‘Good, that’s just what I needed to hear. While I’m reading it gather all the information you have on the pillbox event and on Robbie Ochterlonie.’ Turning to Morag, he said, ‘When the twins arrive gather the team in the rest room. Ask Ewan to get the whiteboard ready and have different coloured marker pens and notepaper ready for everyone.’
Ten minutes later, after he had digested the reports and called Dr Ralph McLelland to ask for some medical advice, Torquil went through to the rest room where the others were waiting.
As usual, Ewan had made a big pot of tea and handed cups to everyone before they began.
Torquil took a drink of tea then went over to the whiteboard. ‘Well folks, things are pretty bad as you all know, but things have just gotten a whole lot more complicated. We’re going to have a brainstorming session. Penny, you take minutes and everyone else make notes as we go along.’
He tapped the whiteboard. ‘Right, so we have two incidents here. The first is the pillbox where the three teenagers were drinking peatreek and having a post-exam get-together. The teenagers were Jamie Mackintosh, Vicky Spiers and Catriona McDonald.’
On the left hand side of the board at the top Torquil wrote PILLBOX and drew a square around it. Underneath he drew three circles in a row, each with an arrow pointing to the pillbox square. Inside each he wrote the name of one of the teenagers. Under Jamie Mackintosh’s he put a cross and the letters RIP. Similarly, under Vicky Spiers’s name he wrote ‘missing,’ and under Catriona McDonald’s, ‘hospitalised, dialysis, visual problems.’
‘OK, what do we know about them?’
‘They were all doing their Highers,’ said Ewan.
‘Jamie’s dad, Angus Mackintosh is a carpenter. He was on a bender at the time,’ said Wallace.
‘Vicky Spiers’s parents are Jeannie and Brock Spiers. Brock is disabled after an accident at the Glen Corlin Distillery seven years ago. He’s wheelchair bound,’ said Morag.
‘Catriona McDonald’s parents are divorced,’ said Penny, reading from her file. ‘Charlie McDonald is a local councillor and her mother Bridget has her own internet business. They share custody of Vicky.’
Torquil added ‘Student-Highers’ under each teenager’s circle. Then he picked up a red pen and wrote each parent’s name and surrounded each with their own circle and drew arrows between them to show the relationships. He tapped Jamie’s circle with the end of his pen and asked, ‘OK, Jamie’s post-mortem, what do we have?’
Penny summarised. ‘Inhaled vomit and aspiration pneumonia. Brain and lungs showed evidence of asphyxiation. That is from little blood haemorrhages called petechiae — kidney disease called renal dysplasia. Effectively he only had one functioning kidney — high methanol level and other toxins — his blood tests showed he had metabolic acidosis.’
Below Jamie’s circle Torquil added these details as a series of bullet points. ‘And Catriona McDonald also had this metabolic acidosis, didn’t she? Ralph McLelland treated her for it.’
He added bullet points under her circle, underscoring the methanol poisoning under both teenagers’ entries.
‘And she had visual problems, also undoubtedly methanol caused,’ he added as he wrote. ‘Ralph said it was called optic neuritis.’
Swapping marker pens again, on the top right of the board he wrote ‘Lochiel’s Copse’ and drew a square around it. Lower down he wrote Robbie Ochterlonie’s name and circled it, adding underneath the cross sign.
‘What else?’ he prompted.
‘He was the manager of the Old Hydropathic Residential Home,’ said Ewan.
‘He was an ex-fisherman, like us,’ said Douglas.
‘And he liked his peatreek,’ added Wallace.
‘He was a type 1 diabetic, which means he had to take insulin,’ replied Penny. ‘And apparently he wanted to be a writer. He was always on his laptop, writing his novel or short stories. At least that’s what they thought and what he told them he was doing.’
Torquil added bullet points with the information under his circle. Then to Penny, he said, ‘First let’s put down the findings at the scene, amalgamated with any tests from forensics.’
Penny turned pages in the file to the appropriate entries. ‘Body discovered by Norma Ferguson on Monday morning. She had been concerned because he had not shown up for work so she went round to his cabin after breakfasts at the home had been served. Nor had either of the two teenagers, by the way. The body was lying face down in the sitting room. A whisky glass and a bottle were lying near the body and in the kitchen a couple of empty insulin bottles and a syringe were lying on the table along with his mobile phone. The bottle contained illicitly distilled whisky. It exactly matched the residue found in the bottle the teenagers had used.’
Torquil jotted more bullet points under the title ‘Scene findings’. Once he had finished he asked Penny, ‘What about his laptop?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘There wasn’t one in the cabin.’
Torquil raised his eyebrows momentarily, then went on. ‘Yesterday, Lorna reported the main post-mortem findings to me. Dr Giles Lamont said that he sustained a blunt facial injury called a Le Fort type 2. This effectively means that the middle of his face was shoved inwards. It is usually caused by a high velocity injury, like a fall from a height rather than a fall forward onto the face. The latter apparently causes a Le Fort type 1 or floating palate injury, which is not as severe.
‘The post-mortem also showed a contrecoup injury, that is injury to the back of the brain as it bounced back and struck the inside of the cranium. That too is consistent with a high velocity injury. Also, there were petechial haemorrhages over his brain, which implied he’d had a convulsion. Whether that was before he fell or after he’d struck his head is not clear. The pathologist wasn’t sure.’
He jotted the information further down the board as bullet points under the title ‘Post-Mortem Findings’. Then he picked up the typed out reports that Penny had given him and looked at notes he had jotted down in the margins.
‘The next points come from testing of the blood samples that Ralph McLelland took and also the ones from the post-mortem. Dr Lamont also took samples of the stomach contents and body fluids, including from his eyes. First, he had high, toxic and almost certainly lethal levels of methanol in all of these. They use testing called head space gas chromatography with a flame ionisation detector and they can work out all of the toxins in his system. It was predominantly methanol in his case as death occurred soon after. The blood results also showed extremely low blood sugar.’ He added the notes about these findings as another series of bullet points. ‘What does that mean to you?’
Penny raised her hand and pointed to the board. ‘There were two empty insulin bottles, one fast-acting insulin and the other long-acting insulin. And an empty syringe.’
‘So presumably he’d recently taken a big dose of insulin?’ suggested Morag.
‘Aye, insulin drops the blood sugar, so it would show a low blood sugar right enough,’ said Wallace.
‘And a low blood sugar like that along with a skinful of peatreek, never mind whether it is methanol or good ordinary whisky would make him wobbly legged to say the least,’ Douglas said, nodding his head in agreement with his brother.
Torquil circled the methanol readings in all of the tests with a green marker. Beside them he wrote in capital letters — HIGH.
‘Look at that, we are all agreed, the readings were high. But look at this,’ he said, exchanging marker pens and circling the blood sugar in black marker and beside it writing in capital letters — LOW. He tapped them both. ‘High and Low!’
Morag stroked her chin pensively. ‘I can’t see what you are getting at, Piper. The pathologist and the forensics haven’t flagged anything up, have they? It fits, doesn’t it? He drank, felt his sugars going up so took a big dose of insulin then collapsed, maybe having had a fit.’