Death's Door bs-17 Page 3

  ‘What else did I tell you without knowing it?’

  ‘Small-calibre gunshot to the head?’

  McGuire nodded.

  ‘No other sign of violence; no sexual assault?’

  ‘No . . . not in the examination at the scene, at least.’

  ‘Body arranged as if she’d been laid out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Victim as yet unknown?’

  ‘So far. There were absolutely no personal effects on the body, nothing to identify her. But how did you work that out?’

  ‘If you knew who she was, you wouldn’t be here. You’d either have worked out a connection between her and Stacey and you’d have pulled someone in already, or you’d be out there helping Steele to find a link. You said you briefed the boss. Did you let him see the body?’

  ‘No. She was on her way to the morgue by the time I called on him. Why?’

  ‘If she’s local, there’s just a chance he’d have known her.’

  ‘True, although the beach walker, the guy who found her, he told us that he’s lived in Gullane for nearly thirty years and he didn’t recognise her.’

  ‘So what’s Stevie going to do?’

  ‘He’s got a techie working on a photograph of the body, trying to make her look as lifelike as he can. After the publicity, she might be reported missing overnight, but if not, then tomorrow his team will start knocking doors and showing it around. If we haven’t identified her by late afternoon, he’ll release it to the media and ask the TV stations to show it on the news.’

  ‘That’s horrible,’ Paula exclaimed. ‘A dead woman’s photo on telly!’

  ‘It won’t be the first time,’ McIlhenney told her.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Louise interrupted. ‘I guess I haven’t been taking enough interest in my husband’s work. Who is Stacey Gavin?’

  The two detectives looked at each other for a second or two, until McGuire nodded, as if in signal.

  McIlhenney leaned his head back; suddenly it was as if his eyes were fixed on something far away. ‘Stacey Gavin,’ he began. ‘At five minutes past ten on the morning of March the thirteenth, she’s lying on a quiet beach near South Queensferry, almost under the Forth railway bridge. She’s on her back, looking up at the sky. Her arms are by her sides, palms down. It’s a clear morning, but chilly, so she’s wearing an Afghan coat, over a sweater, and a long dress that’s spread out as though she arranged it that way when she lay down. She looks very peaceful, so peaceful that three people walk past her, before a fourth, a lady called Irene Chettle, says, “Good morning,” but gets no response.

  ‘Mrs Chettle thinks she’s rude, and carries on with her constitutional. On the way back, she hails her again: no answer again, but she’s a wee bit closer this time, and there’s something, some indefinable thing about Stacey’s stillness, that makes her stop and go over to her. She stands over her and says, “Hello, dear.” Even then she thinks she’s being ignored; she gets annoyed. “I’m sorry if I’m disturbing you,” she says. She’s decided that the girl’s what she still thinks of as a hippie, and that she’s playing some game. She’s going to leave her to it when the sun comes out and washes across her face.

  ‘Two things strike her: she’s very pale, and her pupils don’t react. She reaches down and touches her cheek. It’s cold, even allowing for the weather. She shakes her, but there’s no reaction. Finally Mrs Chettle, a recently retired civil servant who’s never seen a cadaver in her entire life, realises that she’s dead. She doesn’t carry a mobile, so she legs it back up to the town and goes into the Hawes Inn, where she asks the receptionist to call the police.’

  He paused, took a sip of wine, and refilled his glass. ‘We attend, initially in the form of two uniforms from the Hopetoun Road office: they look at her and they think, “Junkie.” A doctor arrives, closely followed by two detective constables, and they all think the same thing. The doc declares that to be the probable cause.

  ‘To be fair that’s not unreasonable, because there’s nothing that screams “suspicious death”: there are no signs of a struggle, and she’s a strong-looking girl. So the alarm is not raised: death is pronounced and the wagon’s called to take her away to the morgue, off the Cowgate.

  ‘There’s nothing in her pockets to identify her, no purse, driving licence, no mobile, no nothing, but by sheer chance, the driver of the ambulance is a South Queensferry lass and recognises her as a girl she knew at school: Stacey Gavin, number thirteen Wallace Court, age twenty-three. Chippy Grade, the inspector from the local office, goes to the house, with the female uniform who attended the scene. It turns out that Stacey lives with her parents, and her mum’s at home. They break the news. Naturally the mother’s stunned, too stunned to cry, like the bereaved can be until they’ve actually seen the body.’

  Neil broke off and looked into his glass, as if it was a window into his past. ‘People have an off switch, you know. There are things that . . . We react when we’re told, but inwardly we refuse to countenance them until we’ve seen the truth, and know that it’s real, that there isn’t any way to avoid it any longer. Believe me when I tell you that.’ He drew a deep breath, as Louise reached out and squeezed his hand.

  ‘So there’s Mrs Gavin,’ he continued, ‘staring at the wall, in her own corner of hell, and suddenly she says, “What about Rusty? Where’s poor Rusty?’ Inspector Grade, bless his wee silver epaulettes, thinks nothing of it. He assumes she’s talking about her husband. His name’s Russ and he’s an engineer with a local firm, they’ve discovered, and so the inspector leaves the constable with the mother, and goes to see him, to break the news and to take him to the mortuary for the formal identification.’

  ‘So who was Rusty?’ asked Paula.

  ‘Rusty was her dog, but I’ll get to him later. The dad’s shattered too, as you’d expect. On the way into the city, Grade asks him, as delicately as possible, he swore afterwards, about his daughter’s drug habit. Mr Gavin blows up at him, but Grade thinks it’s hysteria and calms him down. He makes the ID, and he’s taken home to his wife. The pathologists are busy that day: there’s been a multiple fatality on the city bypass. So the autopsy is set for ten next morning, Wednesday. But there’s a delay: it doesn’t begin until eleven fifteen, and that’s when it hits the fan. That’s when the hole in the back of her head is discovered, and that’s the first time we realise that we have a homicide on our hands, a full day and more after the discovery of the body.’

  ‘What happened next?’ Louise leaned across the table, her face serious but her eyes bright with interest.

  ‘The pathologist was working alone,’ Neil told her. ‘He stopped and called for a colleague as corroboration, and he phoned me. I called Stevie Steele and we sat in on the resumed examination: we were there when the bullet was recovered.’

  ‘Why DI Steele? I thought Chief Inspector Mackenzie was in charge of that area.’

  ‘The Bandit? No he’s still on sick leave.’

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘They’re calling it post-traumatic stress, after that big armed incident in St Andrews that we got drawn into. Within this room, he went on the piss in the wake of it, and it turned into a breakdown.’ He glanced at his friend. ‘That one there’s muttering about a pitch for early retirement on health grounds, but I’m not going along with that.’

  ‘You’re too soft,’ Mario grunted.

  ‘No,’ Neil retorted. ‘The opposite: I’m probably too bloody hard. I was there and I saw the same bodies and blood that Bandit did. You think I didn’t get the shakes after it? I got over them, that’s all, just like I did when my best friend got himself shot a few years back. And as I remember it, you weren’t all that fucking nonchalant, even after they’d patched you up.’

  ‘Point taken,’ said McGuire, quietly.

  Louise brought the discussion back on track. ‘So Inspector Steele headed the murder investigation?’

  ‘Yes, reporting to me, but he was under a major disadvantage from the off, be
cause he had no crime scene.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘More than twenty-four hours had gone by since the body was discovered. It was hopelessly compromised: any forensic evidence discovered there would have been absolutely useless in court. We didn’t even have a reliable time of death, because the autopsy had been delayed so long.

  ‘Steele began with the parents, looking to build up a list of Stacey’s acquaintances, since nine times out of ten the victim knows the killer, but before that he spoke to Chippy Grade, who mentioned the Rusty remark. As I said, he was her dog, a Westie. She walked him every morning; her mother said that sometimes she stayed away for two or three hours looking at the seascape and such, stopping to sketch on occasion, and so there was nothing unusual about her not returning. She’d gone out around eight that day, so that gave us a firmer idea of the time of death. Or rather deaths: we found the poor wee mutt Rusty a couple of days later, washed up in Granton, with its lead still attached to its collar. It had been shot and, yes, we had a vet do an autopsy, and the bullets matched, so that’s something else we’re going to do this bastard for when we run him to ground.’

  ‘Did Stevie make any progress?’ asked Paula.

  ‘He eliminated a lot of people. He and his officers created a pretty thorough model of Stacey’s life. She was a full-time artist: she graduated last year from the art college up in Lauriston, and worked out of a studio in her folks’ attic.’

  ‘Did she sell much?’

  ‘For a newcomer she was doing all right; she specialised in coastal views, not just scenery, though, impressionistic and very colourful. I saw some of her work in the Scottish Gallery; it’s good, very good, and as far as I can tell, unique. It’s going for about a grand on average, depending on the size; her records showed her gross income since last October as just under fourteen thousand, less commission.

  The gallery people said that wasn’t bad at all for a newcomer, that she’d found a niche for herself and could have looked forward to making a good living from prints as well as sales of original works.

  ‘Apparently she was quite a talented portrait painter too. Stevie told me that he saw pictures of her mum and dad in the house. She didn’t do much of that, though: one or two freebies for friends, but that was all. She was a very focused girl, and wanted to cement her reputation in what she did best, before branching out into less commercial work.’

  ‘What about her social life? Boyfriends?’

  ‘Not active. She had a circle of art-school friends, a mix of guys and gals. The team interviewed them all, and were pretty certain that there was nobody special. One bloke told us that he’d had a thing with her in their first year at college, but it ended when Stacey asked if they could just be friends. That’s what they’ve been ever since, he said.

  ‘Stevie dug as deep into her background as he could. He looked into her e-mails, her mobile records, calls to the family phone: nothing. He put out the usual request for information, but all he got were responses from the three people who’d walked past her on the path above the beach. Stacey wasn’t the only one who walked her dog there in the morning. None of them were any bloody use at all, though: they all said they’d thought she was sleeping.’

  ‘They would, wouldn’t they?’ Louise murmured. ‘Those who behave like Levites rarely own up to the fact. So where does the investigation stand now?’

  ‘Until this afternoon it was standing still. Now, it’s got some momentum again, and a new urgency. I’m pretty sure we have a double murderer on our patch. And the scary question is, if we don’t catch him will he stop at two?’

  Five

  ‘When does a multiple murderer become a serial killer?’ Margaret Rose Steele put the question to her husband as he dried his hair with a towel in their big kitchen watching her remove the stone from an avocado. It was his unshakeable practice to take a shower as soon as he returned home after witnessing an autopsy before doing anything else.

  ‘You’re a copper,’ he retorted. ‘You should know that.’

  ‘Maybe, but I don’t. “Serial killer” is one of those phrases the media loves to throw about, but I’ve never seen it defined.’

  ‘What are we having for supper?’

  ‘Just a couple of prawn thingies. It’s nearly ten: we shouldn’t eat too much. But don’t change the subject. Come on, tell me. Or don’t you know either?’

  ‘As it happens, I do. We had a guest lecturer on a course I was on at the police college who specialised in the subject. He said that the FBI came up with the term thirty years ago.’

  ‘So it’s an American phenomenon?’

  ‘Hell, no, it’s as old as time. The definition we were given is that serial killers are people who commit three or more murders over a period with gaps between. Often they will appear quite normal, and their hobby goes unsuspected by their friends and neighbours. Usually, there’s a sexual aspect to their crimes, but there doesn’t have to be; there wasn’t with Shipman, for example.’

  Maggie shrugged. ‘So they’re just mass murderers.’

  ‘No,’ her husband contradicted her. ‘That’s different: mass murderers are defined as those who kill three or more people in a single event and at a single location. Suicide bombers are the classic modern example. And there’s an accepted third category, spree killers, people who go on a rampage, popping victims off all over the place. They don’t revert to normal behaviour between kills, though: they’re driven by an overwhelming homicidal urge, and they carry on until they’re caught or killed. It doesn’t mean a lot to the public, though; whatever you call them, they’re all seriously disturbed.’

  ‘Crackers,’ said Maggie, tersely.

  ‘But not legally so; not in the case of serial killers, anyway. Most of them, when they’re brought to trial, will try to plead not guilty on the ground of insanity, but very few of them succeed. The legal definition of who’s nuts and who isn’t is still based on the McNaughten rules. They date back to a case of that name in the nineteenth century, in England; it set the principle that a person is sane if he knew the difference between right and wrong at the time of each crime. The premeditation in serial cases, plus the murderer’s clear success in avoiding detection for what can be long periods, makes an insanity defence very difficult to sustain.’

  ‘So if you’re right about these two killings being connected . . .’

  ‘I am right. It’s not just me, either: Mario’s just as certain. Neither of us saw Stacey Gavin’s body at the scene, but we did see the only two photos that were taken. The mere description of the second body made him drop everything, head out to East Lothian and call for me. But we’ll know for sure when we get the result of the ballistics comparison between the two bullets.’

  ‘So: what will you have?’

  ‘We’ll have a bad bastard.’

  Maggie frowned, as she spooned cooked prawns from a sieve and arranged them over the halves of the avocado. ‘That covers all of your definitions. Be specific, Inspector.’

  ‘That may depend on who the second victim is. Does her circle of acquaintances overlap with Stacey’s? I’ve already checked . . . or, rather, I had a detective constable, Tarvil Singh, check . . . all of the interviewees in the Gavin investigation. He got hold of them all, so she isn’t one of them, but tomorrow we’ll go round them all and show them a touched-up photo, see if we get any reactions.’

  ‘I’ll bet you do; just give their breakfast time to go down, that’s all. But so what if the two are connected? Where does that take you?’

  Stevie stared at her, as she finished preparing their light supper and carried two plates across to the refectory table in the corner of the kitchen. ‘What’s with you?’ he asked. ‘It’s not so long since you were an ace detective yourself.’

  ‘Maybe being back in uniform’s made my brain go soft.’

  ‘Well, let’s toughen it up,’ he retorted, as he uncapped a bottle of sparkling water, and began to fill two glasses. ‘You tell me what I’ll have.’

&n
bsp; She sat on a long bench on one side of the table. ‘Hopefully, you’ll have a prime suspect. A connection between them would rule out, almost certainly, unless it was a slight or accidental connection, the notion that they were random victims. If you find a link you’ll see where it takes you, or rather, to whom it takes you. But if they are random . . .’ She whistled. ‘Nasty.’

  ‘Very . . . and my arse will be on the line as senior investigating officer.’

  ‘Now you’re being over-dramatic,’ she said. ‘From what you’ve told me about the Gavin case, there’s no evidence pointing you towards anyone. Maybe you’ll get lucky: maybe the second victim will give you some. But if it doesn’t, that won’t mean that you’ve fallen down on the job. It’ll simply mean that you’re up against a very careful, methodical villain. You won’t be condemned for that.’

  ‘I’ll be in the spotlight, though. Investigating a potential serial killer get you lots of attention, even if he is just starting out. I’ll be under more pressure than I’ve ever known.’

  ‘What if he isn’t?’

  A forkful of prawn in thousand-island dressing paused halfway to his mouth. ‘Isn’t what?’

  ‘Starting out. What if Stacey wasn’t his first victim?’

  ‘Come on, love, give me some credit. We checked the markings on the first bullet through the national database. The weapon hasn’t been used in any other crimes, solved or unsolved.’

  ‘What if he has more than one gun?’

  Stevie frowned.

  ‘What if the two bullets don’t match?’ she continued. ‘Will that put paid to the idea that it’s the same killer?’

  He shook his head slowly. ‘Not as far as I’m concerned. I feel it in my gut that these crimes are related.’ He glanced at her. ‘Hey, Mags, promise me something, right now: promise me you’ll still challenge me, won’t you, even if you do leave the job?’

  ‘You don’t need me to do that. You always get there.’

  ‘Maybe, but sometimes you help me get there faster. Like now: one of my priorities tomorrow will be to run both crime scenes, photos and descriptions, through the national computer to see whether we get any matches.’