“Mr. Skillicorn was a doctor, I understand,” King prompted gently. Detective Constable King had been introduced to Mrs. Skillicorn by Elka some ten minutes earlier and so far the only information he had been able to elicit from Mrs. Skillicorn was that her husband had had no enemies.
“Yes, Mr. King,” said the woman. “He was an obstetrician. He worked at the Victoria Infirmary but he also had private patients.”
King wrote neatly on his pad in ballpoint. He was a chubby, bearded man, twenty-five years of age. Elka Willems sat silently beside him. She was a tall, blonde policewoman, whose blue eyes and high cheekbones betrayed her Dutch ancestry as much as did her name. She kept her hair in a tight bun while on duty, but even in the full tunic in the winter months she would cause heads to turn.
“You left the house at three p.m. yesterday?” King asked.
“I did.” The woman paused long enough for King to have cause to worry that he was going to have to prize each word out of her, or even be content with a shake or a nod of the head. But then she continued: “I visited friends in Milngavie. I called in for tea — it’s a pattern which has established itself over the years, two hours on Sunday afternoon for tea and cakes. When I left our home, Hugo was reading the Sunday papers. When I returned—”
“You and Mr. Skillicorn lived alone, I take it?”
“Yes. We have a gardener and a maid, but they don’t live in. We have three grown children, each of whom lives abroad.”
“All three?” said King — sorry as soon as he had spoken.
“Yes. All three. Two sons and a daughter. All three are doctors, all have married other doctors. One lives in Australia, another in Canada — and our daughter is with her husband in Africa, where he is studying tropical medicine.”
“Have you contacted them?” King asked her.
She nodded. “I phoned Nigel in Perth — Perth, Australia.”
“Yes, of course.”
“He said he’d make sure he contacted the others and would then come straight home. That was yesterday. He’ll be home later today. I declare, the wonders of modern technology — telephone link-up by satellite and modern jet aircraft means that even if your son lives on the other side of the world he can still be home at the drop of a hat within twenty-four hours. Australia isn’t so far away if you look at it like that.”
“I suppose not,” said King. “When you returned home yesterday, you didn’t notice any sign of forced entry, no struggle?”
“There had been a struggle in the dining room. The furniture was disturbed a little and the carpet kicked up at the corner. I noticed that after I saw Hugo. We always keep a clean and tidy home. I managed to phone you—”
“Yes.” King nodded. “I understood that you kept calm long enough to do the right thing. Thank you. Nothing else was disturbed?”
“No. The constables checked every room, every cupboard, under every bed to see if he was still in the house. When they told me it was safe, I looked over the house quickly to see if anything was stolen and nothing has been touched. There was, in fact, some fifty pounds lying on the dressing table in the bedroom and it’s still there. Really, Mr. King, nothing has been taken.”
“No forced entry, no robbery, no sign of really violent struggle. A popular man with no enemies, yet he was stabbed several times in his own home.”
“Hacked to death would be my description,” said Mrs. Skillicorn.
Donoghue read Elliot Bothwell’s report. He found it spare, just the nuts and bolts, but its contents were nonetheless interesting. The locus of the offense was in Bothwell’s view “forensic friendly.” The phrase jarred Donoghue’s classically trained mind. He assumed Bothwell meant that the dining room was clean, the surfaces waxed, and good latents were able to be lifted. There were, apparently, four sets of latents, three of which could be identified as belonging to the deceased, the wife of the deceased, and the maid. The fourth latent could not be identified but did not belong to the gardener, whose prints Bothwell had taken that Monday morning. The fourth latent was also found on the button the deceased had had clenched in his fist. The mysterious latent was not on computer file in Glasgow. The Police National Computer at Hendon, England, had yet to come back to P Division, at the time of the writing, to indicate whether or not it was on the national records.
Donoghue set Bothwell’s report to one side and picked up the report submitted by Jean Kay of the Forensic Science Laboratory. Donoghue knew Jean Kay well and liked her. She was a small, wiry woman in her sixties and held a Ph.D. in Chemistry from one of Britain’s leading universities, Donoghue could not recall which one. Her reputation and the reputation of the laboratory she ran were such that her services were unashamedly sought by the police forces of the Highlands and Islands region, the Tayside and Grampian forces, the Central force, and the Dumfries and Galloway police. Only the professionally competitive Lothian and Borders force showed any reluctance to approach her.
Her report, as befitted a woman of her learning, was fuller than Bothwell’s but nevertheless gave Donoghue very little to go on. All the blood on the clothing was AB negative, the blood group of the deceased. If the attacker was wounded and bled in the affray, then he by sheer coincidence must also be blood group AB negative. But, she concluded, the balance of probability was that all the blood came from the deceased. There was little to identify the button which had apparently been found in the hand of the deceased, but it was not a part of the clothing worn by the deceased at the time of death. The deceased had obviously bled profusely, the attack had been carried out by a knife, as indicated by the slashing of the clothing. She expected the pathologist might have more to say on the matter, but she was certain the attacker must have left the locus of the offense well covered with his victim’s blood. It would have been a conspicuous site, she thought, on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer. She regretted, in a single-line paragraph, that she could not have been of greater assistance.
The phone on Donoghue’s desk rang. He took the pipe from his mouth and propped it in the huge black ashtray on his desk. He picked up the receiver and, turning to a blank page in his notepad, said, “D.I. Donoghue.”
“Reynolds here,” said the calm voice on the other end of the line.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ve completed the postmortem.” Reynolds spoke unhurriedly. “Death was caused by stab wounds. One wound particularly pierced the aorta but any of half a dozen others could have killed him.”
“I see.” Donoghue wrote on his pad.
“The weapon in question seems to be about five inches long, but wider than a kitchen knife.”
“Like a commando knife?”
“That sort of thing, yes. He sustained seventeen wounds in all, all to the anterior of the torso.”
“The front of the chest.”
“Yes. Nothing below the waist or above the shoulders. Six wounds were particularly penetrating and deadly. He was a well nourished man, unlike most of our profession.”
“Oh?”
“Well, you know what they say — an alcoholic is someone who drinks more than his doctor. There’s a lot of truth in jest. We are a notoriously alcoholic profession, but Hugo Skillicorn had a very healthy liver and kidneys. There’s really nothing else I can add. My report will be typed up and sent over to you as soon as possible.”
Donoghue thanked him and replaced the receiver. He picked up his pipe from the ashtray and held it by its stem as he scraped the bowl with his penknife. Then he pulled the stem apart and cleaned the interior with a pipe cleaner, wincing at the oily nicotine and tar that had accumulated. He refilled the bowl with a plug of the special mixture he had made up for him by a city tobacconist: a Dutch base for taste, with a twist of dark shag for depth of flavor and a slower burning rate. He placed the flame of his gold-plated lighter over the bowl and drew lovingly on the smoke. Now where do we go? he thought.