Dead And Buried bs-16 Page 29

  She was still glowering at the phone when it rang. She snatched it up, ignoring McIlhenney’s instruction to record all incoming calls. ‘Yes?’ she snapped. ‘What is it this time?’

  ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ Sarah exclaimed. ‘Hold on a minute. Whoever it is you’re steamed at, this isn’t him.’

  Alex sighed. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just . . . Something I thought was over just reared its head again.’

  ‘Man trouble?’

  ‘That’s too kind. These are reptiles.’

  ‘I’ve encountered a couple of them in my time.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’ Once again there was silence on the end of a phone line. This time it was distinctly frosty. ‘I’m sorry, Sarah,’ said Alex at once. ‘That was out of order. What can I do for you?’

  ‘I was wondering if you knew what your dad’s up to? I had the briefest of brief calls from him this morning, saying that there’s no way he’s getting home this weekend, like he’d hoped, and asking me to say sorry to the kids.’

  ‘I really don’t know, I’m afraid. I know where he’s headed, and that’s America, but that’s as far as it goes. He’s not saying anything about what he’s doing, not even to me.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Alex could sense that her stepmother was thinking something over. ‘Do you have any big plans for tonight?’ Sarah asked, at last.

  ‘Not even the tiniest.’

  ‘In that case, you wouldn’t like to come out here, would you? I know it’s pushing nine, but it might be the last chance I have to talk to you, one to one, about everything that’s happened. How about it?’

  Alex looked at the phone: the red light had stopped blinking, but it still shone brightly. ‘Why the hell not?’ she replied.

  Seventy-one

  ‘There’s a rule, isn’t there?’ ACC Max Allan muttered. ‘Every time there’s a job to be done it has to be bloody freezing.’

  Sir James Proud glanced up into the blue morning sky. ‘Thank your lucky stars that we’re not doing the digging.’

  Screens had been set up around the Solomons’ shed, dividing off a section of the garden. The Glasgow media grapevine being as effective as any in the world, a statement had been issued announcing that the police were carrying out excavations at 14 Dundyvan Drive, Broomhill, in the light of new information relating to the disappearance of a woman almost fifty years ago. It stressed that the investigation had nothing to do with the present occupants of the house. The old couple themselves seemed a little bemused by the proceedings, and by the small knot of journalists and cameramen who were gathered in the street outside.

  The two senior officers braved the cold and watched as the shed was emptied, then dismantled by a team of joiners, carefully, so that it could be rebuilt later. When they were finished four burly police officers moved in, wearing steel-capped boots, Day-glo jackets and hard hats, and began to attack the base on which it had stood. They worked carefully, each sledgehammer blow carefully placed, trying to crack rather than shatter the concrete. It took the best part of an hour before scene-of-crime officers were ready to begin to remove the pieces to see what they had uncovered.

  ‘Is it buried treasure?’

  Proud turned and saw Arnold Solomons, standing beside him inside the enclosure, his back bent and his nose bright with the cold, even though he was wrapped in a heavy Crombie overcoat, with a scarf and thick leather gloves. ‘I wish it was, for your sake,’ he replied. ‘Now please, go back inside.’

  ‘Will I hell: this is my garden and I want to see what’s going on.’

  ‘Sir!’ The call was to Allan, from one of the SOCOs. He and Proud moved closer, with the old man shuffling behind them. ‘There’s a base of boulders here, but in among them . . . They’re wrapped in brown paper, maybe so that anyone watching would think they were rocks too, only they’re not.’

  The officers stood aside, allowing the two chiefs to look into the excavation. The brown paper had been torn open in places and inside they could see white bones, some large, some finger-sized, and in the centre, a skull.

  ‘My, oh my, oh my,’ Solomons murmured. ‘For all these years, I’ve been storing my lawnmower on top of someone’s grave.’

  Seventy-two

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ asked Eddie Charnwood. The eyes that looked up from the interview room chair were emotionless, and cold as ice.

  ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Neil McIlhenney, and you are done.’

  ‘What happened to Mackenzie?’

  ‘He’s on holiday.’

  ‘On suspension, more like; he’s a mug.’

  ‘He’s on holiday, and next time you say anything disrespectful about him I’ll hit you so fucking hard you’ll leave an imprint on the wall behind you.’

  ‘Tough guy.’

  ‘Usually I don’t have to be. You can have it either way.’

  ‘You can’t touch me.’

  McIlhenney turned to DS Wilding. ‘Ray,’ he said, ‘would you step outside for a minute, please?’

  ‘Certainly, sir: as many minutes as you like.’

  Charnwood raised his manacled hands. ‘Okay, okay. I get the message. Where’s Ollie Poole? He should be here by now.’

  ‘Mr Poole has declined to represent you, as is his right. You can nominate another lawyer if you like, but this interview is going ahead right now. We’ll do it informally for the moment. We’re going to be joined by officers from Dundee: I’ll switch on the tape when they get here.’

  ‘So get on with it.’

  McIlhenney nodded. ‘The first thing I have to tell you is that I wasn’t kidding when I said that you’re done. We’ve got a nice fingerprint from Big Ming’s doorbell, and from the handle of Joe Falconer’s fridge. We’re so clever these days that we should be able to extract DNA from them, so be in no doubt, Eddie, you’re looking at life imprisonment. The only question is, how long will your tariff be? Guilty pleas usually get you a few years less than if you go to trial.’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘He’s not kidding, Eddie,’ said Wilding. ‘That’s how it works.’

  ‘As for the drugs,’ the superintendent continued, ‘we’re not going to bother about them. Soraya’s going down for that end of it. Her brothers were the suppliers and she was the distributor, through Gary Starr, Falconer, and maybe other people we don’t know about yet. You probably thought when you shot Big Ming and Joe, your own cousin, as we’ve discovered, that all the potential witnesses were taken care of, but we’ve got enough circumstantial evidence to send her to Cornton Vale till your boy leaves school . . . maybe longer if we decide to charge her as an accessory to Gary Starr’s murder. Who else could have provided the drugs that were used on him, before you sawed the poor bastard’s hands off and bled him to death?’

  For the first time, Charnwood’s arrogance cracked: fear showed in his hard blue eyes. ‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,’ he shouted.

  ‘Sure, pull the other one. You decided to kill Gary Starr when the stunt with the bayonet went wrong. You knew it would attract our attention to his sad wee bookie’s shop and that sooner rather than later we’d happen upon his other business. So you killed him in a way that you hoped would make us forget everything else and pin it on the boy with the missing digit.’

  ‘I bloody didn’t!’

  ‘Sure you did. What I don’t understand is why you left the drugs and the money in the safe for us to find. You had all Saturday to clear it out.’

  ‘I didn’t because I didn’t fucking kill him.’

  ‘Maybe you just made a mistake, and thought we wouldn’t look there. I don’t suppose you thought that Ming would blab about his trip to Pamplona either. You may have thought that the drugs racket would survive Starr’s death. But once Ming did talk, he and Joe had to go: as the couriers, they could identify Sorry’s brothers. When I think about it, we’ll probably do her as an accessory there too.’

  Charnwood banged his hands on the table. ‘Leave her out of this! I’ll do you a deal, all right. So
rry never knew what was happening. Her brothers approached me directly, not through her: I set the whole thing up with Gary and Joe. Leave her alone and I’ll plead guilty to all that, and to the shootings.’

  McIlhenney gazed at him. ‘I might consider such an arrangement,’ he said slowly. ‘But what about Starr?’

  ‘I’m telling the truth about Gary. I didn’t kill him. I’d have emptied that safe as soon as I heard he was dead, but I never had a chance. You guys were all over the shop like bugs. I had to act the daft laddie when Mackenzie asked me to open it.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You twigged because I knew the combination, didn’t you?’

  ‘It helped, but we’d have got you from the prints, and because you’d killed all the other contenders.’

  ‘Not all. How many times do I have to say it? I never killed Gary.’

  Seventy-three

  ‘Hey, big man, you’re a star!’ exclaimed Mario McGuire. McIlhenney held the phone slightly further from his ear. ‘I don’t want to be a Starr: he was left with two bloody stumps where his hands used to be.’

  ‘You can be anything you like. You’re telling me that Charnwood’s confessed.’

  ‘That’s right, to importing and dealing in drugs, and to the murders of Smith and Falconer. He was formally interviewed by me and by Rod Greatorix, the head of CID in Tayside; he admitted the lot on tape, and then he signed a statement, in the presence of a solicitor. He’ll be up in the Sheriff Court tomorrow, for a formal remand hearing.’

  ‘What about the wife?’

  ‘She’s been released, and her son’s been returned to her. We’d have been struggling to charge her anyway, and her husband’s specifically exonerated her.’

  ‘We couldn’t do her for travelling with a false passport?’

  ‘That would be difficult: it was found in Eddie’s possession, not hers, and he would probably say that she thought it was her real one.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said McGuire. ‘He might even be telling the truth; maybe she really didn’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Remind me, friend,’ said McIlhenney, ironically, ‘is the Pope a Catholic?’

  ‘Last time I looked. He’s still refusing to admit to Starr, you say?’

  ‘Yes, and we don’t have any evidence against him, other than strong circumstantial. My theory is that he’s worked out that if he does, any judge who heard what was done to him would give him a minimum thirty-year stretch.’

  ‘He’d be right too. Bugger it, we’ll settle for what we’ve got. It’s party time in Leith and you’re on the bell.’

  Seventy-four

  ‘Going by the remains,’ said Max Allan, ‘the pathologist is VJoing by the remains,’ said Max Allan, ’the pathologist is saying that she was about six months pregnant when she was killed.’

  ‘Has she made a stab at a cause of death?’ Proud asked.

  ‘She didn’t have to: it was quite clear. The back of her head was smashed in. The marks on the skull indicate that he used a hammer. You’re not going to believe this, Jimmy, but Mr Solomons told us that when they took over the house, Bothwell had left all his tools behind him in his brand new shed. He’s still got them, and there’s a hammer among them. Forensics say that it’s a match: we’ve actually found the murder weapon.’

  Mario McGuire leaned closer to the conference phone. ‘Have your people made any progress on the Ethel Ward disappearance, Mr Allan?’

  ‘Not so far. She had to be alive when they sold Thorny Grove, to sign the conveyance and lodge the money. The old lawyer told me that they moved out on completion day, and not before, but he had no idea where they were headed.’

  ‘Do you still have records of unclaimed female bodies from that time?’

  ‘There was only one: a woman came to the surface of the Clyde, or at least part of her did. She’d been hacked about by a ship’s propeller. I had a look at the post-mortem report, but it isn’t helpful. The cause of death was drowning, and the age was estimated as late twenties; that’s younger than Mrs Bothwell.’

  ‘Any chance of a visual identification from the photographs of the body?’

  ‘Not without the head, Mario: they never found that. It was written off as a suicide and the remains were cremated. To be frank, I don’t hold out any hope of tracing the poor woman, but in the light of what we found under Mr Solomons’ shed we can assume that she’s dead. I’ve advised the family accordingly.’

  ‘Fine, Max.’ Proud sighed. ‘I don’t imagine they’ll spend too much time mourning, from what old Bert told me. How are Mr and Mrs Solomons handling it?’

  A chuckle came from the speaker. ‘They’re loving the sudden fame. The old boy’s sold his story to the Record. They’re running it tomorrow. How about your end of the business, the Spanish wife and Miss Gentle, who thought she was his fiancée?’

  ‘That’s not easy: Adolf’s been pretty good at covering his tracks. The only address we have for him in this area was out of date by the time of his disappearance.’

  ‘Do you have any thoughts on how we should proceed?’

  ‘Actually,’ said McGuire, ‘Mr Solomons’ story might give us an opening. We’ve got photographs of Bothwell from old school year-books and the like. Let’s get a specialist to work out how he might look now, and give it, and the original, to the Record to run with their piece, and then to all the other media immediately afterwards.’

  ‘We’d need Crown Office permission,’ his chief constable pointed out.

  ‘No problem: they’ll give it without a second thought, but we should let the press have much more than that. So far they only know about the Primrose Jardine investigation. With respect, gentlemen, has the potential magnitude of this dawned on you? We’re dealing with a man who’d murdered two, probably three women . . . possibly four, since Annabelle Gentle’s been missing for all that time as well . . . by the time he reached his mid-thirties, and we’ve lost trace of him. We’re in pursuit of a serial killer here, and he’s had forty bloody years to add to his tally of victims. Don’t you think that it’s our duty to tell the media the whole story and to ask for their help in tracing him?’

  Proud picked up his letter-opener and twirled it in his hand. ‘Mario,’ he declared, ‘I couldn’t agree more. Max?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Who’s going to issue it?’

  If it is possible to hear a smile, Mario McGuire swore later that he did at that moment. ‘Jimmy,’ said ACC Allan, ‘there is only one man qualified and entitled to do that, and that’s you. Modesty be damned, this is your finest hour as a detective. Get up there and take the credit. You’ll let me see a draft of the announcement, Mario?’

  ‘Will do, Max.’

  ‘Speak to you later, then.’

  Proud switched off the conference telephone and swung his chair towards McGuire. ‘I really am most embarrassed by all this. When I got into this I’d no idea what would come to the surface. Mario, you brief the press; I’ll take a back seat.’

  ‘Are you asking me to refuse a direct order, sir? Don’t be shy about it. If I’d done what you’ve done I’d be up there basking in the fucking glory, but I didn’t so I won’t. Please, for us, and for our absent friend, you do it.’

  The chief smiled and ran a hand across his brow. ‘Okay, if you insist. I’d better call him before this goes public, I suppose.’

  ‘That would be a good idea, sir,’ said the head of CID. ‘And someone else as well.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘The woman who started all this: Annabelle Gentle’s daughter.’

  Seventy-five

  For several reasons, Alex was glad she had gone to Gullane for the night. It had given Sarah the opportunity to tell her, face to face, why, from her side of the situation, her marriage to Bob had failed. She had been able to have breakfast with her brothers and sister. But most of all, it had got her away from the flat, and from that damn phone. She had to admit to herself, if to nobody else, that the calls had been getting to her. The sense of being hunt
ed was one she had never experienced before, and she did not like it. As she thought about it, sitting in the lunch-time restaurant, waiting for Gina, she felt cold, dispassionate anger welling up inside her: if she was someone’s prey, then he was in for a hell of a shock when he caught up with her.

  As she looked back over her week, she realised yet again how much she loved her job. It was the central pillar of her life, and she had chosen it as such, for a few more years, at least. She had been given the ‘wife and mother’ ultimatum when she had been engaged to Andy, and had rejected it, and him. In doing so, she had set herself a single objective: to be a partner in Curle Anthony and Jarvis by the time she was thirty. Already she was the firm’s youngest associate, so she was on track: the better you were, the more you were in demand. That overriding purpose allowed her to laugh off all the blips in her social life, even Guy Luscomb, that conceited, self-satisfied, useless prick. The dual connotation of that thought made her laugh to herself.

  Or so she thought. ‘Hey,’ said Gina Reed. ‘What’s lit up your day?’

  ‘Oh, nothing.’ She laughed again. ‘At least not very much. I was thinking of my flexible friend from London, that was all. How’s yours been so far?’

  Her friend laid a series of bags against the wall next to their table. ‘Hell on earth, darling. The shops at this time of year are just unbearable, even during the week.’

  Alex pointed to her haul. ‘You seem to have battled through, though. I have to confess that this year I’m doing most of my Christmas shopping on the Internet.’

  ‘Who’s the big present for this year? Guy?’

  ‘Piss off. He’ll get a card if he’s lucky. It’ll be for my dad, I suppose, but what do you give a man who has everything?’

  ‘A repair kit.’

  ‘They don’t make them for what’s broke in his life. I had a heart-to-heart with my soon-to-be-ex-stepmother last night. She’s making preparations to go back to America and concentrate on doctoring.’