Funeral Note bs-22

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Why, sir?’ he chuckled. ‘To go and meet Alice, of course.’

  He was trying to wind me up, as he had Mario. ‘Sorry, Inspector. Why did you put on your overcoat? Do you know what I was doing on Wednesday evening, around the time you left the station? I was sat out on my balcony, looking down at the Water of Leith, with a beer in my hand. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and I was killing midges by the dozen. It was a warm, muggy evening, and you’re telling us that you put your uniform coat on to go out and meet a family member? Enlighten us, please. Why would you do something so strange?’

  He shrugged, and smirked at me. ‘I didn’t want to be seen in uniform.’

  ‘Meeting your niece, and her a cop as well?’

  ‘Yes, sir. It might seem strange but that’s what I did; you know it, you’ve probably seen the CCTV.’

  ‘Sure, it’s the “Why” I’m still struggling with. Let’s go back to DC Cowan’s call. Did she say why she wanted to meet you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you ask her why?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why should I have?’

  ‘Because you were on duty,’ I suggested. ‘In charge of the station. Come on, man; your niece calls and you walk off the job just like that?’

  He spread his hands. ‘Point taken, sir. I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Not accepted,’ I snapped. He was beginning to rile me too. ‘However, that’s probably a matter for a different inquiry. So, you put on your overcoat and stepped out into a warm steamy evening, to meet Alice. Who got there first?’

  For the first time, Varley hesitated for a second before replying. ‘I think I did,’ he offered.

  ‘You think?’ I repeated. ‘Come on, man; this was less than forty-eight hours ago.’ I leaned forward, hustling him.

  ‘Okay, okay, I was first, definitely.’

  ‘How did she arrive? Was she on foot? Did she get off a bus?’

  ‘Taxi. She got out of a taxi.’

  ‘How was she dressed?’ I fired the question at him.

  ‘In civvies.’

  ‘Don’t be evasive, Mr Varley. What was she wearing?’

  ‘Jeans and a blouse,’ he retorted.

  ‘So, she hadn’t got dressed up to meet you. Did she seem in a rush?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose she did.’

  ‘Make-up, was she wearing make-up?’

  He shrugged. ‘You can’t always be sure with Alice.’

  ‘Come on, Inspector, you must know. We’ve just seen her. She’s got this big bleb on her nose just here.’ I touched mine, on the right side. ‘Was it covered up or not?’

  ‘No,’ he answered. ‘No it wasn’t.’

  Beside me, McGuire didn’t move a muscle. ‘Good,’ I said. ‘We’re making progress. So there you are on the street, the pair of you, she with a bleb on her nose, you sweating like a pig in your uniform coat. That’s the scene, is it?’

  He nodded. ‘That’s the scene.’

  ‘Who began the discussion?’

  He frowned. ‘I did, as I recall. I said, “What’s the panic, Alice?” or something like that.’

  ‘And she said?’

  ‘Her reply was “Freddy’s in trouble”. Naturally I asked her “Freddy who?” and she replied that she meant Freddy Welsh, Ella’s cousin.’

  ‘And your good friend.’

  He stared at me. ‘I wouldn’t say that, Mr Martin. He’s more a friend of Alice.’

  I let my eyebrows rise. ‘Is he? Why do you say that? He’s a cousin of your wife and your relationship with Alice is on your side of the family, not by marriage. So why should he be more friendly with her than with you?’

  Varley winced, as if it was paining him to go on. ‘This is where I get into really deep water,’ he murmured. ‘Alice and Freddy, they’ve. .’ He let his voice tail off.

  ‘They’ve a what? Spell it out, man.’

  ‘A relationship, sir.’

  ‘Do you mean a sexual relationship?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘How long has it been going on?’

  ‘For six years that I know of.’

  I leaned closer, pressing him. ‘How do you know about it?’

  ‘I saw them, at a wedding,’ he replied. ‘They’d been dancing, and I saw them go outside. I followed them. They got into the back of Freddy’s car and he gave her one.’

  I frowned. ‘That’s pretty specific; you’re sure they had sex?’

  ‘Her legs were practically round his neck, and his arse was going like a fiddler’s elbow; I was close enough to see. What would you call it?’

  I looked at him, letting my face register disgust. ‘You spied on them?’ I gasped, contemptuously.

  ‘She’s my niece,’ he blustered. ‘I was worried about her.’

  ‘Wow!’ I exclaimed. ‘Six years ago, Alice was well into her twenties, Inspector. Her sex life was entirely her own business. Did you get a kick out of it? Did you masturbate?’

  He stiffened. ‘Fuck off!’ he yelled.

  ‘So what did you do?’ Mario asked him, rejoining the interview. ‘Did you give them marks out of ten, or did you express your concern to Alice later?’

  ‘No. I did speak to Freddy, though. I told him he was out of order.’

  ‘How did he take that?’

  ‘He said much the same as Mr Martin, that she was a big girl. I never mentioned it again.’

  I waited for a little before I picked up the questioning again. ‘Let’s go back to your street corner meeting and to Alice telling you that Freddy Welsh was in trouble. Elaborate.’

  ‘She said that her boyfriend, Montell, had mentioned his name in connection with a job he’d been pulled into, close observation in a pub up in Slateford. And then,’ another pause, ‘and then she asked me if I’d call him and warn him.’

  ‘Which you did.’

  ‘No!’ We’d arrived at the point to which Mario and I had known we were heading. We’d even warned Alice about it, but neither of us had really believed in the possibility. ‘No, I did not,’ he declared, solemnly. ‘I refused point blank. I reminded her that she was a police officer and told her to behave responsibly. Then I left and went back to the station. I was pretty angry with her, as you can imagine.’

  ‘No, Jock,’ McGuire said, shaking his head. ‘I can’t imagine that at all. What I can imagine is you thanking her, when she phoned you to tip you off that a relation of your wife was in the spotlight. Then I can picture you digging out the phone book to find the Lafayette’s number, and going out to phone it from the call box up the road.’

  ‘No, sir,’ he replied, quietly, looking at the table.

  ‘Your prints are on the handset, man,’ he pointed out.

  ‘I’ve used it,’ Varley conceded. ‘I admit that. I don’t like calling in bets from the office, so when I have a flutter I use the phone box to ring my bookie.’

  ‘The bar person,’ he fired back, ‘who took the call in Lafayette’s, told DC Haddock that it was a male voice.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ the inspector challenged. ‘You know Alice, DCS McGuire, so you must realise that she has a deep voice. I’ve heard her sing; contralto, she is. If you heard her for the first time, on a phone line in a crowded pub, could you be sure it was a female calling?’

  Mario hesitated, for only a second, but it was enough. ‘See? You wouldn’t,’ he exclaimed.

  ‘I suppose you realise,’ I murmured, ‘that DC Cowan’s, that Alice’s, story is the complete opposite of yours.’

  He nodded, his mouth tight. ‘I suppose I do, but this is my story, and I’m sticking to it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you want a lawyer here?’ I challenged him. ‘Was it because you didn’t want to trot out that pack of lies in his presence?’

  ‘I don’t need a brief. I’ve given you my account of what happened, and if it’s at variance with Alice’s, then I’m sorry for her, but it’s her problem.’

  McGuire smiled, and looked him in the eye
. ‘No, Jock,’ he said ‘it’s still yours. You don’t know your niece as well as you think, if you imagine she’d go anywhere with a big bleb on her face. She’d sooner saw her fucking head off. There never was such a spot. If you’d come clean and told the truth, it might have gone better for you. As it is, I’m going to charge you with attempting to pervert the course of justice.’

  Varley’s eyes hardened. ‘The Crown Office will laugh at you,’ he hissed. ‘You haven’t a chance of making it stick.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I’m going to try. Stand up.’ He rose to his feet. ‘John Varley. .’

  When it was done, we released him on police bail, with orders to remain at home until the following Monday morning, when he was to report to the Sheriff Court for an initial hearing. Before he left we gave him one of the interview disks, signed by both of us.

  When he had gone, we returned to the interview room. ‘Bastard,’ Mario growled, as he closed the door. ‘Can you imagine that? Trying to stitch his own niece up. What a ruthless. .’

  ‘Maybe, but he’s right, it is his story versus hers,’ I pointed out.

  ‘Aye, but he fell for the bleb trick, didn’t he? Well done, by the way; you rushed him into that.’

  ‘Sure, he fell for it,’ I conceded, ‘but a good defence counsel will blow that away in a trial. It’s not enough to send a man to jail, least of all a cop with twenty-five years’ more or less exemplary service. And you can bet that Alice, in the witness box, will be taken all the way back to that car park, with her legs in the air, screwing a married man. She’ll be shredded. No, big fella, all you’ve got is breathing space, and maybe not much of that, unless you can come up with something more to show the fiscal, something that ties Varley and Welsh together.’

  ‘In that case,’ he said, gloomily, ‘we’re in the hands of Mackenzie and the Strathclyde guy, Payne. That’s their job. A recovered alcoholic and the boss’s sister-in-law’s husband.’ He sighed. ‘I hope they’re up to it, otherwise, you’re right; Jock bloody Varley might just walk.’

  Detective Inspector Becky Stallings

  ‘What the devil am I doing here?’

  That’s what I ask myself sometimes, when I think of the world I left. Of course, Edinburgh has its attractions. It’s a much gentler city than London, and the pace of life is so much easier. From the job point of view there’s less serious crime, the body count is lower, and I never feel that I’m taking my life in my hands when I go to work of a morning.

  But it’s about one-fifteenth the size of the capital (you can shove the nationalist nonsense: I’m British, we have one capital city and that’s London), and the force I left to move north is eighteen times larger than the one I joined, with promotion prospects commensurately better for a smart cop, and even better for a smart female cop — both of which boxes I tick — in this politically correct century. Plus, I liked being called ‘guv’nor’, not plain ‘boss’ which is all I get here, and that’s on a good day.

  So what the devil am I doing here? Well, it’s Ray, innit? This flash Detective Sergeant Wilding pitches up in London in hot pursuit of some bad guys, I’m assigned to him and his mate, DI Steele, and the next thing I know he and I are staring at my bedroom ceiling and I’m in love with the guy. It might have stayed unrequited from then on if I hadn’t found myself loaned to his big boss for the duration of the investigation and impressed him enough to be offered a permanent transfer, but that’s how it played out.

  The love thing hasn’t worn off, no, that’s gone from strength to strength, and there’s still enough about Edinburgh’s social life to interest me, but from time to time I miss the thrill and the pace of the job that I left. Not the mindless street violence side, oh no, that’s just sordid, but the pursuit of the unusual, of villains with a bit of class and imagination about them. Because, to be honest, your average Edinburgh criminal mastermind wouldn’t go halfway to meeting the Mensa IQ requirement. (That said, the only Mensa member I’ve ever known wound up shooting himself, so maybe a great big brain can be a curse as well as a blessing.)

  Ray can read my occasional frustration, and bless him, the love’s even offered to put in for a transfer to London himself if I want to go back. We could probably have worked it too, on the coat-tails of Neil McIlhenney’s move down south, but Ray’s only just made DI and as a new boy down there he’d probably have been given the jobs that nobody wants, like cleaning up the mess that youth gangs leave, and investigating drive-by shootings. So we’re staying put, he and I, although we have discussed the possibility of me applying for a spot with the Serious Crimes Agency.

  All that said, the job isn’t always boring; the oddest things can happen, and they don’t come any odder than a call-out to a grave site in the grounds of a crematorium. Funny, I take most things in my stride, but that one threw me right off kilter, especially when I saw the body, as it had been left. It gave me the creepiest feeling.

  Every death is sad, and every homicide is positively tragic, but there was something about that one that I found unnerving. It even brought a couple of tears to my eyes, although I hid them from the rest of the team. And then the chief constable turned up, and said what I’d been thinking, that the burial was a thing of honour and respect, not violence and hate.

  I couldn’t work out what had happened to the dead man, though. Like the rest of us, I had to wait for the pathologist to tell us. That pathologist; she’s a cool one. I had no idea about her back story with the chief until Jack McGurk filled me in, and I gather that Sauce hadn’t either. Not that I’d have dropped any clangers. She isn’t the sort of woman that you can dig in the ribs and whisper, ‘Hey, see the chief? I fancy him a bit.’

  Not that I do; I’ve always been good at reading men who are dangerous. I don’t mean potential wife-beaters or anything like that. No, I’m talking about men who radiate sexual attraction, without being aware of it. In my experience guys like that are emotional train crashes waiting to happen, and I’ve always avoided getting on board with any of them.

  That’s my take on Bob Skinner, and the fact that he’s on his third marriage, not counting what I’m told was a serious thing with a woman DI about fifteen years ago, is proof enough for me that I’m right. As for Dr Sarah Grace, she’s his female equivalent; aloof and a bit of an ice maiden when she’s at work, but she’s as sexy as hell, and I’ll bet she’s hardly ever been without a man somewhere around.

  I was wondering, idly, how Sauce was getting on with her when he walked into the CID suite. Detective Constable Harold Haddock makes me laugh, but always with him, never at him, for all that he can look a bit like Tintin with muscles.

  There are those who do make that mistake, usually time-serving officers who can’t see behind his gawky appearance and think he’s gullible. I’ve noticed them size him up, and I’ve heard them take the piss. He never reacts, never gets riled, never rises to the bait, but I’m quite sure that he’s filing everything away, and that those comedians might live to regret their mistakes.

  Jack McGurk, his sergeant, was Sauce’s mentor when he came into CID, but those days are over; the long fellow has nothing left to teach him. Now they’re equals in rank, since Sauce’s move down to Leith to replace my Ray in the DS slot there. But that was still in the wind on the day he attended the autopsy of Mortonhall Man, as we were calling him then.

  He was frowning as he came through the door, as if his mind was still in the mortuary. ‘Tough day at the office?’ I asked.

  He stared at me, surprised. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘The autopsy,’ I said. ‘Gruesome, was it? Don’t worry about it, they always turn my stomach too.’

  He smiled. ‘My Uncle Telfer, that’s my mother’s brother, was the manager of an abattoir before he retired,’ he replied. ‘He took me to work with him one day, when I was fourteen. I didn’t say so to Dr Grace, in case the comparison offended her, but a post-mortem’s nothing earth-shaking compared to that.’

  ‘Jesus, Sauce,’ Jack exclaimed, ‘are you saying that animals
mean more to you than people?’

  ‘Of course not, ya daft. .’ He shook his head. ‘The big difference is that in an autopsy, you don’t see the thing that’s going to be carved up walking in through the doorway. Try watching what happens to it and see how you react.’

  I shuddered. ‘Are you trying to put me off black pudding for life?’

  He laughed. ‘Boss, if you saw that being made. .’

  ‘Enough,’ I declared. The boys weren’t to know it, but I’d been sick that morning. . and I was nearly four weeks late. ‘Come on; tell us what we want to hear. What are we dealing with?’

  ‘Nothing, boss; this is officially not a suspicious death. The man died from natural causes, namely a spontaneously ruptured artery in the brain. There were no contributory factors, no signs of trauma and he was in perfect health otherwise. A man in the second half of his twenties in an athlete’s body with just one fatal weakness, Dr Grace said.’

  ‘Did she tell you what his name was?’ McGurk grunted.

  ‘Sorry, no. She’s a remarkable woman, but she’s not that good. Tracing him is still down to us.’

  ‘Did she tell you anything at all about him, other than that he’s male?’

  ‘His blood type was O positive,’ Sauce replied, ‘the most common there is. His last meal looked as if it had fish in it and some other stuff, washed down with mineral water, and he ate it no more than a couple of hours before he died. Analysis will tell us exactly what he had. His prints are being emailed to my address, for checking with NCIS, and the lab’s going to give us his DNA profile, to be run through the national database. That’s as much as we have to work on, but don’t get too excited about that.’

  ‘Why not?’ I asked, catching up with him. My mind had paused to reflect on ‘remarkable woman’.

  ‘Because Dr Grace suspects he isn’t British.’

  ‘Remarkable indeed,’ I muttered, dryly. ‘How does she work that out?’

  If he caught my sarcasm, his face didn’t betray it. ‘His teeth are too good. She told me that she’s never done an examination in this country, or in America, where the subject’s been dentally perfect. This man was; she reckons he had a sugar-free diet because there’s no sign of decay, and that he never drank tea or coffee because there’s no staining.’