Easy Kill (21 page)

The superintendent wanted a breakthrough, if not an immediate result. He had people on his back, not least the media. It wasn’t Bill who had to face the daily press briefing. Terri’s story, from nice girl to heroin addict to prostitute, had grabbed their attention, fuelled by the fact she might be alive and in the hands of the killer. Add in a criminal psychologist with Magnus’s looks and personality and it was a heady brew. No doubt the media would soon be aware of the ‘moon’ angle. It was common practice for moles in the force and among hospital and mortuary staff to alert the press with a good story. In the case of the lower paid, any supplement to their wages was welcome.

Having to let both Beattie and Irvine go had added to the fallout. Beattie was hiding something, but Bill had a feeling it was something other than Terri’s disappearance. Perhaps he made a habit of hooking up with his female pupils – that wouldn’t make him a murderer. They were probing a bit deeper into Beattie’s sailing club connections, checking if there had been any
complaints made against him. It wouldn’t be the first time warning signs had gone unnoticed.

Irvine was a different but equally unpleasant character. A high earner, he’d professed to frequenting the red-light district when he’d made, as he put it, a
killing
on the stock market. According to Irvine, slumming it with street prostitutes added to his high. Both he and Beattie had alibis for the night in question. If the alibis checked out and neither man’s DNA was a match, then both were out of the picture.

Magnus had shown his worth in both interviews, describing afterwards the subtle changes in body movement suggesting truth, evasion or lies. Things Bill had sensed intuitively, or learned over two decades, now apparently had a scientific name – kinesics. Thinking of Magnus now, Bill wondered where he was.

Repeated calls to his mobile and home numbers had yielded nothing. Neither had a check on his flat. Magnus, like the online auction, had simply disappeared. Bill reminded himself Magnus was not his responsibility, but it didn’t prevent him from worrying that the professor had done something stupid and possibly dangerous.

Bill checked his watch. He had a meeting in half an hour with ballistics. He decided the time in between would be best spent in the incident room.

Information overload was the impression he got on entry. That was the problem with modern-day detective work. Everything had to be checked, double-checked and cross-referenced. For most of the incident
team, that meant sitting all day in front of a screen, interrogating a database.

For the team trawling CCTV footage of the red-light district, it meant hour after hour of grainy images of shadowy cars. Geordie had given them a time for Terri’s departure, but bearing in mind the old man had shown signs of memory loss and confusion, it probably wasn’t reliable. DC Mark Geddes showed him footage of a dark car arriving around the allotted time.

‘That looks like a towbar to me,’ he suggested.

Bill peered at the screen, trying to reshape the blob Mark was indicating into a towbar. It wasn’t easy.

‘No registration number?’

Geddes shook his head. ‘I’ve played around with what I think the figures might be. I’m running that through now.’

Cathy’s photograph had been added to the wall display of victims, although at the moment they had no forensics to link her to their killer. It was just too much of a coincidence that hours after discussing Terri’s disappearance with him, Cathy was dead.

Janice, like the rest of the team, was hunched over a computer. She had a train timetable from Glasgow to Cardross on the screen.

‘McNab called in. Said there was a train station close to the shore. Asked me to check the schedule. Trains run every half an hour. The last one on a Sunday night leaves Queen Street for Helensburgh via Cardross at 11.24 p.m.’

‘Bus?’

‘Not at that time on a Sunday.’

So Cathy could have got there without a car.

‘Okay, let’s see if we can get a sighting of her at Queen Street. Do we have an address for her yet?’

‘Just in. She lived in a block of flats off Duke Street, near where her body was found.’

‘Right. See what you can find out there. I’m off to ballistics. I take it there’s no word on Magnus?’

Janice shook her head.

DC Tweedie showed Bill a photograph of the bullet wound. ‘The wound suggests a handgun with a rifled barrel, used at close range. A small, clean, circular wound with bruising, singed skin and a muzzle imprint. I checked the inside of the culvert but I’d say she was shot elsewhere. It’s likely to be a reactivated gun because there’s plenty of them about. A father and son team from Manchester have just been charged with reactivating 4,000 handguns and selling them on, so no problem getting hold of one. Land Services have okayed a culvert trip, now the water level’s down. Maybe we’ll find the weapon.’ He didn’t sound hopeful. Why dispose of a gun you’d want to use again?

Guns and crack cocaine went together. Ask colleagues in Manchester or London. Glasgow was still the home of heroin but, as Craig Minto’s recent business venture suggested, what happened south of the border made its way north sooner or later.

BILL STOOD IN
the centre of Cathy’s small sitting room and looked about him. A blanket spread out on the sofa suggested someone had been sleeping there. An empty vodka bottle and two glasses stood on a nearby coffee table. He took a closer look but didn’t touch. Each rim was smeared with lipstick. It seemed Cathy had had a female visitor before she went out.

On his way to the kitchen, he took a look out of Cathy’s window. Nine storeys high, facing south, it provided a clear view of the Great Eastern, with the goods yard behind, his old school playground and of course the foliage around the Molendinar, where Cathy’s body had been found. Cathy hadn’t had far to go between home and grave. So why the round trip to Cardross?

A tiny kitchen led off the sitting room. The only item of interest in there was a packet of Valium, the prostitutes’ standby, lying next to a filled ashtray.

The bedroom was an altogether different matter. It could have won a prize in a bordello competition. Cathy had done her clients proud. The walls were painted a deep red, the king-sized bed spread with scarlet satin sheets and covered by a tiger-patterned
throw. Behind and above hung large mirrors. A fluffy bag next to the dressing table revealed an assortment of sex toys, including a large blue dildo that looked like it had been modelled on King Kong.

Bill heard a knock on the open front door. The caretaker, Jimmy Fairlie, stood in the doorway looking worried.

‘I was told you wanted to speak to me.’

Bill and Jimmy went back twenty years. As far as Bill was aware Jimmy had kept his nose clean for the last five years, since he got this job. Door to door interviews in the block of flats had given the impression Jimmy was well liked, and probably just as law-abiding as the rest of its inhabitants.

Bill stepped out onto the landing to question him.

‘Cathy had a visitor Sunday night?’

‘Aye. A lassie, about eight o’clock. Cathy was expecting her. She rang down and told me to let her in.’

‘What did she look like?’

Jimmy gave a reasonable description of what sounded like Leanne. ‘She was in a bit of a mess. Like she’d been out all night.’

‘Did Cathy say the name Leanne?’

‘She might have.’ Jimmy looked cagey. He didn’t want to point the finger at anyone.

‘And what happened after that?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No one else came to see Cathy?’

‘Nope.’

‘Did you see Cathy leave?’

Jimmy shook his head. ‘I knock off at eleven. She must have gone out after that.’

‘What about the girl?’

‘She never came down before I left.’

Jimmy was avoiding looking over Bill’s shoulder at the open bedroom door.

‘How well did you know Cathy?’

Jimmy cleared his throat. ‘Eh. We were pals.’

‘How pally, exactly?’

Jimmy was considering his reply. One look at Bill’s face convinced him that honesty was the best policy.

‘I helped her out with anything that needed fixing in the flat – she was nice to me.’

‘When was she last nice to you?’ Bill kept his voice level.

‘A week ago Saturday, when I knocked off work.’

The pathology report suggested Cathy had had sex in the hours before her death. Jimmy might be telling the truth, but they had to be sure.

‘We’ll have to check your DNA.’

Jimmy shrugged his shoulders. ‘You’ve got it already.’ He didn’t look bothered, which suggested he might be telling the truth. The man had been a smalltime crook, not known for violence. Breaking and entering and trading in stolen goods was his business. He hadn’t jumped on the drugs bandwagon when it arrived either. Bill had no doubt Jimmy was still operating in a low-key way. Why pay Inland Revenue your hard-earned money when the really rich never did?

‘Any idea who would shoot Cathy?’

Jimmy shook his head. ‘Fucking terrible.’ He looked genuinely sorry.

‘Did Cathy say anything to you about Terri Docherty?’

‘Only that she thought the missing lassie wasn’t dead.’

‘When did Cathy tell you that?’

Jimmy looked scared, as if he’d said too much. ‘I don’t remember.’

‘Try.’

‘Okay. It was Sunday. She had a cup of tea with me in the booth.’

‘Did she tell you why she thought that?’

‘No, but she sounded pretty sure.’

They were back at that telephone message. Bill cursed himself again for not answering the bloody phone when it rang.

CHRISSY HELD UP
a paint chip as big as her little fingernail.

‘That was in the soil?’

‘On Geordie’s clothes.’

Rhona took a closer look. The shape was black and irregular, which was good for matching. Under a microscope the layers would be obvious, the chemical analysis of them straightforward. Every model, make and year of car had its own distinct colour mix. Paint was a forensic scientist’s dream trace evidence.

‘And this,’ Chrissy gestured to the microscope, ‘is what I found in the soil.’

The flake was much smaller and the colour of wood.

‘I haven’t gone any further than just admire it,’ Chrissy said. ‘But the thought did cross my mind it might be varnish.’

Rhona had done work on spar or marine varnish before. It resembled regular varnish except for the higher oil content, making it more flexible and better in humidity. UV inhibitors were often incorporated, because of exposure to the sun. It would be more difficult to match a yacht varnish to an actual yacht than a flake of paint to a make and model of car.

They took some time out to discuss progress in general.

‘What happened about the partial print on the gag?’ Rhona asked.

‘Livescan have it, and the one lifted from Terri’s handbag. So we’ll see if they find a match in the DNA database. The partial isn’t good, but I did rescue some skin cells from the tape. I’m waiting for results on those too.’

Rhona related her tale of the Cardross trip.

‘You and McNab getting cosy again?’

‘Chrissy,’ Rhona warned.

‘McNab’s good at pretending to be good.’

‘He’s seeing Judy at GUARD.’

‘Really?’ Chrissy pulled a face. ‘It was Janice Clark last I heard.’

That’s what McNab had told Rhona on the Nigerian trip, but she’d seen no evidence of it on her return.

‘Funny he never fancied me.’ Chrissy pondered, mock-affronted.

‘He’ll get around to it.’

Chrissy patted her belly. ‘Not when he finds out about this.’ She dug in the pocket of her lab coat and extracted a small photo. ‘I know it looks like a blob.’

Rhona sought the shape of a baby in the blur. Chrissy helped by pointing to the curve of the backbone. Recognition sent a shiver up Rhona’s own spine.

‘Boy or girl?’

‘I prefer surprises.’

There was a moment’s silence, while they both
digested the enormity of what the image actually meant, then Chrissy changed the subject.

‘How’s the Viking doing?’

‘He’s disappeared.’

‘What?’

‘Magnus didn’t come to the meeting and is non-contactable.’

‘You’re worried,’ Chrissy said, stating the obvious.

‘He’ll turn up,’ said Rhona, hoping her conviction would make it true.

On the way back from Cardross, McNab had repeated his suggestion that they study the Atlantic City file together. Rhona’s request that he fax her the forensic details had been stonewalled – poring over them together seemed to be his preferred option.

He’d finally given in. ‘You’ll let me know if you find anything interesting?’

‘Of course.’

McNab had been as good as his word. The documents were with her an hour later. Rhona put them with the unsolved cases for later study and set about examining the flake sieved from the grave soil.

Chemical analysis established it as spar or marine varnish, as Chrissy had said. Matching it to a particular company took longer. She eventually located a family firm called Realpaints, specialising in paints and varnishes that incorporated only traditional ingredients and production methods. Their spar was based on tung oil, similar to her analysis. The man Rhona needed to talk to wasn’t there, but his assistant
promised he would get back to her. Her call did establish that their varnish was designed for use on the masts and wooden hulls of older yachts. Useful once they had a suspect who owned or worked on such a yacht, but as yet just another piece in an increasingly complex puzzle.

Magnus had seemed pretty certain on two things – the importance of both the killer’s geographical profile, and his signature. Rhona had already marked up a city map with the various crime scenes, like the one Bill had on display in the incident room. She drew a line through the various locations. The Necropolis to Duke Street, to the emergence of the Molendinar, and finally to Calton, where Terri and Lucie had been picked up.

The line formed the shape of a wide crescent, bizarrely like the shape of a half-moon. Apart from a possible link with Cardross, the killer had operated within this boundary. Magnus had suggested the perpetrator would have a base not far from where he killed. He would retreat there as soon as possible afterwards, like a lion returning to its lair.