by Iain Cameron
‘Oh, what’s that then?’
He looked over at Watson but he was impassive to McGovern’s little pantomime. ‘I’ll get him,’ he said jerking a thumb at his solicitor, ‘tae put up the Warrior Gene defence.’
Henderson smiled. A graduate of Glasgow University with a degree in Sociology and Psychology, he still maintained an interest in both subjects despite the passage of twenty-odd years. However, it would shame him to admit, he often didn’t have the time to read the thick copy of Psychology Today that came thumping through his letterbox every second month.
He knew what McGovern was talking about as there had been a television programme about the Warrior Gene a few months back and at the time, it piqued his interest and so he dug out the relevant issue of the magazine to read and checked it out on the web.
The article and the television programme focused on a court case in America in which the prosecution in a murder case were convinced that the perpetrator would receive the death penalty for a murder, as there was overwhelming evidence against him. However, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after a psychologist successfully argued the killer carried the monoamine oxidase A gene, or MAO-A gene.
The controversial theory behind this gene suggested there existed a direct correlation between aggressive behaviour and the presence of the gene, providing the subject had also suffered a violent childhood. It followed that it wasn’t only the murderer’s decision to kill, but his genes were making him more inclined to do it.
Henderson wheeled around to face him. ‘You forget McGovern, I’ve met your mother and I know she lives in a nice house in Maryhill and nothing you can say would ever make me believe that you have had a bad upbringing, quite the reverse in fact. If this was ever brought up in court, it would take the jury less than two minutes to realise it was you who brought shame and humiliation on your family, and not the other way round.’
Henderson slammed the door behind him and walked back to his office in silence. His sour mood was compounded by the knowledge that it was McGovern who was battering his way into respectable people’s houses and beating them up, and there was no doubt in his mind that the injuries suffered by Frankcombe, Basham and all the rest, were the result of McGovern’s addiction to violence.
Henderson played over in his mind key passages of the interview but try as he may, he could not see how McGovern could be fooling him. He knew the type, poke them, prod them, shout at them and they would always react in the same way, he was too stupid and vain to lie. Likewise, people like him boasted about their conquests and played down their failures and no way would he nick a top of the range Bentley and not mention it, unless of course, if it wasn’t his gang that committed the crime.
He had to face it. What looked like an open and shut case, had now spilled its guts all over the carpet. If he believed it wasn’t McGovern’s crew who carried out the raid in Ditchling, then they couldn’t have killed Sir Mathew Markham. If wasn’t them, who the hell was it?
THIRTY
DI Henderson didn’t mind Mondays as much as Bob Geldof. On this one in particular, he should have been jubilant as the car thieving gang were history, Rab McGovern was now in secure custody, and DI Speers had picked up the rest of the car nicking crew, Ehuru, Cahill, and Rooney.
There could be little doubt that McGovern murdered Stephen Halliday as Jasmine David remembered waking up in the middle of the night and noticing that McGovern was no longer in the flat. Using this information, they were able to track McGovern’s movements on CCTV as he walked through Clapham to Henshaw Gardens to Halliday’s flat, and bloodstains discovered on the policeman’s baton, which they found in his flat, had now been analysed and found to belong to the victim. As promised, McGovern would be meeting Jasmine again but he suspected she was not going to be the ‘Get Out Of Jail’ card he was expecting.
The reason for his glum disposition was despite the gang admitting their involvement in the car nicking enterprise, they could hardly do otherwise in the face of McGovern’s confession, they all denied killing Sir Mathew. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as no one wanted a murder charge hanging over their heads, but Cahill's ‘nicking’ list proved the gang had never been asked to steal a Bentley around the time of Sir Mathew's death, and as McGovern told them during the interview, the gang had never been to Ditchling.
Chief Inspector Harris was undeterred by the gang’s denials and felt sure further interviews would establish their guilt, and he left Henderson to do the necessary while he prepared for a press conference to pass on the good news to the media. It was perhaps not a quirk of timing that he found a new ‘cold case’ on his desk this morning, his boss’s way of wiping his hands of the car thefts and Markham’s murder, as he believed those responsible were now in custody and it was time to move on.
The next call he made was to his brother Archie. He decided on Friday that rather than stay on in Brighton for the weekend, as planned, he would go up to Glasgow and see his kids and have it out with his wife. He packed his kit bag and was dropped off at Brighton Station, the corporal’s ears tingling with big brotherly advice.
They were both aware of several well-publicised cases of soldiers returning from duty, armed with a stolen AK47 or commando knife, and pulling it out during acrimonious exchanges, thus guaranteeing the discussion would end in tragic circumstances. Archie reassured him he was unarmed and said he had no intention of hurting her. Nevertheless, he had been counselled to take it easy and walk away if the strain was becoming too much.
‘Hello Archie, how are you? How’s Glasgow?’
‘I’m champion Angus, how are you? Did you solve your car nicking case yet?’
He went on to tell him about the arrest of McGovern and capture of the rest of the gang.
‘Well, you’ll need to do the same with the people up here as they’re all going nuts about some comment a Celtic player made to a journalist after a game against Aberdeen. You’d think football was the most important thing in their lives to hear them. Give me rugby or shinty any day of the week.’
‘I hope for your own sake, you’re not sitting in a pub or standing in George Square otherwise you might be playing jeopardy with your manhood or the shape of your face. How are Mandy and the girls?’
‘They’re great.’
‘So, there’s no strange man on the scene, then?’
‘Ach no, it was all a piece of nonsense, if you ask me. The guy she’s been seen with is the leader of the local youth club, a place where she helps out a couple of days a week. He’s a church elder, twice her age and has been happily married for thirty years.’
‘What about all this clubbing you were talking about?’
‘The only club she’s been in, is the Labour Club with her father and it’s hardly a den of iniquity, is it?’
‘You need to have a wee word with your snitch and tell him to get his facts right before he starts bending your or anybody else’s ear.’
‘Aye I will, but this time I’ll be armed and dangerous.’
‘For Christsakes Archie don’t do anything–’
‘Hold your horses old man, I’m only winding you up.’
‘Less of the ‘old man.’ I’m only a few years older than you and let me tell you, there are times when I find it hard to believe you managed to reach the age of thirty-seven.’
He put the phone down a few minutes later. He was relieved his brother hadn’t gone home to a domestic car-crash, but annoyed with his so-called ‘comrades’ for not checking the facts and spreading such damaging rumours when he must have felt so powerless to do anything about, while so far away in Afghanistan.
He dealt with the most pressing emails and phone messages and then spent a couple of hours continuing the work he started last week on companies interested in buying Markham Microprocessors, now keener than ever to find another motive for killing Sir Mathew. When he finished, he headed upstairs to the offices of Jamil Shirani, a DS in Fraud.
Jamil, a qualified accountant and an expert on the dirty d
ealings of businesses, worked in the City of London for several years before joining the police. To some, it was a strange move as previously he was a Compliance Officer for a major US bank and earning a six-figure salary. Henderson had known the young man for a few years, as he was a keen poker player and often sat on the opposite side of the table from him, and he came to realise that the principles of fairness and justice were higher priorities in his book than mere money and possessions.
‘I’m investigating the death of Sir Mathew Markham,’ he said to him when they were seated, ‘and I’m thinking his death might be linked to the proposed sale of Markham Microprocessors. If so, the death of Finance Director David Young could also be linked. At the moment, I’m unsure about the motive but maybe the reduction in their share price, brought about by their deaths, might have been engineered by one of the buyers. What do you think?’
Jamil leaned forward, his dark eyes as impassive as they were at the poker table. His black hair was cut short and he had a well-trimmed beard and moustache. He no longer wore the five hundred pound suits he did at the bank, impractical for police work as they would be ruined after a couple of operations, but nevertheless his smart-casual clothes looked expensive.
‘Nothing is out of bounds where corporate greed is concerned, Angus and I could site numerous takeovers that were plagued with allegations of blackmail, prostitution, bribery, drugs and of course, murder. Although I stress, murder is at the far end of the spectrum and rare, as they have so many other effective tools at their disposal.’
He tapped the keyboard on his computer before twisting the screen around for him to see. ‘Ever since the chairman’s death, Markham’s shares have fallen sharply but in the weeks since then, they have recovered a lot of ground. However, two hundred and fifty million pounds has been wiped off the company’s value and I don’t know about you, but it’s a lot of money to get greedy about.’
‘When you put it like that, it puts post office robberies and raids on building societies into some sort of perspective.’
‘Although you have to realise, the fall is likely to be temporary.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, the underlying principles of the business haven’t changed, the fundamentals as we call them. They are still a well-run company, making great products and they have many large customers in all the main electronics centres of the globe. If there is a takeover, the new management team will need time to find their feet but when they do, they will start to woo the City with their expansion plans and profit forecasts and soon the shares will return to near enough their old level, and this particular window of opportunity will be closed.’
‘That’s fine,’ Henderson said, getting animated now as his promising theory was beginning to make sense and standing up to Jamil’s financial scrutiny. ‘Whoever is doing this, wants to buy the company now. They’ll get the benefit later, when the share price recovers.’
Jamil nodded. ‘Yes it’s true and then you will see one of the great business deceptions rear its greedy head. You see, the incentive pay of senior managers is usually based on an increasing share price and so in the scenario I have outlined, they would earn fat bonuses when the share price recovers and as we know, they didn't do much to earn it at all.’
‘Deception? It’s more like daylight robbery.’
‘Ha, right. Now you’ve come up with one motive, the falling share price, have you thought of any others?
Henderson shook his head. ‘I can’t think of anything else.’
‘You see, one thing you could say about this killer, if there is a single killer, he has targeted the company carefully. He has killed an old man who no longer works there, and a Financial Director with good contacts in the City and a pretty high standing but I would argue, two replaceable men and not key players in the company’s future strategy.’
‘How so?’
‘Markham is a specialist technology business and what they need to drive it forward is brilliant techies, making great products and business people who can interpret such knowledge, keep them happy and sell the products to all the large electronic companies.’
‘The key people at Markham,’ he continued ‘are Managing Director, William Lawton who is also a great salesman, and the microprocessor design team who continue to produce fantastic products, headed up by Marta Stevenson. Marta and her senior designer, Sanjay Singh have been responsible for developing and improving the operating system software which has been in every major Markham microprocessor chip for the last twenty years. It’s not too grandiose to say, they are the technology equivalent of Lennon and McCartney.’
‘Yeah, but can they sing?’
Jamil laughed, flashing uneven white teeth with a gap in the middle.
‘I think I see what you’re getting at,’ Henderson said. ‘If the motive of the killer is something other than a drop in share price, the murders of Markham and Young might be in revenge for something or to remove an obstacle to progress or something, and if they don’t get what they want, the killings we’ve seen so far are only for starters?’
He nodded his head. ‘It’s only a theory Angus, but in my twisted way of thinking like a copper and not like an accountant, I think he doesn’t want to kill the victim yet but make him suffer. Your job is find out why.’
THIRTY-ONE
Henderson stood up and stretched. He gathered up a pile of papers from his desk and walked along the corridor to the Murder Suite.
It was a large, open-plan area that could be sub-divided to provide a flexible working space for major investigations. It had the added advantage of moving officers from their normal place of work into an area where they would live and breathe the investigation, free from the distractions of daily duties. However, as a place to conduct a review meeting, it lacked the formality of a small meeting room because officers swung idly on chairs, fiddled with staplers or nudged one another with sly asides, and left him with the impression they weren’t listening.
In fact, chairs were at a premium as every detective out in the field, made a point of returning to base when word got round of McGovern’s confession and the gang’s subsequent arrest. For some, it was the end of the school term all over again, illustrated by shirts hanging out of trousers, slouched bodies on chairs, and more smiles and a happier atmosphere than could be found at the Comedy Club. Rather than start the meeting with a roundup from each of the team leaders as he often did, but there was no need today and instead he talked them through the interview with McGovern.
His words brought gasps of relief and release from members of many small teams, tasked with calling car dealers, customs officers, and other police forces when they came to realise their jobs were finished, and dignified smiles of satisfaction from Scenes of Crime Officers and the Family Liaison Officer of yet another job well done. He knew the feeling well but it was also tinged with a pang of regret for some, when they recognised that the job on which they spent the last few days or even weeks, had been for nothing, as the luck of the draw had given them a dead end to drive into.
It made a pleasant change to see all the happy faces instead of the glum frowns that often dogged this investigation, as everyone was glad to see the back of a gang of savage car thieves who had terrorised the county for so long, and he would be the first to admit, they weren’t any closer to catching them until McGovern opened his sizable gob. For a few minutes he said nothing as mutual backslapping spread around the room with the alacrity of a box of chocolates on someone’s birthday.
‘Now,’ he said trying to restore order, ‘for the car-thieving teams your investigation work is complete and I would like to thank you all for your efforts, so go out tonight and enjoy the celebration.’
He nodded towards DC Baldwin, a happy go-lucky lad who was often first to the bar. ‘Kenny, see me after this briefing and I’ll give you some money to start you off tonight, as I won’t be there to celebrate with you and pick up the tab.’
A cacophony of riotous noise burst out and only calmed wh
en he held up his hand. ‘Now for the bad news. I’m going to be an old nag and ask you all to ensure your interviews, notes and everything else are fully documented and your files are complete and up-to-date, ready to hand over to the CPS and begin court proceedings.’
‘This disbanding directive however,’ Henderson continued, ‘does not apply to the murder team under the direction of DI Hobbs, as you guys are still working on this investigation.’
‘What?’
‘Why?’
‘Bloody hell, what’s going on?’
‘The widely held belief of the media, Chief Inspector Harris, and many in this room, including at one time myself,’ Henderson said, ‘was that if we caught the car thieves, we would also catch Sir Mathew’s killer. I have heard nothing from McGovern and DI Speers has heard nothing from the rest of the gang, that leads us to believe McGovern’s crew carried out the raid on Stavely House.’
One item at a time, he went through his reasons but to his astonishment, few agreed with his analysis.
‘The gang have been escalating their violence for some time and almost with every raid,’ DC Stone said. ‘It was inevitable they would kill somebody in the end.’
‘I agree,’ someone said from the back.
‘Look what they did to Grant Basham, they gave him a serious beating and nearly killed him,’ said another. ‘He’s still in a coma.’
‘You see sir,’ DS Harry Wallop said, ‘one minute we’re celebrating the capture of a gang we know for sure nicked fifteen cars in our neck of the woods and put several innocent people in hospital, now you’re telling us it was someone else who did in poor Mr Markham. If you’re suggesting we have a copycat killer on our hands, well I just don’t see it.’
There were many shouts of agreement and he knew, in part it was caused by the number of new additions to the investigation team, brought in to investigate the murder as they were not so knowledgeable about the gang’s methods. However, it was those who had been with him since the start he was most disappointed with.