by Caro Ramsay
‘Do you want a fresh cup of coffee?’
Wyngate went out the room, and saw, to his surprise, that the ACC was behind the glass.
‘Once you get his statement, let him go,’ said Mitchum.
‘Let him go?’ Wyngate was incredulous.
‘He is guilty of many things but not murder. And he has just lost his wife.’
‘But Sally said on the tape that she only brokers deals. Then we have a dead girl. And an abducted—’
‘I know what she said, but then she flung herself off a roof and innocent people tend not to do that,’ said Mitchum, reinforcing his thoughts with a tone of authority.
‘Is that the right thing to do, sir?’ Wyngate said, then remembered who he was talking to. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘We need to let him go, we need to investigate further. Process him then release him. He has other things to attend to. And so do we. I know you are rudderless at the moment with Anderson in intensive care and Costello at the hospital, so you can take it from me, in my capacity as the most senior police officer. Now get on with making the coffee and get one for me while you are at it.’
Noakes had been going through the gym, room by room. They had found Miss Bluecoat and she had been removed from the premises in the middle of the night and he was finishing that corridor, opening doors, looking in cupboards, finding, he suspected, the instruments of an abortionist. He was at a walk-in linen cupboard, marked ‘clean (not sterile)’ and he rummaged around in the shelves of fluffy blue towels and folded dressing gowns. At the bottom, at the back, was the folded body of a woman. He called for assistance as he placed a finger on her neck, feeling a faint pulse. She was curled into the corner, her head down as if she had been sheltering or hiding from her attacker. Her knees were drawn up, her hair down and lying over her face. Only a sliver of her cheek was visible, it was deep purple and swollen. He could see a ligature round her neck, narrow, brown, deep into the skin of her neck, leaving it white and puckered. There were slight traces of blood on the hands that were pulled up in front of her face. When had she realized it was all going wrong? Had she started praying?
He knelt down, getting closer, hearing a conversation in the gym, help was coming. He tried to see behind her fingernails, had she scratched her assailant. He shone his torch on the chain round her neck, slight and silver with a butterfly clasp at the front, around which was attached some dark hair. It didn’t look like the woman’s straight dark hair, this was more like fluffy wool.
Black fluffy wool. He’d make sure that the preservation of evidence was at the forefront of the mind of any medical assistance.
It was a question more often asked in jest than in legal history: did she fall or was she pushed? And there were many factors to be considered before any definitive answer could be reached. The height, weight and momentum of the victim as they went over the top and the horizontal distance they landed from the drop point.
Professor O’Hare knew a whole team of people with very accurate computer algorithms who worked that kind of thing out, but so far all he knew was here in front of him in the form of a forty-three-year-old female, white, slim but well-nourished with good muscle tone. There was evidence of some surgery on her right knee which was not recent and old scarring to her right shoulder. He knew from palpating the rib cage and the skull that there was a lot of internal damage, her ribs compressed easily and with a familiar scrunch that showed the bony cage was no longer intact. A large part of her parietal bone had moved and disrupted the brain tissue underneath which was commonly found when impacting concrete at speed. She had probably died when she hit the tarmac. There had been no time for her to bleed out, although the blood in her spleen and her liver at the time of impact had flooded into her abdominal cavity, all of which was fairly typical. He didn’t need to wait for the toxicology results, he had eyewitness evidence that Sally had consumed a few glasses of wine and brandy but that she was not drunk. With her rather low body weight it would have been enough to upset her balance. Experience told him that it was odds on that she was pushed, experience and the deep red abrasion she had on the side of her pelvis. He had looked at the photographs of the rooftop terrace. Sally was fit so she would have gained speed and gathered momentum but as she came to the rail she would have put her hands out to stop her. It was one of those infallible human instincts and even if that hadn’t stopped her, the rail would have hit the front of her pelvis and in someone so slim that would have been metal on bone, but there was no evidence of that. The evidence was at the side like someone who had stopped and half-turned to face their pursuer, maybe to fight back or plead for their life. It was not for him to speculate. The certainty was that the rail had caught her on the hip under her centre of gravity and one small nudge to the upper body would have sent her over. He knew before any of Mathilda’s staff ran their computer program that she would have landed relatively close to the side of the building. And that meant she was murdered. Then he remembered he wasn’t allowed to have a professional opinion nowadays, it had to be backed up by a boffin staring at a screen, so he got on with his job, selecting his scalpel, ensuring the recording device was picking up his dictation, and he started with the Y incision.
Braithwaite nodded, a silent thank you for the coffee. ‘I heard what she said on the recording and she is not being entirely truthful. And yes, I have lied all the way through this. You need to understand that I love … loved Sally. I love the ground that she walks on and, well, she is, was, vulnerable, more vulnerable than you might think. She needed money, she needed money because of me.’
‘Why?’
‘I like to gamble but I am not very good at it. You know that the billionaire Joe Aspinall had a selection of busts made from marble. He called them The Great Gamblers. That kind of gambling is admirable, fearless and it’s in my nature. I will gamble on anything, even my career. I like to win, I lose with a degree of philosophy.’
‘And Sally?’
‘Sally didn’t lose the baby that resulted from the rape. She sold it, that part of what she said is absolutely true.’
Mulholland leaned forward in his chair. ‘Sold it?’
‘It wasn’t like that. A friend, a good friend had been trying for a baby for years. Nothing happened. They tried to adopt and that didn’t work. They were offered a child that was older, but she wanted a child to be seen to be her own, so the two women came to some arrangement, like a surrogate. Sally, three months pregnant, the other woman announced she was pregnant, and the two pregnancies – the real one and the false one – went along hand in hand until the day came and the baby was born. Abby went home with a new baby girl and Sally got money to go back to uni and continue her studies. And I think she wanted to get back to Colin. There was always a wee spark of something there, you see. Even back in our uni days I used my medical knowledge to edge him out; it was me who helped her get fit, me who strapped her knee. And later she couldn’t get together with Colin because I knew. I knew what she had done, and that brought us close, and we have remained so ever since. I was bound to her because of my gambling and I needed her money, and she was bound to me because of her big dark secret. Then we heard Colin had joined the police, we knew he was bright, and we kept our distance.’
‘But continued the baby selling.’
‘Brokering, I tend to call it. And I trained as an obstetrician. It wasn’t difficult.’
‘And she gets the women through the gym, the Pilates, the yoga class?’
‘Yes, all fair, all above board. And she is the one who makes that initial conversation. It’s something women talk about. God, at one point, a woman came to the Pilates class believing that it was the class who had got her friend pregnant.’
‘It’s not legal.’
Braithwaite waved the objection aside. ‘It’s a floating loophole. That’s all it is, nobody gets hurt, and everybody gets looked after.’
‘I think Orla Sheridan might disagree with that.’
‘Sally became odd. I don’t know wh
ere she was that night we got drunk at my house. You need to find out what happened to Orla.’
‘We are getting to the bottom of it,’ assured Mulholland, rubbing his leg.
‘She was back in the Blue Neptune building on Wednesday. And I think you should be looking for a woman called Valerie Abernethy. She was there last night, I let her into the building. Sally might have harmed her, but if you could find her and make sure that she’s OK. Please.’
‘Do you know Valerie socially?’
‘Vaguely. She hinted that she wanted a child but would be considered unsuitable for adoption, her age was against her. I think it was one of those things that can surface in a women’s psyche. She was supposed to be investigating why, or how, a woman called Diane Speirs got pregnant. And that led her right to me. By sheer bad luck, Valerie knew Diane and knew that Diane had suffered bilateral ovarian cancer. Then it turned out Val wanted a child. I thought she was genuine but Sally thought she was investigating us. And I believe she was, at first—’ he took a sip of coffee – ‘but it resonated with her. Val saw the good in what we were doing and was going to let us be, as long as we gave her a baby.’
‘And what happened to Valerie?’
‘I don’t know. What did happen to Valerie?’
That was almost too glib. Braithwaite went on. ‘Sally was very suspicious of her, it all started going wrong in her head. So if something has happened to Valerie then …’ He shrugged and whispered, ‘I think Sally killed Orla. I don’t know when or how but Orla wanted more money. There was another girl, Sonja. They had found out about each other and seemed to think they had hit on a gravy train if they gently blackmailed us, threatening us. No way Sally was going to have that.’
‘Sholto? What happened to Sholto?’
‘I have no idea, honestly, I have no idea.’
‘Are you telling us that Sally killed these women, not you?’
‘Yes. On the night Orla was murdered, Colin Anderson was out at my house, getting blind drunk on the sofa.’ He rubbed his face, as if trying to erase the tiredness. ‘I had difficulty walking never mind driving. Sally took a very long time to come home from work that night. And Colin Anderson knows that, so I hope to god he pulls through. He’s my alibi.’
THIRTEEN
Saturday 14th October
Costello had to replay the short message on her phone before she realized who it was. Her heart sank, but what could she have done about it anyway, in the midst of all that had gone on. She couldn’t be everywhere at once. She read the sign on the hospital wall telling her, in many languages, to turn her phone off and she called Dali on her home number, the phone being answered by a much younger voice that echoed all over a house, ‘Mum it’s for you’, and then the phone was clattered down. Dali had come to the phone stressed and breathless.
‘Hi, it’s Costello here. I can’t say much but whatever was going on at the Blue Neptune is over. For good.’
‘That’s good.’
‘Well, we will see. But I am phoning about Malcolm, the boy I told you about.’
‘The boy behind the bins? Yes?’ The voice was immediately more alert.
‘Can you get a call made out there, a welfare check to see how he’s doing. He called me and left a message while I was …’ She paused. ‘Tactically deployed but I have been warned off going near the house by the powers that be. And there is a connection between Malcolm’s mother and the Blue Neptune so my hands are tied.’
‘I’ll get somebody to pop out. What did he say on the phone?’
‘He just said, “you said I was to call you”. Then he waited a bit and said goodbye, that was all. He didn’t sound distressed, more detached than anything.’
‘Beyond fear? I’ll deal with it. I’ll try to action something but it’s a Saturday.’
The phone went down, leaving Costello to send a text before she walked through the double doors of the hospital.
It was strange to think, those little tubes keeping somebody alive. Costello wouldn’t have believed it, but they had agreed that it was the high pressure of the water going up Anderson’s nostrils, racing down into his trachea and into his lungs, bursting delicate vessels and making them bleed. It accelerated the damage of oxygen deprivation. It took people a long time to drown. Not so long when the water was being fired into them.
So now there was a machine that hissed and puffed, Anderson’s chest rose and fell. There were another few bits and bobs of machines that clicked and whirred. Small pads fixed bits of wire onto his skin.
Costello had told them back at the station, both Govan and West End, ‘All we can do is wait. He knows we are here and we know that he is getting all the support he needs.’
Brenda was with Claire and Peter up at the terraced house. David was with them. They were waiting. From Wyngate’s brief report, the person who seemed to find it hardest to accept was Andrew Braithwaite. He was still numb from the shock of Sally’s death. Incredulous that within a few minutes, one was dead and the other hanging onto life by the slimmest of threads. Not so difficult to accept, Costello had replied, if the survivor of the three is a cold-blooded killer.
Costello stayed at the far end of the corridor, sitting behind a vending machine, but able to see anybody going in and out of Anderson’s room. She was tired, leaning back against the cold metal of the machine, her eyes almost closed, but in reality fixed on a small mirror placed on the seat she was resting her feet on.
A cleaner was slowly arcing the mop back and forth across the floor, leaving no trail of water behind it. It certainly wasn’t dirty after the length of time he had mopped it.
It was the fifteenth time the double doors opened, a click and a hum, as the palm hit a switch and the electric motor whirred into action. The cleaner looked up and went into a coughing fit. Costello recoiled in her seat, dipping her head slightly to see what was going on at the other end of the corridor. She picked up her phone. And they waited until the door into Anderson’s room had opened and then closed over, giving them all a little glimpse of the man lying on the bed covered in a light blue sheet, in the dim light, his face covered in tubes and wires.
‘This is going to be a nightmare,’ Mathilda McQueen, the forensic scientist, looked round the small room next to the birthing suite, hands on her hips looking like a two-year-old in a dolls house. ‘How am I supposed to make sense of all this?’
She opened a fridge, full of specimens and dishes, and then looked at a freezer, locked with a colour-coded electronic lock. ‘Do you think anybody will tell me what I am looking for?’
Gordon Wyngate was sitting on a stool in the middle of the birthing room, spinning round. He seemed not to have heard her.
‘I can’t believe he did that.’
‘Did what?’
‘The ACC. He just let Braithwaite go.’
‘Well what did you expect him to do?’ She opened a few drawers and looked in. ‘Can you look round and gather all the computers? We need all the records. I know he was an unethical bastard but even unethical bastards are good at defensive note taking.’
‘Do you think if I had looked up I would have seen him on the roof, pushing her?’
‘No, Wyngate, I don’t. You need to look at the bigger issue. Two people involved in this each doing a very good job of blaming each other and that makes “beyond reasonable doubt” very difficult to prove if they ever get Braithwaite to trial. That is why the ACC told you to let him walk. For now. And I am sure you are familiar with the three greatest defences: I wasn’t there, it wasn’t me, and a big boy did it and ran away, or in this case, my other half did it and jumped off a tall building. You need time to get more evidence and that is our job, so you can either sit there and twirl round on that seat like a four-year-old or start collecting the computers and laptops. So, hop to it, now.’
Wyngate slunk off the chair and started walking towards Sally’s office. It seemed a good place to start.
The cleaner laid his mop against the wall. Costello slowly got up from
the chair and made her way quietly across the corridor to the room where Anderson lay. His visitor was sitting beside the bed. Costello clicked in her earpiece. The cleaner did the same, both listening to what was being said, picked up by the microphone on the bedside table by Anderson’s head.
She could make it out quite clearly. A deep, resonant voice was asking how the patient was doing, just popping in to say hello, how nice it had been to meet up again and how tragic it all was. The cleaner, a big DS from Stewart Street, built like a brick shithouse and the only guy they could think of who would take Braithwaite down, looked at Costello and shrugged. The doctor wasn’t incriminating himself in anyway at all.
Then his voice went quiet almost as if he was whispering into Anderson’s ear. Slowly, quietly, closer. Then one of the machines stopped going ping, as if it was malfunctioning.
A male in a nurse’s tunic came round the corner, not hurrying as much as he should be. He opened the door to Anderson’s room just as Andrew Braithwaite stood up.
Costello reached for the light switch and turned it off. The bright blue fluorescent gel on Anderson’s neck glowed brightly. As did the fingers of the tall, bearded man, easily seen in the dark.
‘So, you touched the pipe then touched his neck. What were you trying to do? Give him a reassuring hug or trying to strangle him?’ Costello asked.
Braithwaite moved quickly towards the door. Costello sidestepped to let him through. The other cops, one dressed in a nurse’s tunic and one dressed as the cleaner gave chase. The nurse would catch him, the cleaner would hold him.
‘You OK?’ Costello asked Anderson.
The ‘patient’ sat up in the bed, rubbing his neck, then looked at the gel in disgust. ‘These pillows are bloody uncomfy.’
‘You have bigger problems than that. I photographed your bare arse hanging out that hospital gown. That’s worth a few bob at the Christmas party.’
They heard a squeal and a thud, a scuffle and some swearing. ‘I hope they don’t rough Braithwaite up too much, they are busy enough in A and E as it is.’