‘I’ve got it, sir,’ Wilding volunteered, ‘and the one on Stevie. I had them e-mailed to me an hour ago. There’s the Ballester printout.’ He handed over a folder. ‘It’s straightforward: death by strangulation.’
‘Sure, but. .’ Holding the document in his left hand he flipped it open and scanned through it. ‘Obvious suicide,’ he murmured, ‘so how thorough was the pathologist?’ Suddenly his right index finger stabbed at a paragraph. ‘Very thorough,’ he exclaimed, then began to read aloud: ‘One other injury was apparent on the body, a depressed fracture of the left zygomatic and temporal bones. This was peculiar in that it was certainly sustained post mortem. I can only speculate that it was caused by the body being dropped by the officers who cut it down. . Sorry, lads. . Within this area there were two small marks on the surface of the skin, seven and a half centimetres apart, which appear to be burns. It is not possible to say whether these were inflicted before or after death.’
He turned to another part of the report. ‘It says here,’ he continued, ‘that Ballester was one metre eighty-two centimetres tall, about six feet, weighed eighty-three kilos, thirteen stone, give or take, and that he was in good physical condition. Mario, how would you subdue a big guy like that?’
McGuire held up a massive fist. ‘Same way as you would, probably. If you two were concluding in there that Ballester’s suicide was assisted, to put it gently, then somebody bigger, or harder, banjoed him, I guess. Maybe when you lost it in the cottage and walloped him you covered up something that was there already.’
Skinner shook his head. ‘There were no signs of a fight, in the kitchen or anywhere else.’
‘Then what about a stun gun?’
‘That’s what I’m looking at. The picture in my head is showing me Ballester answering a knock at the door.’
‘Why would he do that? He was on the run.’
‘Then, whoever it was, he knew him; the door had glazed panels, remember, so he’d have been able to see who was on the other side. Either he knew the caller, or he reckoned it was one of us, knew he was trapped and was prepared to give himself up. He didn’t have the gun to hand, remember: it was stashed in the shed, so shooting his way out wasn’t an option. My thinking is that he let his guard down and the newcomer zapped him and, yes, probably with a stun gun. That would have been quick, effective, and afterwards virtually untraceable.’
‘Too right, sir,’ said Montell. ‘I’ve used one in South Africa. You shoot three-quarters of a million volts into somebody, it fucks up his nervous system big-time. He’s helpless, all yours.’
‘Why doesn’t it fry him?’ asked Singh. ‘That’s what I’ve never understood.’
‘That’s because you spell “physics” with an F, Tarvil. A stun gun delivers a huge voltage, but it has very low amperage, so it’s entirely non-lethal.’
Skinner looked at him impatiently. ‘Thanks for the lesson,’ he said. ‘But that’s my scenario. Ballester was knocked down so efficiently that his assailant or assailants … it might not have been the Aeron guys, but there may very well have been more than one attacker. . were able to hang him, unresisting, from the hook in the ceiling.’
‘But how did they know the hook was there, sir?’ asked Montell.
The DCC frowned. ‘You know, Griff, there’s a fine line between being a devil’s advocate and being a smartarse, and you want to be sure that you never step over it when you interrupt me.’ The detective constable gulped. ‘Happily, this time you’re just about all right,’ Skinner continued. ‘Have you ever seen a suicide by hanging?’ he asked.
‘No, boss,’ Montell confessed, ‘I haven’t. A couple of lynchings, in my early days on the job back home, but that’s all.’
‘Yeah, well, I’ve come across a few, and quite recently I saw one that was supposed to be a suicide, but wasn’t. If you want to do yourself, you don’t need a hook, or a tree branch or anything other than a ligature. In the case I’m talking about, the guy was on his knees, but if circumstances hadn’t proved it otherwise, it would have been accepted that he’d topped himself.
‘So the hook’s irrelevant; it was handy, that’s all. He was strangled by the rope, as intended. Once he was, the message was typed on the laptop, by someone wearing gloves, so that nobody could ever prove that the dead man hadn’t done it, and the grenade was put in place.’
‘I don’t get that part, sir,’ said Pye. ‘Why do that?’
‘I don’t get it either, Sammy, not at the moment. But let’s not get sidetracked by it. Who are we looking at? Who are our potential suspects?’
‘Surely the two guys from Aeron,’ said Wilding, emphatically. ‘Spicer and his mate. They have to be first on the list.’
‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Ray, but didn’t the man you and Stevie spoke to say that they left for Wooler around midday?’
‘Maybe he lied.’
‘You were there. Is that what you thought at the time?’
The sergeant shook his head. ‘So let’s assume that he didn’t. When does the pathologist reckon Ballester died?’
‘She says around eleven o’clock, but she can’t be precise about it, since there was a fire burning. The place doesn’t have central heating, and it had been a cold morning in Wooler. Ballester must have lit it when he got up, but as the sun got higher the room must have got a lot warmer.’
‘Yes,’ McGuire agreed. ‘It was still pretty warm when we were there, even though the fire had burned itself out a while before. But even at that, he must have been killed well before Stevie spoke to the man Spicer on his mobile.’
‘Precisely,’ Skinner continued, ‘and they were still there. According to your statement, Ray, they were even prepared to keep the place under observation until the police arrived; in fact, they did just that. If they’d just rigged a lethal trap they’d hardly have hung around to watch it sprung, would they? Let’s agree they’re in the clear. So. .’ He paused and looked at each officer one by one. ‘. . that points us straight at one man, the man who gave them their orders, the man whose daughter is one of the murder victims, the only other person who knew where Ballester was, and the man who put a price on his head: Davor Boras. It’s time that he and I had a conversation.’
‘Boss,’ said Wilding, ‘we’re not allowed to go near him. Becky told Stevie and me that she’d been specifically ordered not to bring him into the Barker investigation, by one of her big bosses. And that woman from the Home Office was all over our interview. He’s got protection, from political contacts, Becky reckons.’
‘Ray,’ the DCC replied quietly, ‘we’re investigating the murder of one of our colleagues, one of our friends. If Boras knows something about that, there is no power in this land that will protect him from me. Have you spoken to DI Stallings yet?’
‘Yes, boss, while you were in there.’ He nodded towards the now empty room.
‘Well, call her back, and tell her that her secondment starts this afternoon. Mario, you and I are going to see Boras, and Inspector Stallings can come with us.’ He looked back at Wilding. ‘Tell her not to worry. By the time we get there, all the arrangements will have been made. I’ll send her flight details as soon as I have them.’
‘What if the Home Office try to get in the way, sir?’
‘Then somebody’s getting arrested for obstruction. Sergeant, I’ll lift the Home fucking Secretary if I have to.’
Sixty-eight
‘You realise, boss,’ said McGuire as he and Skinner strode along the air bridge at Heathrow, ‘that we have no legal right to be here. We’re investigating two homicides; everybody but us thinks that one was a suicide, and that the other is a closed case. But neither of them took place within our area. By the book, we should be reporting what we believe to Les Cairns and letting his CID take it from here.’
The DCC smiled. ‘It’s not too often I say this, Mario, but bugger the book. Les Cairns and his people have got access to the same information as us, and they yet don’t see anything in it to contradict their assumptions. We’ve found Ballester and you and I are happy to sign off on him as the guy who killed the three girls and Harry Paul, on the basis of motive, weapon and everything else.