Pye smiled, and raised an eyebrow. ‘D’you think I’m going to disagree with Mr Skinner?’
‘It’s allowed.’
‘Maybe, but I’m not going to. One problem I’ve got relates to something else Prof Hutchinson told us. He said he was surprised that to get that amount of glucose into his bloodstream the man only had to inject himself with a single capsule.’
‘Maybe he didn’t inject himself at all. For all you know he might have taken it orally, swallowed the stuff in liquid form.’
‘The prof’s having the stomach contents analysed to check that out.
But even if you’re right, and he ingested glucose, he injected himself as well; that’s not in doubt. Old Joe found a fresh prick in his left thumb, from one of the six-millimetre disposable micro-needles that these pen things use. He’s taken some tissue from the area for analysis. Even if we never find the capsule or the needle, that should tell us about its contents, for example how concentrated the dose was. Leaving that aside, though, from McCool’s description, although he was slurring, and a bit unsteady, Glover was in high good humour, laughing and joking with him. That’s my big concern. It doesn’t square with a man who’s about to take his own life.’
‘Who knows what people think at a time like that? Maybe he was on a high because of it?’
Pye shook his head. ‘No, there’s more; from something he said to McCool, I’ve got no reason to believe that he thought he was injecting anything other than insulin.’
‘So? What are you saying?’
‘That I don’t buy this as a bizarre suicide. Plus, subject to interviewing the chemist who supplied the dead guy, I don’t see how this can have been a pharmaceutical accident. These capsules are factory-filled with insulin. If a mistake was made on the production line, or if there was sabotage, for that matter, if would surely have affected a whole batch, not just a few. We’d have had comatose diabetics all across the country by now. But the thing is, going by what I’ve been told, it’s unlikely that they’d be dead, even given a high concentration. The quantity required to kill, at least to cause death as quickly as it occurred in this case, would be more than the maximum dose of insulin that any diabetic would be likely to inject. Maybe Glover had been careless, with the drink and the snacks at the party; maybe he’d allowed his level to get critical and one dose was indeed enough to push him into ketoacidosis, but that’s not what Professor Hutchinson would have expected to find.’
‘And even the Pope’s no less fallible than he is.’
‘So they say.’
‘All of which leaves you with?’
‘Deliberate and very specific intervention by another person. I believe that we have a murder inquiry on our hands, sir, and that’s why I’ve asked the prof to go over the body again, inch by inch, to determine, if he can, the precise means by which this guy got enough glucose into his system to kill him.’
McIlhenney sucked his teeth. ‘How did I know you were going to say that?’ he muttered. ‘I only wish I could argue with you. Fuck me, the biggest book festival in the whole damn world, with two whole weeks to run, and it looks like we’ve got a homicide right in the middle of it.’
Fifteen
He looked at the two cocker spaniels as they ran before him on the end of their extended leads. ‘Joe and Jarvis,’ he laughed, quietly. He had wondered how their classically military owner had come to name his dogs after two rock stars, until Colonel Rendell had volunteered the information, unprompted. The idea had been his daughter’s. That woman, Skinner reckoned, had a wicked sense of humour.
‘Dogs,’ he murmured. ‘Imagine, me walking dogs. What would you have thought about that, Mum?’
Robert Morgan Skinner had never been what his mother had called a ‘doggie sort of person’. There had been a time in his childhood when he had wanted a pup, a golden retriever like his friend John, the teacher’s son. He had been seven years old, he recalled, when he had put ‘Puppy like Toe-rag’ at the top of his Christmas list. John’s father, a veteran of the North Africa campaign, had christened the animal ‘Tuareg’, but in Motherwell, a hard-edged town built around vast steel mills, that name was never going to stick. But his mother’s frown, her dismissive use of the phrase, and the open contempt of his older brother Michael had planted in his young mind the notion that ‘doggie people’ were another race, incomplete personalities who were alien to the world that the family Skinner occupied.
At the same age, Alex had made the same plea, and he, too, had refused, one of the few occasions during her childhood when he had denied her anything. His reasoning had been legitimate, that as a busy single parent with unpredictable working hours, he simply could not fit a dog into his routine. She had accepted that, and had settled for a kitten; when it was flattened by a passing car, the pet phase had come to an end. Still, he had wondered, subsequently, whether he might have tried a little harder to make the canine work had it not been for the underlying prejudice instilled by his mother.
In middle age, Skinner rarely thought of his childhood family unit. He had been brought up in comfortable, even privileged circumstances; his solicitor father had been one of the most respected men in the community, and Bob had idolised him. His mother, though, had always been distant and, he had thought, unloving towards him. Of course he had been too young to have heard of closet alcoholism, far less to spot the secret that she had kept hidden from her husband for years, until after the seeds of her early death had been sown. Then there was his brother Michael, who had done his best to make his early years a nightmare, and who had returned to trigger a brief crisis in his middle age. Life was a coin, he sometimes thought, spinning in mid-air, with no logic or physical law determining which side finished on top. He did not regard himself as anything like the man his father had been, yet he had inherited his strengths and built a career upon them. Michael, on the other hand, had inherited their mother’s weakness, and had blended it with an innate cruelty that had often spilled into sadism. And if that spinning coin had landed with the other side up. .
His mind’s eye looked back at the family in which he had grown up, and at those he had raised himself. ‘What a record, eh, Bob?’ he mused. ‘If you’ve any honour you’ll spell out to Aileen the history she’s marrying into; give the girl fair warning. . and the chance to change her mind?’ Then he considered how he would feel if she did, and decided that instead he would do his best to learn from experience.
His musing was interrupted by a snarl, followed by a burst of furious barking from two German shepherd dogs, tethered to stakes in the ground outside a caravan, parked on the left of the road down which he was walking. Far from hiding behind him, Joe and Jarvis strained at their leashes, their feathered ears flapping as they tried to launch what in his eyes would have been a suicide mission.
As Skinner pulled them back towards him, winding in the retractable leads a couple of feet at a time, the caravan door opened and two men stepped out. The first was tall and lank-haired, clad in washed-out jeans and an Ozzy Osborne T-shirt. His companion was shorter, and lightly built; he wore a vest and tracksuit bottoms, and seemed all bones and angles. ‘Sorry,’ Ozzy called across, cuffing each Alsatian round the ears, silencing them instantly. ‘They’re bitches, and they’re both on heat. They wouldn’t hurt a fly, mister, honest.’
‘I’ll take your word for it.’ He stopped, and looked along the line of mobile homes. The traveller seemed to interpret this as a signal, since he walked towards him. Skinner eyed him up and down; around forty, he reckoned, fit, air of authority about him. The other man could have been anywhere between early thirties and forty-five, his eyes narrow and much less confident.
‘Are you the neighbours?’ the tall man asked. The accent was predominantly Scottish, but with a faint touch of the Northern Irish.