Deadlock

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Does that mean you deny visiting Clyde Houseman recently, in a flat in Candleriggs, in the Merchant City in Glasgow?’

  ‘I think I can deny ever having been in Candleriggs. I grew up in Glasgow but it wasn’t somewhere I hung out in. I misspent most of my youth in rugby pubs and clubhouses.’

  ‘In that case,’ the DCI said, ‘we have a problem. If you don’t know Houseman, and you deny having a meeting with him, social or business, can you account for your genetic material being found on those premises, where a body that we believe to be his was also discovered?’

  Martin’s eyes locked on hers. Cotter moved and opened his mouth as if to emphasise or endorse the question, but his senior stopped him with the slightest movement of her hand.

  ‘No,’ their erstwhile commander replied. ‘No, I cannot. But I want the name of the scene of crime technician who found the alleged sample of my genetic material and I want to see proof of its authenticity. You said that you believe the body to be his? But you don’t know?’

  ‘We don’t, not for certain. The corpse wasn’t identifiable, but Houseman lived at that address and the remains match his ethnic origins. As for giving you the name of a SOCO, you know better than that, Sir Andrew.’

  ‘Maybe I do,’ Martin conceded, ‘but I can be fairly certain of one thing. Mine wasn’t the only DNA recovered on the premises. How many others have you got?’

  ‘Including the woman who found the body,’ Cotter replied, ‘and the cops who contaminated the scene, we have half a dozen so far. Others are still being processed.’

  ‘Okay. I think I can work this out too. Houseman’s details aren’t on a database either, or you’d know for sure your body was him. Plus, your stiff has either never been to a dentist or the killer messed with his mouth to prevent identification through his records. Detective Chief Inspector,’ he looked back at Mann, ‘how many of your half dozen profiles have been identified?’

  ‘Only yours, sir,’ she admitted.

  ‘So you have another five potential suspects. Why hit on me?’

  ‘Come on!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s bloody obvious. Your presence there is incongruous to say the least, and there’s a connection, however tenuous, between you and the suspected victim. If we’d swept it under the carpet and someone at Gartcosh had leaked it—’

  ‘If someone at Gartcosh leaks this,’ Martin spoke quietly, but looked up at the camera and made direct eye contact, ‘it’ll be the same person who took my profile from the database and planted it among the crime scene samples that were returned to you.’

  ‘No,’ Mann said, ‘I’ve excluded that possibility. I asked Arthur Dorward about the source of the DNA that he found. You have very distinctive hair, sir; his team found two of them, stuck in the victim’s blood.’

  He looked back at her, considering what she had said. ‘In that case, there’s only one possible explanation for their presence. Someone planted them at the crime scene looking to incriminate me.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Cotter guffawed. ‘Are the Tories so scared of you becoming an MSP they’d do that?’

  In his years of working with Bob Skinner, Andy Martin had been in many interview rooms with him, and had witnessed his ability to extract the truth from suspects with nothing more than an ice-cold, unblinking stare. He turned his own version on the little detective, and it had a similar effect. ‘Son,’ he murmured, ‘when this mess is cleared up, I am going to make it my business to bring your career to a grinding, painful halt. If you think that’s an empty threat, you really don’t know who you’re dealing with. This is a formal interview, so I’m entitled to a copy of the recording. Imagine the rest.’

  He stood up, abruptly. ‘We’re done, DCI Mann. You have a hair sample, but you can’t prove my presence in those premises by any other means. You have my historic meeting with Houseman . . . I know who and what he is, by the way. As chief constable I had to know what the Security Service was up to on my patch . . . but you can’t even prove that he’s your dead man. Now, I’m going to pick up my kids. If you try to stop me, I will indeed call a lawyer. She might be an Advocate Depute just now, but I’m pretty sure she’d help me out. Tell the Glimmer Twins that Andy Martin said hello.’

  Mann rose also. She stared after him as he left the room, but she made no move to stop him.

  Forty-Nine

  ‘I’ll give you a formal statement as soon as I get home, Sauce,’ Skinner promised, ‘but basically this is what happened. I had picked up Anne’s clubs from the clubhouse as she asked me to and called in to drop them off. As soon as I saw the feathers, I knew it wasn’t good.’

  ‘I googled her like you said,’ Haddock told him. ‘A very impressive record: I feel guilty, never having heard of her, me being a golfer and all.’

  ‘You shouldn’t feel too bad; Anne Eaglesham was even before my time. Her generation of amateur golfers is largely forgotten. Most folk these days think that the game only began when TaylorMade invented metal woods.’ He grinned, wistfully. ‘If you check her bag, you’ll find that she used Pings. She moved with the times . . . on the golf course, and even in her eighties she was far too good for the likes of you and me. I reckon that a twenty-year-old version of Anne today would be world class . . . that’s if she turned pro. If I had to compare her with any golfer it would be Bobby Jones, and he never did.’

  The young DCI surveyed the scene in the garden. ‘You reckon that the kid you spoke about did this?’

  ‘He’s my number-one suspect; he’s the only person I know to have been in the garden recently. Last time I was here that brown bin wasn’t at the gate, full of leaves. He’s been back since. Anne wouldn’t have done it herself, and she didn’t use any of the local gardeners. She employed a couple of greenkeepers from the golf club in the spring and summer months, but in the winter the place took care of itself.’

  ‘Could she have owed them money?’

  ‘No chance,’ Skinner declared. ‘Anne was a generous lady. She donated to every fundraiser in the village whether she knew the organiser or not. The guys would never have been allowed to leave here unpaid.’

  ‘Is it possible,’ Haddock asked, ‘that the kid turned up, did the work, then couldn’t get an answer when he went to get paid? So he took it out on the chickens?’

  ‘Yes, it’s possible, I’ll grant you. I am struggling to convince myself that the kid actually killed her, and yet he’s a common factor, a link between three recent, sudden and apparently accidental deaths.’

  ‘You said it, gaffer; accidental. I’m struggling to convince myself that anyone killed her at all. I’ve been in that laundry room. I’ve seen the old three-pin plug after Dorward’s son took it apart. The earth wire’s completely separated and the washing machine’s resting on a nail, as you demonstrated on the photos you took before you lifted the victim out . . . which you should not have done, by the way. The thing was live, and as soon as she stuck her hand in . . . kaboom. I look at that and what I’m seeing is a tragic accident. Death by electrocution; that’s what the autopsy report will say, and you know it.’

  ‘Yes, I do, he conceded. ‘Then I look at Mrs Alexander, another of my resilience group clients. I found her too, dead on the kitchen floor having fallen off a stepladder and hit her head on the corner of the kitchen table, with the mark of the impact clearly visible. I looked at that and I saw a tragic accident. Then I look at one man finding two victims within a few days of each other, and my inherent disbelief in coincidences kicks in.’ The sound of feet crunching on gravel distracted him. He looked round to see Noele McClair approaching.

  ‘Welcome,’ Haddock exclaimed. ‘You don’t start until tomorrow, officially, but it’s good that you could come. The gaffer’s calling this a murder scene and linking it to another, but I need convincing.’

  ‘Christ, did I teach you nothing, Sauce?’ Skinner cried out. ‘Always disregard coincidence until the facts are establish
ed. Mrs Eaglesham, electrocuted, discovered by me. Mrs Alexander, heart failure after a fall, discovered by me. What does that say to you?’

  The DCI smiled. ‘It says that you’re a person of interest, gaffer.’

  ‘Fuck off! Sorry Noele. Add in the early-teens kid on the bike that Anne Eaglesham employed to tidy up her garden, whose description matches a lad who nearly ran over my toes outside Mrs Alexander’s flat.’

  ‘He did more than that,’ McClair volunteered. ‘A boy fitting that description knocked on the door of Mrs Alexander’s upstairs neighbour looking for work. It’s a fair bet he asked her as well. Not just that, when Tiggy Benjamin and I attended the sudden death of Mr Michael Stevens, she was almost knocked over . . . almost certainly by the same lad. What colour was the bike, Bob?’

  ‘Black. The lad was wearing a puffer jacket, and his fair hair hung down to his collar.’

  ‘That’s him.’

  ‘What was Mr Stevens’ cause of death?’ Haddock asked.

  ‘Cerebral haemorrhage as a probable result of ingesting too much blood-thinning medication.’

  ‘You didn’t find his body, did you, gaffer?’

  ‘No, Sauce, I didn’t, but my wife did the post-mortem.’

  ‘Only because the deceased’s daughter insisted on it,’ McClair volunteered. ‘She said that her mother passed away in similar circumstances last year, and that it was unexplained. Mr Stevens was having his afternoon drink with his cronies at the time.’

  ‘See?’ Skinner said. ‘She didn’t believe in coincidence either.’

  ‘Maybe not, but her father’s death was still classified as non-suspicious by the fiscal.’

  Haddock frowned. ‘What about the mother? What’s known about her death?’

  ‘Nothing other than that the GP certified it as a heart attack. She was on the waiting list for an aortic valve replacement. The procedure was delayed by the pandemic; the hospital was catching up on the backlog, but too slowly for her. We can’t revisit it, Sauce, if that’s what you were thinking. She was cremated.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to propose it,’ the DCI told her. ‘I’m not going to open a triple murder investigation either,’ he added. ‘However, I will do as the gaffer suggests and ask Mr Dorward’s team to do a full sweep of the other two sites, in the hope that they haven’t been totally contaminated by now. Tomorrow morning, DI McClair, when you and DC Benjamin start officially in Serious Crimes, your priority task will be to find this mysterious and omni-present kid.’

  Fifty

  When she had been in private practice as a solicitor advocate, Alex Skinner had never allowed a phone to ring unanswered. Her availability might make the essential difference between a client’s liberty or their detention, seven days a week.

  As an Advocate Depute, she took a different view. The court worked on a weekday basis, unless there was a need for an urgent appearance by a newly charged accused, and so did she. The downside was that in her downtime she was subject to the same lockdown rules as everyone else, unable to entertain or be entertained, and unable to leave her local authority area to visit her family in East Lothian, other than in emergency situations, as she had done when her father and stepmother had been isolated.

  Yes, there were other exceptions, but the fate of other public officials who had been caught out was a powerful disincentive to testing their limits.

  ‘How are you doing?’ Dominic Jackson asked her as she took his call.

  ‘Much the same as you, I guess,’ she confessed. ‘Bored out of my tits.’

  ‘I wouldn’t quite put it that way, but I understand what you mean. I spent this morning working on the final draft of my book, but since then . . . there’s a limit to the amount of Mozart I can take. I’m about to go for a walk but I thought I’d call you first, to see if you were thinking the same.’

  ‘I went running this morning,’ she told him. ‘Round Holyrood Park . . . twice. This afternoon I’m at such a loose end I actually thought of going down to Portobello beach for a swim.’

  ‘A bit parky for that.’

  ‘In my wetsuit,’ she added. ‘Imagine my nipples showing through all that rubber.’

  ‘Alex!’ he laughed.

  ‘Imagine, that’s all. You do realise, Dominic, that if we were shagging, we’d actually be able to visit each other, in a sort of conjugal bubble.’

  ‘Well, we’re not, and we agreed a while back that would be a bad idea. Besides, I’ve been celibate for most of this century. If we did, I suspect it would last about two seconds.’

  ‘I’ve never known a man who didn’t come back for more.’

  ‘Enough! I’m off out. You do the same or try some Wolfgang. He’s good at soothing savage breasts.’

  She smiled as the phone went dead. She knew that she and Dominic would never get it together, as it would put at risk the truest friendship that either of them had ever known, but she still fantasised about it from time to time. She had been celibate herself for over a year and was getting used to it as a fact of her life.

  ‘Alexa,’ she said, firmly, ‘play music by Mozart.’

  The device was in the process of obeying when, to her great surprise, her door buzzer sounded. ‘Who the—?’ she whispered as she moved to the video screen. She gasped in surprise as her curtailed question was answered.

  ‘Andy,’ she said. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘Probably breaking the law,’ he replied, ‘but there’s a situation. It’s been doing my head in for a couple of days and I need to talk to you about it.’

  ‘Personal or professional?’

  ‘The latter.’

  ‘In that case, you can come up.’ She pushed the entry buzzer and held it for a few seconds after his image had disappeared from the screen.

  She opened the door and waited, watching the numbers above the lift as they counted the floors during its ascent to her penthouse apartment. The Andy Martin who stepped out had aged more than the three or four years that had passed by since their last meeting. He seemed to have surrendered to being middle-aged; mid-forties, but no one would have been blamed for taking him for a fifty-year-old. To her surprise she felt sorry for him, something that she could never have imagined at the height of their relationship. But almost immediately she realised there might be another reason for his different demeanour. He paused, looking back into the lift. ‘Come on,’ he said sharply, ‘before the doors close on you.’ He extended a beckoning hand, and two young children jumped out to join him.

  Alex had never met Andy and Karen Martin’s children, Danielle and Robert. When she and their father had been involved, she had kept them at a distance, out of respect for their mother’s feelings as much as anything else. Danielle was blonde, a mirror image of her father as far as a seven-year-old could be. Robert was dark-haired, a smaller version of his mother.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Martin said. ‘I had no choice but to bring them.’

  ‘You did,’ she pointed out. ‘You could have called me on FaceTime, or Zoom, or something similar.’

  ‘That wouldn’t have been secure enough. I might be under surveillance.’

  ‘And this is secure? If you are being watched and it’s being done properly, they’ve followed you right to my door.’ She frowned. ‘Why did I ever let you in? You’re breaking the law by coming here, and you’ve made me complicit.’

  ‘Robert needs to pee,’ he said. ‘He really does.’

  ‘Then he better had.’ She smiled at the child, who looked back at her with a level of suspicion that made her feel like Cruella de Vil. ‘Go on, sweetie. Daddy will show you the way.’ She looked at Martin. ‘I’m sure he remembers.’ She turned to Danielle, as father and son departed. ‘Have you kids eaten?’

  ‘Not since we left Motherwell. Dad said he’d get us sandwiches, but he hasn’t, not yet.’

  ‘Typical,’ she sighed. ‘
Come with me and we’ll fix that. I’m Alex, by the way.’

  The child gave her an appraising look as he followed her to the kitchen. ‘Mummy says you’re a witch,’ she announced, frankly, ‘but you don’t look like one.’

  She gave Danielle her best Cruella smile. ‘Check the hall cupboard that we just passed. You might find my broomstick.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Well thank you, young lady. For what it’s worth, I think your mum’s a princess. What would you like to eat? I can do corned beef sandwiches, or pepperoni pizza from my freezer . . . although that’ll take longer.’

  ‘Robert loves corned beef,’ Danielle said, as her brother appeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘Can I have mustard in mine, the kind with seeds?’

  Alex opened her fridge and looked inside. ‘Yes, you’re in luck, you can. I have some left. Would you and Robert like to watch TV while I make them? I have a little sister about your age, so I have Sky Kids, and Disney Plus.’

  ‘Wow!’ Robert gazed up at her; she felt like Mary Poppins. She took the children into the living room and set them up with an episode of Paw Patrol. She sensed that Danielle would have preferred something a little more mature but had learned to settle for a quiet life.

  When she returned to the kitchen she found Martin at work, making the promised sandwiches for the children. ‘Make yourself at home, why don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘It’s the least I can do,’ he replied. ‘You want some yourself?’