Deadlock

by Quintin Jardine

  She frowned at him as he burst into the room without waiting for a response to his knock, but stayed silent, possibly only because she was halfway through a Mars bar.

  ‘Sorry, boss,’ he said urgently, ‘but you need to see this. It’s a positive match for the Candleriggs flat.’ He laid the print-out on her desk.

  She stared at it. McGuigan found her reaction almost comical, realising that it matched his own.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ she asked, quietly.

  ‘It’s what I got back, boss. There’s no room for error, unless there’s a fuck-up in the PNC.’

  ‘Go and run it again,’ she ordered.

  She leaned back in her chair and waited, quietly munching her Mars bar and considering the implications of the print-out that lay before her. She had just crumpled the wrapper and tossed it into her waste bucket when McGuigan returned, once again entering unbidden.

  ‘No mistake, boss,’ he exclaimed.

  She whistled. ‘Okay, Barry,’ she said. ‘Leave it with me. Carry on with the sample checks, and do not breathe a word about this to anyone, not even DS Cotter.’

  As soon as the door had closed behind him, Mann picked up her mobile and found the DCC’s number, realising that she was doing exactly as the DC had done, in moving a problem upstream. The call went straight to voicemail; rather than leave a message, she phoned the chief constable’s direct line, which all senior CID officers had for emergency use. That also went unanswered. Finally, she called the executive officers’ main switchboard and was connected to the chief’s secretary, Claudia, a woman who famously saw herself as a human shield around her boss.

  ‘They’re in conference,’ she told the DCI. ‘All the command team are. Not to be disturbed.’

  ‘They are now,’ Mann replied, quietly, but with an edge to her voice that precluded debate. ‘I need to speak to DCC McGuire, so go in there and haul him out.’

  ‘What will I tell him?’ Claudia asked.

  ‘One word. Candleriggs.’ She repeated it, slowly. ‘You got that?’

  ‘I have. If he agrees to leave the meeting, I’ll call you back.’

  ‘He will. I’ll hold on.’

  She waited, battling against the urge to reach for a second Mars bar: she had a history of sugar intake under stress. She kept her eyes on the wall clock, watching the second hand sweeping in a silent circle. It was halfway through a second revolution when McGuire came on-line. ‘Lottie,’ he said briskly, ‘we’ve adjourned the meeting, you’re on speaker and the Chief’s with me. There’s nobody else in the room. Now what’s the crisis?’

  ‘The DNA sample check, sir. It’s established the presence of an individual at the crime scene. Obviously there’s no time frame, but the DNA sample recovered is definite.’

  ‘What do you need from us, DCI Mann?’ McIlhenney asked.

  ‘Authority, sir,’ she replied. ‘Because of who this is I need instructions from the highest level on how to proceed.’

  ‘Lottie,’ McGuire growled, ‘you might not think that an arse being covered has a sound, but it does, and a very distinctive one at that. I can hear it right now. You’re a senior CID officer in charge of a specialist unit. You proceed exactly as your experience tells you and this office will back you all the way. Now, who is this hot fucking potato?’

  ‘Sir Andrew Martin: the first chief constable of the national force, and a candidate for the Scottish Parliament in the May elections. My only doubt is, sir, do I go to him, or do I ask him to come to me?’

  ‘What’s your thinking?’ McIlhenney asked again.

  ‘That if he’s a suspect who or what he is doesn’t matter. He should be interviewed under caution, with a lawyer present if he chooses. As for the venue, I can’t cede any aspect of control of the situation. That means he comes to me, under arrest if that’s what it takes.’

  ‘Agreed,’ McGuire said.

  ‘Do either or both of you want to be there?’

  ‘Mario and I have known Andy for years,’ the chief constable replied. ‘We worked with him, and he was our senior officer all of that time. We can’t be in the room or even in the building when he’s interviewed. You’re fully in command of this one, DCI Mann. Proceed in any way you feel necessary without further reference to either of us or anyone else until you feel the need.’

  Forty-Seven

  Bob Skinner felt guilty on more than one level. His Covid isolation and virtual lockdown had brought it home to him that although he had lived in what Matthew Reid insisted was the small town of Gullane for more than half of his life, even allowing for a brief sojourn in Edinburgh during his first marriage to Sarah, his personal contribution to the community had been minimal.

  Also, he had let Anne Eaglesham down. As they had parted at the end of his garden visit, she had asked him to retrieve her golf clubs from her locker in the clubhouse.

  ‘With these hands I couldn’t hit the ball out of my garden these days, Bob,’ she had confessed, ‘so I might as well knock a few balls around within its confines.’

  She had given him her locker key and he had picked them up next day, but they still lay in his hallway, a fine set of Ping GLEs that could have been no more than three years old. They would stay there no longer, he determined, picking them up in their fine white bag, with the name ‘Mrs Anne Eaglesham’ embossed upon it.

  He was grinning as he arrived at The Eyrie, imagining the old lady threading a drive between her trees, with no likelihood of hitting them. The broad entrance was closed as always, but a brown recycling box stood outside. He lifted its lid and glanced inside; it was crammed full of leaves. He assumed that the kid must have been back; bright lad, he thought, for Anne Eaglesham would always be a good payer. He stepped through the side gate and into the driveway, a smile still on his face in anticipation of the good deed he was about to complete. It faded when he saw the first of the feathers. They lay on the ground at the side of the house moving gently on the breeze. He picked up his pace and, as he drew closer, he saw that they were everywhere, on the drive, on the lawns and even among the trees. Laying the golf clubs on the ground he ran round to the back of the house. The door of the henhouse lay open, but there was no one home. He had no idea how many chickens Anne Eaglesham had kept but there were no survivors. The scene was one of carnage, blood, guts and feathers everywhere, with a few heads, wings and feet among them. He looked at the latch of the enclosure; the padlock that had secured it was unfastened, and the door had been left open. The slaughter had involved more than one fox, that was for sure, but a human had let the hens loose. Not Anne, so who? He thought of the likely candidates for such an act of sabotage; in the wider world of the politically correct there were people, no doubt about it, who disapproved of any form of poultry enclosure, but none that he knew of in Gullane. Even if there were, who knew that Anne Eaglesham had a hen coop? She was a figure of mystery to most; visitors to The Eyrie were few and far between. But there had been one recently, apart from himself.

  The kid on the bike.

  ‘Little bastard,’ Skinner hissed, moving the boy instantly to the top of a very short list of persons of interest. ‘You and I are going to be having a chat.’

  But . . .

  As his red-hot anger faded and relative calmness returned, another thought came with it. Poultry did not go quietly to the slaughter; there must have been a hideous noise as the foxes feasted, more than loud enough to rouse Anne Eaglesham and bring her out with her shotgun. And yet it had not.

  There were three doors at the rear of the house, two of them in an L-shaped single storey section with a sloping roof. He surmised that the one on the left would have been the coal shed when the house was built. He opened it to check his theory; the walls were still blackened, but it contained only garden equipment, spades, hoes, rakes and trowels, with weedkiller, fertiliser and other products stacked on a high shelving unit. He left it and went straig
ht to what he assumed was the back door of the house. It had two locks, one an old-fashioned mortice with a large keyhole, the other circular, not a Yale, but one he recognised as the work of a specialist locksmith company in Edinburgh that had been out of business for many years. He tried the handle and to his surprise the door opened.

  He stepped inside, into a large kitchen. Glancing around, he surmised that the fittings were as old as the house itself. The cupboards and shelving units were the work of skilled carpenters, and the work surfaces were granite. There was a deep double sink beneath the window, with brass taps above, and a table in the centre of the room with four chairs around it. The only items that spoke of modernity were the electrics, the switches and plugs, and an Aga cooker. He knew the model because he and Sarah had considered it only to rule it out because its induction hob would have been at odds with his cardiac pacemaker.

  ‘Anne,’ he called out loudly, moving into the house. It was as much of a museum as the kitchen had been, with a wide hand-carved staircase rising from the hall and several doors off it. He checked the ground-floor rooms one by one, continuing to call the owner’s name, even though he knew that she would have replied by that time, had she been capable. He went upstairs and checked each of the seven bedrooms; two of them were en-suite. The larger, obviously Anne’s room from the items on the dressing table, had a circular shower enclosure of a type he had seen once before in his life, in a public school where he had gone to play an away game of rugby as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. His rugby career had been brief and had ended that day. An opposition forward had grabbed him by the testicles. Skinner had broken his nose and fractured his eye-socket. The incident had been hushed up by the host school, but he had been suspended indefinitely by his own.

  Layers of dust on the wooden furniture and windowsills on the first floor and attic rooms told him that all but the owner’s had been unopened since the first lockdown a year earlier and possibly for longer than that. Later he would realise that, in spite of the importance and essential nature of his task, a part of him fell in love with the house as he searched it, but in the moment, he ran back downstairs as soon as he had looked behind every door, including the second en-suite and two family bathrooms.

  Back in the kitchen he paused for thought, retracing his movements in his mind. There was only one door that he had not opened, one place that he had not explored. He stepped back outside and turned to his right, to the middle of the three rear doors, alongside which there was a small window with a white muslin curtain. There was a key in the lock; he swore softly at himself for not noticing it earlier as he twisted it anticlockwise, confirming that it was not engaged, then turned the handle, swung it open and stepped inside.

  The architect who designed Eagle’s Nest, before it became The Eyrie, had probably described the room as ‘The Laundry’. It was spacious, with painted walls and an uncarpeted wooden floor, another original feature. A drying rail, the type for which a contemporary interior designer would pay a fortune, hung from the ceiling, restrained by a double cord attached to the wall. As in the kitchen there was a double Belfast sink, this with scrubbing boards on either side, one basin with the drainage tube of an ancient washing-machine hung over the side. Skinner thought of his grandmother’s house; he could remember very little of her, but her Hoovermatic twin tub was fresh in his mind.

  He thought of her again as he saw Anne Eaglesham slumped over the machine, one arm plunged into the washing compartment, wondering what the difference had been between their ages. He knew they had been born in the same century but that was all. He stepped towards her; he was about to check her for a pulse when he was stopped by the instinct for self-preservation that had served him well throughout his life. For a reason too obscure to pursue, The Laundry had not been re-wired with the rest of the house. Its power sockets were old style, round pin, fifteen amp, and the light switches were round and made of brass like the taps above the sink.

  He looked for the fuse box and saw it, beside the window, within easy reach as he moved to pull the lever that shut off the electricity that had killed the old lady. Once that was done, he took out his phone. From the doorway he shot twenty seconds of video. Moving forward, he took still photographs from three different angles and one close-up of a section of the floor beside the machine. Only once he was satisfied that he had enough, did he remove the body from its unnatural pose and lay it down, gently.

  He took a deep breath and stepped outside, reaching once again for his phone. He searched his contact list for ‘S’ and pressed the call button, listening to it ring out, once, twice.

  ‘Gaffer,’ Sauce Haddock said. ‘What can you do for me?’

  Skinner ignored the joke. ‘You, son,’ he replied, ‘can help me break a bad habit I’ve developed lately.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Finding old ladies dead in their homes. The first one fooled me, but this one doesn’t. This is more than suspicious. This is homicide; I’m sure of it.’

  ‘Where are you?’ the young DCI asked, all business.

  ‘I’m at a house called The Eyrie, in Gullane, not far from my place. The victim’s name is Anne Eaglesham. Google her, adding the word “golf”, and you’ll find her in a second.’

  ‘I’ll be there on the double, with a full team.’

  ‘The SOCOs need to process one other address, maybe two. Bring as many as you can get.’

  ‘Will do, gaffer. Are you going to tell me who did it as well?’

  ‘Definitively no, but as it stands, you’re looking for a kid around fourteen years old, whose intelligence must be off the fucking scale.’

  Forty-Eight

  Sir Andrew Martin’s eyes were green, but they were ablaze with anger as he walked into the interview room where DCI Lottie Mann and DS John Cotter waited. He was alone.

  ‘Is your solicitor travelling separately, sir?’ Mann asked, forcing herself not to make her voice sound deferential in any way, although she felt a level of nervousness that was new to her.

  ‘I don’t need a lawyer,’ the former chief constable snapped. ‘I have no idea what this is about. All I was told by your DC McGuigan was that it would be a formal interview, but that was all. My assumption is that it relates to my former service. If that’s the case, Detective Inspector, I’m comfortable that it was as exemplary as it was brief.’

  ‘Detective Chief Inspector,’ Cotter corrected him. ‘I thought you’d have known that.’ He managed not to wince as Mann kicked him under the table, hard.

  Martin’s eyes turned from fire to ice. ‘And you are?’

  ‘John Cotter, sir. Detective Sergeant. We’ve met; you paid a brief visit to Aberdeen not long before you resigned.’

  ‘You must have been at the back of the room. Or standing behind someone.’

  Mann bridled at the slight and made no attempt to hide it. Cotter might be a short-arse but he was her short-arse. ‘Please take a seat, Sir Andrew,’ she said, curtly. She switched on the sound and video recorders and identified the three people in the room. ‘You are not under arrest, Sir Andrew, but as DC McGuigan said this is a formal interview and is on the record for the purposes of any future court proceedings. If at any point you feel you would benefit from legal advice, we will stop to allow that. However, I need you to confirm for the record that you are happy to proceed without it.’

  ‘I’m familiar with the Cadder ruling by the Supreme Court, and I do confirm it,’ Martin declared. ‘Now, also for the record, I want to warn you that if I have the slightest suspicion at any point that this summons to a police station has anything to do with my political ambitions, the interview will also stop, and the consequences will reach far beyond the chief constable’s office.’

  ‘Was that a threat, sir?’ Cotter asked.

  ‘No, Sergeant, it was a very clear warning. Now, let’s get on with it. I’m looking after my kids just now and I’ve had to make special arrangements
for them with a family member.’

  The DS had neither forgotten nor forgiven the height slight. ‘Would you like to tell us who that is, sir,’ he murmured, ‘should this interview get to the point where we need to safeguard them?’

  Martin looked Mann in the eye. ‘What would you and this idiot do if I got up and walked out of here, right now?’

  ‘We’d arrest you,’ she replied.

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘That we have reason to believe that you have committed an indictable offence and that your detention is necessary for the furtherance of our enquiries and to protect the public.’

  ‘What?’ A laugh exploded from him. ‘You are surely taking the piss. Is this Mario McGuire pulling my chain?’ Mann gazed back at him, emotionless. ‘Okay,’ he said, ‘let’s hear it. What am I supposed to have done? Bought my house with crypto-currency that went belly up before the ink was dry on the deeds?’

  ‘Did you?’ Cotter growled.

  Both Mann and Martin ignored him. ‘Does the name Clyde Houseman mean anything to you?’ the DCI asked.

  The former chief constable frowned, accentuating the lines on his forehead. ‘Off the top of my head, no it doesn’t,’ he replied. ‘Should it?’

  ‘We’re told that you met, a long time ago in Edinburgh. You were a young CID officer then, with Sir Robert Skinner’s Major Crimes team. Houseman was an even younger gang leader in a housing scheme that you and Sir Robert visited in the course of a murder investigation.’

  ‘Mia Watson’s brother’s killing? That one?’

  ‘I don’t know the specifics,’ Mann confessed.

  ‘That would be it,’ Martin continued. ‘We went to interview the victim’s mother, a brute of a woman who wound up dead herself. In the street outside a bunch of kids tried to hustle Bob. The usual, give us a fiver to mind your motor or it won’t have wheels when you get back. I remember now, Bob showed him the error of his ways. He told him that if the real neighbourhood heavies saw him taking money from a pair of CID officers, it didn’t matter how tough he thought he was, it would have an adverse effect on his life expectancy. From what you say that would be the boy. Okay, I met him but I never heard his name, so it couldn’t have meant anything to me.’