“Not a thing. Arm nick was the sort of thing you would get giving blood. Nice work on the thyroid incision, I’m told. Takes a real artist to sew it up.”
“Her face was puffed up.”
“Aye. The sinuses. She had a cold, remember?”
“Aye.”
“There was a bruise on her chest, probably bumped herself falling.”
“Can you give blood when you have a cold?” Gorrie asked.
“Why not? Five cigars,” added Conall. “And I’d like the disc back when you’re done.”
“Aye,” Gorrie grunted.
An accident then, like council member Ewie Cameron’s accident. A coincidence, random and unconnected. The sort of thing that happened all the time.
A walrus waited for Gorrie in his office, polishing its tusks on a large piece of pastry supplied by one of the girls down the hall. He sat behind Gorrie’s desk, brushing crumbs away with his stubby fins, every so often touching his enormous mustache to see if any had strayed there.
The walrus was the deputy area commander, whose arrival at the Inverness Command Area’s CID section could bode no good at all.
“Sir,” said Gorrie, who had been warned by scurrying comrades before he approached.
“Inspector Gorrie, I’m pleased you could make it this morning,” said the deputy commander, Nab Russell.
“I’ve been nosin’ around,” answered Gorrie. “What brings you here, Chief?”
“There are rumors, Inspector, that your methods of detection are not proceeding with the snap and polish expected of the Northern Constabulary,” said Russell.
From another man, the words would have been meant to elicit a laugh. But another man was not the deputy commander. In a minute, Gorrie knew, he would begin to cite the Constabulary’s unprecedented detection rate—62 percent, up four percentage points from the year before and, more importantly, four points higher than that of the Central Constabulary. Not that there was competition, mind.
“I believe a review of my methods will pass any muster,” said Gorrie.
“You’re trying to connect a traffic accident involving a respected council member — a legate holder, a man descended from heroes, Frank — an unfortunate accident to a tawdry suicide?”
“At least one was murder,” said Gorrie.
“Cameron slept with the wife?”
“No evidence of that. I didnae even think it has been suggested.”
“Where’s the connection then?”
“It would be premature to connect them, sir. Inquiries are being made.”
“Inquiries, lad! I’m not the bleeding press. What is it you have?”
“The dead men met together the night they were murdered,” said Gorrie. “That’s it.”
The walrus pounced. “One was murdered by his wife. The other died in an accident.”
“Manslaughter, at the least.”
“Pending an investigation — and that is not your case,” Russell reminded him.
“I didna ask to be assigned it, sir.”
“You made hints.”
“I followed strict procedure when I met with the detective sergeant in charge,” said Gorrie sharply.
He had. The hints were made in a pub later on.
“Frank.” The walrus leaned to one side, then slid back in the desk chair. With appropriate adjustment for specifics of geographic locale, the speech that followed could have been given by nearly any police supervisor in the islands of Great Britain since the Romans. Crimes to be solved, yes, but flights of fancy not to be indulged. Connections sought, but fantasies nipped in the bud. Investigation to be pursued, but wild-goose chases to be foreclosed.
In some cases, the obvious was the obvious. And there was the detection rate to consider.
Finally, Gorrie couldn’t take any more of it. “Her hand was at the wrong angle,” he said. “I didnae think it could be suicide.”
“What?” asked the walrus.
“She was holding the gun the wrong way to have killed herself. If she were a man, perhaps, or stronger, but to have fired it the way she did, the bullet would have traveled further to the right of her head. To fire it the way she had”—Gorrie held his own hand to demonstrate—“her arm would have had to have been twisted.”
“The autopsy says that?”
“The report only notes the angle of the wound.”
“And the body might not have been moved? Or the arm jerk back as a reflex?”
“You’ll have to trust me on this, Nab. My instincts—”
“Frank, instincts?”
“I helped you out of the traffic division—”
“For twenty years you’ve held that over my head. Twenty years, lad.”
“And I’ll hold it twenty more, God willing.”
The walrus had no argument for that. More importantly, he was finished with his Danish. He rose.
“You have to close these cases out, Frank. The London papers are having a field day with us.”
“I wouldnae thought you cared about a London tabloid, Nab.”
The phone interrupted a recapitulation of the earlier lecture. Gorrie reached over and picked it up.
It was the detective in charge of the Cameron traffic accident case. They’d just found the truck they thought had hit the council member.
Gorrie caught a glimpse of an ancient stone house on his right as he turned down the road near Loch Ness where the truck had been found. Fifteen years before, the stone house had been the residence of Kevin and Mary Mac-Millan; it had been the scene of the first murder he’d ever investigated. Tidy case that — wife on the floor with her head bashed in, husband holding the hammer he’d done it with when the constables rushed in. Sergeant Gorrie spent more time typing up the report with his two-fingered typing than he did interviewing the suspect.
The truck was a year-old Ford, registered to and stolen from Highland Specialty Transport the night Cameron had been killed. It was a large diesel tractor, its front fender scratched slightly, one of its headlights smashed, and on its fender a small speckle of “something red and dried, foreign, not part of the finish”—the young detective’s exact words in his preliminary report — had been found.
“Tip came in directing us here on the hot line,” said Lewis. “Newspapers good for something, at least.”
The two investigators stood near the cab as one of the forensics people ran a small, battery-powered vacuum cleaner across the floorboards. The exterior of the truck seemed fairly clean, not what you’d expect if it had sat on the side of the road gathering dust for a week.
“Cleanest lorry I ever saw, inside and out,” said Lewis. “You could eat off the floor.”
“Vacuumed?”
“Maybe.”
“But that’s likely blood on the fender. And the glass.”
“Aye.”
They could do a DNA test on the fender, and attempt to match the headlamp glass with glass at the scene. If this truck had killed Cameron, they would know it.
“We’re under five minutes from the spot where Cameron was found,” said Lewis. He pushed back the hair on his forehead. He seemed to be combing it down to hide a bald spot, except that he had no bald spot. “If it was here the morning after the accident, two dozen constables missed it, along with myself at least twice.”
“When do you think it was left here?” Gorrie asked.
Lewis shrugged. “We’ll set up a barricade and ask people who pass this way going from work.”
Gorrie stood back a few feet and surveyed the scene. The shoulder across the way was wide enough for a waiting car, easily parked in the shadow of the pines.
Hadn’t the words Specialty Transport been on one of Cameron’s pads?
Gorrie reached into his pocket for his notebook, though even before he opened it he realized he hadn’t written down what the council member’s pads had said.
Bad detective work, that. What would the walrus say?