Seventy-two
‘Who the fuck are you?’ asked Eddie Charnwood. The eyes that looked up from the interview room chair were emotionless, and cold as ice.
‘I’m Detective Superintendent Neil McIlhenney, and you are done.’
‘What happened to Mackenzie?’
‘He’s on holiday.’
‘On suspension, more like; he’s a mug.’
‘He’s on holiday, and next time you say anything disrespectful about him I’ll hit you so fucking hard you’ll leave an imprint on the wall behind you.’
‘Tough guy.’
‘Usually I don’t have to be. You can have it either way.’
‘You can’t touch me.’
McIlhenney turned to DS Wilding. ‘Ray,’ he said, ‘would you step outside for a minute, please?’
‘Certainly, sir: as many minutes as you like.’
Charnwood raised his manacled hands. ‘Okay, okay. I get the message. Where’s Ollie Poole? He should be here by now.’
‘Mr Poole has declined to represent you, as is his right. You can nominate another lawyer if you like, but this interview is going ahead right now. We’ll do it informally for the moment. We’re going to be joined by officers from Dundee: I’ll switch on the tape when they get here.’
‘So get on with it.’
McIlhenney nodded. ‘The first thing I have to tell you is that I wasn’t kidding when I said that you’re done. We’ve got a nice fingerprint from Big Ming’s doorbell, and from the handle of Joe Falconer’s fridge. We’re so clever these days that we should be able to extract DNA from them, so be in no doubt, Eddie, you’re looking at life imprisonment. The only question is, how long will your tariff be? Guilty pleas usually get you a few years less than if you go to trial.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘He’s not kidding, Eddie,’ said Wilding. ‘That’s how it works.’
‘As for the drugs,’ the superintendent continued, ‘we’re not going to bother about them. Soraya’s going down for that end of it. Her brothers were the suppliers and she was the distributor, through Gary Starr, Falconer, and maybe other people we don’t know about yet. You probably thought when you shot Big Ming and Joe, your own cousin, as we’ve discovered, that all the potential witnesses were taken care of, but we’ve got enough circumstantial evidence to send her to Cornton Vale till your boy leaves school. . maybe longer if we decide to charge her as an accessory to Gary Starr’s murder. Who else could have provided the drugs that were used on him, before you sawed the poor bastard’s hands off and bled him to death?’
For the first time, Charnwood’s arrogance cracked: fear showed in his hard blue eyes. ‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,’ he shouted.
‘Sure, pull the other one. You decided to kill Gary Starr when the stunt with the bayonet went wrong. You knew it would attract our attention to his sad wee bookie’s shop and that sooner rather than later we’d happen upon his other business. So you killed him in a way that you hoped would make us forget everything else and pin it on the boy with the missing digit.’
‘I bloody didn’t!’
‘Sure you did. What I don’t understand is why you left the drugs and the money in the safe for us to find. You had all Saturday to clear it out.’
‘I didn’t because I didn’t fucking kill him.’
‘Maybe you just made a mistake, and thought we wouldn’t look there. I don’t suppose you thought that Ming would blab about his trip to Pamplona either. You may have thought that the drugs racket would survive Starr’s death. But once Ming did talk, he and Joe had to go: as the couriers, they could identify Sorry’s brothers. When I think about it, we’ll probably do her as an accessory there too.’
Charnwood banged his hands on the table. ‘Leave her out of this! I’ll do you a deal, all right. Sorry never knew what was happening. Her brothers approached me directly, not through her: I set the whole thing up with Gary and Joe. Leave her alone and I’ll plead guilty to all that, and to the shootings.’
McIlhenney gazed at him. ‘I might consider such an arrangement,’ he said slowly. ‘But what about Starr?’
‘I’m telling the truth about Gary. I didn’t kill him. I’d have emptied that safe as soon as I heard he was dead, but I never had a chance. You guys were all over the shop like bugs. I had to act the daft laddie when Mackenzie asked me to open it.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You twigged because I knew the combination, didn’t you?’
‘It helped, but we’d have got you from the prints, and because you’d killed all the other contenders.’
‘Not all. How many times do I have to say it? I never killed Gary.’
Seventy-three
‘Hey, big man, you’re a star!’ exclaimed Mario McGuire. McIlhenney held the phone slightly further from his ear. ‘I don’t want to be a Starr: he was left with two bloody stumps where his hands used to be.’
‘You can be anything you like. You’re telling me that Charnwood’s confessed.’
‘That’s right, to importing and dealing in drugs, and to the murders of Smith and Falconer. He was formally interviewed by me and by Rod Greatorix, the head of CID in Tayside; he admitted the lot on tape, and then he signed a statement, in the presence of a solicitor. He’ll be up in the Sheriff Court tomorrow, for a formal remand hearing.’
‘What about the wife?’
‘She’s been released, and her son’s been returned to her. We’d have been struggling to charge her anyway, and her husband’s specifically exonerated her.’
‘We couldn’t do her for travelling with a false passport?’
‘That would be difficult: it was found in Eddie’s possession, not hers, and he would probably say that she thought it was her real one.’
‘Fair enough,’ said McGuire. ‘He might even be telling the truth; maybe she really didn’t know anything about it.’
‘Remind me, friend,’ said McIlhenney, ironically, ‘is the Pope a Catholic?’
‘Last time I looked. He’s still refusing to admit to Starr, you say?’
‘Yes, and we don’t have any evidence against him, other than strong circumstantial. My theory is that he’s worked out that if he does, any judge who heard what was done to him would give him a minimum thirty-year stretch.’
‘He’d be right too. Bugger it, we’ll settle for what we’ve got. It’s party time in Leith and you’re on the bell.’
Seventy-four
‘Going by the remains,’ said Max Allan, ‘the pathologist is VJoing by the remains,’ said Max Allan, ’the pathologist is saying that she was about six months pregnant when she was killed.’
‘Has she made a stab at a cause of death?’ Proud asked.
‘She didn’t have to: it was quite clear. The back of her head was smashed in. The marks on the skull indicate that he used a hammer. You’re not going to believe this, Jimmy, but Mr Solomons told us that when they took over the house, Bothwell had left all his tools behind him in his brand new shed. He’s still got them, and there’s a hammer among them. Forensics say that it’s a match: we’ve actually found the murder weapon.’
Mario McGuire leaned closer to the conference phone. ‘Have your people made any progress on the Ethel Ward disappearance, Mr Allan?’
‘Not so far. She had to be alive when they sold Thorny Grove, to sign the conveyance and lodge the money. The old lawyer told me that they moved out on completion day, and not before, but he had no idea where they were headed.’
‘Do you still have records of unclaimed female bodies from that time?’
‘There was only one: a woman came to the surface of the Clyde, or at least part of her did. She’d been hacked about by a ship’s propeller. I had a look at the post-mortem report, but it isn’t helpful. The cause of death was drowning, and the age was estimated as late twenties; that’s younger than Mrs Bothwell.’
‘Any chance of a visual identification from the photographs of the body?’
‘Not without the head, Mario: they never found that. It was written off as a suicide and the remains were cremated. To be frank, I don’t hold out any hope of tracing the poor woman, but in the light of what we found under Mr Solomons’ shed we can assume that she’s dead. I’ve advised the family accordingly.’