Gallery Whispers

'So Mr Murray was a golfer, was he?'

Drysdale blinked and looked bemused. 'I've no idea. I was speaking figuratively.'

'Ahh. I'm sorry. Thick of me.' The superintendent glanced out of the window of the opulent office. On the skyline, he could see the top of the Scott Monument, surrounded by scaffolding as usual.

'When Mr Murray left,' he asked, 'did he strike you as being in a good state of mind? Did he seem depressed to have outlived his usefulness to you?'

'He was never a very cheerful sort, to be truthful. Morose, sometimes; when he spoke to me, at least.' I'm not bloody surprised, thought Pringle.

'Did he seem worse after his wife died?'

'Did she? I didn't know that. It's my policy, you see, not to become involved in the family situation. I mean if I did that all the time, I'd be a damned counsellor, rather than a businessman.'

'But isn't a happy employee an efficient employee?'

Drysdale frowned at this radical thinking. 'My job is to make the shareholders happy, Mr Pringle. I'm afraid in this day and age you can spend very little time treating the wounded, before — to borrow your word — you have to shoot them.'

'Oh aye,' said the detective, heavily. 'The ultimate price, eh.'

'That's right,' said Drysdale, rising to his feet to signal the end of the interview. 'Tell me, superintendent,' he asked, as he walked his visitor to the door. 'Do you bank with us?'

60

'Who do you bank with, Sarah?' Clan Pringle asked.

'The Bank of Scotland. But before I was married I was with the Royal. Why d'you ask?'

'I've decided to change mine. Are they okay?'

'Yes, both of them, as far as I'm concerned.'

'Thanks. I'll bear that in mind. Now, what have you got to tell me?'

'First of all, let me ask you something. How closely did your ME at the scene look at the body?'

'He just pronounced life extinct and gave me a probable cause.

That was all I asked him to do. I saw no reason for anything more.'

'Mmm,' said Sarah. 'No harm done, but if he had looked a little closer, he'd have seen that the deceased was wearing a colostomy bag.'

'What does that mean?'

'In this case, Clan, it means that he had cancer of the bowel. He had most of it removed at some point. The survival rate from colonic cancer is better than some forms, but not for this man. Mr Murray had secondaries in his liver and bladder, plus a developing spinal tumour which must have been approaching the unbearable stage. I'm slightly surprised that a man in this condition was still at home.'

'I see,' murmured Pringle. 'Would he have been given drugs to control the pain?'

'Almost certainly. The drugs in his system didn't kill him though.

In this case the injection rendered him unconscious and he suffocated.

Your ME's probable cause was absolutely right. That's what's going to give you all a headache, I'm afraid.'

'Eh? How come, if it's as simple as that?'

'Two reasons. First of all, I don't think this man would have had the strength to tape the bag so that it was airtight. Second, he didn't inject himself; someone else did. The syringe went into the right thigh; I've traced the angle and there's no way that dying man could have administered that shot himself.'

Pringle whistled down the telephone. 'Is that right?' he paused for a moment or two. 'So how does that give us a headache? We've got a murder investigation on our hands. That's a bugger, I know, but routine.'

Sarah laughed, sharply, the unexpected sound making the divisional commander hold his phone away from his ear. 'Ah,' she exclaimed, 'but have you? I can't say for certain, not under oath, that Mr Murray didn't fix that bag on himself. And it was the bag that killed him, remember, not the injection. So was it a murder or was it a suicide? I don't see how you'll ever prove either way, until you find the person who gave him that shot, and persuade them to tell you what happened.'

61

Bob Skinner smiled at his wife as, lying sprawled on the sofa, he pressed the television remote. 'You're getting too sure of yourself, doctor.' BBC Scotland's trademark red balloon drifted across the big wide screen for a few seconds, before the portentous signature music of the Nine O'clock News boomed out into their living room.

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, my love, that postmortem evidence isn't the only sort.

There is a way of proving whether the late Mr Murray topped himself with the poly bag, or had someone do it for him.'

'What's that, Mr Detective?'

'The scissors. The roll of tape. The poor chap wasn't wearing gloves was he?' Sarah shook her head, quickly. 'Right then. If his fingerprints don't show up on those scissors — or even better, if they're clean — most juries will accept that as proof that he didn't cut off the tape roll.'

'Wait a minute,' she argued. 'That doesn't prove that he didn't secure the bag himself, though. Conceivably, he could have wound the tape tight round his neck then the person who injected him could have cut it off. I can't rule that out.'

Bob grinned hugely, ignoring the latest political drama from America which was being played out on the television screen. 'That's fine,' he exclaimed, with a touch of delight in his voice. 'In that case, we'll still charge the accomplice with murder; he took part in the act of securing the bag, an act which killed Mr Murray, as you will state under oath. That's enough for me and it'll be enough for the Crown Office.'

'Will it be enough for a jury to convict on, though?'

'As long as we have other evidence that places the person in the house at the time, then it probably will be. Of course if he's left us a print on the end of the tape roll as well, and there are none of Mr Murray's, that'll be game, set and match.

'I doubt if we'll be that lucky though. Assuming that this is the same person who was with Gaynor Weston-'

'You are sure?' Sarah interrupted.

'Ach, of course I am; and so's Andy, and so are you. Look at the similarities; clear poly bag — it would be undignified to end your life in something with "Tesco" printed on it would it not — secured by black tape, victim injected; there's no doubt about it. As I was saying, on that assumption, the way I see it is that the helper assumed that the Weston death would simply be seen off as a suicide. When we started to make ambivalent noises after the body was found, he realised just how sloppy he'd been.

'That's why you've got a different pattern with Mr Murray's death.

This time the tape, scissors and syringe have been left there. He's getting better, but there are still flaws in the setup.'

Bob picked up the remote once more and snapped off the television picture, then swung himself into a sitting position. 'Actually,' he said, 'you and I can sit here having a detached, professional discussion about this thing, but I've got to remind myself at the same time just how serious this is.'

'How come?'

'How come?' he repeated. 'Listen, if someone walked into a bank, shot a teller and ran off with a pile of money, we, and every tabloid newspaper in the country would go bananas about it. But if the same person walked into another bank a few weeks later and did it again…

Christ, love, just imagine the reaction! 'Yet that's what we're dealing with here. Forget the semantics, forget our clever technical debate about the whys and wherefores of Murray's death. We have a double murderer loose in our city, we made a porridge of catching him first time up and now he's done it again.'

Sarah frowned. 'Yes, I hear what you're saying. But what about the moral issues involved? In that respect, the two situations are completely different.'