‘What’s up, Dad?’ James Andrew asked. A strapping lad a few days off his eleventh birthday, he had threatened rebellion when his father had insisted that he use his booster seat but had yielded when given the choice between that and missing out on a visit to the city’s spectacular Riverside Museum.
‘Respect, son. There was once a poet and wise man named John Donne, who said, “Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankind.” Understand?’
‘I think so. When I went to the Jesus and Me club at the church, I remember the minister saying that we are all equal in the eyes of the Lord. You’re saying why are they talking about the footballer as if he’s more important than any of the other people who were killed.’
‘That’s it. What about you, what are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that it doesn’t matter if you have a Champions League winner’s medal, you can’t take it to heaven.’
‘A shade blunt, perhaps, because the footballer isn’t unimportant, but you’re on the right lines.’
‘Am I supposed to believe in heaven, Dad?’ the boy asked, taking Bob by surprise.
‘Many people would say you are,’ he replied. ‘I prefer to tell you to make up your own mind once you’ve had time to consider the question. There are many visions of heaven; I think we each have to choose the one we find most realistic.’
‘Have you chosen one?’
‘I know what I believe, yes. But I’m not going to tell you what it is, not yet. I don’t want you adopting a belief system just because it’s mine.’
‘But you believe that when you die and Sarah dies,’ James Andrew persisted, ‘you’ll meet up somewhere?’
‘I hope so.’
‘If you do, and if you meet up with Alex’s mum as well, won’t it be . . . awkward? What if they don’t like each other?’
‘That is not something I have ever considered,’ Bob admitted.
‘Would they have liked each other?’
‘Honestly? I doubt that very much.’
‘If Alex’s mum had lived, would she have been my mum?’
‘She might have been another boy’s mum, but he’d have been different from you. But then again, if she hadn’t died, she and I might not have stayed together, Sarah and I might still have met and . . . well, here you’d be.’
‘But . . .’
He laughed. ‘Jazz, stop right there. Let’s resume this conversation in five years. Quit thinking like a teenager until you actually are one.’
He drove on, steadily and carefully, switching to the M74 motorway and approaching their destination from the south side of the river that cuts Scotland’s largest city in two. The car park at the Queen Elizabeth II University Hospital was as busy as Skinner had expected, but Graham Scott had given him directions to the staff section, where he announced himself through a microphone and waited as the barrier was raised by unseen security staff.
He had been to the mortuary section before and had no intention of taking an eleven-year-old. Instead he led his son to the nearby café, bought him a mineral water and an apple, and told him to amuse himself with his iPad. He trusted Jazz to stay where he was until he returned, but as an added precaution he identified himself to the reception staff, told him that he had a meeting and asked them to keep an eye on the boy.
As he’d expected, Graham Scott was ready and waiting for him in his office. ‘This had better be good, chum,’ he told the professor, smiling. ‘Whatever it is, from the sound of you last night, it seems to have made your weekend.’
‘It has,’ the pathologist replied, ‘and it hasn’t. What I’ve found shames a member of my profession, on two grounds, incompetence and possibly corruption as well: a man called Archie Banks, a peripatetic beyond retirement age who was commissioned by the procurator fiscal to do the Marcia Brown autopsy because there was nobody else available.’
‘I know the name,’ Skinner volunteered. ‘Sarah encountered his work in her early years here. She was unimpressed; called him a horse doctor if I remember right.’
‘God help the horse. The fiscal has a lot to answer for; he let Banks sort out his own corroboration, and he used a student, Marguerite Swanson. Her name features very briefly in the report. I had my doubts that she was ever in the room, so I checked with her – she’s qualified now. She was present, but not close up. Banks let her observe, not participate; she remembered that, and also that there was very little to see.’ Scott opened a file on his desk. ‘That’s the report to the fiscal, and that’s her corroborating signature below Banks’s, but she told me she had no part in its preparation. Look at the dates, of the post-mortem and the report.’
Skinner peered at the page, then with a sigh of exasperation took a pair of reading spectacles from his pocket and perched them on his nose. ‘They’re the same,’ he observed. ‘He did the PM and signed off on it on the same day. Quick work, but so what?’
‘I’ll get there. The report says that the examination was also witnessed by Detective Sergeant Terry Coats, but his signature is not present.’
‘It fits, though; we know that he attended the suspicious death call-out.’
‘As it turned out,’ Scott said, ‘he wasn’t suspicious enough. Banks’s finding was that death was due to a massive overdose of liquid morphine, self-administered, that the dose was too great to have been accidental, and that the victim undoubtedly ended her own life. That’s what he reported and that will have been enough for the fiscal, I am sure.’
‘It was,’ Skinner confirmed. ‘It was signed off as suicide. So, Graham, why am I here?’
‘Because the stupid bastard signed it off on the blood analysis alone! That would have been done very quickly, and it was enough for him. What he didn’t do was what any competent pathologist would have done. He didn’t wait for the result of the stomach contents analysis!’ He took a second page from the folder and, clearly agitated, thrust it at his companion. ‘Look what it says! It notes the presence of rice, curried lamb, banana yoghurt, coffee, and a significant amount of red wine, but not a trace of morphine! It can only mean that the fatal dose was injected. According to the capsules and the packaging found with the body it was fucking Oramorph, Bob, the kind that the patient swallows. Why would anyone intending to kill herself bother to inject the stuff, even if she was half pissed? She wouldn’t, Bob, she wouldn’t have. She’d have fucking swallowed it, as you’re supposed to!’
‘But the stomach contents do indicate that she was drunk. Can you say with any certainty that she didn’t do just that?’
‘I can say with certainty that a fatal dose of morphine was injected into the bloodstream. The police report, and Detective Sergeant Coats, wherever he is now, will have to tell you whether a syringe was found at the scene. Possibly more than one, or she’d have had to reload, given the size of the dose. That, by the way, would have been practically impossible; she’d have been unconscious before she was finished, most likely. She had help, for sure, and she wasn’t a willing victim.’
‘Proof, Graham,’ Skinner insisted. ‘Proof.’
‘Yes, and I can show it to you.’ He turned to his computer and swung it round. ‘The one thing that was done right was the photography of the body. Marguerite Swanson did it, she told me, with a digital camera, and the images were stored on a memory stick. It was in the file when I opened it. I’ve studied them, I’ve enlarged them, I’ve improved the definition as much as I can. Now look at these.’
He went to his keyboard and clicked, bringing on to the screen an image of a woman’s upper torso and shoulders, and the lower part of her face. He zoomed the image, focusing on the left shoulder then the right.
‘What can you see, Bob?’
‘Bruising,’ Skinner whispered. ‘On the upper arms below each shoulder.’
‘And the shape?’
He peered at the screen, trying to focus, until finally he gave up and put on his spectacles. ‘General bruise on the right,’ he murmured. ‘On the left, yes, definite finger marks.’
‘Exactly. This person was gripped and held, with great force, causing immediate bruising. If death followed soon afterwards, and it did, the marks would remain. I believe there were two assailants; that she was held down and forcibly injected with the dose of morphine that killed her. I would testify to that effect in a criminal court. I can’t prove it, but I would also suggest to a jury that from the shape of the marks on her upper arms, if we had clear images of her armpits, that’s where we would find the injection site or sites. This was never a suicide, my friend. As I told you, this was a premeditated homicide.’
Skinner nodded. ‘I’ll buy it. Okay, Graham, it was worth my while coming through.’
‘What are you going to do about it?’ the professor asked.
‘It’s been nine years; it can wait for a few more hours. Right now, I’m going to take my son to the Riverside Museum. At some point after that, I might just pay a call on a lady of my acquaintance.’
Seventeen
Carrie was pushing her luck, she knew it. Undoubtedly, the sensible, responsible thing was to do nothing precipitate until she had interviewed Hazel Delaney, the LuxuMarket manager, in Dundee on the following Monday, as she had intended. However, as her father had told her when she was sixteen and he had caught her in flagrante with the married woman next door, she had been born with no sense and even less responsibility. It featured nowhere on her CV, but her recklessness had led to the end of her career in the Territorial military police. A headlong rush through an open door in Kabul when she had been ordered to hang back had brought her face to face with two Taliban intruders and had cost her colleague his life.
She had her case already: David Brass and his dead son had been right all along. She was sure that Marcia Brown had been framed, set up as a shoplifter by a conspiracy involving Vera Stephens and her fiancé. A call had been placed to the South Australian police headquarters in Adelaide, asking for confirmation that Peter Parker was indeed a member of that force, and requesting a phone call whenever he was next on duty.
She knew that she should wait, that she should go nowhere near Councillor Gloria Stephens until she had all the facts assembled, until she was in a position to report everything to Alex. There was only one more question to which she needed an answer. Perhaps Hazel Delaney could supply it. Perhaps Spidey could be scared into telling her the whole story, in the hope of saving his Australian career. But perhaps not, in either case: probably not.
There really was only one person who knew the answer, and she was holding a constituency surgery that afternoon, advertised on the West Coast Council website, in her office in Newmilns. Carrie had driven straight there from Edinburgh Airport, and a shaken Terry Coats. Her blood was up, and she hoped to put just as big a scare into the councillor.
She found the small office easily. It was above a row of small shops, faced by a public car park that might have been busy through the week but was empty on a day when most of the townspeople had probably headed for the nearest beach. The door that she confronted bore a glossy image of a smiling Gloria Stephens, on a campaign poster; she opened it and stepped inside, into a waiting room where three people, middle-aged women, sat on a long bench. They were faced by a man behind a desk, burly, grim and unsmiling. Carrie had a flashback to her first year in secondary school, and a humourless maths teacher who had earned the dislike of the entire class.
He stared up at her as she approached him; his eyes were dull and disinterested. ‘Here to see the cooncillor?’ he drawled.
She smiled back at him. ‘I hope so,’ she replied, but drew not a flicker in return. Instead he slid a piece of paper towards her.
‘Name, address and the reason for your visit,’ he growled.
She leaned over the desk and took her pen from its slot in her notepad. ‘No’ there!’ the gatekeeper snapped. ‘You’ll mark it.’
‘I won’t be the first,’ she retorted. ‘Where, then?’
He shrugged and returned his attention to that day’s Metro.
McDaniels took a place at the end of the bench and began to fill the form on her lap, using her notepad as a support. Adopting the name Daniella Carrington, her favourite subterfuge, she recalled the name of the street that had led her into Newmilns and used that, adding the number thirty-seven. Beneath her bogus credentials she scrawled, ‘School catchment areas’, then handed her submission back to the custodian, who accepted it without a glance. As he did so, a door opened behind him, and a man emerged. His expression did not suggest that he was a satisfied constituent.
One of the waiting three rose to her feet, but she was waved back down by the man behind the desk, with a terse ‘Haud on.’ He stood up himself, and vanished into the room behind, taking Carrie’s information form with him. He was gone for less than a minute; when he returned, he ignored the waiting trio and pointed to her. ‘You next.’
‘Sorry,’ she murmured to her companions as she stood. ‘Don’t know why.’ She walked past the man into the inner sanctum.
The Gloria Stephens who faced her from a chair behind a larger desk than the one outside was an older version of the one in the welcoming photograph; older and considerably less friendly. Her hair was still auburn, well cut and carefully arranged, but she wore much less make-up and there were no laughter lines around her eyes.
‘Which paper are you from, hen?’ she asked in a smoker’s rasp. ‘Or have you got a hidden camera in your bra?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Carrie protested.
‘Save it,’ Stephens snapped. ‘Daniella fucking Carrington indeed! If there was anybody with a name like Daniella fucking Carrington in my ward, I’d have known about her long ago. As for the address, the number you gave me, it’s a shop. Once again, what paper are you from and what the hell are you playing at?’
Knowing there was no point in further pretence, Carrie settled into the low-slung chair facing the councillor and opened her notepad. ‘No newspaper, no hidden cameras.’ She took a business card from the pad and handed it over. ‘My name’s Carrie McDaniels and I’m a private investigator. I’ve been hired by an Edinburgh solicitor advocate, Alexis Skinner, to look into the death nine years ago of a fellow councillor of yours, Marcia Brown. She killed herself after being accused of stealing from a store in Kilmarnock. Councillor Brown claimed at the time that she was the victim of a conspiracy. The enquiries I’ve made, and the sources I’ve spoken to, lead me to believe that was true. It appears that Marcia may have been set up by your daughter Vera with the help of her boyfriend at the time, a serving police constable name of Peter Parker. Their motive is less clear, but I’ve been told that you and Councillor Brown had a blazing row in your room in the council offices just before it happened. It’ll be for my client, Ms Skinner, to decide what to do about it, but she’s an officer of the court, so she won’t really have much choice but to ask for a formal police investigation. Before we get to that stage, I feel it’s only right to give you a chance to tell your side of the story, if you have one.’
Hatred flowed across the desk in waves. ‘That is fucking nice of you,’ Gloria Stephens growled. ‘Okay, this is my side of the story. There is no fucking story. Whoever’s been talking to you has been telling you very large porkies for one reason alone: to smear me. I’ve been at this game for a long time, and I’ve left a lot of jealous and bitter people in my wake. You might have met a couple of folk who’ve strung you along, but once your so-called sources have to put their hand on a Bible, or a Koran, you’ll hear fucking different. That’s if they’ve got any hands by that time. Marcia Brown? Well named, she was; a reckless, vicious pile of shite driven by one thing and one thing alone, and that was pure fucking insanity!’ She paused, leaning forward, icy grey eyes drilling into Carrie, ‘I don’t know what drives you, lass, but if you think you can walk into my town, and my office, and threaten me without there being any consequences, you have made a very dangerous mistake.’ She pushed herself to her feet. ‘Now get the fuck out of here, before I get big Ronnie outsid
e to show you out through a window!’
Carrie McDaniels had been threatened before, in military situations, and in the course of her work, but she could not recall anything resembling the cold stab of fear that pierced her as the dumpy woman glared at her. It was all she could do to maintain her dignity and to walk from the room, rather than breaking into a run.
Her panic did not subside until she was back in her car, safely locked within. When she was calm once more, she took out her phone and dialled her client’s mobile number. When it went to voicemail, she stifled a moan but recovered herself. ‘Alex,’ she said to the recorder, ‘hopefully you’re in Edinburgh this weekend and you’ll pick this message up very soon. I know it’s Saturday, but I’d like to update you on my investigation.’ She checked the Rolex once again. ‘Since I don’t know where you live, I’m going to head for your office; since you share it with a newspaper, I assume the building will be open. With a bit of luck, I’ll be there by five thirty.’
She drew another deep breath, fastened her seatbelt, switched on the engine of her Renault and drove steadily out of the car park. Rather than return to the M77, she decided to head in the other direction, towards Strathaven, where she would have a choice of heading for East Kilbride and on to the M8 or simply staying on the A71 heading for Edinburgh. Until then, the road was straight, and it was quiet; the Clio had plenty of poke for its size, and so she put her foot down.
She was through Drumclog before she became aware of the car behind her, a black Ford Mondeo that was travelling as fast as she was. She thought no more of it until the driver reached out of his window and placed a flashing blue light on the roof, flashed his lights and turned on his indicator.
‘Bugger!’ she murmured as she pulled over.
Eighteen
The Bad Fire (Bob Skinner series, Book 31): A shocking murder case brings danger too close to home for ex-cop Bob Skinner in this gripping Scottish crime thriller Page 10