14 - Stay of Execution

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘So what’s the conclusion?’

  ‘It’s all pointing to them being off to parts unknown with the bank’s million. Tomorrow we start taking a serious look into her background.’

  ‘Hold on, though. Maybe they’ve just gone off for a long weekend without telling anyone,’ Maggie suggested.

  ‘Hah,’ Stevie exclaimed. ‘One day in the new job and you’re thinking like a plod already.’

  ‘Hey! That’s Chief Superintendent Plod, if you don’t mind.’ She grinned as she drove. ‘But you’re right; that’s where it points. So why did Ivor top himself, in that case?’

  ‘The cancer, I suppose. If he did top himself, that is. What if he found out about the fake company and was about to expose her?’

  ‘Indeed.’ She paused. ‘By the way, speaking of topping oneself, while you were out on the chase with Mary, I had a call from my ex, very upset. Remember his American visitor?’

  ‘The New Yorker? Yes.’

  ‘Well, last night he had supper at Paula’s, walked back to the Malmaison and into the docks, wrapped a heavy chain around his middle and jumped in.’

  Stevie whistled in the darkened car. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t remember Paula’s cooking being that bad.’

  55

  The Archbishop’s residence was an anonymous villa in an anonymous Edinburgh suburb. Bob Skinner had never been there before, and so as he parked in the street outside and turned into the driveway, he expected to find a sober place with white-curtained windows and a monastic look.

  What he saw was a light, airy garden strewn with plaster sculptures and with fountains playing musically on either side of the pathway. There was a garage to the left with a Chrysler PT Cruiser parked in front and a Suzuki SV1000 . . . a very serious motorcycle, the DCC knew . . . alongside it.

  Father Angelo Collins opened the door in answer to his ring of the bell. ‘Whose is the bike?’ Skinner asked the young priest. ‘Yours?’

  ‘You have to be kidding.’ Archbishop Gainer’s voice came from within the hallway. ‘This boy thinks a Ford Fiesta’s a bit racy. No, that’s my toy out there. I saw Easy Rider when I was a kid and I was hooked. Come in, Bob. Actually, I’ve been meaning to get in touch with you. Come on through to my study.’

  He led the way to a room at the back of the big, airy house, furnished with a desk, swivel chair and two armchairs. There was a flat-screen computer monitor on the desk, and a television in the corner. ‘Sit down, Bob,’ he said, collapsing into one of the armchairs. He was wearing black cords and a grey sweatshirt with one word, ‘GOD’, in large letters on the front. He saw it catch Skinner’s eye as he sat opposite him and grinned. ‘If you support a team, you have to wear the colours,’ he said. ‘What about that poor Belgian? What’s the story?’ he asked, then paused. ‘Sorry, how inhospitable can I get? Would you like a beer?’

  ‘I’d like several . . . I have to go to witness a post mortem . . . but I daren’t have even one. About the Belgian, that should be plural, not singular.’ He told Gainer about Jack McGurk’s discovery half-way through his so-called routine interviews. ‘Dan Pringle called me when I was on my way here. He’s been in touch with the Humberside police. They’ve got no witnesses, they’ve got no vehicle, but they do still have the body, pending shipment back to Belgium. Pringle’s contact told him some very interesting stuff. The man Hanno was hit by a heavy vehicle going fast. They reckon it was an off-roader or a pick-up; whatever it was it had bull-bars, because the marks of them could be seen clearly on the victim’s shattered legs. The most significant thing was what they didn’t find.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Skidmarks. There were none on the road where the body was found. None at all. That means . . .’

  ‘I know what it means,’ the Archbishop intervened. ‘It means that the driver didn’t even try to stop, but just steamed straight through the poor bloke.’

  ‘Correct; and that in turn says to me this was a deliberate hit-and-run. I’ve never seen a fatal involving a drunk where the driver didn’t brake hard and leave some sort of trace on the road.’

  ‘What about the other one, Lebeau, the one who was poisoned?’

  ‘It changes our thinking altogether. We’re no longer inclined to believe that he was a random victim of a contaminated product. We know the tube that killed him was bought in Newcastle on Friday while the band was there.’

  ‘By one of them, do you think?’

  ‘Not possible, they were playing at the time. I guess it was bought there to make it look as if Lebeau had bought it himself, and to make us react in exactly the way we did, by blowing the whistle and starting a national product recall.’

  ‘Do you think these two men were picked out, or were they random victims within the band?’

  ‘We don’t know for sure, but on the evidence we have at the moment, they’re random. Hanno ran out of fags and went to get more from their bus; that’s why he was outside. How could the driver of the car have known that was going to happen? It suggests that he was just waiting for any one of them. In that case,’ he continued, ‘we’ll have to give the whole bloody lot protection from now on. I’ve booked them into a hotel . . .’

  ‘The Church will pay for that,’ Gainer told him at once.

  Skinner smiled. ‘Thanks for that. I’m glad I didn’t have to ask you.’ His expression grew serious once more. ‘There is something, though. What is it with these people? Why are they here at all?’

  ‘I wish I could tell you,’ the Archbishop murmured, ‘but I can’t, for I’ve been asking that myself. Without bragging, Bob, I’m probably closer to the Holy Father than anyone except his brother, but not even I know why he’s invited the Bastogne Drummers to play at his rally. If you want answers, you’ll have to ask him yourself.’

  The DCC’s gaze went to the ceiling. ‘Not me, Your Grace,’ he said. ‘There are very few occasions when I hide behind my chief constable, but this will be one of them. If anyone’s going to question the Pope as a potential witness in a murder inquiry it’s going to be him!’

  He turned to leave, and the Archbishop moved to show him to the door. As they went along the hall, he asked, ‘What’s happened to you, Bob?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that, compared to last week, you’re a different man.’

  Skinner glanced sideways at him. ‘You sure, Jim? Are you sure it isn’t the old one coming back?’

  56

  As was the case with many pubs, Monday was the quietest evening of the week in the Wee Black Dug. There were fewer than a dozen customers in the saloon when McGuire walked in and Malky Gladsmuir was behind the bar with only one assistant.

  ‘What can I get you, sir?’ he asked, eyeing the detective up and down.

  ‘A pint of seventy and your undivided attention.’

  ‘Oh, aye?’ said Gladsmuir, giving a slight smirk as he started to draw the beer.

  The detective looked him dead in the eye. ‘I want you to think hard about this,’ he said, under his breath. ‘Do you want to cross me? I mean it, do you reckon you want to get on my bad side?’

  ‘Fancy yourself, do you?’ Gladsmuir growled, but there was a tiny flicker of hesitation in his voice.

  ‘All the fucking way, Malky, and any time you like. Now you listen, and take note; the name is Detective Superintendent McGuire, and I’m not here to bring you good news. My predecessor probably came across to you as a guy you could keep stringing along. A wee bit of info here, another wee bit there, and you were left alone to get on with whatever fucking scams you run in this place.’

  ‘Ah run a straight pub. You ask your guys.’

  ‘Like hell you do. You hammered that drug-dealer because he moved gear in your bar . . .’

  ‘That’s right. See what I mean?’

  ‘. . . without giving you a cut,’ McGuire concluded. ‘Greg Jay might have placed too much trust in human goodness to have figured that one out, but I’m not like him. So if you want any sort of s
lack . . . and that will not include drugs being dealt in here, by the way, not ever again . . . you will do what I tell you.’ He took a deep swallow of the beer. ‘Not bad,’ he conceded. ‘The first thing I’m going to tell you is this. We pulled a friend of mine out of the Albert Dock this morning.’

  ‘Another copper, I hope,’ the bar manager mumbled.

  ‘In your office, now.’ McGuire pointed to the door behind him and stepped through the hatch. He followed Gladsmuir into the private room, closed the door behind them, and in one continuous movement swung his right fist up and buried it in his belly. The breath left him in a groan and he sat down hard on the floor.

  The detective stood over him, glaring down with angry, dangerous eyes; Malky Gladsmuir had the good sense to be scared. ‘You might be a hard man in your own league,’ McGuire said quietly, ‘but you’re not in mine, so don’t you ever show disrespect to a police officer in front of me. As I was saying, we recovered the body of a friend of mine from the water this morning. There are a few questions in my mind that still need answers, and I want you to help me. My pal left my partner’s place at about ten last night . . . she lives in the warehouse conversion just off Great Junction Street; you know the one I mean. He walked from there, back to the Malmaison Hotel, only he never went in there. They’re trying to say he jumped, and maybe he did, but I need to be certain. We called in here for a pint earlier; you were off duty, but there were a few people in. On his way back, he’d have gone past this place, more or less. I want you to ask around, and I want you to find out if any of your regulars remembers seeing him. He was about six feet tall, slim built, but he was wearing a big heavy jacket so he’d have looked quite bulky. If that does ring any bells, I need to know also whether there was anyone else around, anyone, or maybe more than one person, who might have been following him.’

  Gladsmuir looked up at him from the floor. ‘I’ll see what I can do.’ He winced.

  ‘No, you’ll fucking do it. I’ll bet Greg Jay gave you his direct line number, didn’t he?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Well, that’s my number now. Call me on it as soon as you’ve got anything for me. And don’t get cute and make up any stories to get me off your back. So far you’ve only seen my friendly side.’

  57

  ‘Hey,’ said Skinner, quietly, as he helped Sarah fasten her sterilised blue gown, ‘before we go in, there’s something I want to tell you. I’m sorry I leaned on you to do this; moral blackmail isn’t very nice and I wish I hadn’t said what I did, about you letting me down. It wasn’t right, and it wasn’t even true.’

  ‘Sure it was true,’ she replied. ‘That was how you saw it at the time, and if you were being honest with yourself rather than simply trying to be nice to me, you’d see that it still is. I’ve got no ethical problem with doing this; my reluctance was personal. So can we please stop saying sorry to each other? It’s all right for us to disagree, Bob, and it doesn’t even matter who’s right and who’s wrong.’ She pulled on her cap. ‘Now let’s do this thing.’

  She led the way from the dressing room into the autopsy theatre, where a postgraduate pathology student and a police photographer were waiting, standing over the body of Colin Mawhinney as it lay on the stainless table, naked, washed clean, white, still and cold.

  She went straight to work, running through the preliminaries, giving the corpse a thorough external examination, speaking into the microphone above her head as she did so, dictating the notes that she would type up later. ‘I can find no marks on the body,’ she said, ‘no signs of injury, not even any old scars.’ She turned and nodded to the photographer, who snapped off a couple of shots. ‘I’m now going to look inside the mouth,’ she continued, picking up a spatula, and pulling the jaws apart. ‘Inside, I can see traces of weed, and general debris that’s come from immersion. That’s what I would expect. We’ll take samples later. Let’s have a look at the hands now.’

  When the first phase was complete, she turned to the student. ‘Mike, I want you to do a couple of strong compressions on the chest wall. Not too strong, though; mustn’t break any ribs.’ As the young man did as she had asked, she turned to her witness husband. ‘Do you know what this is for?’

  ‘No.’>

  ‘It’s . . . Wait a minute. Yes. Come here.’ Reluctantly, he followed her beckoning finger. ‘Do you see that foam, around the nostrils and mouth?’ He leaned over and saw as she had described, a light froth, white, with a very faint pink tinge. ‘That’s a vital sign,’ she told him. ‘It’s a mix of water, air, mucus and a little blood, whisked up by respiratory efforts. Basically it tells us before we do anything else that he was alive when he went into the water.’

  ‘We never doubted that,’ said Skinner.

  ‘Well, you know for sure now. Okay, I’m ready to begin the internal examination. In the circumstances,’ she said to her assistant, ‘I’m going straight for the lungs.’ Skinner backed off, quickly; when she picked up her scalpel, he cheated, as he always had done at that moment in every autopsy he had witnessed, by staring into the lights, blinding himself to what was going on before him. He could not shut out the sounds, though, as she opened the abdominal cavity then spread the ribs.

  As she worked, her assistant came to join her on the opposite side of the table, mercifully blocking Skinner’s view. He knew what they were doing, and he tried not to imagine it, but as always he failed. She removed the lungs, and placed them in a wide dry basin, which the assistant hooked on to a scale. ‘Seventeen hundred and ninety grams,’ he announced.

  ‘That indicates that they’re still full of water,’ said Sarah, as the student laid the organs on a steel bench. Leaving the opened corpse, she walked round the dissection table and began to examine them. ‘They’re voluminous and ballooned,’ she called out, speaking up for the microphone. ‘The pleural surface appears marbled; they feel doughy and are pitting on pressure. I’m going to start to section now.’ The assistant came over to her with several dishes ready to receive tissue samples. ‘But first, I’m going to be a little unconventional and aspirate some of the water content.’ She reached out and selected a syringe with a long needle, inserted it carefully into the lower lobe of the right lung and began to draw off liquid.

  ‘Bob,’ she called out, when she was finished, ‘I think you should see this.’

  Her husband tore his eyes away from the bright, near-blinding light. ‘Must I?’ he replied.

  ‘Oh yes, you must.’

  He blinked hard as he walked round to her, trying to restore some focus to his vision. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I’m not going to make you look at any squidgy bits, but tell me,’ she held up the syringe, ‘what you make of that.’

  He peered at the fluid in the chamber. ‘It’s slightly pink,’ he murmured.

  ‘Blood traces; to be expected. Anything else?’

  ‘Nothing I can see.’

  ‘Exactly. And that’s what’s giving me a problem.’

  She laid down the syringe, and turned to him. ‘Go on,’ she said, ‘get your large ass out of here.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You heard. I don’t need you here any longer; Mike’s a witness, the photographer’s a witness. This autopsy has just become anything but routine. I am going to have to work super-carefully from here on. I’m going to have to take several sections of the lungs from different lobe locations, central and peripheral. I’m going to have to take samples of the stomach contents, and do a lot of other testing. I do not need the distraction of having you in the room and wondering all the time when you’re going to puke.’

  She patted his chest. ‘Thanks, you’ve got me this far, after I was reluctant to do this; now the best way you can support me is by digging out a technician, regardless of the time of day it is, to take water samples from the part of the dock where the body was found. We’ll need to analyse them. After that, you can go home . . . but don’t wait up for me: I could be some time.’

  58

  The top hinge of t
he front door squeaked. It had done for the last year, and every two months Bob had promised that he would buy a new tin of Three-in-One and fix it. On the odd occasion, though, it served him well.

  He checked his watch: the time was ten past one. Killing the insomniac’s movie on BBC2 with his remote, he walked into the hall with a glass in each hand. One contained red wine; the other, which he handed to Sarah, was a brandy goblet. ‘That’s been getting warm for the last hour and a half,’ he told her.

  Dropping her briefcase where she stood, she accepted it, gratefully, and took a sip. ‘I told you not to wait up,’ she said, ‘but I’m glad you did.’

  He led her through into the darkened garden room, and dropped into a couch, looking out of the window at the lights of the Fife towns, across the river. ‘Sleep wasn’t an option, not knowing what you’ve been doing.’

  ‘Did you do your part?’ she asked, as she joined him.

  ‘Not personally, but it’s taken care of.’ He glanced at her as she sat beside him. ‘So what’s your story?’

  ‘You’re not going to like it. It’s all subject to confirmation by test, but I don’t believe that Inspector Mawhinney drowned in the Albert Dock. When I checked the stomach, there was dirty, oily water present, and other detritus that almost certainly did come from there, but that need not have been swallowed. It was also present in the large airways, but it need not have been inhaled. It wasn’t in large quantities in the stomach, and it wasn’t present in the further reaches of the bronchus. You saw the water I aspirated with that syringe; it was clear, and it was abundant in the lower areas of the lungs. It may also have diluted the dock water in the stomach. Bob, I think that he was drowned in fresh water and was put in the dock afterwards, weighted down with that chain to make him sink.’

  He leaned back and let out a huge sigh. ‘You’re right about one thing, without any lab confirmation. You haven’t exactly made my night. Was there anything else?’