Never Proven

by Bill Daly

  ‘Is there anyone who could vouch for that?’ Terry asked.

  Andy scratched at his chin. ‘Aye, Jack Mulgrew. I nailed his hand to the bog door.’

  Terry grinned. ‘I suppose there’s a reasonable chance that Mulgrew might remember you having done that.’

  Charlie called Tony O’Sullivan to his office to show him the letter that had been sent across from the Daily Record office.

  ‘Forensics gave it the once over before I handled it,’ Charlie said. ‘The stamp was the self-adhesive kind, so no possibility of a DNA match with the sender’s saliva. They found several sets of prints on the envelope, which is what you would expect when it was collected from a post box somewhere in the city, then handled in the sorting office in Springburn as well as in the Daily Record mail room. There were only two sets of prints on the letter itself. The forensics guys are checking them out, but they’re sure to belong to the girl at the Record who opened the envelope and the editor.’

  ‘He’s a fan of old technology, I see,’ Tony said as he examined the single sheet of paper. ‘Cutting and pasting words from newspaper articles.’

  ‘Effective, nevertheless,’ Charlie said.

  Tony scanned the page:

  ‘How many murders has he claimed now?’ Tony asked.

  ‘If you believe all the letters were sent by the same person, this is his fourth.’

  ‘Do you not think they were?’

  ‘How much do you know about him?’ Charlie asked.

  ‘Just what I read in the papers. I wasn’t involved in any of those cases.’

  ‘I was, for my sins. Up to my neck. It was the bane of my life. The first murder he claimed to have committed was in Aberdeen about eight years ago. The victim’s name was Robertson, if I remember right. A man in his fifties. He was found bludgeoned to death with a hammer in a country lane on the outskirts of the city. Two weeks after he was killed a letter arrived at the office of the Press and Journal. In it, the self-designated Avenging Angel announced that he had been given a mission by God to rid the world of vermin. He said he’d killed Robertson because he had interfered with young boys in a school football team twenty years previously. Robertson had been charged with that offence at the time, and the verdict was not proven. But there was a lot about the Avenging Angel’s claim that didn’t ring true.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Robertson hadn’t tried to hide himself away. He’d been living in the same house for more than thirty years. If you’re so enraged that you’re contemplating murdering someone, why would you wait twenty years before doing it? Apart from that, the letter wasn’t sent until the day after the Press and Journal ran a piece divulging Robertson’s history and the not proven verdict. At the time I thought the murder had nothing to do with Robertson’s past. I thought that whoever killed him was trying to muddy the waters. Either that, or a nutter was stirring things up.’

  ‘When did the Avenging Angel next stick his head above the parapet?’ Tony asked.

  ‘About five years ago, in Edinburgh. This time the victim was a guy in his thirties who been charged with having sexual relations with a fourteen your-old girl. He had been acquitted with a not proven verdict on a technicality, something to do with the crown prosecution service not disclosing evidence to which the defence was entitled in a timely manner. Apart from the administrative cock-up, the case looked rock solid, so he probably got away with it – up to a point. A week later he opened his front door to someone who stabbed him several times in the guts.’

  ‘Someone associated with his victim?’

  ‘That’s odds-on. The third murder the AA claimed responsibility for was a strange affair,’ Charlie continued. ‘A couple of years ago, late on a Saturday night, a car mounted the pavement in Castlemilk and side-swiped a man standing at a bus stop, then drove off without stopping. A few months previously, a charge against the victim for underage sexual activity had been found to be not proven.’

  ‘So there is a pattern,’ Tony said. ‘All the victims had been charged with underage sex offences and all of them were acquitted on not proven verdicts.’

  ‘That was Niggle’s line of thinking,’ Charlie nodded. ‘He was convinced that the Avenging Angel was a serial killer and he was determined to demonstrate that the Glasgow CID could crack a case that had confounded both the Aberdeen and Edinburgh divisions. He lumbered me with the investigation – it was before I was bumped up to DCI. My team spent God only knows how many hours battering their heads against a brick wall. The Edinburgh boys had a field day. When they heard I’d been assigned to the case they sent me lots of useful advice, such as: ‘you should pull in for questioning everyone in Scotland who owns a pair of scissors’; ‘check out anyone who has bought a book of stamps within the past year’; ‘focus on everyone who has bought a newspaper recently’. Unsurprisingly, the investigation went nowhere – it was needles and haystacks.’

  ‘Do you think the same killer carried out all three murders?’ Tony asked.

  ‘I very much doubt it,’ Charlie said with a shake of the head. ‘For a start, there was no similarity in the way the murders were carried out. If the incident in Castlemilk was a premeditated murder, it’s a weird way to go about it. You’d have to be certain that the person you were targeting would be standing at a particular bus stop at a particular time and, unless you had a total disregard for human life, you would have to be sure that no one else would be waiting at that stop. At the time I thought it had been a hit and run accident. My theory was that the driver was probably drunk and when he read in the newspapers the following day that the man he had killed had previously been acquitted of child sex offences on a not proven verdict, he jumped onto the Avenging Angel bandwagon in order to divert attention from himself. Besides,’ Charlie added, ‘I realise Scots are a multi-talented people, but being capable of bludgeoning someone to death with a hammer, stabbing someone in the guts with a knife and side-swiping a guy with a car would be a rare set of skills for any one individual to acquire – even in Glasgow.

  ‘And I don’t think our Avenging Angel friend had anything to do with the other two deaths either,’ Charlie added. ‘I reckon he’s an attention-seeking saddo whose only interest is in trying to make our job even more difficult than it already is. Of course, the tabloids were in their element,’ Charlie added. ‘They lapped up the Avenging Angel story and they published his letters. In his first missive the AA regaled us with the mission statement that had been sent to him by Almighty God, but the next two letters were more succinct.’

  ‘What do you reckon in Preston’s case?’ Tony asked. ‘Is this another instance of the saddo jumping onto the bandwagon?’

  Charlie shook his head emphatically. ‘That’s not what we’re dealing with here, Tony. This time it’s kosher.’

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Take a look at the postmark on the envelope. It was time-stamped in the sorting office in Springburn at twenty-past ten on Sunday morning, which means it must have been put into a post box either late on Saturday night, or very early on Sunday morning, which was before the identity of the victim was known. This is the first time the Avenging Angel has had information that wasn’t in the public domain at the time the letter was posted.’

  When Tony left the office, Charlie turned his attention to the e-mails Eddie McLaughlin had printed out for him. As he worked his way through them, the pieces started to fall into place. Malcolm Steel was a teacher in the same school as John Murdoch and, from the tone of the communications, it was evident that they’d been in a relationship, up until about eighteen months previously when things had started to turn sour, with Steel accusing Murdoch of having tried to seduce Ronnie Gilligan, one of the second-year pupils in the school.

  Charlie homed in on the correspondence between Murdoch and Ronnie Gilligan. The communications had started about two years ago, in December 2009, and from the content of the early exchanges it was apparent that Murdoch was trying to groom Ronnie. The dialogue had ended abrup
tly in February 2010 before starting up again in August 2011. Charlie noticed that both their e-mail addresses had changed in the intervening period; john.murdoch95 changing to john.preston73 and Ronnie Gilligan, while keeping the same name, switching from gmail to hotmail. The tone of the post-August 2011 correspondence was completely different, with Gilligan informing Murdoch he knew that he had changed his name to Preston and telling him that he knew where he was living now. He was threatening him with blackmail.

  Leaning forward to depress the buzzer on his intercom, Charlie asked his secretary to set up a meeting for him as soon as she could with Donald Parker, the school’s head teacher.

  It was just after half-past seven when Lesley Adams arrived in The Rock. From the doorway of the lounge she did a double take when she saw Myra sitting on her own in a booth in the far corner.

  Myra waved across when she saw Lesley come in. ‘I started without you,’ she called out, holding up her wine glass.

  Lesley ordered a drink at the bar and carried it across to the booth.

  ‘I didn’t recognise you for a minute,’ Lesley said as she flopped down.

  ‘What do you think?’ Myra asked, turning her head from side to side and patting her hair.

  ‘I like the style, but the green streaks will take a bit of getting used to.’

  ‘You should get something done with yours,’ Myra said. ‘Derek says auburn is so twentieth century.’

  ‘Who is Derek?’

  ‘My new stylist. Amanda in the office put me on to him. He’s really hot,’ Myra added with a sly grin.

  ‘Is he available?’ Lesley asked.

  Myra shrugged. ‘He’s married.’

  ‘I suppose that’s not too bad – he could have been gay.’

  ‘Amanda warned me off chatting him up in the salon,’ Myra said. ‘Apparently his wife works there too and she keeps a beady eye on him.’

  ‘That’s a bit of a bummer.’

  ‘Derek told me that I’ll need to get my roots done every four or five weeks. I can feel a heavy cold coming on in about a month’s time,’ Myra added, ‘so I’m planning to ask him if he’ll come over to my place and touch me up.’

  ‘You’re incorrigible.’

  ‘Just trying to lighten the mood,’ Myra said, a serious tone creeping into her voice. ‘You sounded a bit down in the dumps on the phone. Is there something wrong?’

  Lesley gazed long and hard into her drink before replying. ‘As I told you on the phone, I had a visit from the police this morning.’

  ‘I thought you said that went okay?’ Myra queried, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘It did, up to a point. It was mostly routine stuff. They were looking for background information on the Carter family and my name happened to crop up in the social work reports. They asked me a lot of questions about Tommy and Gavin – as well as the father and the uncle.’

  ‘So what did you mean by ‘up to a point’?’ Myra asked, picking up her wine glass and taking a slow sip.

  ‘I didn’t –’ Lesley let out a sigh. ‘I didn’t say anything to them about me and Gavin.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Lesley!’ Myra spluttered. ‘What in the name of God were you thinking about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lesley said, running her fingers through her hair. ‘I panicked. I thought that if I didn’t mention it, they might not find out about us.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Keep your voice down!’ Lesley said in a strangulated whisper. She glanced quickly round the bar, but no one appeared to be paying them any attention. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight.’

  ‘Of course, they’re going to find out about you and Gavin. That’s a racing certainty. And that information had better come from you,’ Myra added forcibly, ‘otherwise they’ll think you’ve got something to hide.’

  ‘I realise that,’ Lesley said, exhaling noisily. ‘I’ll call Inspector Anderson first thing in the morning and let him know.’ Picking up her glass, she threw back the contents. ‘I need another drink.’

  CHAPTER 14

  I waited six months from the time I spotted Murdoch in Stravaigin before getting in touch with him. Having set up a hotmail account in the name of ‘Ronnie Gilligan’, I sent him an e-mail in which I told him I’d seen him coming out of an office building in Bath Street a few days earlier, but I’d decided not to approach him. I told him that I’d followed him home to Oakfield Avenue and when I checked his doorbell, I saw that he was using the name ‘Preston’. I said that I’d gone back to the office in Bath Street and when I saw there was a firm in the building called ‘Murdoch & Slater’, I’d put two and two together. I’d called the secretary in the office and she’d given me his e-mail address.

  I told him I had kept all the e-mails he had sent me while he was my guidance teacher – and that the day of reckoning had arrived. If he didn’t want me to forward the e-mails to the police, it was going to cost him a grand. I suggested that would be a lot cheaper – and easier – for him, than having to change his name again, find another job and move flat.

  It was three days before he replied. When he did, it was the usual guff. He said he would agree to pay what I was asking, on condition that I would never come back looking for more money – and he wanted to know how he could be sure the e-mails would be deleted.

  I told him he’d have to trust me on that – just as I had to trust him when he was trying to shag me. I suggested that we meet in Cottiers in Hyndland Street for him to hand over the money because the pub had an outside garden area where children are allowed in. I told him I wanted the cash in used tens and twenties. I proposed that we meet the following Saturday night at eight o’clock. I told him we should exchange mobile numbers in case either of us needed to change the arrangements at short notice. He sent me his phone number and I sent him mine. I grinned when he e-mailed me to confirm the rendezvous.

  CHAPTER 15

  Jack Mulgrew was sitting on a bench seat at a table in the corner of the lounge bar in The Jacobite Arms, an untouched pint of heavy on the table in front of him. Chewing hard on the end of his pencil, he was engrossed in studying the midweek football fixed-odds coupon when Andy and Gavin Carter walked into the pub.

  ‘I thought we might find him here,’ Andy whispered to Gavin.

  ‘I really don’t like this, Andy,’ Gavin said. ‘I still think it would be better if I told the polis I was in Edinburgh with Stuart.’

  ‘We’ve been through all that. The cops would tear a hole in that story in five minutes flat. Just do what I told you and everything will be fine. Come on.’

  Striding across the bar, they sat down on the bench seat, one on either side of Mulgrew.

  Mulgrew glanced in Gavin’s direction. Turning round quickly, he stared at Andy.

  ‘Do you remember me, Mulgrew?’ Andy said quietly. ‘We ran into each other last Saturday night downstairs in the bog.’

  Mulgrew’s jaw dropped and the pencil slipped from his grasp. He held both his hands up in front of his face, his left thumb gently massaging the tight bandage wrapped around the palm of his right hand. ‘Aye,’ he gulped. ‘I remember you all right.’

  ‘Have you told the cops what happened to you?’ Andy asked.

  ‘I didny say nothin’ to the polis,’ Mulgrew whimpered. ‘Honest, mister – I didny say a fuckin’ word.’

  ‘Then it’s about time you did.’

  ‘What are you on about?’ Mulgrew’s voice was shaking. ‘I willny say nothin’.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you will. You’re going to tell the cops what happened to you – and who did it.’

  ‘Are you aff your fuckin’ heid? If I shop Jim Colvin, he’ll kill me!’

  ‘This has got nothing to do with Jim Colvin,’ Andy stated. ‘I’m not asking you to shop him. I’m telling you to shop me and the boy here. The boy’s name’s Gavin, by the way, he’s my nephew. You happen to know his name because you heard me mention it on Saturday night when we claimed you. You’re going to go to the polis right now and you’re going to
tell them that me and Gavin grabbed you downstairs in the bog on Saturday night and that we nailed your hand to the cubicle door.’

  ‘But it was…… it was you and Jim Colvin,’ Mulgrew stammered.

  ‘Not at all! Your memory’s playing tricks on you, Mulgrew. Jim Colvin wasn’t anywhere near this place. It was me and Gavin who claimed you. And the reason we did it was because you owed me five hundred quid. Have you got that? You owed me five hundred quid – not Jim Colvin.’

  ‘What are you guys playing at?’ Mulgrew whimpered.

  ‘We’re not playing, pal.’ Taking a firm grip of Mulgrew’s bandaged hand, Andy started to squeeze it hard. ‘You’re going to go to the cops right now,’ he whispered forcibly in Mulgrew’s ear, ‘and you’re going to file an official complaint. You’re going to make a statement, telling the polis that you know who nailed your hand to the bog door. Under no circumstances will you mention Jim Colvin’s name. Do you understand what I’m saying?’ Mulgrew nodded as he swallowed hard. ‘And don’t mess up,’ Carter added, releasing Mulgrew’s hand and reaching underneath the table to take a firm grip of his testicles. ‘Because if you get this wrong, I’ll be back. And it won’t be your hand I’ll be nailing to the bog door next time. It’ll be these,’ he said, gradually tightening his grip. Beads of perspiration broke out on Mulgrew’s forehead and his eyes started to bulge. ‘Have you got that?’

  ‘Aye!’ Mulgrew yelped.

  Slowly relaxing his grip, Carter handed Mulgrew a slip of paper on which the names “Andy Carter” and “Gavin” were written. ‘These are the names you’re going to give to the polis. You’re going to tell them that Gavin held your hand against the door while I hammered in the nail. Do you understand that?’ Mulgrew nodded, wild-eyed. ‘And one more thing,’ Carter added, prodding his index finger hard into Mulgrew’s chest. ‘One very important thing. You’re going to tell the cops at what time it happened – which was exactly half-past ten.’