, Barry,’ she replied quietly. ‘Given that the post-mortem told us that he was still alive on Sunday and that we know he made it to the crime scene because he was found dead there, I don’t propose to make that a tick on the success column. Anything else?’ She sighed, looking at DS Cotter. ‘Never mind fucking progress. What do we know now, John, that we didn’t know when the body was discovered?’
‘You mean when most of it was,’ an older constable grunted.
Mann’s glare froze the smile on his lips. ‘McDonnell, save it for the stand-up club. We’re called Serious Crimes for a reason; we’ve got no room for would-be comedians.’
‘We believe we know the identity of the victim,’ Cotter said. ‘Clyde Houseman, age thirty-six, born Edinburgh. He retired from the Royal Marines four years ago with the rank of captain.’ He paused then continued. ‘We believe we know his identity, but,’ he added, ‘we can’t confirm it. The Ministry of Defence should have his DNA profile and fingerprints on file, in case he was killed in action and they were needed, but they don’t.’
‘How could that happen?’ DC McGuigan asked. ‘I read a story about an ex-soldier in Inverness who set his house on fire. They needed DNA to identify him and they got it from the army.’
‘I guess the Marines do it differently,’ Cotter snapped. ‘Bottom line, we can’t prove it’s Houseman in the morgue. We’ve tried to find family members, without success. His mother’s dead, his father is a life-sentence prisoner who’s currently in a secure mental hospital suffering from early onset dementia and his stepfather’s a useless tool. DS Tarvil Singh from Edinburgh Serious Crimes tried to interview him but the guy’s an alcoholic. He was so wasted on cheap wine that he couldn’t even remember Houseman’s given name. He claimed there was a younger sister and he always got them confused, but he couldn’t remember her name either.’
‘Could we find the sister through the Edinburgh education department?’
‘Tarvil’s colleague DS Wright tried that, Barry. There was only one Houseman on file and that was Clyde. Singh and Wright doubt that the sister even existed.’
DC McDonnell raised a hand. ‘How about his old neighbours? Has anybody interviewed them?’
‘Not yet,’ Cotter admitted, ‘but they’ll be hard to trace. The housing scheme he grew up in, and ran away from, was demolished a couple of years after he left and the tenants were rehoused all over the city.’
‘There’s one thing I don’t understand, Sarge,’ McGuigan said. ‘With no evidence of terrorist involvement despite the brutality of the murder, this stinks of organised crime. We’ve got a headless corpse that’s been unidentifiable so far, in a property with no marks of occupancy whose overhead costs are being met by an untraceable bank account, and yet we’re going on the assumption that it’s this man Houseman. How do we know that? Where did this suggested identity come from?’
‘We have a source,’ Mann declared.
‘Are we allowed to know who that is?’
‘No, Barry, you’re not. All you need to know is what you’re told, and that’s all you need to do as well, all of you. Now, one positive is that Dorward’s Crime Campus team have harvested various different DNA profiles from the scene. I need all of you to crack on with identifying as many of the owners as you can from the national database.’
‘Where would we be without DNA?’ McDonnell sighed, wearily.
‘Even further up shit creek,’ Mann shot back. ‘Get on with the task. Even if we can’t get a positive ID on the victim, find me some suspects.’ As her team went back to their desks and computer terminals, she turned to Cotter.
‘You know, boss, don’t you?’ he said quietly. ‘You know who the source is.’
‘Maybe I did,’ she conceded, ‘but for the purposes of the inquiry I’ve forgotten it already.’ She paused, frowning. ‘John, when you contacted the Ministry of Defence, did you ask them specifically for Captain Houseman’s identification records? Did you ask for him by name?’
‘Yes, boss, like you told me.’
‘Maybe I was wrong. The one thing we know for sure about our victim is that he has a Royal Marine crest tattooed on his arm. Go back to the MoD, send them the profile that we hold and ask them to identify it. Maybe the source is wrong too. Maybe this is someone else’s remains.’
Forty-Five
‘I’m cursed by lethargic procrastination, Bob,’ Matthew Reid confessed. ‘I’m easily distracted. I determine that I will work from nine thirty every morning, then I open my email inbox and there’s something that will lead me in another direction. I turn my attention back to the computer but before I get into my current novel, I decide to check Facebook, and I wind up debating the hot Gullane topic of the day with someone on the village news group. By that time, it’s eleven so I get up from my desk to make myself a mug of tea. Then I decide I’d better check my bank accounts to see if my publishers have forwarded me any money. Not that that happens too often, but when it does I have to enter the details into the spreadsheet where I record my income for my accountant. That means opening Excel, and the software always needs updating so it can be a long time booting up. Then I remember I need to call or message someone about a resilience group task. They’re not immediately available, so I finally get down to work, but I’ve barely got the document open when they call me back. Once we’ve agreed whatever has to be agreed the caller asks me if I’ve heard about such and such, and I haven’t, so that’s another ten or fifteen minutes written off. I hang up and then I notice that I’ve got half a mug of cold tea on my coaster, so I get up again and I rinse out the mug before it gets so stained that it needs to go in the dishwasher, which I only run every three days, that being all you need when you live alone. Having done that I decide to make myself a coffee so I dry the mug and take a cup and stick a capsule in the Nespresso machine but before I switch it on I start to heat some milk in my frother, and time it so they’re both ready together. Once the coffee’s done I have to wash out the frother straight away before the residue burns into the surface. Once I’ve done that I am finally ready to work, but by that time it’s gone midday and frankly I am no use after noon, unless I am right at the end of a book when I can see the whole story clear as a bell, at which point my creative mind takes over and the words just seem to pour on to the screen. I read once that Edgar Wallace claimed to have written a novel in a weekend just to show that he could do it. Maybe he did, but I will bet you it was no bloody good because the story-teller’s mind shouldn’t work like that. That said, once I’m at the stage I describe, when it becomes almost an involuntary act . . . I heard of a particularly vicious review once when a work was described as having been excreted rather than created – maybe that’s why I never read reviews of my own work . . . anyway, once I’m at that stage I’ve known myself to get through fifteen thousand words in a weekend. When I’m not, as I said I’m mostly no use once the morning’s over, so I head back into the house and make myself lunch, and maybe, if it’s a nice day, phone a pal and invite them round for coffee in the garden in the afternoon, like I did with you today.’
Skinner laughed as his friend’s monologue ended. They were seated in rattan armchairs at a glass-topped table, the furniture set in front of the author’s office which stood apart from the rest of the house. Both wore disposable gloves, as a precaution against Covid. Even though Reid had received his first vaccine dose three weeks earlier he had cited an underlying health condition which he said would surely kill him if he contracted the virus.
‘How long have you lived in the village, Matthew?’ he asked.
‘Small town,’ Reid corrected him. ‘We’re a small town. According to the people who classify these things, Gullane is too big to be just a village. The upper population limit for a village is t
wo and a half thousand. We have more than that on the electoral roll, even without the recent ridiculous over-development that the bloody council forced upon us. A nine-member planning committee and it was passed by four votes to three!’ Real anger showed in the author’s eyes but passed away as quickly as it had arisen. ‘How long have I lived here?’ he continued. ‘It’ll be fifty years soon. I’d been a golf club member for a few years when you arrived and before that I’d been a while on the waiting list.’
‘I know you were,’ Skinner acknowledged. ‘You seconded my application form when I joined the list. Mind you, I didn’t have all that long to wait.’
‘No, Bob, you didn’t,’ Reid said. ‘You were moved up after your first wife was killed in that car accident. You were given the first five-day vacancy that arose, out of sympathy.’
‘I never knew that,’ he confessed.
‘Why should you? The committee didn’t see the need to tell you, or anyone else for that matter. It was done, and that was that.’
‘I didn’t know you were ever on the committee.’
‘I wasn’t, but I knew people who were. I was quite involved with the club back in the day.’
‘And yet you’re never seen on the course nowadays.’
The writer shrugged. ‘The truth is I never took pleasure from the game, mainly because I was never any good at it. I have too violent a nature, I suspect. I want to crush the ball, rather than encourage it to move forward. I keep a five-day membership just in case, but I don’t think I’ll ever play again. The price of golf balls these days,’ he moaned, ‘they were cheaper back then.’
Skinner winced. ‘Back then,’ he murmured. ‘Not the best time in my life. You know, Matthew, aspects of Myra’s accident are still a bit of a blur to me.’
His friend nodded. ‘That’s hardly surprising. Post-traumatic memory loss, they call it.’
‘I couldn’t even remember the make of car she was driving.’
‘It was a Mini.’
Skinner looked at him in surprise. ‘You know that?’
‘Obviously it was reported at the time, and that detail must have stuck with me. I have that sort of memory, possibly because of the job I did.’
‘What were you, before you became an author? I’ve always wanted to ask you, but Friday night in the pub wasn’t the place to do it.’
Reid frowned. ‘What was I? I suppose you might have called me “A Spokesman”. I started my working life as a very bad journalist, very bad because I wasn’t a social enough animal to build up the network of trusted contacts that you need to be a success as a reporter. As soon as I could I escaped into a job in the press office of a government department. The civil servants used to call us “Failed journalists” behind our backs. In all honesty they were probably right. I did that job for nine years. Some of it I enjoyed, but the writing side of it wore me down. We churned out press releases that were meant to tell the press what the government was doing without ever crossing into politics.’ He smiled. ‘Basically, that meant we weren’t allowed to use adjectives. Eventually I began to rebel; I was passed over for a promotion and finally it dawned on me that the long-term security and the cushy non-contributory retire-at-sixty pension just wasn’t a high enough price to accept for my newly creative soul.’
‘Does that imply that the civil service is the devil?’
‘No way, it lacks the imagination for that. The guys I worked with at ground level, and they were all guys in those days, bar one, they were all good. So were most of the people at the top, but one or two of them were arrogant bullying wankers with post-graduate degrees in self-importance, and that was the culture that prevailed.’
It was Skinner’s turn to smile. ‘Not bitter, then,’ he murmured, gripping his warm mug in his right hand and taking a sip of Reid’s acceptable Colombian coffee.
‘I might be now if I’d stayed there to the end, but an opportunity arose to use adjectives in hyperdrive, and I took it. I crossed the barrier and went to work for the party of government. That was liberation, and great fun. I made a lot of friends. I made a couple of enemies too, untrustworthy bastards who still made it to high office, but I gave up giving a shit about them a long time ago. Five years was enough of that, though. Finally, I privatised myself and went into business with a couple of people I’d met during that time. They were into corporate communications, and I was supposed to be the public relations arm. The problem was that my skills were in media relations.’
‘What’s the difference?’ Skinner asked.
‘There’s less money in media relations, unless you’re a financial specialist. We did okay for a while, then the economy took a dive and so did we. However, when it was good we did well enough for me to have the time to start writing crime novels. The rest, as they say, is geography.’
‘Do you enjoy it?’
‘Yes. It began as a challenge, but it’s become the main purpose of my life. Now I can create a mystery that not even you could solve. Guys like you need guys like me to keep your hand in. Did you enjoy policing?’ the author countered, abruptly.
He considered the question. ‘In CID,’ he began, ‘I enjoyed the satisfaction I got once the job was completely done and the perpetrator was sentenced. Then I made it to the top and found that some aspects of being a chief constable bored me rigid.’
‘When you had to pull the trigger, Bob, how did that feel?’
Skinner frowned. ‘Who says I did?’
‘Come on. I know you did. I hear things in my line of work.’
‘Then you shouldn’t,’ he said, firmly. ‘You tell your sources, Matthew, that leaks that affect state security are taken very seriously.’
‘Noted,’ Reid conceded. ‘Let’s be hypothetical. What would someone in that position feel? I’m interested professionally.’
‘In the moment, nothing. An armed police officer is trained to take that decision dispassionately. There might only be a second to assess the situation and make a judgement on the risk to the public, and the personal risk.’
‘If they get it wrong?’
‘Somebody dies. In theory, they could face prosecution for homicide, or be dead themselves. In practice, they don’t get it wrong, because the threat is always clear and obvious.’
‘Obvious or not, it must have been difficult for a compassionate person like you.’
Skinner beamed. ‘Compassionate? Me?’
Reid smiled back. ‘Yeah, you,’ he repeated. ‘I know you have this image as Britain’s toughest cop, but that’s a perception. It’s a media shout line, like my publisher used on the jackets of my early Septimus Armour novels, to pull in readers like a fairground barker pulled in the punters. I don’t see you as that man. I see you as someone who, suppose he was deep-sea fishing, strapped into a chair and hooked on to something big, would fight with it for an hour until all its strength was gone, then when it was ready to be brought on board and turned into a trophy, he’d cut the line.’
Skinner stared at him. ‘Have you been talking to Sarah?’ he asked. His host had described, in detail, an encounter that he had had several years before in the Gulf of Mexico, with a giant marlin that he hoped was still swimming around there.
‘No, Bob, I haven’t, I swear it. It’s my impression of you, that’s all. Christ man, if I thought you lived up to your reputation do you think I’d have asked you to go calling on vulnerable old ladies?’
‘I’ll tell Anne Eaglesham you said she was vulnerable,’ he warned. ‘She’d pull the trigger on you without a first thought, let alone a second.’ He laid his mug back on the table and pulled off his disposable gloves. ‘Matthew, that was a pleasant break. It seems that you know more about me than I do.’ As he rose, his phone sounded. He took it from his pocket and read ‘Hector Sureda’ on the screen. ‘I have to take this,’ he said, heading for the garden gate. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
Forty-Six
/> DC Barry McGuigan had a low boredom threshold, but he was careful to disguise it. He had worked hard to become a member of DCI Mann’s team and he had no wish to put that in jeopardy. Nevertheless, the tedious task of trawling through national databases for the owners of fingerprints and DNA profiles was one that he would have passed on happily to his worst enemy.
It was clear to him that the Candleriggs flat had not seen many callers, unless the SOCOs had missed as many of them as they had found. It was clear also so far that those who had visited were law-abiding citizens, for with all of the fingerprint samples checked through all the accessible collections, national, European and global, he had come up with as many positives as the UK entry in the Eurovision Song Contest usually gathered votes.
‘Nil points,’ he muttered as another DNA profile produced no matches. Moving on to the next, labelled C7, he pushed the send button and turned to his phone and his Facebook page as he waited. He was a member of three news groups, but rarely posted in any of them. His profile did not mention the fact that he was a police officer, but he was acutely aware that if anything he put up was politically incorrect, even accidentally, there could be professional consequences. His attention was caught by a warning about bomb disposal officers on an Ayrshire beach that was a favourite spot for both him and his boyfriend. He followed it through, smiling when the potential unexploded bomb was proven to be nothing more harmful than an old boiler. ‘I had a date with one of them before I met Angus,’ he whispered. He was still smiling when a corner of his eye registered a change on his computer screen. He laid down his phone and turned to give it his full attention.
His face froze as he scanned the information displayed; it was a DNA match, one hundred per cent, from the Scottish national database. His mind registered two things, astonishment and the need to pass the buck as quickly as possible. Grasping his mouse, he sent the entry to the printer, and was ready to retrieve it before it slid on to the tray. He grabbed the single sheet and headed along the corridor to the chief inspector’s office. Happily, Mann was there.
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