17 - Death's Door

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Okay,’ said Mackie. ‘I was just wondering, that’s all.’

  McGuire leaned back in his chair. ‘Come on, Brian, out with it.’

  ‘I’ve just been in to see the chief. He’s just had a call from Amanda Dennis, the acting director general of MI5, telling him that her duty officer had occasion to phone Shannon late last night to complain about one of our people, not in Special Branch, making enquiries about an e-mail address and a mobile number that are on a sensitive list.’

  ‘Do we know what she did about it?’

  ‘Not from her, but Mrs Dennis told Jimmy that she called back shortly afterwards to say that it had been taken care of.’

  ‘I can see why you’re asking about Steele. His investigation is the only thing we’ve got live at the moment that would trigger that sort of incident. So why did Dennis call the chief?’

  ‘I think she just wanted to make sure that it had been put to bed, because of the individual involved, the person whose identity MI5 were protecting. She told the chief, and this mustn’t leave this room, that it was Bob Skinner.’

  ‘Fuckin’ hell!’ the head of CID exploded. ‘It must have been Montell doing the digging,’ he continued. ‘Stevie told me that he was going through Zrinka Boras’s computer records to see if they threw up any recent contacts. I’d guess he was checking her incoming e-mails, and found one from him.’

  ‘What are we going to do about it?’

  The chief superintendent chuckled. ‘Hey, Brian, you’re the man from the Command Corridor. You tell me.’

  Mackie ran his hand over his bald dome in a trademark gesture. ‘No, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to order you to do anything. This is a major investigation, and if you think this information will have any bearing on it, you’re at liberty to advise Steele, and have him show you the content of the e-mail. If the pair of you feel it necessary, you’re authorised to visit Bob, to tell him about it.’

  ‘You mean interview him, as in eliminate him from our enquiries? Thanks, pal, for dropping this one in my lap.’

  ‘What’s your thinking?’

  McGuire gazed at him, hard. ‘My thinking, Brian, sir, is that I can spot the buck being passed a mile off, especially when it’s aimed at me. Well, I’m not catching it. I’m saying fuck-all to Steele, and I’m going to pretend that you haven’t been here. Can you imagine, for one second, what would happen if we did what you’re hinting at? No, if we even discussed it, and one hint of that conversation found its way to the media?’

  ‘Yes, but . . .’

  ‘Brian, do some joined-up thinking here. Why do you think that the security service keeps an eye on big Bob’s private e-mail and mobile numbers? I know he’s a heavy and everything else, and that he’s been well involved with them over the years, but it’s more than that. You and I both know that he’s not just the DCC any more, he’s the partner of Aileen de Marco, this country’s First Minister.’

  Forty-seven

  When Steele collected him from his apartment building DC Griff Montell looked a different man from the one he had encountered on his arrival at the office. He was clean-shaven and well scrubbed. He had changed from the previous day’s clothes into black cords and leather jacket, worn over a white shirt that looked as if it might have been taken from the packet in which it had left Marks & Spencer. Only his brown-tinted sunglasses offered any hint that he might be feeling less than fresh as a daisy.

  ‘Do we know where Amy’s salon is?’ he asked, as he slid into the passenger seat beside the detective inspector.

  ‘Yes, it’s along Raeburn Place, just before you get to Edinburgh Accies’ rugby ground. There’s a big clue. It’s got “Mervyn” over the door.’

  Steele found a parking place in the side-street beside the sports ground. As he had said, the hair salon was only a few yards away. As they entered they saw a girl’s back, as she bent over a customer, rubbing so vigorously at her head that Montell winced. At first he thought that she was Amy, until she stood straight and he realised that she was older and taller.

  As they stood in the doorway a man came towards them, tall, slim, in his thirties and wearing a violet smock that almost reached the ground. ‘Good morning, officers,’ he said. ‘I’m Mervyn. What can I do for you?’

  Steele smiled. ‘It’s that obvious, eh?’

  Mervyn eyed Montell up and down. ‘You don’t look like the public-health department, that’s for sure.’

  ‘We’d like to see Amy Noone, please.’

  ‘So would I. I’ve got four clients in already, and she hasn’t turned up. I know she was upset yesterday, but I really need her.’

  ‘Has she called in sick?’

  ‘No, and that’s the bugger of it. She doesn’t seem to be at home. I called her half an hour ago, but got no answer. Her big fat boyfriend doesn’t know where she is either; I rang him too. He told me that they had a drink last night, and that it seemed to cheer her up a bit.’

  ‘Indeed? Well, thanks, er, Mervyn. We’ll go and check her place anyway, just in case she was in the toilet when you rang her. When we find her we’ll give her a lecture about responsibility, and advise her to get along here, pronto.’

  ‘Don’t be hard on her,’ said the hairdresser. ‘She’s never let me down before, and she really was in a state when she heard about Zrinka and Harry.’

  ‘We’ll be gentle as piglets,’ Steele promised him.

  Amy Noone’s tiny apartment was in a cul-de-sac off a side-street from Comely Bank Avenue. Once it had been a garage, or even a stable, but in common with most of the buildings of its type in Edinburgh, it had been converted for human habitation. It was one floor up, but the entrance was at ground level, with a buzzer and intercom. Montell leaned on the button for a few seconds. They waited, but no sound came from the speaker grille.

  ‘No luck,’ the DC exclaimed. ‘Maybe she’s gone home to her mum for a day or two. Come on, Amy,’ he called out, ‘you’re holding up our investigation.’ He thumped the black door with the side of his right fist. It swung open.

  ‘Jesus, Griff,’ said Steele, ‘you haven’t broken the bloody lock, have you?’

  Montell peered at the door frame. ‘No, boss, I haven’t; it must have been on the latch.’

  ‘Careless,’ the inspector murmured, ‘or . . . Let’s take a look.’

  A short narrow staircase, with rails on either side, rose up to the little flat. Steele led the way, opened the door to the living area, stepped inside and stopped in his tracks. ‘Aw, fuck!’ he moaned.

  Amy Noone was lying on her back in the centre of the room, facing the morning sun and bathed in its light as it streamed through a big dormer window. She was naked, and her face was peaceful, as if she was in a dreamless sleep. Her dark hair, which had been in a ponytail when they had visited her the day before, was loose and neatly arranged, allowing them to see that it was streaked with honey-blonde highlights. Her arms were stretched out by her sides, palms down.

  ‘The bastard,’ Montell hissed. ‘This is just too much.’

  Steele saw that behind the glasses his eyes were squeezed tight shut. ‘Hey,’ he said gently. ‘Hold it together.’

  The DC nodded. ‘I will, boss, don’t worry. But you and Tarvil were talking to this kid only yesterday, and now look at her. Why the hell did he need to kill Amy? She wasn’t an artist.’

  ‘Neither was Harry.’

  ‘His body was hidden. Amy’s is laid out just like the other two.’

  ‘Yes. Now let’s stop making assumptions and get back to being professional about this. Don’t move; stay exactly where you are and look around. What do you see?’

  Montell did as he had been ordered: slowly, carefully, he gazed round the room, doing his best to take in every detail. ‘I see a pink towelling dressing-gown, thrown over one of the dining chairs. There’s a T-shirt on top of it, and a pair of pants on the floor beside the gate-leg.’

  ‘Yes, go on.’

  ‘I see two mugs on the work surface, next to the
sink beside the kettle, and a jar of coffee with the lid off. And a spoon. There are coffee granules spilled on the work surface.’

  ‘What don’t you see?’

  The detective looked around the room for a second time, and then a third. ‘A bed,’ he replied eventually. ‘This is a studio apartment, she was in her night clothes at one point before she took them off, but I don’t see her bed.’

  ‘No,’ said Steele, ‘because it folds up into the wall, there, between those two cupboard doors. See? The legs are hinged and they tuck away too, but you can see four marks on the carpet where they stand when it’s down. She didn’t undress for this guy, Griff; probably the opposite. She dressed to let him in, and he stripped her again, after she was dead.’

  ‘How did he get in?’

  ‘He talked himself in.’

  ‘Or she knew him.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Steele conceded, ‘but if she knew him, would she have bothered to put her bed away? Take a good look at her hair; the ends are still wet. Go into the bathroom; touch nothing, but go and look.’

  Montell stepped over to the studio’s only other door and opened it, then looked inside. ‘The shower’s been used today,’ he called out. ‘There’s a damp towel on the floor, and a plastic cap.’

  ‘Yes, now go and take a look at her T-shirt. I would, but I want to keep movement in here to a minimum: it’s a confined space.’

  ‘Okay.’ Steele waited. ‘There are damp patches on it.’

  ‘I thought there would be. Are you getting the same picture as me? Amy’s just got up. She’s had a shower, being careful to keep her hair as dry as she can. She’s a stylist: she won’t do her own hair; she and her colleagues will go to work on each other’s after the salon closes. Trust me on this: I’ve been out with a couple of hairdressers in my time, and both of them asked where my shower cap was.

  ‘She’s almost finished drying herself,’ the DI continued, ‘when the buzzer goes. She answers it, and the killer’s there. She lets him in, but not before she’s put on the T-shirt, her knickers and the dressing-gown, and pushed the bed back into its alcove. He talks to her for a bit. She’s just up and hasn’t had breakfast, so she asks him if he’d like a coffee. He says, “yes, please,” so she goes over to the sink, fills the kettle, and she’s spooning coffee into the two mugs when he shoots her in the back of the head. He strips her, lays her out like this and then leaves.’

  ‘God,’ Montell whispered, ‘it’s like we were in the room when it happened, watching it.’

  ‘I wish we had been,’ Steele murmured. ‘Then we could have stopped the fucker.’

  ‘Why’s she naked? Neither Stacey nor Zrinka were.’

  ‘He did them in public places. He didn’t have time.’

  ‘And Padstow had already seen them naked.’

  Steele scratched his chin. ‘I was at both post-mortems. Stacey Gavin was a pretty girl, but her body wasn’t especially attractive. She had a thick waist and a big brown mole on her side, below her left breast. Zrinka had a figure like a model, but it was disfigured by a vivid appendectomy scar. On the other hand, Army’s flawless; she’s unmarked, and her skin’s like fine china. Maybe he has a thing about perfection. Or maybe the sod just wanted to see Army naked, to humiliate her for her open dislike of him.’

  ‘Wouldn’t he have been taking a hell of a risk, calling at that time of the morning? A lot of people must have been going to work. There’s a big chance he’ll have been spotted.’

  ‘Not as big as you think. The salon doesn’t open till ten, remember, and it’s just round the corner. He could have sat here, waited till it was quiet and then made his move.’

  ‘Would she have let Padstow in? She didn’t like him.’

  ‘That’s what she said, but you never know, that may have been loyalty to her friends.’

  ‘Let’s go back to the why, sir. Why kill Amy? What reason could there have been?’

  ‘The most obvious one is that she would have been a key witness in any trial. She was the only person who could have stood in the witness box, pointed to Padstow and identified him as the guy who was chucked by both of the female victims, then followed into Zrinka’s affections, and bed, by Harry Paul.’

  ‘In that case, is there anyone else who could identify him? Zrinka’s mother, for example?’

  ‘She never met him. They only spoke on the phone. But Russ and Doreen Gavin did. Griff, let’s back out of here, get uniforms to seal the place off, and call in Arthur Dorward and his fine-tooth combers. Once that’s under way, we need to get to South Queensferry, not just to talk to Russ Gavin but to make sure he and his wife are still in one piece. I’m going to send a car there right away, but meantime, without alarming her if I can avoid it, give her a call.’

  Forty-eight

  ‘Maybe it’s Tuesday.’

  ‘What?’ Tarvil Singh exclaimed, gazing bewildered at Ray Wilding, leaning back in his chair with his feet on the desk as he gazed at the chart on the wall.

  ‘I’ve just noticed. Both murders were on Tuesday: the first Tuesday in March and the first Tuesday in May. Maybe that’s the real link between them and we’ve been missing it all along.’

  ‘In that case we’ve got a bit less than two months to catch this guy before he does it again.’

  ‘Bags of time.’ Wilding sighed. ‘Where does all that take us?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’ Singh grunted.

  ‘The information we got from Mrs Dell and her boy.’

  ‘Nowhere forward that I can see. Okay, there’s a new connection between all three victims, in that they all had the same agent, but we knew they were linked before we went up there. Okay, if you look at the three of them, Zrinka was very much the focal point, but we knew that too. For what it’s worth, I’m still looking at Padstow and, right now, I don’t think the DI will be handing out prizes for heading off in any other direction . . . like your Tuesday theory, for example.’

  ‘No, he won’t. You’re spot on there; that’s one I will definitely leave on the back burner. What have you got on your desk?’

  ‘Calls while we were out. Two alleged sightings of the subject, and one . . . Hey, this is interesting: one from the woman I spoke to yesterday at the passport agency.’

  ‘Why does everything have to be an agency these days?’ Wilding mused, idly.

  ‘So that the government can kid people on that the public sector is smaller than it really is.’

  ‘That’s a very profound analysis from a big lummox of a detective constable.’

  ‘And that’s more than a shade sarky from an idle dick of a detective sergeant. Actually, I’m quoting my old man; he’s so far to the right politically that he’d join the British National Party, if they allowed guys with turbans to be members.’

  ‘In that case he wouldn’t approve of public money being wasted in meaningless chatter. Are you going to answer those phone calls or not?’

  ‘If you’ll shut up and let me.’ Singh picked up his phone and dialled the passport service direct line number that had been left for him. He swore. ‘Got it wrong. Your fault for sidetracking me.’ He redialled and this time heard the ringing tone.

  ‘Roberta Savage,’ said a voice at the other end of the line, in an accent with West Indian overtones.

  ‘Hello, it’s Tarvil Singh here, up in Edinburgh. You rang when I was out. What is it? Have you found Dominic Padstow after all?’

  She laughed. ‘No, don’t build your hopes up. Our database never lies, and it’s impossible to hide in it. No, something happened today that I thought you’d be interested in. Somebody else has been asking after the same non-existent person.’ She leaned on the second syllable of the last word. ‘He’s a popular chap, this Mr Padstow of yours.’

  ‘Let’s just say he’s much sought after. Who was it that rang you?’

  ‘He didn’t ring me. It was one of my team who took the call; I just happened to be close by and heard the name being mentioned. I waited until he was finished and then I quizzed him. T
he call came from a man called Dailey, Patrick Dailey, from the Home Office.’

  ‘You mean the security service?’

  ‘No, I don’t. This chap’s in the immigration division.’

  ‘How did your colleague deal with it?’

  Roberta Savage laughed. ‘By the book. He told him that we were established as an agency to protect people from intrusion like this, and that he should go away and get legal authority.’

  ‘And did he?’

  ‘Actually he didn’t need to do that: my colleague hadn’t seen a newspaper this morning, so he had no idea that Padstow is a suspect in your investigation. But it seems that Dailey didn’t know that either: he tried to bully my man, “I’m from your Head Office” sort of thing, but when he found that he couldn’t, he gave up.

  ‘I was suspicious about the approach, and so I called him back myself, to verify that he was who he said he was. I asked him the reason for his enquiry. He got evasive, and told me he wasn’t at liberty to say, but that it didn’t really matter. In return, I told him to go away and read the Data Protection Act.’

  ‘Nice one.’ Singh chuckled. He imagined that crossing Ms Savage might be a mistake. In the background he heard another phone ring, but paid no attention.

  ‘Do you have any idea what this might have been about?’ she asked him. ‘Yours is clearly a Scottish investigation; it has nothing to do with the Home Office. I know this, for I worked there myself before transferring here.’

  ‘I have no idea, but I’m pretty sure that my boss is going to want me to find out. You didn’t run across this man in your time there, did you?’

  ‘No. He’s new. I checked with a chum: he moved there last year, on a sideways transfer from the DTI.’

  ‘Okay. Thanks for the information, Roberta. I’ll see how my DI wants me to play it.’

  ‘Keep my name out of it, please.’

  ‘Absolutely, Roger. That’ll be no problem.’ She laughed again, and hung up.

  Singh did the same, then entered her number into his personal contact book. When he was finished, he turned to Wilding. ‘That was interesting, we’ve got competition from the Home Office. They’re asking about Padstow too. When’s the DI back?’