Bad Debt, page 19
‘I’m just dropping the wean off,’ he said. ‘I promised Tina I’d take her to Sandy’s for something to eat.’
‘No more ice cream lunches, Alex,’ Joanna said.
‘Of course not,’ my dad lied. He handed our son over to Joanna. ‘So, tell me. What’s the news from the post-mortem? That’s where you were this morning, wasn’t it?’
Joanna looked at me.
‘Bashed head, blunt object, shot twice in the chest,’ I said. ‘It looks like they’ll have to put the trial off.’
‘At least that’s something,’ he said. ‘Give the pair of you more time to build up a defence. Maybe you’ll remember where you were the night it happened.’ He gave me no more than the twitch of an eyelid, but Joanna spotted the wink.
‘There’ll be no made-up alibis,’ she said. ‘There’s no point—’
‘Me and Dad both going to jail?’ I said.
‘I was going to say, there’s no point in leading an I was with my dad watching the football alibi. Who’s going to believe that?’
‘But there’s Malky too. And Brendan from the Red Corner said he’d—’
‘Alex, will you listen? I don’t care if you rope in Her Majesty the Queen. An alibi isn’t going to explain Robbie’s DNA on a pickaxe handle with the blood of a dead man on it who’s later found floating in the River Avon!’
My mind raced back again to that night in the outbuilding, and the way MacDonald had taken me out of the equation with one sweeping leg kick before skittling Stan Blandy’s two henchmen.
‘You saw MacDonald, Joanna. He was a big guy, and fit looking. What age was he?’
‘Early forties.’
‘How could he let himself be beaten up by a sixty-odd-year-old out-of-shape politician, and then again by someone else just a few weeks later? Don’t they teach them hand-to-hand combat any more?’
‘Don’t who teach them?’ Joanna asked.
‘The Army.’
‘I don’t think MacDonald was ever in the Army,’ Joanna said. ‘According to his witness statement—’
‘The one he wouldn’t speak to in the witness box?’ I said.
‘Doesn’t matter. He’d hardly have lied to the police about his work history. What would be the point of that? He lived and worked in the Highlands most of his life as a freelance photographer. He only moved down to the central belt a couple of years back when his wife died. He bought the place near Muiravonside as work in progress and has been employed part time in the country park. It might have been someone there who reported him missing the next day when he didn’t turn up for work.’
By this time, I’d finished my tea. Joanna had scarcely touched hers. I could tell she was still doubtful about the MacDonald/Army connection.
‘Trust me, Jo, he was ex-Army,’ I said. ‘He had an Army tattoo. You must have seen it at the post-mortem.’
Jamie was reaching out and tugging at Joanna’s hair. Gently she shook her head free of his grasping little fingers. ‘There was no tattoo, Robbie.’
‘There must have been,’ I said. ‘A big one on his left forearm. An Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders motif.’ I laughed. ‘You’re not telling me it dissolved in the water?’ I glanced over at my dad who was listening intently. ‘Sans Peur.’ The only French words I knew growing up, though never quite sure why a Scottish regiment had a French motto. ‘You remember Uncle Jim’s tattoo, Dad. Well, this one was like that, only bigger and in colour.’
It was my dad’s turn to laugh. ‘I remember Jim’s tattoo all right, but I’m with Joanna on this one. You must have been seeing things.’
What was he talking about? Yes, I’d seen it. It was one of the last things I had seen before being dumped unceremoniously on my arse. I might have bumped my elbow, but not my head.
My dad put a hand on my shoulder. ‘You’ve been through a lot, son. It’s understandable if—’
I shrugged free and looked at each of them in turn. ‘Stop it. I know what I saw. You weren’t there. I was.’
‘And you saw an Argylls tattoo on a MacDonald. Is that right? Robbie, the Argylls were a Campbell regiment. There’s more chance of the Pope joining the Orange Lodge than a MacDonald getting his arm inked with an Argylls tattoo. I mean to say, there’s still pubs near Glencoe where a Campbell can’t buy a drink. Did they not teach you about The Massacre at school? There’s even a song about it.’
Joanna looked at me. I looked at her. We knew the song well. In fact, we’d heard someone singing it last Friday night. My dad started in on the opening line. ‘Oh, cruel is the snow . . .’ when Grace Mary came through and mercifully saved us from any more.
‘Jessica Barrett. I remember where I’ve seen that name before.’ She handed me the indictment, flipped over the citation sheet and pointed to the foot of the page. ‘She signed your indictment.’
35
I made the call and arranged to meet the cops from the SCD. I still didn’t trust them, so I wanted somewhere there’d be plenty of witnesses. Around five o’clock that same Friday afternoon I arrived at the Falkirk Wheel, the world’s biggest – the world’s only – rotating boat lift. I parked in the high car park situated on a level with the Union Canal and waited by the maquette of the Kelpies. The hundred-foot equine sculptures of Baron and Duke were four miles further down the Forth and Clyde canal, though it was quicker to walk than navigate a barge through the many intervening locks. My phone buzzed. Private number. It was Stan Blandy calling exactly one week since he’d last been in touch, no doubt demanding Maggie Sinclair’s phone. I bumped the call as soon as I heard his voice. Two could play at being uncontactable.
I’d been hanging about for about twenty minutes, watching the Wheel transport tourist-filled barges between the two canals, and trying not to get run over by students whizzing around on Segways, when the big black car drew up and parked alongside mine. DCI Sandeman alighted. She was more casually dressed than normal and minus her fat companion. She removed a packet of cigarettes from the handbag slung over her shoulder and shook one loose as she sauntered over to me. ‘Thought they were a lot bigger than that,’ she said, looking at the miniature Kelpies.
‘They are. These are scale models,’ I said.
‘I’m joking. I passed the real ones on the motorway.’ She lit her cigarette, took a leisurely draw and blew smoke out of the side of her mouth. ‘Left it a bit late to get in touch, haven’t you? I wasn’t going to come. I’m off duty. Not sure there’s all that much I can do to help at this stage. Not now that we’ve got the body.’
‘But you don’t have the weapon,’ I said.
Sandeman disagreed. ‘No, we have one of the weapons. The gun’s probably at the bottom of the river.’
We walked down the path from the car park. ‘I don’t know where the real murder weapon is,’ I said, when we’d reached the visitor centre. ‘But I do know what you have is the wrong body.’
Sandeman snorted jets of smoke down her nostrils in amusement.
‘It’s true. The man they pulled out of the Avon – he’s not MacDonald, or, if he is, he’s not the MacDonald who was stalking my wife, and he’s not the MacDonald who gave evidence at the trial of Simon Keggie.’
We walked on in silence, around the café to the esplanade by the basin where a few boats were moored and tourists queued for a spin on the wheel. There were some metal tables and a few chairs scattered around them. Sandeman pulled one out and sat down. I joined her.
‘That’s ridiculous,’ she said at last. ‘The DNA from the blood on the kitchen floor matched MacDonald’s. There’s also blood in the outbuilding and on the pickaxe handle.’
‘But the blood in the outbuilding and on the pickaxe handle isn’t MacDonald’s,’ I said.
I’d read over the forensic reports a hundred times. it wasn’t until I’d learned of the dead man’s missing tattoo that I’d read them again, this time properly. Sandeman was right, the blood in the kitchen was indeed MacDonald’s, but the report had gone on to say it was not possible to positively identify MacDonald’s DNA from the few drops of blood on the filthy stone floor or from the streaks on the pickaxe handle. Naturally I’d assumed there’d been insufficient material for a clean sample. The outbuilding floor was filthy, and there were only traces of blood on the pickaxe handle. The samples would have dried out or might otherwise have been contaminated. The reasonable inference to be drawn was that, if there was blood in the kitchen and blood in the outbuilding, they both came from the same source. When I’d mentioned it to Joanna, she’d phoned the forensic lab and dragged the truth out of them. Not that Police forensic scientists were prone to untruths – they were just trained to be as unhelpful to the defence as possible, but in a truthful sort of a way. The truth was that DNA had been extracted from the blood swabs taken from the floor of the outbuilding and also the pickaxe handle. It was also true that it hadn’t been possible to identify the DNA as MacDonald’s – because it wasn’t his. The report was perfectly true. Perfectly true and perfectly misleading.
The truth was that the blood belonged to someone, and that someone had a dirty great big Argylls tattoo on his forearm.
‘Whose is it, then, the blood in the outbuilding?’ Sandeman said, the cigarette between her lips waggling up and down as she spoke.
‘I don’t know his name. Maybe you could try and find a match on the DNA database.’
There was an ashtray on the table, but Sandeman didn’t use it. She let her arm drop to her side, flicked ash off her cigarette and let the wind take it away. ‘I could,’ she said. ‘If you’ll tell me who else was there with you in that outbuilding.’
Had she been listening to me? ‘I’ve just told you. The man in the outbuilding wasn’t MacDonald. I’ve never met the real MacDonald. Not even when he was supposed to be giving evidence at Simon Keggie’s trial. He was a plant, making sure Keggie wasn’t convicted.’
The DCI shrugged. ‘It’s still your DNA on one end of the pickaxe handle and MacDonald’s blood nearby. Maybe you killed him so that this other MacDonald could take his place at the trial. You were Keggie’s lawyer after all. What better way to secure an acquittal? I’ll bet those politicians pay well. Legal aid solicitor like yourself, wife and a couple of kids . . .’
This wasn’t at all how I’d imagined things going. ‘The person you should be looking for is the person who took MacDonald’s place in court,’ I said. ‘A good place to start asking questions would be with Keggie. He must have known that wasn’t MacDonald in the witness box.’ I remembered our lunchtime consultation at Mr Singh’s and how confident Keggie and his wife had been that I, the lawyer dropped in at the last minute on a recommendation from slip-and-trip Sammy Veitch, would secure an acquittal.
Sandeman shrugged noncommittally. ‘Or I could start with the procurator fiscal depute who prosecuted the case and didn’t recognise that the chief witness was the wrong person. Your wife, wasn’t it?’ She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray and wafted a hand at the spirals of smoke that rose from the dying butt. ‘You know? The more I think about it, the more I think we should be bringing your old lady in for a spot of questioning.’
‘That’s not happening,’ I said.
‘Oh, it’ll happen all right,’ Sandeman said. ‘I’m back on duty in forty-eight hours. If by then you don’t have the names of whoever was with you in that outbuilding . . .’ She planted the palms of her hands on the table and leaned across at me. ‘Your missus is coming in for a chat.’
36
A husband shouldn’t try to keep secrets from his wife, mainly because she’ll find them out anyway; however, desperate times called for desperate measures and there was no way I was going to break the news to Joanna that she was a couple of days away from being handcuffed, marched into a police station and interviewed on suspicion of conspiracy to murder.
To quote Samuel Johnson, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. I wasn’t to be hanged, but the prospect of life imprisonment had me keenly focused on the issues at hand. I knew what I needed to do, and to do it I needed a van and two people crazy enough to help me.
‘What kind of van?’ Jake Turpie asked.
‘One that’s easy to throw someone into,’ I said.
‘I thought that’s what you said.’ Jake turned on a steel toecapped boot and set off down an alley of wrecked cars, stacked high either side. I followed in his wake, dodging the oil-skinned puddles that were a feature of Jake’s scrapyard whatever the time of year or weather. This do you?’ he asked, slapping the front panel of a Ford Transit that was a series of rust spots travelling in close formation.
‘Nah, I’m looking for something with a side door,’ I said. ‘Something you could bundle someone into without too much hassle.’
Jake raked the sole of a boot along the shale path. After he’d finished shaking his head, he looked up at me. ‘Bawheid, you couldnae bundle firewood. Are you sure you’ve thought this through?’
I had, and I hadn’t intended being the one doing the bundling. ‘What’s Deek up to tomorrow?’ I asked, strongly suspecting that Jake’s colossal sidekick would be doing what he normally did: collecting money from late payers to Jake’s informal payday loan scheme. Credit control was something Deek managed to do without threats of litigation. Just threats.
Jake sniffed. ‘I could make him available I suppose.’ He booted a front tyre. ‘What are you going to do with it afterwards?’
‘I don’t know. Bring it back here, I suppose.’
Jake rubbed his jaw. ‘Well now. If you’re talking about me giving you a loan of Deek and this van and me having to start up the crusher . . . It’s not going to be cheap. Then there’s getting rid of the body, that’ll cost you too. You’re best with a Mini or one of they wee Fiats if we’re going to sail it out into the Forth and dump it.’
It seemed we were talking at cross purposes.
‘Jake, I just want to stuff someone in a van and have a word with them.’
‘And after that . . .?’
‘There’s no after that. After that I let them go again.’
‘What about the cops? What about Deek?’
‘Deek can wear a mask. But it won’t matter. After I’ve spoken to him, this person will be going nowhere near the cops, trust me.’
Fully concentrated as my mind was, I’d concluded that there were two people who definitely knew that the Angus MacDonald who’d given evidence at the councillor’s trial wasn’t the real Angus MacDonald. One of them was the imposter with the Argylls tattoo, the other was Simon Keggie, and while I had no idea how to track down the former, I knew exactly where to find the latter. There was a good reason Simon Keggie had seemed so confident during the pre-trial consultation at Mr Singh’s. He knew he was taking a walk. Eddie ‘The Fixer’ Frew must have orchestrated the whole thing. Eddie got to Jessica Barrett QC, who in turn had pressurised Josh Wedderburn. The reason why Keggie hadn’t been quite so cool at his actual trial was because the plan looked like it had failed. That suggested the decision to bring in the fake MacDonald had been done in an emergency. But by whom? Eddie was dead and buried by then. I needed to know everything Keggie knew, and since he was point-blank refusing to speak to me, I’d have to give him a little encouragement.
Jake booted a stone down the rutted avenue. ‘You can have the van for five hundred. I’ll leave it on the track with the keys in it. After that, you’re on your own. And don’t bring it back here. Dump it somewhere.’
‘Come on, Jake. I can’t do it myself. I just need a wee hand to chuck this guy into a van so I can drive him somewhere isolated, have a chat and then boot him out the door. I guarantee there’ll be no comeback.’
Jake did some more jaw rubbing. ‘A grand for the van and Deek. One hour. Understand?’
I understood all right. Everything apart from me paying £1,000 per hour for the services of a clapped-out van and a big eejit like Deek Pudney. ‘I’ll give you two hundred for Deek and the van.’
‘Seven-fifty. Take it or leave it,’ Jake said.
I wasn’t for taking it, but neither was I leaving it. ‘One hundred for the van, and I’ll do the next court case for Deek or one of your boys, whoever gets in bother first.’ Jake hesitated. ‘You know it’s just a matter of time,’ I said.
‘Two-fifty and the next case for free,’ Jake said.
I pulled out five folded twenties. ‘I’ve only got a hundred. Come on, Jake. If you don’t help me out on this, you’ll not have a lawyer because I’ll be in jail.’
Jake snatched the money from me with an oily hand. ‘No one better end up dead. If they do, I’ll be needing a lot more than this,’ he said, scrunching the money in my face before stuffing it into the pocket of his boiler suit.
So far so good. I had the van, but only one person crazy enough to help. I needed one more.
37
‘It just does, that’s all,’ Malky said. ‘End of. Full stop. Finito.’
On the way home, I called in at my dad’s house to collect Tina. She’d gone there straight from school, and I found her in the kitchen deep in conversation with my brother on the subject of after-school snacks: the most important meal of the day.
‘But, Uncle Malky, I like them cut into wee triangles, like Mum does.’
Discussions with persons more intelligent than yourself are never easy; still, my brother was doing his best. He’d had lots of practice.
Malky smiled patiently at his niece’s naivety. ‘Listen, princess. Who’s the adult here?’ I would have interrupted, but I wanted to know the answer. He stroked Tina under the chin. ‘I don’t make the rules, darling. It’s just a fact. Accept it. A jam sandwich tastes better if you put it on a single slice of bread and fold it over – strictly no cutting. Don’t ask me why. I’m not a scientist,’ he said, lest there be any confusion on that score, then presented my daughter with the palm of his hand to indicate he was taking no further questions.
