Last Will

by William McIntyre

  The professor sucked on the stem of his dead pipe and adopted a studious expression. ‘Hmm, let me think. Ah.’ He raised an index finger. ‘I tell you time of death and, wallop, suddenly not only did your client not do it, but he has witnesses to say they were with him when he didn’t do it.’

  ‘Not all alibis are fabricated,’ I said.

  ‘No, but some of the best ones are, and I’m not going to be the person who gives your client the material to cobble one together. The Lord Advocate wouldn’t like it and he’s paying my wages.’

  Over on the rolling lawn, Tina stalked the squirrel with all the gentle finesse of a dawn drugs’ raid, the animal darting here and there, just enough to keep my daughter at bay, but not sufficiently far for her to give up the chase.

  ‘Persistent, isn’t she?’ the professor said.

  ‘The prosecution say the murder took place sometime during a seven-day window. It was me who discovered the body in the kitchen and even I could tell he wasn’t exactly fresh. Go on, narrow it a little for me. I’m not asking for a down to the minute opinion, just the day it’s most likely to have happened.’

  But the professor seemed more interested in what my little squirrel hunter was up to for she had left the lawn and was now careering through an area filled with plants and shrubs.

  ‘Tell her to be careful,’ he gasped, recoiling as though in pain, ‘I just planted those beds at the weekend.’

  ‘Tina!’ I shouted. ‘You’re standing on all the flowers. Come back here.’

  ‘There’s no flowers!’ she called back, transgressing further into the flower border.

  ‘Get back on the grass!’

  She stopped, looked around at the neat rows of bedding plants, some now no longer quite so neat.

  ‘Tina! I said get out of the flowers and back on the grass!’

  ‘And I said, there’s no flowers! There’s only leafs!’ she yelled, her hands-on-hips pose a direct challenge to my authority. What did I do now that shouting hadn’t worked? I started forward. Tina ran off giggling, happy to change from chaser to chasee as she trampled more and more of the professor’s precious vegetation. I had to give up to prevent further damage.

  ‘The Wednesday the week before he was found,’ Professor Bradley said hurriedly. ‘Maybe the Thursday, possibly even the Friday. That’s the best I can do. If you want anything more specific time-wise you’ll need to speak to, what’s-his-name, you know, the fly-man.’

  The squirrel reappeared from under a bush. Tina squealed with joy and ran after it. Grimacing, Professor Bradley chewed on the stem of his pipe. I had a feeling Tina had moved above squirrels on his things-needing-throttled list.

  ‘Now for the love of God, Robbie, will you get that child of yours out of my Sweet Williams?’

  21

  Coming back from Edinburgh we diverted through South Queensferry and ate fish and chips in a car park with a good view of the Forth Bridges. On the way home I’d intended to discuss Tina’s behaviour, but my daughter was more interested in telling me all about baby pandas, squirrels and Professor Bradley’s imminent death from pipe smoking. When, eventually, I did manage to raise the subject of why little girls should do what they were told, I thought she was listening very attentively, until I realised she was asleep.

  She was still out for the count when we arrived back at my flat. Children, I’d begun to notice, were peculiar. They never went to sleep when you wanted them to, but when they wanted to sleep it was practically impossible to wake them up. Somehow I managed to take Tina to the toilet, put her pyjamas on and tuck her into bed all while she remained in some kind of somnambulistic limbo.

  Afterwards, I sat down in front of the TV with a cup of coffee. Peace at last. The phone rang. My dad.

  ‘I can’t bring her to the phone, she’s sound asleep,’ I told him. ‘I know you haven’t seen her since Thursday. We’ve been busy. We were at the new soft play area yesterday and I took her to the zoo after nursery today. By the way, if Tina starts going on about the baby pandas, don’t look surprised if she tells you that there were lots of them and that they were swinging through the branches on long bushy tails.’

  ‘What have you got lined up for tomorrow?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘but Vikki is coming to see us on Wednesday and there’s a lot of housework to be done before then.’

  ‘Then why don’t I come and take Tina out tomorrow afternoon? It’ll let you get on. I’ll give the bairn her lunch and then if it’s nice we’ll go down the Peel. She can run around there for a while and go to the swings.’

  Linlithgow Peel is the name for the grounds and gardens surrounding the Palace. It’s a local thing, but for some reason one goes ‘up to the Palace’, and, ‘down to the Peel’, never the other way around. Anyway, no matter his plans, I wasn’t about to make things easy for the old man. Not after his quality-time talk. ‘Hmm. I’m not sure. Don’t you think Tina should be spending more time with me? You’re just the granddad after all, you’re only supposed to be flitting in and out of Tina’s life and Thursday wasn’t that long ago.’

  I could sense knuckles whitening on the telephone receiver and almost hear the clenching of teeth. That was enough. Mission accomplished. I put him out of his misery and after lunch next day the two of them set off in the direction of Linlithgow Palace leaving me to turn my flat into a semblance of tidiness in time for Vikki’s arrival the following day.

  After they’d gone I spent five minutes putting away the hoover, brushes, dusters and other items that I’d dug out in support of my Cinderella story and another five minutes to change into my suit. Five minutes after that I was in my car, avoiding Linlithgow High Street, and en route to Haddington; site of many an English invasion, the birthplace of John Knox and home to Doctor Alfred Wiltshire, entomologist, AKA the fly-man.

  ‘He’s not here,’ his wife said when I arrived at the front door.

  ‘But I phoned last night.’

  ‘Oh, was that you? I’m so sorry, Alf’s diary-keeping’s hopeless. He must have forgotten that he was lecturing today. He’s not long gone, actually. Edinburgh Uni. Kings Buildings. You’ll catch him there if you go now. I don’t think he’s on until two o’clock.’

  I pulled up in front of Kings Buildings at one thirty and had no sooner alighted than I was approached by a member of security who asked if he could help, and actually looked like he meant it.

  ‘Doctor Wiltshire,’ I said. ‘There’s a lecture—’

  ‘I’ve a Doctor Wiltshire, for a lecture,’ the security guard said into a walkie-talkie. I couldn’t make out the response, but he obviously could. ‘You’re already here, Doctor. You booked in half an hour ago.’

  I thought he was joking. His serious face told me he wasn’t. Could he be that stupid and work at a university? Or did he simply assume that all scientists were absent-minded? Once I’d explained I wasn’t the fly-man, but someone looking for the fly-man, I was directed to Ashworth Labs, an immense stone building with a short flight of steps to a landing and an enormous double door, above which was carved into the stone facade the word ‘Zoology’ and the year 1929. Inside, the place smelt musty like an old school gym hall. Straight ahead there was an impressive staircase and to my right a laboratory filled with white-coated students.

  I veered left down a corridor and followed a sign to a lecture hall. It was empty. Row upon row of wooden fold-down seats stood to attention, ready to inflict pins and needles on the next batch of students. On the wall a huge, coloured chart displayed the geologic periods.

  ‘Lost?’

  From behind me an elderly woman in a blue lab coat appeared, carrying a bucket. She pointed to a corner of the high ceiling. ‘Just had the roof fixed for the umpteenth time and it’s still leaking.’

  ‘I’m looking for Doctor Wiltshire,’ I said. She frowned. ‘The entomologist?’ I added.

  ‘Oh, you mean Alf? You’ll probably find him in Immunology, talking mosquito mouthparts to the malaria lot,’ she said, an
d went on to give directions that caused me to retrace my footsteps down the corridor to where I met an elderly man at the foot of a flight of stairs. On his head he wore some sort of battered hat from beneath which wisps of grey hair made a bid for freedom. The rest of him was clad in a shapeless tweed suit that he was frantically patting down.

  ‘Doctor Wiltshire?’

  ‘Bloody lecture starting in ten minutes and I’ve gone and left my notes in the car.’

  ‘My name’s Robbie Munro. I’m a lawyer. I was hoping to catch a few words with you about the murders.’

  He stopped patting. ‘Which ones?’

  ‘Up at Sunnybrae Farm.’

  ‘Not pleasant,’ he said.

  ‘I was hoping you could give me an idea as to time of death.’

  ‘I can’t do anything until I find my car keys,’ he said. ‘I’m absolutely positive they were in this pocket.’ He rummaged around in the tweed suit some more and then shook his head. ‘I simply don’t understand it. I parked the car, got out and locked it.’ He mimed each action as he spoke. ‘I put the keys in my pocket, walked to the front door, up the steps, turned left and—’

  ‘Alf!’ A voice from the top of the stairs. ‘You’ve forgotten your coat. Catch!’

  A navy-blue raincoat dropped down the stairwell, weighted by something heavy in one of the pockets. I took a guess at what that might be.

  ‘My report’s not yet complete, you know,’ Wiltshire grumbled, as we walked through the car park. He wanted me to wait until after the lecture, but I explained that as he was having to walk back to his car in any event, we could talk on the way. ‘All I have are my notes. Lawyers. So impatient, the lot of you. Everything’s got to be done in a rush.’

  I was content to let him grumble on as much as he wanted. All I needed from him was the time of the deaths at Sunnybrae Farm. Something I’d otherwise have to wait weeks for. The doctor might know all about flies and mosquito mouthparts, but he had much to learn about the criminal justice system. Not all lawyers were in a hurry, and those at Crown Office in particular wouldn’t be busting any guts to disclose important evidence to the defence before it was absolutely necessary. Doc Wiltshire was my fast track to an alibi for Deek Pudney. The prosecution would hate to think I was getting such vital information before them and from their own witness at that. The good thing was that Wiltshire didn’t seem to know or care. But, then, to a man who’d devoted his life to the taxonomy of bugs, lawyers, Crown or defence, we were all the same species.

  ‘Okay, let me see.’ Wiltshire sat on the driver’s seat, door open, briefcase on his lap, a sheaf of papers in his hand. ‘Oh, yes, here we are. One male, one female . . . ’ He scanned down the pencil-written page. ‘Male . . . injury to the nose, stab wounds to the neck and thorax.’ He glanced up at me. ‘October’s not the best month for flies. Happily the weather the week before the bodies were found was mild for the time of year, even milder if averaged out over the preceding twelve days, and being on a farm with plenty of animals and dung about the place there was always going to be calliphoridae vomitoria around somewhere. I see that I calculated the ADH . . . That’s accumulated degree hours.’ I was none the wiser. ‘At . . . ’ He turned to a graph sketched out on one side of A4 and drew his finger along it to where two lines intersected.

  I leaned into the car and placed a hand on his shoulder. ‘I don’t want to keep you, Doctor Wiltshire. I know you have a lecture to deliver. If you could just give me your opinion on time of death, I’ll er . . . buzz off.’

  He stopped tracing the curve of the graph and glowered up at me. At first I thought I’d crossed some entomological line with my attempt at fly-humour, but it wasn’t that or at any rate, not just that. ‘I don’t have a T.O.D., I have a PMI’ He certainly sounded like he had PM something. ‘Post-Mortem Interval is the time between the first blowfly eggs being laid on the body and the date the body was discovered.’

  Wiltshire then went on to explain things in some detail. What I understood of it was quite interesting, although I was glad I wasn’t having to sit on a hard fold-down seat while he spoke or sit an exam at the end of it. From his mini-lecture I learned there were lots of different types of blowflies and that they were all the very dabs at detecting dead flesh and making a beeline for it. Wiltshire reckoned that with a partially open door in a rural setting, a recent stab victim would attract the delightfully named C. Vomitoria in under an hour.

  ‘It could be more, or even slightly less,’ he said. ‘In July you’d be talking fifteen minutes but given the time of year, my ADH calculations suggest around about sixty minutes. After that, in a centrally heated building with the temperature not falling below sixteen point five degrees centigrade at any time . . . ’

  It all began to get a little hazy, he started to lose me when he moved onto larval and pupal transitions and I didn’t even want to think about maggot mass temperatures.

  ‘Which brings me to the zero point of my PMI, being the time of egg-laying, to sometime late evening on the Thursday the week before the body was found. Give or take.’

  ‘Which means . . . ’

  ‘Which means that, assuming they hadn’t been moved, and the scene was as it has been described to me, those poor people were most probably murdered around midnight on Thursday the 8th of October,’ the doctor said.

  It was amazing how his timing could be so precise, and even more amazing that Deek Pudney’s liberty was about to be secured, not by anything the law had to say, but on the breeding habits of a few creepy-crawlies.

  22

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Hugh Ogilvie asked.

  Wednesday morning, Tina was at nursery with the other Little Ships. I, meantime, had sailed up to Livingston and press-ganged the Procurator Fiscal into discussing Deek Pudney and what I now saw as grounds for his inevitable and imminent release.

  ‘I’ve had it straight from the horse’s, or maybe that should be the horsefly’s, mouth,’ I said, injecting a little insect-humour.

  Ogilvie appreciated it about as much as the fly-man had. He sat back in his chair. ‘I hate it when you’re this cheerful. It usually means some criminal is about to get off on a technicality.’

  ‘No technicality here, Hugh, old son. Just a plain, good old-fashioned alibi.’

  ‘Really? How unusual. One of Munro and Co.’s clients has come up with an alibi.’

  True it wasn’t that rare an occurrence. ‘Except . . . ’ I took a piece of paper from my jacket pocket, unfolded it and spread it flat on the desk in front of him. ‘This could be the best one yet.’

  My turn to sit back, while I let the PF study my timeline. According to Dr Wiltshire, the folk in the farm had been murdered around midnight on Thursday 8th October. Working on what I thought was a generous four-hour margin of error either side, I had set out in writing Deek Pudney’s movements.

  ‘Eight o’clock on the Thursday evening he’s in a pub in Glasgow. One thirty a.m. on the Friday he’s admitted to A & E at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Three fifteen he’s stitched up and three forty-five he’s in the back of a taxi heading for Linlithgow. At no time is he ever within a twenty-mile radius of the murder scene during what your own insect expert reckons was the time of death.’ I leaned forward and pointed to the foot of the page where I’d jotted down the name of the casualty nurse and the phone number of the taxi company, just in case my word wasn’t good enough. ‘Oh, and, of course, the piece de resistance. A petition at the instance of the Procurator Fiscal, Glasgow, complete with summary of evidence alleging that at around 12.30 a.m. on Friday 9th October, Martin Sneddon assaulted Derek William Pudney and struck him on the head with a knife, or similar instrument, all to his severe injury and permanent disfigurement.’ I slapped the petition down on the desk like a Royal Flush in a high-stakes poker game.

  Ogilvie picked it up, barely glancing at it before giving me a slitty-eyed stare. ‘You know you can get into all sorts of bother interfering with Crown witnesses.’

  ‘If by interfering
you mean asking an independent expert witness like Doctor Wiltshire for his independent expert opinion on an important piece of evidence that might prove my client’s innocence, then, no, I’m not sure how much trouble that would land me in. I mean, we’re both stakeholders in the justice system, aren’t we?’

  ‘I know one of us is.’ Ogilvie threw the petition down on the desk on top of my handwritten timeline. ‘Okay, I’ll give it some thought.’ By which he meant, he’d mull it over and then do whatever the Crown Office Gestapo told him to do.

  ‘Yes, you do that,’ I said, unable to keep the smugness out of my voice. ‘Give it a good think. It’s Wednesday. The full committal isn’t until Friday. You can do the honourable thing and let my client out before then, or—’

  ‘Or what? Your client’s section 23D’d. He’s going nowhere except back on remand.’

  ‘Seriously, Hugh. In the face of all this?’ I picked up the papers and wafted them in front of his face. I hadn’t enjoyed myself so much in ages. ‘Even section 23D allows for bail in exceptional circumstances and while I agree Sheriff Brechin might not think that being in two places at the same time is sufficiently exceptional, I have a feeling the boys in the red jerseys up at Parliament House might think otherwise.’

  Ogilvie stood. ‘Your opinion on the appellate court is, as ever, invaluable,’ he said, pointing to the door. ‘But, if you don’t mind, I’ve other things to do than waste time on one of your dodgy alibis.’

  On the way to collect Tina, I dropped in at the office. Joanna was out at court. Grace-Mary heard me enter and came through from reception. ‘Sometimes I think I see more of you now that you’re on holiday than when you’re actually working. You’ve been told to stay away.’

  ‘I know, I know. I’m picking Tina up in five minutes and I’ve only come in to use the phone.’

  ‘Well, don’t go messing the place up.’

  ‘You’ll never know I was here.’