‘So?’ King smiled.
‘So?’
‘So you killed him, and that’s it.’
Dodemaide shook his head in a manner which King thought to be smug and detached. ‘So I didn’t kill him and that’s it.’
‘We found the murder weapon, we found your dabs on the murder weapon, we know that you and Eddie Wroe knew each other.’
‘We were mates.’
‘You lived in the same gaff, you shot up together, you probably shared each other’s works, you turned people’s windows together, you screwed people’s cars together, you knock little old ladies down to the ground and steal their pensions, and one day you and Eddie had an argument and you stabbed him. You stabbed him and dumped his body in an alley.’
‘Did I?’ Dodemaide smiled. ‘Then you shouldn’t have difficulty proving it. I’ve been here two hours now. You either charge me or let me go.’
‘He came at you and you took the knife from him.’
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Come on, Shane, tell us what happened, help yourself and the charges could be reduced. How does culpable homicide sound—or even manslaughter?’
‘Sounds good, sounds better than murder. Called plea bargaining, isn’t it?’
‘So, what happened between you and Eddie Wroe?’
‘Nothing. I went to my bed, my mattress, late Saturday, slept late, went up the ‘tannies’—the Botanical Gardens—in the afternoon and sat in the wind and blew some grass. Came back, shot up, went out…came back. Went to bed. Got woken up by you guys. Haven’t seen Eddie since Saturday morning. I suppose I won’t see him again. He was the sort of guy who’d drift, he’d come, he’d go. You know how it is?’
King shot to his feet and opened the door. A constable entered the room. King said, ‘Take him to the charge bar.’
In a large room adjacent to the uniform bar stood a metal desk. A wooden desk with an inclined plane stood on the metal desk. King stood in front of the desk with the plane inclined towards him. Shane Dodemaide stood in front of the desk, handcuffed to the constable. King laid papers on the inclined plane of the desk and consulted them. He looked at Dodemaide. ‘Are you listening?’
Dodemaide nodded.
‘Right, then…Prisoner at the bar, you are not obliged to say anything, but anything you do say will be taken down and may be used in evidence…do you understand?’
‘Aye.’ Dodemaide nodded.
‘Shane Dodemaide, you are charged that on the night of twenty-eighth March in the city of Glasgow, in the vicinity of Sauchiehall Lane, or elsewhere, you did assault Edward Wroe with a knife, that you did stab him repeatedly all to his hurt and severe injury and did murder him.’
Silence.
King spoke and wrote, ‘Prisoner at the bar made no reply.’
Chapter 4
Monday, 08.30–18.30 hours
Fabian Donoghue pulled his Rover into the rear of P Division Police Station at Charing Cross and parked in the space marked ‘Detective Inspector’. He glanced at his gold hunter—just forty-five minutes from his home in Edinburgh to his place of work. Not a bad trip at all, fast and smooth, no holdups, no delays, just a steady sixty miles an hour. He slipped the watch back into his waistcoat pocket, left his car and walked the short distance across the car park to the door at the rear of the police station itself. He signed in, checked his pigeonhole for messages and went upstairs, taking two at a time, and into the CID corridor. In his office, he took off his coat and homburg and hung them on the coat stand; he sat down at his desk, ready to begin his day’s work at 08.32.
He leaned forward and tore off Saturday and Sunday’s date from his desk calendar and read the day’s message for Monday, 28th March. It was the Mark Twain quote, ‘Giving up something is easy. I’ve done it many times.’ Donoghue smiled and thought it appropriate as he reached for his pipe with the gently curved stem with one hand and his tobacco pouch with the other. He filled his pipe with easy expertise, glancing at the operation only occasionally, but for the most part doing it by practised touch, enjoying as he did so the fragrance from the tobacco as it teased his nostrils. The tobacco he favoured was a special mix, made up especially for him by a small independent tobacconist in the city centre; it had a Dutch base for taste, with a twist of dark shag for depth of flavour and a slower burning rate. He smoked five ounces a week; less than he used to smoke. When the bowl of the pipe had been filled to his satisfaction, he replaced the tobacco pouch in his jacket pocket, took his goldplated lighter from his waistcoat pocket and played the flame over the bowl of the pipe, drawing the smoke up the stem and blowing it from his mouth with loving satisfaction. It was the first pipe of the day—always the most enjoyable.
He leaned backwards in his chair and glanced out of his office window at the city, looking up the length of Sauchiehall Street, at the shops, the office buildings, at the buses nose to tail, of many different liveries following deregulation of the services, thus allowing the independent operators to compete with the municipal service. Above the boldly angular buildings of downtown Glasgow, the sky was blue with a few heavy white clouds. Not a bad day at all, for the time of year, and after such a wet weekend. He thought that this year might very well be a good summer and his thoughts drifted momentarily to a week’s fishing in the Borders.
A tap on his office door brought him sharply back to reality.
‘Come in,’ he said.
Montgomerie entered his office and strode confidently towards Donoghue’s desk, a number of files under his arm.
‘Take a pew, Montgomerie.’ Donoghue took the pipe from his mouth and nodded to the chair in front of his desk. He rested his elbows on his desk at either side of the blotting paper bad. Odd item of office furniture, he thought, utterly and completely redundant since the advent of the ballpoint pen, but without which no desk looks complete. He glanced at Montgomerie and thought that the young detective-constable looked pleased with himself He also looked tired and bleary-eyed, as would any cop who had just come to the end of the graveyard shift. He looked a little grimy, his downturned moustache—which normally set off his chiselled, aquiline features very well—was now beginning to share his face with a growth which was somewhere between a five o’clock shadow and designer stubble, more of a shadow, not yet quite a stubble, but none the less Montgomerie, Donoghue saw, was evidently the sort of man who has to shave twice a day. Montgomerie smiled through the fatigue, smiled through the stubble. He did indeed look pleased with himself.
‘Good weekend, sir?’ he asked, sitting as invited. He was a Glasgow man whose gentrified accent betrayed his Bearsden childhood and had been further softened by three terms in the Department of Law at Edinburgh University.
‘Pleasant enough, thank you.’ Donoghue had an equally soft accent, although he was from the Saracen, the streets of cobbles and high kerbstones, canyons of tenements, pitched battles in the street on a Saturday night. He had fought up the way and had eventually graduated with honours from Glasgow University and, at forty-one years, also spoke with a soft Glasgow accent. ‘Didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, but as often as not that seems to be the way of it.’ He drew gently on his pipe. The preliminaries over, he looked squarely at Montgomerie and then raised an eyebrow.
‘Well, sir.’ Montgomerie shuffled in the chair and laid the files on his lap. He was well used to Donoghue’s method of calling the meeting to order and requesting information. ‘Routine weekend, sir.’ Montgomerie opened the first file. ‘Item one is car thefts. We had a team that stole a car from the car park of Yorkhill Hospital and used it to visit every hospital car park in the West End, and park and ride car parks—well, you name it, we followed their spoor all across the West End as reports came in of car radios and stereos stolen and eventually we found the stolen car abandoned in a side street in the Broomielaw. They got away with hundreds if not thousands of pounds’ worth of goodies.’
‘How far are we on with that?’
‘Not very far, sir. The stolen
vehicle is with Forensic right now and they are going over it with a fine-tooth comb, as they say; the first impression is that the thieves wore gloves.’
‘Donoghue took his pipe from his mouth. ‘So that will have to be allocated.’
‘It would seem so, sir.’ Montgomerie laid the file on the edge of Donoghue’s desk.
‘We had the usual gamut of Code 7s, a few people got their windows turned, clean, neat jobs, straight in and out, lifted a few items but didn’t vandalize the houses.’
‘Some compensation for the home owner!’
‘And by means of compensation for us,’ said Montgomerie, ‘we pulled a team on suspicion, four boys sitting in a car in a residential area. Took them home and their houses were full of stolen property. We wrapped up twenty reported break-ins with those arrests.’
‘Good, very good.’
‘They’ve been released on bail.’
‘Very well.’ Donoghue wondered when Montgomerie was going to come to the case which was making him look so pleased.
‘We also had the usual fights when the dancing chucked them out; the cells are full of neds with some heads and no recollection of how they got to be banged up for the weekend.’
‘They rarely have.’ Donoghue held the bowl of his pipe in the cupped palms of his hands. ‘I think that ninety per cent of crime must be alcohol-related.’
‘I’d be inclined to agree, sir,’ said Montgomerie, working through the files. ‘We had a stabbing in the city centre, not fatal, the assailant fled. And—’ he came to the last file— ‘we had one Code 41.’
‘Only one murder.’ Donoghue smiled. ‘It has been a quiet weekend.’
‘Quiet by comparison, sir. This one is wrapped up already, signed, sealed and delivered. Victim identified and a man has been charged.’
‘Really!’ Donoghue nodded, impressed. ‘All on your own, Montgomerie?’
‘No, I had no part in it, sir.’ Montgomerie handed the case file to Donoghue. ‘It’s all down to Sergeant Sussock and Richard King.’
‘Who made the arrest?’
‘Richard King.’
‘And he’s been charged?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So he’ll be going up before the Sheriff this morning and he’ll be remanded, pending trial.’
That’s the pattern, sir.’ . ‘Well, it’s policy in Scotland not to grant bail to persons charged with murder, as you well know. I wondered why you were looking pleased, Montgomerie.’
‘Didn’t know it showed, sir, but I am pleased for Sergeant Sussock and Richard.’
‘Generous and unselfish of you.’
‘Well, I like the Division to keep its end up.’
‘As do we all. Look, I know that you want to get away, but could you give me a summary of the circumstances before I look over the file for myself?’
‘Well…’ Montgomerie became uncomfortable.
‘I’ve told you before, Montgomerie—I’ve told you that if you wanted to punch a time card, then you shouldn’t have entered a profession.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘So summarize it for me, please!’
‘Well, sir, body found by a beat cop, yesterday morning in the city centre—’
‘The city centre?’
‘An alley behind Sauchiehall Street, Sauchiehall Lane at West Nile Street.’
‘I see.’
‘Subsequently identified as one Eddie Wroe, a druggie, lives in a squat with a few similar personages.’
‘Where at?’
‘Belmont Street, Kelvinbridge. Knife found near the body. Wroe died of stab wounds—the knife has been identified as the likely murder weapon.’
‘You mean it fits the wounds?’
‘Yes, sir, Dr Reynolds was able to test the knife late yesterday, and the blood group of the blood on the knife is the same as the victim’s blood group. The knife had fingerprints on the handle which were identified as belonging to one Shane Dodemaide—’
‘So we know him.’
‘Yes, theft, violence—and he lived at the same address as Eddie Wroe. Richard King picked him up last night. He denied everything, as one would expect, but he was charged anyway.’
‘I see.’ Donoghue pulled on his pipe. ‘Clear-cut, as you say.’
‘It seems to me to be so, sir. Open and shut, really. Will that be all, sir?’
‘Were you able to identify a motive at all?’
‘I don’t believe so, sir. The other thing you should know is that the Drug Squad is interested in the building, or rather the occupants of same; we didn’t know that last night, so Richard King told me at the shift changeover. It rattled their cage a bit that we went in without notifying them, but we had no reason to suspect that we’d be treading on any toes. In the event, we did no damage and the Drug Squad is still talking to us. They are just keeping an eye on the premises.’
‘Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind.’
‘Will that be all, sir?’
‘Yes. Thank you, Montgomerie.’
The woman knelt beside the girl who sat on the bed, her knees pulled up to her chest. Her eyes were wide, her mouth set firm in a teeth-clenching grimace, her hands clutching her stomach. The woman reached out and rested a hand comfortingly on the girl’s feet. She said, ‘It won’t be long now. Father knows best. He knows what he’s doing.’
Donoghue read the report of the arrest and charging of Shane Dodemaide. He then appraised himself of all other incidents reported to the P Division CID over the weekend and reports of all other CID investigations and arrests. Then, for a second time, he read the file on the murder of Eddie Wroe and the subsequent arrest of Shane Dodemaide. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it when he first read it and when he read it for the second time, he liked it even less. Donoghue slowly and carefully refilled his pipe and played the flame of the lighter over the bowl, adding more smoke to the layers of smoke which were already beginning to fill his office. He rose from his desk and switched on the electric fan which stood on top of the grey Scottish Office issue filing cabinet. He resumed his seat. He couldn’t put his finger on why he didn’t like the report, and he had to concede that it was all there—a relationship of sorts between victim and accused which he felt was very, very relevant because in over twenty years of police service Donoghue had only once dealt with a random stabbing.
A boy, a teenager, was waiting at a bus stop and another boy of about the same age was walking along the road with his mates; as he drew level with the bus stop, he drew a knife and stabbed the boy who was waiting for a bus. Just like that. Didn’t know the young man from Adam; no preamble, no cross words, not even any eye contact; nothing. Stab. You’re dead. He didn’t intend to kill him, so he said, just rip him a bit. Just. None the less, he went down for life and, to Donoghue’s mind, deservedly so. He remembered the young man, the murderer, being exceptionally self-important, not a thought about the boy he had wantonly murdered, not a thought for the family he had devastated, not even a thought for the effect on his own family. He just wanted to know how long he would have to wait before he got a cell of his own.
On this occasion Eddie Wroe had been stabbed repeatedly, so it probably wasn’t random, and he and Shane Dodemaide knew each other and the motivation for the crime ought to be able to be located within their relationship. Dodemaide had stabbed Eddie Wroe in a garage or similar premises, had dumped the corpse in the city and had gone home, only to be wakened by the law a few hours later and buckled for murder. And why not? The murder weapon was found almost next to the body with Shane Dodemaide’s fingerprints on it.
Too neat. Too neat by half Donoghue reclined in his chair. No, he thought, no, it isn’t too neat at all; it’s clumsy; glaringly, obviously flawed. A man who kills another in one place and removes the body to a place where it is intended to be found would dispose of the murder weapon. If then, Donoghue reasoned, the weapon was found close to the body, it was only found because it was meant to be found. And, as a consequence, Shane Dodemaide’s finger
prints were also meant to be found.
So Dodemaide had been set up. By whom?
‘Answer that one, Fabian,’ said Donoghue, as he stood and reached for his hat and coat. ‘Answer that and you’ve got your man.’
He walked into the town for lunch.
Montgomerie drained his glass. He was sitting alone in the revamped Rock on Highburgh Road. A group of business men sat in the corner, another man sat alone in the middle of the room, reading an early edition of the Evening Times, In another corner two women sat in front of tall glasses and talked to each other, and both, it seemed to Montgomerie, seemed to be talking at the same time. The lunchtime rush had died down, just the stragglers remained. Outside it was overcast and grey, already heralding the evening.
He had left P Division police station, finally clearing the building at 09.30 hours after being obliged to indulge what he had always felt to be the Detective-Inspector’s favourite game of kicking it around a bit’. He’d driven home to his flat just off Highburgh Road, three up and overlooking the swing park, washed, changed and had walked down to Byres Road to the supermarket at the top of the road and bought a plastic bag full of food. On the way back to his flat he’d called in at the Rock, just one to help him sleep, he had told himself A glass of Guinness.
It went down very well. Very well indeed. In fact, it didn’t touch the sides of his throat.
So he had another.
He got into conversation with a merchant seaman and they began to buy each other drinks. The waitress came up with a smile and a cloth and cleared their table of empty glasses and wiped the ashtray clean. Then the merchant seaman said he had to go, by which time Montgomerie could not remember how much he had had to drink. The clean table and the clean ashtray deluded him into thinking that it probably hadn’t been that much. Not really much at all.
So he bought another pint of Guinness and it slipped down like silk.
It’s always the way of it, he thought, always; he could go for days without a drink and not crave one, but if he took one and he got the taste, then he went on until he was legless. He sat and cradled the glass in his lap and he wondered if he maybe had a wee problem.
And Did Murder Him Page 6