‘Mike and Rachel plead panic. The guys are good witnesses; the jury believes them and they walk. So once again, we’ve got two very satis fied clients. Agree?’
Cowan nodded emphatically.
‘But not everybody’s going to be happy with that, are they? What more do we know about Shirai?’ Skinner flicked through the papers before him and found a two-page document, the A4 sheets stapled together. ‘This is the Strathclyde Police report on her background. Let’s see what it says.’
Cowan found the same document in his sheaf of papers; each read quickly.
Skinner summarised aloud as he went along. ‘Interesting. Comes from an above-average family background, even by Japanese standards. And interesting too, she’s not an overseas student, as such.’
The shadow of a smile crept across his face.
‘Her father and mother live in Balerno, of all places. He’s forty-four, managing director of a Japanese pharmaceuticals company in Livingston.’
Cowan looked at him. ‘So he could be a man with a grudge? Not a. dissatisfied client, but the father of a victim. Is that what you think?’
Skinner shrugged his shoulders. ‘It’s the only lead I’ve got, so I’ll have to follow it up. Tell you one thing, I’ll be interested to learn what John Ho and Shun Lee are doing right now. And I can’t wait to show a photograph of Yobatu san to your Advocate Depute pal Harcourt.’
Cowan held up a hand. ‘Hold on Bob; you can link this man to Mike and Rachel through that trial, fair enough. But how can you connect him with the other three murders?’
‘I’ll worry about that later. This is the only bone I’ve got to gnaw on at the moment, and I’m going to give it a bloody good chew.’
Skinner closed his folder. ‘Come with me when I pay a call on Harcourt, once I lay hands on that photo.’
21
Detective Sergeant Mackie had just returned from hospital, where his injured elbow had been pronounced sound, when Skinner buzzed from his office.
Mackie went through to the inner sanctum. ‘Hello, sir. I didn’t know you were back. Did our man put in an appearance at the funeral?’
‘I won’t know for sure till I’ve seen the photographs. That’s the first thing I want you to chase up for me. These are the others.’ He issued a series of clear concise orders. ‘And I want them now!’
The funeral photographs arrived two hours later.
Skinner sifted carefully through the blown-up prints. Some of the people, he recognised, but most, he did not. However the most telling thing was that no one seemed to be out of place, or standing in isolation, other than, in one photograph, himself.
‘Christ,’ he muttered aloud. ‘No one would ever know I was a copper from that! Not bloody much!’
Skinner scanned the prints again, to confirm his first impression. There were no oddfellows there. And no one in the gathering looked in the slightest oriental.
The photograph of Toshio Yobatu, Managing Director of Fu-Joki Blood Products plc, arrived half an hour later. Mackie brought it, having been handed the print in a brown envelope, in a pub behind the Scotsman office, by a photographer with whom he maintained a mutually beneficial acquaintance. Mackie had agreed that his friend’s lack of curiosity about the reason for the request would earn an extra favour at some time in the future.
Skinner tore open the envelope and withdrew the photograph. He looked at it and caught his breath. Alongside him, Mackie gave a soft whistle.
The picture had been ‘snatched’ as Yobatu left the High Court in Glasgow, following the acquittal of the two Chinese youths. It had been blown up until most of the features were fuzzy, but nothing could dim the ferocity of the eyes which blazed out at the two detectives.
Nothing could have been further from the image of the smiling Japanese businessman. Even in a bad photograph, Yobatu’s ferocious gaze had an almost hypnotic effect. Not a hint of humour or compassion lay there, only a burning anger, accentuated by a tight mouth, which seemed to have been slashed across the man’s face.
‘Jesus, boss,’ Mackie whispered, ‘if this character had sat staring at me for three-and-a-half days in a High Court trial, I think I’d have jumped under a bloody train as well!’
22
Like many advocates, George Harcourt lived in the network of streets which stretches downhill and northward from Heriot Row, in grey and ordered simplicity.
‘Mr Harcourt. Advocate,’ the brass name-plate announced. However its portent of aloofness was not borne out by the man who answered the door to Skinner and Cowan, and who invited them into a book-lined drawing-room.
George Harcourt was a slightly rumpled Glaswegian, with a round head, set on a stocky frame. He had a voice which seemed to echo from the depths of a well, and which in court had the effect from the outset of his trials, of convincing juries that they were there on serious business.
Skinner had encountered him twice professionally; on the first occasion Harcourt had been acting for the defence, and on the second he had been prosecuting. He had been impressed by the man, in each role. A judge in the making, he had decided.
Harcourt poured each a Macallan, and offered them seats in red leather Chesterfield chairs.
Skinner took a sip from his glass. ‘George, I’m going to ask you to look at a picture.’ He drew Yobatu’s photograph from its brown envelope and handed it to his host.
Harcourt looked at it and gave a start which in other circumstances would have seemed theatrical. Skinner did not doubt its sincerity for a moment. The stocky advocate looked towards Cowan.
‘That’s the guy, Peter. That’s the guy I was telling you about. I’d know that face anywhere. That’s the guy who sat through the McCann trial, staring at Rachel. If she’d asked me, I’d have had the judge throw him out. As it was, she never said a word, but I could tell that she was aware of him, and that she was rattled. And no wonder. Look at those eyes!’
23
When Skinner returned to his office, at just after 9.00 p.m., he found in his in-tray another telex from Strathclyde CID. It was marked, ‘Urgent. FAO DCS.’
He picked it up, switched on his desk lamp and read quickly.
The report told him that at that moment, John Ho, one of the two accused in the Yobatu trial, was safely locked away in Peterhead Prison. While Mike Mortimer’s excellent advocacy had seen him acquitted of the rape and murder charges, it had been unfortunate for Ho that when he was arrested following Shirai’s murder, the police had found, hidden in his apartment, heroin with an estimated street value of £100,000.
The case had been tried a week after his acquittal of the murder. Ho, represented by a different advocate, since Mortimer’s clerk had arranged, skilfully, for him to be elsewhere, had pleaded guilty. The judge had sentenced him to twelve years.
Shun Lee too was out of circulation: permanently.
In October, ten weeks after the murder acquittal, he had been found hacked to death outside his home in Garnethill. The killing was brutal, and fitted the pattern of a Triad assassination.
Shun Lee’s murder was still unsolved, but an informant in the Chinese community had suggested to Strathclyde CID that he and John Ho had stolen the drugs found at Ho’s flat, to sell for their own profit. According to the story, which Strathclyde believed to have the ring of truth, the Triad gangsters who had owned the heroin had been mightily put out. Shun Lee had been killed by a ritual execution squad recruited from London. It was said that a bounty of ten thousand pounds had been offered on the prison grapevine to anyone who would assassinate Ho in jail.