19 - Fatal Last Words

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Kid-glove treatment?’

  ‘No. By the book, but nothing that smells of harassment. Regan will probably need a statement from me. Tell him I’ll take care of it. What’s he doing now?’

  ‘Heading for the campsite to see what he can find out about Mustafic; to interview the travellers and, if he can, to check out their tool kits, to see who’s got a big hammer, ideally one with blood, bone and brains sticking to it.’

  ‘Hah,’ Skinner barked, sourly. ‘We should be so lucky.’ He fell silent, but only for a few seconds. ‘What about the Glover investigation? How’s that going on? What about Anderson?’

  ‘Even as we speak,’ McIlhenney replied, ‘the smooth young knuckles of Detective Inspector Pye should be chapping on his door.’

  ‘Good. Let’s hope he’s in.’

  Thirty-eight

  ‘Not you people again,’ Bruce Anderson exclaimed through the small loudspeaker in the doorway of the Darnaway Street building. ‘I’ve given you my formal statement; now let that be an end of it and go away.’

  ‘I can’t do that, sir,’ Pye insisted. ‘Now let us in, if you please.’

  ‘And if I don’t please?’

  ‘Then an officer will break it down.’

  ‘Are you serious, man? You wait there while I phone your chief constable. We’ll see what he has to say about this.’

  ‘No, sir, I will not wait. Either you will open this door in the next ten seconds, or PC Childs here will; it’ll be a lot quieter for the neighbours if it’s you who does it.’

  ‘This is outrageous,’ Anderson snapped, but a second later a buzz came from the small speaker, and a click sounded in the lock. The DI pushed it open, leading Haddock and half a dozen uniformed officers inside and up the staircase to the first floor. The door to the flat remained closed. Seeing no bell, Pye knocked, softly, then took a pace back as it swung open, watching anger follow astonishment across the former Secretary of State’s face as he took in the throng on the landing. ‘Good God Almighty!’ he shouted. ‘What is the meaning of this?’

  Sauce Haddock handed him a twice-folded sheet of A4 paper. ‘This is a warrant to search these premises, sir,’ he said, ‘and also to search your clinic. It was issued by the Sheriff this morning.’

  ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘The search relates to our investigation into the murder of Ainsley Glover,’ Pye told him. ‘Is there anyone else in the house, sir?’

  ‘No. Lady Walters and my daughter have gone to Harvey Nichols.’

  ‘Good. That means we don’t have to remove them from the premises while we search.’

  Anderson scanned the warrant. ‘This appears to be genuine,’ he said, ‘but you’re searching nothing unless my solicitor is present.’

  ‘Sorry, sir, but we are; the search will be filmed and you may remain present for the duration, but I’m not obliged to let anyone else in here, and I don’t plan to do so. Now I suggest that you allow us to come inside and do our job. I assure you that we’ll be as quiet, neat and discreet as we can.’ For a moment the DI thought that Anderson was going to try to block his way, but finally he stood aside.

  Pye led the squad into the flat. ‘Begin with the bedrooms, Constable,’ he told Haddock as the squad crowded into the narrow hallway, ‘then the bathroom, kitchen, the study, and finally the living room. Dr Anderson and I will be in there while you’re at work. Film everything you find, in situ, before you remove it. Doctor, if you’d like to come with me.’

  ‘I’m going to have your nuts in the crusher for this,’ the politician murmured, softly but with feeling, as he followed the detective into the room where he had received him and McIlhenney a little less that twenty-four hours earlier.

  ‘Don’t threaten me, sir,’ Pye replied calmly. ‘You’re in a vulnerable situation; don’t make it worse.’

  ‘What do you mean vulnerable?’

  ‘You’ve lied to us, yesterday, and again this morning when you gave my colleagues a formal signed statement.’

  ‘Lied to you?’ The man’s eyes narrowed, and for the first time he looked unsure of himself. ‘Regarding what, precisely?’

  ‘I’ve got a problem with your account of your whereabouts at the time of Mr Glover’s death. Your statement has you returning home from the Book Festival party at around eleven thirty, and staying put. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The inspector looked him in the eye. ‘So how does that tally,’ he asked, ‘with the version of a witness who saw you heading back up North Charlotte Street, towards the square, just before midnight?’

  Anderson’s facial muscles froze, but only for a second or so. ‘It doesn’t,’ he snapped, ‘which means that your witness mistook me for somebody else.’

  ‘My witness wasn’t alone, Dr Anderson.’ He spoke the truth, without adding that he had still to ask Sandy Rankin’s companions, Jock Fisher and Ryan McCool, whether they, too, had seen him. ‘You really don’t want to mess me about any longer,’ he added. ‘You are a suspect, make no mistake about it, a very strong suspect at that. You fit the profile of the person we’re after; you showed strong antagonism towards the victim, you have medical expertise and you were seen heading towards the place where he was killed.’

  ‘But I wasn’t!’

  ‘Doctor, I urge you to consider your position. You were seen in North Charlotte Street twice. Once by Lord Elmore and his wife, heading home around eleven thirty, and again by others, going in the opposite direction around twenty minutes later.’

  ‘I wasn’t going back to the Book Festival!’ Anderson shouted.

  ‘Then where were you going?’

  ‘I cannot tell you that.’

  ‘You have to, sir. I’ll let you withdraw the statement you signed this morning, without comeback, but you have to be telling me the truth from now on.’

  ‘I cannot do that.’

  ‘In that case—’

  ‘Sir,’ Haddock called from the doorway. ‘Sorry to interrupt, but I wonder if you could join us for a minute.’

  ‘Right now?’

  ‘Yes please.’

  Pye rose from his seat. ‘Excuse me, Dr Anderson.’ He followed the DC from the room, into the hall, past the uniformed bulk of Constable Childs who stood leaning on his unused door ram, and through to a large bedroom. ‘What have you got, Sauce?’ he asked.

  ‘Have a look, sir.’ He pointed the DI into a small dressing room, where a woman police officer stood, holding a pair of high-heeled shoes.

  ‘Not my style, Sauce.’

  ‘I hope not, sir.’ Haddock took one of the shoes and held it upside down. A packet fell out and he caught it neatly. It was clear plastic, filled with a brown powder. ‘I don’t think that’s sugar, boss,’ he said. ‘There’s the same again in the other shoe. Afghanistan’s finest, going by that drugs course I did last month; if I’m wrong you can stick me back in a uniform tomorrow.’

  ‘And me alongside you,’ the inspector murmured. ‘Have you got this locus on video? I want no suggestion that it was planted.’

  ‘Too right we have.’

  ‘OK. Bag the stuff, in the shoes, as you found it, then carry on with the search; I want to find any other drugs that are in here, and the paraphernalia that goes with the stuff. Tear this fucking place apart if you have to. I’ll be busy with Anderson for a while.’

  He turned and walked back through to the drawing room. It was empty. ‘Dr Anderson?’ he called out. He waited for a few moments, frowning, then returned to the hall and checked the bathroom, and then the kitchen. ‘Oh no,’ he whispered, as he retraced his steps. ‘Don’t let this have happened, God, please.’

  There was a door at the far end of the living room. He strode across and threw it open, revealing a study, with a window that looked on to the back of the building, and two doors. The first concealed a cupboard, filled with books and papers. He tried the second, and found it locked, by a Yale, which he opened easily, and by a heavy mortice which he could not. He peere
d through the keyhole and saw enough to make out a stairway, narrower and less grand than the main entrance. ‘Magic,’ he moaned, ‘a first-floor flat with a back door.’

  He went to the window and peered out into a courtyard enclosed by the building in which he stood and by two adjoining streets. There were several parking places, some occupied, some vacant. Blue exhaust smoke hung in the air, and as his gaze found the exit road, he thought he caught a momentary flash of brake lights reflected in the dark polish of a stationary vehicle.

  ‘Fuck it!’ he swore, then dashed back through to the hall. ‘Childs,’ he called to the burly officer in the hallway ‘I’ve got something needs opening; bring the ram that I threatened Anderson with earlier.’

  Thirty-nine

  ‘Wherever this guy came from,’ said George Regan quietly, ‘he didn’t bring much with him.’

  ‘Sorry, sir?’

  The DI turned to his sergeant. ‘I was just thinking that this guy wasn’t big on personal possessions,’ he told her. ‘He has no photographs, no books, nothing at all, other than his passport and the letter from the immigration people giving him indefinite permission to stay in the UK.’ He pointed to a tiny wardrobe, the door of which was open. ‘As for clothes, apart from what he was wearing when he died, he’s got one pair of work boots, a pair of shoes, four shirts, one jacket and two pairs of trousers.’

  Lisa McDermid pulled open the drawer she had just searched. ‘He didn’t change his underwear or his socks too often either, if this is his entire stock in here.’ She looked around the shabby caravan. ‘Imagine living like this.’

  ‘Most of us are pretty comfortable.’ Derek Baillie was standing in the doorway. ‘We’re not all like Az. When he arrived here he was set up by Playfair’s charity. They gave him the van, and his old truck to tow it.’

  ‘And the clothes?’ McDermid asked. ‘The manky old pants here are from British Home Stores.’

  ‘The jacket isn’t,’ Regan pointed out as he checked its pockets. He twisted it on its hanger to show the label. ‘Whatever that is, it’s not English.’

  Baillie held out a hand. ‘Let me see.’ He took the black garment that the detective passed across, peering at the lettering. ‘It’s the Cyrillic alphabet,’ he declared. ‘Bulgarian, I guess, given that’s where Az was from.’

  ‘Did he ever talk about his origins?’

  ‘Not much. I asked him about Sofia once; he said that for him it was a shit-hole with no jobs for casuals, and that he never went near it. He said he was a countryman, and having seen him at work, I can understand that. His skills were rural rather than urban. He was a pretty fair gardener; I took him out on jobs with me whenever I could. I’d service the machinery and he’d test it for me, cutting grass, trimming hedges and so on. He was good at that, but he hadn’t a clue about what made the things work.’ He smiled. ‘Actually, he was a bit better than fair in the garden. He and I did a big house once, down near Lauder. It had a lot of topiary . . . hedge sculptures and such . . . that had been neglected. Az found a pair of shears and went to work; it took him half a day and everything was perfect. There was a vegetable garden too, and it was a shambles. The guy who owned the house was a stockbroker, and he hadn’t a clue. Az told him that he’d no chance of growing maize in that soil, and the bloke said, “OK, sort it out.” So he did. He tore the place apart, junked nearly all of it. I wound up labouring for him, and in a couple of days he had potatoes, carrots, cabbages and leeks, all in neat sections and rows. He was singing away as he worked, in his own language. That was the happiest I ever saw him, but when I said as much, he clammed up. It was odd.’

  ‘In what way?’ asked McDermid.

  ‘The way he looked. It was as if he felt guilty about being so contented. Like I said, I’ve never seen him that way since, the poor wee guy. Resentment and suspicion were never far from the surface with him. I guess he was one of those old-fashioned gypsies, the sort who want as little as possible to do with the other world. Even last night, when we met your boss, I had to lean on him to get him to come, but it was a waste of time. The man was perfectly reasonable, perfectly polite; I understood his point of view, but Az wasn’t having any of it. He drank up and left.’ Baillie shook his head sadly, then handed the jacket back to Regan.

  The inspector took it from him, and made to hang it on its rail; as he moved, the back of his free hand brushed the hem of the garment and felt something hard. He frowned, slipped it from its hanger, turned it inside out and felt inside the shiny lining until he found a tear inside the breast pocket, large enough for him to retrieve the hidden object.

  It was a brown envelope, unsealed, its contents stiff. He drew them out, a small bundle of letters and two photographs, all held together by an elastic band which snapped as soon as he made to release it. He laid the letters on the caravan’s kitchen work surface and looked at the first of the images. It was cracked and its colours had begun to fade, but the woman it portrayed, seated on a grassy hillside, was still strikingly beautiful, with dark hair, high cheekbones and eyes that seemed to grab Regan and capture him. He stared at her, until he realised that his companions were staring at him. The second snapshot showed the same woman, a few years older perhaps, but still as dramatic, standing, flanked by two small children, a boy, no more than a toddler, and a girl, taller and a year or two older; in the background were a caravan and a car.

  The DI glanced at Baillie, then handed the photographs to him. ‘Did he ever mention a family?’

  ‘No,’ the traveller replied. ‘Never. Not once. Do you think this could be his wife and kids?’ He passed the two prints to McDermid as he spoke.

  ‘It needn’t be. Could be his sister and hers.’

  ‘His mother?’ the sergeant suggested. ‘Could the boy be him?’

  ‘Look at the car in the picture with the kids,’ Regan told her. ‘It’s a Volvo. According to Mustafic’s passport he was thirty-eight years old. So if that’s him as a nipper . . . Well, it couldn’t be, end of story. I did enough time on traffic when I was a plod to know that model’s ten years old, fifteen at most. If this is his family, and he left them behind when he came over here, no wonder he was a sad wee bugger.’

  ‘If they are, they need to be told about this,’ McDermid declared.

  ‘In that case,’ said Baillie, ‘you’d better speak to Hugo Playfair. There’s nobody else here who’ll have the faintest idea how to trace them.’

  Forty

  ‘Are you telling me, Sammy,’ Neil McIlhenney asked, in a quiet tone that Pye regarded as a masterpiece of restraint, ‘that in the middle of an interview, in the middle of a search of his premises, you let our only suspect in the Ainsley Glover homicide inquiry walk out the door? That’s the story, is it?’

  The inspector sighed. ‘That’s what happened,’ he confirmed.

  The superintendent looked across his desk impassively. ‘I might leave you to explain that to the big man when he gets back. I’m just heading off to Gullane to catch up on George Regan’s investigation into a dead gypsy, before the media turn up in numbers.’

  ‘Fair enough. I’m sorry, boss. I took my eye off the ball. It never occurred to me for a second that he’d do that. Even if it had, I wouldn’t have worried, because I had PC Childs stationed at the front door. But I didn’t know about the other way out, did I?’

  ‘No, and I doubt if I’d have guessed that one either.’ Pye breathed easier at the confession. ‘And I suppose the guy had the right to leave without notice. He wasn’t under caution, and you hadn’t arrested him.’

  ‘I was about a second away from doing just that when Sauce came in to tell me about the drugs find.’

  ‘You were? I thought we were playing it cool.’

  ‘The time for that was over. When I pinned him down he admitted that he had gone out again. He denied that he’d gone back to the Festival site, but he refused point-blank to tell me where he was going.’

  ‘What’s your feel for his denial? Genuine?’

  ‘I d
on’t have a feel as such. The man’s a bully and a blusterer; he and I had a confrontation when we served him the warrant.’

  ‘So why did he run for it?’ McIlhenney mused. ‘Did he kill Glover right enough, and realise that the game’s up?’

  ‘That’s one possibility. The other is that he guessed we’d found his girlfriend’s smack and decided he’d be better off out of there.’

  ‘Maybe. Did you find anything else, apart from that?’

  ‘Not what we went in there looking for. Nothing that could relate to the murder.’

  ‘No syringes? I’d have thought she’d—’

  ‘So did I, but as Sauce says, she could have been smoking the stuff. If you’re rich enough you don’t have to inject, and with the quantity she had, that may well be her habit.’

  ‘We are sure it’s hers, and not his?’

  ‘It was in her shoes. Given her record, she has to be a user; mind you, that doesn’t mean Anderson doesn’t join in.’

  ‘With his kid around? Surely to Christ . . .’

  ‘We won’t know till we ask him.’

  ‘True, so what have you done about getting him back?’

  ‘The first thing I did was to send a car to the clinic. Anderson knew we were going to search that too, so I reckoned there was a chance of him trying to beat us to it, get rid of the evidence before we could find it. He’ll be apprehended if he shows up there, but he hasn’t so far.’

  ‘You’ve put a vehicle description out, though?’

  Pye shook his head. ‘That’s my big problem, I don’t know what the fucker’s driving. I did a DVLA check. Anderson owns a blue Discovery; that’s still sitting in one of his two parking spaces. The other one’s empty, so my assumption is that he’s taken his girlfriend’s motor. A neighbour confirmed that she has one, but he didn’t know the make or model. The only thing is, DVLA has no record of a car registered to Lady Walters, and only the one in Anderson’s name.’