by Ian Simpson
‘Burns sang like a canary. You know that after Hutton’s confession became known, he pled guilty during Lord Tulloch’s charge on the basis that he was not the ringleader. There was a great fuss and the lawyers got their knickers in a twist but his plea was accepted. He promised to tell the full story and I think he has. So he’ll expect leniency. He got all his instructions from untraceable e-mail accounts and pay-as-you-go mobiles with voice distorters. He had no idea who was pulling the strings. All the time Hutton kept coming up with the goods, and kept paying his mother’s care costs, so he just did as he was told. He was unable or unwilling to finger Gary Thomson. As you’ll know, the other three were convicted by the jury and they all come up for sentence next week.’
‘Are you getting anywhere with the money in the Caymans?’
‘We should recover some serious amounts, but it will take a while.’
‘And has the fuss died down about that mercy killing case?’
‘I think so. As you know, the judges decided assisting suicide was criminal in Scotland, but when Nugent pled guilty, the judge taking the case admonished him, earning blood-curdling threats against him and Nugent. Nothing’s happened so far and that has to be good.
‘Oh, by the way, we heard from the Glasgow police that a CCTV camera picked up Gary Thomson, quite identifiably, hanging around outside the High Court at lunch time on the day Dolan was killed. You see the right-to-lifers leave and Gary follows them. He appears to have something under his jacket. A couple of the Vita Dei people have identified him as loitering around the High Court that day, but that was just from a photograph. The theory is, that after his early shift in Tesco, he stole a car, drove to Glasgow, killed Dolan, returned to Dunfermline, dumped the car and went to bed, pretending to you and Billy di Falco that he’d been there all day. But that’s just speculation, of course.’
‘Will we convict him?’ Flick asked.
‘I think we should get him for Dolan’s murder, even if he gets off the fraud. It was a good result, whatever, and like politics, policing is the art of the possible.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
All characters are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is coincidental. With one exception. Brenda Lenaghan is a genuine artist, whose work we are proud to have on our walls. She is also great fun. Another supporter has been my devil-master, Bill Reid. I thank him for the idea of bringing a genuine legal issue, the criminality of assisting suicide in Scotland, into the plot.
I am very grateful to the people at Matador and above all to Annie, my wife, for her unfailing support, encouragement and correction of errors.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
After a legal career that included sitting as a judge in High Court murder trials, Ian Simpson has been writing crime fiction. In 2008 he was shortlisted for the Debut Dagger by the Crime Writers’ Association. He was brought up in St Andrews. This is his third published book.