4 p.m., Tuesday 9 February 2010
‘Nice wallpaper.’
Stuart Bannon of West End Properties turned to make sure Jim Innes was being sarcastic, and raised an unprofessional eyebrow at him in agreement.
Catriona Innes wrinkled her nose. ‘It reminds me of …’
‘That crap you had in the Indian last night. Saggy Paneer?’
She smiled at the estate agent. ‘My husband’s sense of humour is an acquired taste,’ she said sweetly.
‘As is the decoration of this flat,’ Bannon agreed, with a rare touch of honesty. ‘On this level, the previous owner never changed a thing, so you do have all the original features. This was the top-floor flat originally, hence the fantastic view. The attic space has been converted to give another two bedrooms up there.’
‘Was the previous owner on drugs?’ Innes asked wryly. ‘Or were they blind?’
Stuart Bannon laughed. ‘Blind, maybe; she was in her nineties.’ He dunted the carpet with the heel of his Doc Martens. ‘But the floorboards under here are solid. A nice wee sand, and then a good wax …’ This seemed a good time to back off and let them think. Number 95 Clarence Avenue was proving unexpectedly difficult to sell, but at least this couple hadn’t walked out after five minutes of cursory politeness like the last three had. And they were still eyeing the place up, considering.
Catriona Innes folded her arms and spun round slowly. ‘I do like this room, even with that bloody wallpaper. So much light. You don’t get windows that size in a new build. And we should know; we’ve seen plenty.’
‘Well, that’s the advantage of these tenements; the room size is amazing. Both this room and the sitting room have feature fireplaces, the back rooms have the original cornices and, as you can see from the schedule, the recent attic conversion is architect-designed in a Scandinavian style. They built into the roof space and used the original beams. It’s even been photographed for an architects’ trade magazine.’
‘Yet it’s been on the market for a while,’ said Innes, his face quizzical.
‘The beneficiaries of the will had a difference of opinion, so the renovation on this level ground to a halt. To be honest, it’s on the market as a half-baked project.’ Bannon gave his most candid smile.
‘I think what you’re supposed to say is “so you get the best of both worlds”,’ Jim answered.
‘Do you work in advertising?’ laughed Bannon.
‘How did you guess?’ smiled Catriona. ‘He could sell Guinness to the Irish.’ Then she pursed her lips slightly. ‘The old dear in her nineties – she didn’t actually die in here, did she?’
‘No, she died in hospital, but she had a long and happy life. This was the family home. The executor now wants a quick sale, so it’s a fixed price – £275, 000.’
‘They might, what with the state of the market at the moment.’ Bannon’s mobile rang, the trill echoing round the empty space. ‘Oh, I do apologize; I’ve been waiting for this call. Please, go ahead and look upstairs. Take your time.’
He disappeared out on to the landing, leaving a vapour trail of Paco Rabanne.
Catriona waited until the door closed, then whispered, ‘What do you think?’
‘So far so good,’ her husband answered. ‘It’s the best we’ve seen. Handy for the school, fixed price, slap bang in the middle of the West End, fabulous view, and Clarence Avenue is a good address. If we play our cards right, we might get a few grand off. I’d say it’ll suit us fine.’
‘You sound like we’ve moved in already.’ Catriona walked into the hall, stroking the carved pineapple finial on the newel post. ‘But I do like it, Jim. Look how the new stairs match what’s already here.’
‘Craftsmanship, that’s what that is.’ Her husband caressed the finial too. ‘Pure craftsmanship.’ Suddenly he looked up. ‘What’s that? I heard a creak.’
‘A mouse?’
‘Don’t be daft! I said creak, not squeak.’
‘Big mouse?’
‘A rat?’
‘The only rat around here is out on the landing, on the phone,’ giggled Catriona.
‘Bloody estate agents! He could tell us how much the executor is actually looking for and then we can stop all this faffing around.’ He proceeded up the stairs, tapping the stair rail with his knuckle as he went. ‘This is a sound conversion; look at the way everything’s finished off. And there’s no damp, no subsidence.’
Catriona paused behind him on the stairs. ‘Are you sure? That creaking, it’s the sound of old wood moving, isn’t it?’
Jim Innes sighed. ‘Might be next door’s joists. We’d have to look into that. What do you think – should we have this upstairs bit as our own private floor? We could ban the kids from coming up here altogether.’ He was now on the top landing, planning his pool table, a mini-bar … ‘Look at that, they’ve reclaimed an old pitch-pine door from somewhere and just replaced the lock. That’s attention to detail. That should be the new bedroom, with the beams. Twenty-six feet by sixteen. We’re five floors up, so there should be some view over Partickhill, right over the tops of the trees.’
Catriona walked briskly across to the door and turned the key, which slid round easily. The door swung open under the light pressure of her palm. She again heard the slow gentle creak, the noise of a ship yawing on a gentle swell. Then her eyes adjusted to the dim light.
A swollen, purple body hung from the exposed beam, the blackened head almost decapitated by the noose. Caught in a slight draught from the window, it turned infinitesimally slowly round towards her. Protruding, deadened eyes stared at her, the face inclined, the ragged, blood-encrusted lips pursed to a kiss.
DCI Rebecca Quinn was scrolling the screen, her broken fingernail tapping impatiently on the mouse as her tired eyes looked over the most recent crime stats for the third time. The powers that be had changed the coding again, and she had to keep referring back to a photocopied chart.
She was too old for this. She had been at it since 3 p.m. and now, an hour and a half later, she was no further forward. She moved the cursor left to the referral rate and sighed. The last time she had felt this bad she was deciding definitely, definitely to get her cat put out of its misery. She was starting to feel that way about her career.
The writing was on the wall for Partickhill Station, she could feel it in her bones. The station had risen like the phoenix from the ashes after the Luftwaffe had dropped an early bomb on the way to Clydebank one moonlit night in 1941. But there was no way it could stand up to the combined uniformed might of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate and the new designer suits at the Strathclyde Police Service.
Partickhill’s operational capacity was slowly being eroded. It hadn’t gone unnoticed that the canteen had been closed for two months now and there was no sign of it reopening. Her requests for a start date for the long-promised refurbishment had not received a precise answer, or even a vague one. The place was being stripped of resources as though a decision had already been made. DCI Quinn lost her place on the list yet again and gave up. She leaned back and yawned. The ever-growing damp patch on the corner of the ceiling seemed to be heading for the window in a bid for freedom, and who could blame it? Everyone seemed to achieve huge enhancement in their lives the minute they left this little station. Gail Irvine was now happily married with a rosy-cheeked two-year-old. Burns, the old constable who had been at Partickhill longer even than the rot, had inherited a croft in Stornoway where he was living the good life with no phone and no TV. And no computer.
Quinn envied him.
And those that stayed here at Partickhill? Their careers withered and died. Partickhill was little more than a lost property office these days, an elephant’s graveyard of hopes and careers.
Of course, nobody was surprised that DC Vik Mulholland had passed his sergeant’s exams with ease and immediately been transferred from Glasgow A Division to K Division in Renfrewshire – to assist in the Drug Unit at Paisley. Quinn was glad he had not been under her command for the last two years. Dedication she could cope with, but ruthless ambition ate at you like cancer. The rumour was that Mulholland would make inspector before the end of the year, and that he was gunning to get back to Glasgow and on to a murder squad. Just in time for Quinn to retire and avoid him. And DI Colin Anderson, tipped to move up to DCI soon, would be transferred too. Anderson was already spending most of his operational time at neighbouring Partick Central, a big modern station with a car park, canteen, and no damp patches, not half a mile from Partickhill. But DI Colin Anderson was a loyal kind of a sod, not one to step on her toes while she was still here and still, technically, his boss. Vik Mulholland was so ambitious he would have tipped her corpse off her seat before the cushion had got cold. Quinn missed Anderson when he wasn’t here. He was the type of DI every chief dreamed of: solid, dependable, respectful and respected. A man of quiet power. She had no doubt his qualities had not gone unnoticed by those higher up the tree, and she knew she couldn’t hold him back for ever.
On the other hand, the more Anderson was promoted, the less understanding his wife seemed to become. He wouldn’t be the first cop to refuse a promotion to ‘put family first’. Colin Anderson had still to make that decision, and nobody could make it for him.
Through the glass of her office Quinn could see Anderson in the incident room. Still looking younger than his thirty-nine years, a tiny hint of grey lightening his fair hair slightly, he was one of those lucky men who become better looking as they grow older. He was on the phone, taking some statement of great importance to the safety and well-being of the denizens of Glasgow’s West End, giving it his full attention, despite the certain knowledge that it was all a waste of his time.
Quinn looked around the others in the incident room, a hotchpotch of misfits who weren’t going anywhere. Littlewood, who should be the one taking that call, was nowhere to be seen. He was most likely out in the fog, sneaking an illicit fag. But like herself, he was working out the last few months of a long career, eking every penny he could out of his pension. He had recently been diagnosed with angina, which was preventing him from doing the job properly but wasn’t severe enough for a medical retirement. He was bitter about it and carried his bitterness like a torch.
As she watched, PC Gordon Wyngate took careful aim and tossed a ball of waste paper towards the bin. It missed. Wyngate, known as Wingnut because of his large protuberant ears, was … just Wyngate. Not the brightest, but endlessly willing and occasionally capable of a stroke of genius.
Quinn pulled herself upright again, unclipping her red hair and curling it around her hand before fixing it again. Maybe she was being paranoid: after all, just this week, Partickhill’s detective squad had been boosted by two. The new girl was what Quinn’s mother would have called ‘well built’, and Littlewood called ‘buxom’ when being polite. She was straight out of uniform and yet to prove herself as a detective. Slightly overweight, unfit, two kids, late thirties, the worst type of rookie in a murder squad. What was her name? Black? Brown? Whatever her name was, she’d been bloody useless so far.
And then there was DS Costello. She had returned from her two-year lecturing stint at Tulliallan police training college. Her syllabus seemed to be a roving brief on CID serious crime procedures, and though Quinn was amazed she knew anything about them, her old DS seemed able to teach them most effectively, no doubt enlivened by her habit of talking before she engaged her brain, while still having the uncanny knack of saying the right thing. But usually at the wrong time.
To give her credit, Costello had some big cases under her belt. In fact, she was what every student on that course was aspiring to be. Only Costello herself was too dense to notice. Quinn reconsidered – dense wasn’t the right word. She let her eyes settle on her sergeant, watching her multitasking on her phone, trawling the computer screen, scribbling and eating a bag of Liquorice Allsorts simultaneously. As usual Costello was dressed like a scruff, her blonde hair shorter and spikier than it had been.
No, dense wasn’t the right word. Costello just couldn’t be arsed what anybody else thought.
The door to the main office opened and the new DC – now she remembered, it was Browne with an ‘e’ – sashayed in, carrying a cardboard tray with takeaway coffee and sandwiches. Quinn left them to it and went back to her crime stats.
The phone rang. Quinn looked up, hearing the simultaneous scrape of chair feet against the tattered lino. She saw Anderson get up, and then Costello bang the phone down. Quinn was on her feet even before Anderson knocked and entered without waiting for an answer.
‘Two bits of good news. Browne can’t count and bought you an extra coffee …’
‘Cheers,’ said Quinn.
‘… and we have a dead body hanging in a tenement in Clarence Avenue, right behind the station here.’
Quinn felt her heart sink. ‘Suicide?’
‘Suspicious,’ replied Anderson.
DCI Quinn could not hold back her smile as she closed the file on her computer, watching the monitor return to its lazy, writhing screen saver.
A case. A big case. And this time, it would be taken from her over her own dead body.
I flick the windscreen wiper on to clear the rain from the glass. I sink a bit lower in my seat, easing my frozen bones while keeping an eye on the door of Partickhill Station. Anderson comes out. DI Colin David Anderson. He is easy to see, even in this dank, foggy mess that has everybody muffled up to the eyeballs against the cold. He’s a tall bloke – six one? Six two? You can tell he’s a man who knows himself and what he is about. Not like his boss, scuttling about in her ridiculous heels. Her legs are too short to move so fast. Her navy-blue coat has the collar folded up to her ears, her hat is pulled down to her neck, but the briefcase is absent. She speaks briefly to Anderson on the way past then climbs into her Lexus and forces the traffic to halt as she does a U-turn on Hyndland Road.
But Anderson is waiting for the little fish.
My little fish.
My little Prudenza.
I turn the radio up slightly. Louis Armstrong singing ‘What A Wonderful World’, a song that always makes me smile at the irony. I see Anderson turn round in response to somebody’s call; his gloved hands are in his pockets, his anorak zipped up to his chin.
And there she is, coming through the fog. Prudenza.
She’s in a hurry, jogging along the pavement. She is carrying a drink carton; not coffee for her, it will be tea. A plump female cop comes down the steps and meets her, a congress of raven hair and blonde. The plump cop shivers, rubbing her hands roughly on the sleeves of her jumper. She hasn’t even bothered putting a jacket on. Anderson is kicking his heels a few yards away, waiting. He’s impatient.
To get a cop to move in this weather without an overcoat is one thing, but to get a DCI out a warm office and drive off into the freezing fog? Must be a matter of life and death. Something’s rattled their cage.
It makes me uneasy.
A couple join them. The woman has her arm on her husband’s shoulder. His face is ashen, and she’s supporting him as if he’s lost the ability to walk along the street under his own strength. The female cop with the short dark hair guides them up the steps and into the station, offering words of comfort to the man.
Prudenza and Anderson are now alone on the pavement. Anderson looks up to the sky, no doubt commenting on the weather. The forecast is freezing fog closing in. Prudenza gains his attention with a playful slap on the arm, and takes a step back. Two heads are thrown back in laughter at a private joke between old friends.
Her back is to me, but from this distance her hair looks blonder, shorter than the last time I saw her.
They move off on foot, pausing right in front of the van. They’re going to go down the lane to Clarence Avenue. I turn the wipers off, to let the rain obscure the windscreen. Not that Anderson would recognize me – I was way before his time.
I flick the wiper to intermittent. Just to get a better view.
Too long.
‘What are those two doing? Waiting for an invite?’ asked Professor O’Hare, rolling his white plastic suit from his shoulders. The dour grey-haired pathologist was standing on the upper landing of the tenement on Clarence Avenue. ‘Should Anderson and Costello not be in here, listening to my words of infinite wisdom, instead of talking to the cop on the door?’
‘Quite,’ said DCI Quinn tersely. She took a deep breath and shouted, ‘Are you lot quite finished chatting?’ down the deep stairwell. ‘Anderson! Costello! I want you up here now.’ Then she muttered to her old friend, ‘Those two are much easier to control when they’re forty miles apart.’
‘But you missed them, Rebecca; your life is too simple without them.’
‘Maybe. I’m glad they’re back together for this case. I think Partickhill’s going to need all the help it can get.’
‘You are going to need all the help you can get.’ O’Hare stepped out of the legs of his protective suit, and checked his watch. ‘No trouble at t’ mill, is there? Within the ranks, I mean. If so, get rid of it now before the powers that be think you can no longer work as an effective team. It’ll only be another excuse to bang a nail in the coffin.’
‘Oh, there’s no trouble between those two,’ said Quinn.
‘And how is DS Costello?’
‘Just the same, unfortunately.’ Quinn folded her arms, her eyes still on the stairway. ‘But my days are numbered. I’m going to be retired. I can feel it. In fact, I think the entire squad at Partickhill is about to be dismantled. And the building is managing to fall apart on its own with no help from us.’
‘You don’t look like you’ve done your thirty.’
‘Well, I feel it in every bone.’ She sighed. ‘But it would be nice to go out with a big one.’
O’Hare said softly, ‘Well, I don’t think you’re going to get any bigger than this.’
DCI Quinn frowned at the sound of two sets of footfalls racing up the stairs. ‘Anderson! Costello! So glad you could join us, eventually.’
‘We got nabbed outside by the guy from the estate agents on his way to the station. He wanted to tell us all about it.’
‘Why was he roaming around on his own?’
‘Wyngate was first on the scene and lost the witnesses in the fog. Don’t ask any more,’ said Costello.
‘But now you are here, pop your collective heads in there before we go any further. Try and keep the door closed so the smell doesn’t get out.’
‘Fair enough,’ said a blue-lipped Costello, smiling cheerfully and handing her paper cup of tea to Quinn, who had no choice but to accept it.
DI Colin Anderson nodded an acknowledgement at the Prof and approached the closed door. He figured he had seen most things in his nineteen years of service, but he steeled himself just the same as he turned the knob. When he opened the door, a rhomboid of light illuminated his feet, and the room inside was slowly revealed as a hive of silent industry. Three white-suited scene of crime officers crouched around the body, and the smell of rotting flesh wafted gently towards him.
Costello followed him in, pulling her hands up into her sleeves, and jammed her woolly fists to her mouth in an attempt to block out the smell. She narrowed her eyes and took one step further, joining him to stand on the aluminium slab that protected the crime scene – as far as they could go without shoe covers.
From the corner of the room they viewed the body, which was now slumped on the floor. It looked male, it looked young, but mostly it looked dead. The rope around his neck had cut so deep it nearly met his spine at the back, and the dark indigo serrated gouge lay open like a flowering lupin. His skin opened in a sinister crusted rupture above his chin, leaving his lips closed, pursing slightly. The other end of the rope was still looped over the exposed beam above. The SOCOs moved slowly in a tacit dance, each concentrating on their individual tasks. The only noise came from a couple of blowflies feasting at the dark wound in the throat, interrupted by the occasional whirr of the camera motor.
Costello tried to look at the face, seeking a point of recognition, but it was too swollen, too blackened. The eyes stared at the ceiling, and the flesh of the cheeks had swollen to absorb the nose. Absurdly, it reminded her of a turnip lantern, only the knife had slipped as someone tried to fashion the mouth, which looked – she searched for a word – wrong.
She tilted her head, her brain registering the brown tag hanging around his neck on a string, a simple brown label. The SOCO lifted it with a gloved hand, tilting it for her to read. Five printed words: My Name Is Stephen Whyte. She nudged Anderson, who was regarding the supine figure as if it was a piece of sculpture.
‘Well, I’ve seen enough, smelled enough,’ said Costello from behind her woolly fist. She recognized Bob MacKellar, the crime scene photographer, under his plastic hood, and nodded a greeting. ‘You getting all this? Can we go?’
Bob the hood nodded. ‘Yip. I think the Prof wants a word.’
They both retreated, Anderson closing the door behind him.
On the landing, they found Quinn and O’Hare, still deep in conversation. The four of them shifted to let a crime scene officer pass, carrying a folded body bag, before they continued. Quinn realized she still had Costello’s tea and handed it back.
It was the pathologist who spoke, slowly, choosing his words with deliberation. ‘The deceased has been provisionally identified for us, by a helpful person with a packet of labels and a printer. The name is Mr Stephen Whyte. No other form of ID. Obviously, we can’t take the label at face value.’
‘Stephen Whyte as in … ?’ asked Anderson.
‘It’s not an uncommon name. So mouths shut until I get back to you. Not a can of worms we want to open unless we really have to.’
‘Could it be him, though?’
‘You’re the cops,’ O’Hare said, looking at Anderson. ‘But I think you will find that you spell his occupation R-A-P-I-S-T.’
‘Pretend you didn’t hear that,’ muttered Quinn. ‘I want no preconceived notions and no speculation. We treat this case as any other. Please.’
O’Hare ignored her. ‘Anyway, that body has been hanging there for a few days. The victim was viciously battered, used for target practice with the proverbial blunt instrument. There are only minor traces of blood spatter on the wall. Dump site or kill site? If he wasn’t already dead when he was strung up, I doubt he was far from it. The killer went to town on him. He …’
‘Or she … ?’ queried Costello, then realized she was staring at DCI Quinn. She hastily looked back at the pathologist.
‘… had deliberately sealed the victim’s lips, so as he screamed or struggled for breath, the skin around his mouth simply tore apart. You’ll get the rest later, and in much more detail, from the boys. He’s in his early thirties, I would suggest, well nourished. I can see that the skin unaffected by the dependant lividity is suntanned. So over to you.’
‘We are working on the timeline – or the window of opportunity, as the modern police service calls it. DC Browne is up at the station dispensing tea and sympathy to the couple who found the poor sod – a Mr and Mrs Innes. The man seems pretty shaken up, understandably,’ Anderson explained.
‘You left Browne in charge of them?’ Quinn rolled her eyes. ‘Has she any real operational experience?’
‘Not on a murder squad. She’s so deluded she thinks Anderson is God and hangs on every word he says,’ said Costello.
‘Must be a nice change for you, DI Anderson, to have a female subordinate who actually respects you and listens to you,’ muttered O’Hare.
‘Can’t say I’ve noticed it yet,’ said Anderson.
O’Hare said, ‘I’m going to get him back to the mortuary. I’ve got a lot on, but I’ll rearrange and try to take a look at him tonight.’
‘We’ll stay available,’ said Anderson. ‘Ma’am, how do you want this played? You know that the minute it gets known, the squad at Partick Central will try to pick it up.’ His voice hinted at resentment.
‘I don’t think I’ll be phoning anybody but the presently attending officers with my preliminary findings,’ said O’Hare nonchalantly. ‘I presume speed is of the essence here, so the sooner you get moving the less likely you are to be taken off the case. I’ll be on my way.’
Anderson had subtly shifted across the landing, blocking O’Hare’s path. ‘So is this the new regime? The forensic pathologist himself calls a particular DCI? And they’re both still here?’ Anderson folded his arms.
Quinn couldn’t help but smile. They were sharp, these two – annoying, but sharp. She looked to her DI then to the pathologist, and the phrase about irresistible forces and immovable objects crossed her mind.
‘So, Prof, are you going to enlighten us?’ Anderson persisted.
But O’Hare pushed his way past. He did a half-turn on the stairs. ‘The name Stephen Whyte means to me what it means to you. The man responsible for the attack on Emily Corbett was never caught. Looks like someone else might have caught him for you.’ He looked at Quinn, as if to say, No bad thing.
Quinn waited before following him down the stairs, and spoke softly. ‘DI Anderson, please don’t repeat that. The Prof and Donald Corbett are very good friends, and Donald has never got over what happened to his daughter. As soon as he heard the name on that label, O’Hare elbowed his junior out the way and took the case. But let’s wait at least until we get a formal identification.’
Anderson and Costello walked back from the crime scene in silence, both remembering the case that had been messed up all those years ago. Now, ten years later, here it was again, and on their doorstep.
Anderson had to stop himself from jogging back to the station. Something should happen now, he kept thinking. The discovery of that body should set off a chain of events that would cascade and roll with a momentum of its own. By 5.30 p.m. it was already dark, and even in the few minutes it took them to walk back to the station, thick winter haar had silvered their clothing with crystal baubles. In a few minutes, the crystal would soak through and they’d both freeze.
Costello was slightly breathless with her attempt to keep up with the DI. ‘I never knew much about that Stephen Whyte business,’ she said. ‘I was still in uniform on the south side. Who fucked it up the first time?’
‘Paisley, K Division,’ he replied, curtly.
‘And how, exactly?’ asked Costello. Her gloved hand rested on his elbow, asking him to slow down.
‘You know, you lecture about it all the time. We can drag suspects in with no evidence and hope for a confession within the six-hour rule. But that was never going to work with a guy like Whyte, so the DCI held back until he had something concrete to work with. Never reckoned on Whyte being a flight risk, though.’
Costello nodded. ‘Bad judgement call? And in a case like that? The words rock and hard place come to mind.’
‘It was the worst. Come on, Costello, I’m freezing my balls off out here.’
There was some excitement as they walked back through the doors of the station. Wyngate, Littlewood and Browne had formed a welcoming committee for a wee brown dog tethered to the front desk. The dog seemed to have a few bits missing: part of an ear, part of his tail. And then Anderson noticed that Gillian Browne, who was supposed to be in charge of Reception, was kneeling on the floor, giving the dog a cuddle and a drink of milky tea – from his mug.
She looked up at Anderson with a beaming smile. ‘I knew you wouldn’t mind, sir. The dog patrol dropped him off here, because the van was full. He was being used as bait in that dog-fighting ring in Possil.’
‘The important bit of that conversation, DC Browne, should have been: When are they picking him up again?’ said Anderson, aware that Costello was about to get on her knees and join the dog appreciation society.
‘Just look at the ugly wee shitface,’ said Littlewood harshly, but the grizzled old cop was tickling the dog behind its good ear affectionately. ‘He’s not a bad-tempered sod. Somebody’s had a go at him, right enough. That ear looks sore, what’s left of it.’
‘We’ve called him Nesbitt,’ said Browne, happily.
‘As in Rab C? As in hairy stinky wee creature?’ enquired Anderson, his voice full of sarcastic enthusiasm. He took Costello firmly by the elbow and hurried her past.
Back at his work station, Anderson sat down at his desk, the worn plastic of the seat moulded to the shape of his bum. After a month at Partick Central working a joint case, he was glad to be back at Partickhill, with its small chaotic informalities that were so at odds with the new policies of the modern police service. And he was glad that they had a case. Hopefully they could hold on to it. And if not, he hoped he wouldn’t be asked to choose – to move back to Partick Central with the case or stay here and investigate housebreaking until the end of his career. His chances of promotion could depend on his answer. What price loyalty? He sighed.
Now, with Costello safely in view at her desk and Browne safely out of view downstairs with the dog, he could relax and get on with thinking about the information board. His intellect told him the name Stephen Whyte might just be a coincidence. That thought was immediately followed by the memory of the crime scene photograph of Emily Corbett. Some things stayed with any police officer: the first dead child, the pensioner fatally beaten for the price of a bag of chips. Glasgow was a violent city, but the image of Emily Corbett lying on New Year’s Day, battered and unconscious, on a blanket of dead bracken, her bare back exposed to the icy wind, her face tucked into her elbow in a bizarre parody of the recovery position, still made Anderson’s stomach lurch. Paisley and the whole of K Division had mismanaged it ten years ago. There could be no mistakes this time round.
He looked up at the board as it was. A call-out. DI Anderson and DS Costello had attended – no mention of DCI Quinn. Suspicious death, the address, the time. A case number and a few smudges left from the hasty wiping-off of the coffee-break shopping list.
The victim had had all ID removed and replaced with a label. To mislead, or to make it perfectly clear? O’Hare’s voice, when he said the name, had held a degree of anger, real cold anger. And his words – ‘The man responsible for the attack on Emily Corbett was never caught. Looks like someone else might have caught him for you’ – had carried an unwonted degree of emotion, and an unvoiced message: Don’t mess this up.
Of course the minute O’Hare got anything, Quinn would know. Those two were old hands at getting to the point, bypassing the paperwork and, with a bit of luck, bypassing Partick Central.
Anderson let his eyes fall on the latest update memo, about Ally the black-browed albatross. Ally, or Thalassarche melanophris, had been blown way off course from the South Atlantic and had unexpectedly put down somewhere near the Barochan Moss nature reserve, about ten miles west of Glasgow. It was only the third time such a thing had happened in a hundred years, so as soon as it had been sighted by a regular birdwatcher at the reserve, the blaze of publicity could not be stemmed. A red star warned that its exact location was to be kept secret in case somebody went after it with an air rifle. If Ally had landed any closer to Paisley, the locals would have deep-fried it and eaten it by now. Anderson’s stomach rumbled, suddenly thinking about a chicken supper with extra chips. If he could find out roughly where the bird was, he might take Peter out and have a look. The RSPB were organizing a low-key feeding and protection rota until the weather improved. At the moment the fog was hampering their attempts to install webcams and observation platforms but, Anderson supposed, the weather was giving the bird more protection than anything else could. Though why the stupid thing didn’t just fly away, he couldn’t quite grasp. The tabloids were starting to cause problems, and there were rumours of a celebrity birdwatch. Give it another twenty-four hours and Strathclyde’s finest would be called in to provide a protection detail for a bloody bird with all the sense of direction of a myopic drunk in a dodgem.
Anderson glanced over at the traffic report. There’d been a bad accident at the mouth of the Clyde Tunnel, which snookered him for getting home in time to see the kids tonight. He heard Gillian Browne outside the door, laughing.
She came in and the dog followed her, wagging what was left of his tail. ‘He’s nice, isn’t he?’ Browne said, arms folding across her ample chest.
‘No, he’s not. He’s smelly and has vital parts of his anatomy missing. DC Browne, that’s a job for uniform, not for us. Phone the cat and dog home and get him booked in for the night.’
‘When I was in uniform we called you lot the arses.’ She tentatively approached his desk.
Anderson tried to ignore her chest, settling his gaze on her badly bitten fingernails instead.
‘Colin!’ Costello’s voice, as subtle as the Cloch foghorn, came to the rescue. She banged a file down on the desk. ‘This is all I could get on Stephen Whyte so far. DC Browne, Reception stinks of dog shite. Quinn has her stilettos on, so get it cleaned up before she skids on it. You’ll find bleach in the loo.’
Browne trotted off, and Nesbitt followed at close quarters.
‘Timely intervention, Costello, but you could have been a bit more subtle,’ muttered Anderson once Browne was out of earshot.
‘I don’t do subtle. Is this hanging man our Stephen Whyte? The Stephen Whyte?’ she asked, ignoring Anderson’s signals that Quinn was on her way.
‘O’Hare suspects so. But officially we have to wait for confirmation; you know that.’
‘We are all waiting for confirmation,’ said the DCI, handing Anderson a pile of buff files.
‘It’s just that this is a small station. I don’t know how long I can or should keep it quiet,’ said Anderson.
Quinn shrugged a little too casually. ‘If I’m right, and they are one and the same – oh, I don’t know that I could be that lucky …’ Her voice drifted off, leaving Anderson and Costello to exchange glances. ‘Don’t let anyone disturb me for the next half-hour unless something important comes in from the door to door or forensics. I’m waiting for a call from the mortuary. Oh, and shut that dog in the kennel downstairs, before it stinks the station out. It’s only being held here until it gets put to sleep.’ Quinn walked off to her own office, her stilettos clicking on the worn floor tiles.
‘Poor dog, I bet he hasn’t even bitten anyone …’ Costello watched Quinn’s retreating ankles. ‘Yet.’
Littlewood looked at the single sixty-watt bulb dangling on a kinked, dirty cable. It was twisting and swinging slightly in the draught, a slow hypnotic back-and-forth, left-to-right motion. He sighed. Wyngate was doing the first interrogation and DCI Quinn had made it quite clear that he, John Littlewood, with thirty-two years’ experience in the job, had to just sit there and keep his mouth shut. Wyngate had been through it all twice already. Catriona Innes had been steady and calm. Her husband was a wreck. Littlewood could have predicted that; he could read people. And he could tell Stuart Bannon was as straight as a die, nothing to do with the hanging man; he was just the estate agent who’d been asked to sell the deceased’s flat.
Bannon looked as Scottish as a man could – not very tall, with fair skin and receding hair that was either strawberry blond or red fading to grey. He was slightly overweight, in his mid-forties, and wore the look of the recently divorced like yesterday’s socks. His good clothes had been inexpertly ironed, and the straining buttons on his shirt suggested a recent and unwelcome weight gain.
They had got to him last, after the Inneses. Now he was going through it all again, being patient and polite, picking his words cautiously, thinking through each answer. His mobile phone had rung, and he had gone out on the landing to answer it. But the reception was poor, so he had gone down the stairs to the main door of the building. He was still on the phone when he heard pounding footsteps behind him, and was almost knocked down by Jim Innes flying down the final step and out the door.
‘He only just made it to the garden before he was sick,’ Bannon recalled.
‘And what about her?’ asked Littlewood, disobeying Quinn’s instructions. ‘What about Mrs Innes?’
‘Well, I went up the stairs, thinking that something had maybe happened to her, but she was standing in the angle of the door and I couldn’t see what she was looking at. I walked in, and it was … hanging there. Just hanging there. Then the smell hit me.’
‘Not a smell you forget easily,’ Littlewood agreed.
Bannon looked from Wyngate to Littlewood, as if wondering whether the old guy was enjoying this as much as he appeared to be.
‘And before that, the last time you were in the property was about ten days ago, Saturday 30th January?’ asked Wyngate, trying to regain control of the interview.
‘I think so. I’ve been the only one doing viewings in the past few months.’ Bannon smiled ruefully. ‘Things have been a bit slow in the housing market, credit crunch and all that. But yes, the last few viewings were accompanied by me, and the keys were in my hands at all times.’
Littlewood steered him back on track. ‘Did you recognize the deceased?’
‘Look, I didn’t realize that it was a body at first, that it was even human. There was just something hanging there. Then the flies started buzzing, I smelled that smell, and I had to get out. I remember almost pushing Mrs Innes out the room. I did close the door behind me. When I got downstairs, Mr Innes was already on the phone to you lot, and that’s when I realized what I’d seen.’
Wyngate sat silently, as if he was thinking, thinking that he should know what the next question was. He didn’t.
‘And there was no sign of forced entry?’ asked Littlewood, trying to get to the point.
‘So I believe.’
‘So how did they get in?’
Bannon looked nonplussed.
‘How did they gain entry? The neighbours deny letting anybody in on the buzzer system.’
‘They are very security conscious. I had to make sure all the workmen were provided with keys, not just let in by the residents,’ Bannon said.
‘So if there was no sign of forced entry, the killer must have had the code for the entry system, and a key for the door of the dwelling on the fourth floor.’ Littlewood spelled it out for him.
‘But I now have all the keys back. Three sets, to be exact.’
Littlewood watched Bannon closely. He wasn’t stupid, and saw the implication of what he’d said, but his reaction was more puzzled than anything else.
‘OK, you say all viewings were accompanied by your good self. But what about others who’ve had the keys in their possession the last few weeks? Keys only take minutes to copy.’
Bannon let his gaze fall to the floor. ‘The builders put a new lock on the flat, and the digitized entry system at street level was new. Both were in by the end of November; we were waiting on it before we could put the property on the market. Since then,’ Bannon bit his lip, trying to recall exactly, ‘there’ve been a couple of surveyors, a valuation, a soundproofing survey, the usual meter readings. Oh, and an architects’ magazine wanted access. I think that’s about it. They were all unaccompanied.’
‘So any of them could have taken the keys and copied them.’
Bannon’s face paled, the first sign he was rattled. ‘But the surveyors are people I use all the time; I know them well. As for the rest, there is a legitimate trail of paperwork. I certainly talked with them all at least once.’
Littlewood skimmed a piece of blank paper over the table towards Bannon, followed by a biro. ‘Well, you’ll be able to give us a list then, won’t you?’