‘He’s still breathing.’
‘We’re not judges, Bob,’ he said. ‘If you judge people, you have no time to love them. Mother Teresa said that.’
‘And she’d probably have told us that Perry’s Jesus in disguise,’ I countered. In spite of myself, I smiled at the image, and at the memory of the scene when we had raided the house, the naked form in the water. ‘Would that make Vanburn John the Baptist?’
Back at headquarters, McFaul came upstairs to say goodbye to the team; that done, I walked him back down to his car. We shook hands. ‘If ever you get to the point where you can’t take any more of ACC Cherry and his wife,’ I told him, ‘let me know. I’m not a decisionmaker here, but I’ve got some influence with the people who are.’
‘Thanks, Bob,’ he replied, ‘but I’ll outlast him. The word is that he’s going in a couple of years, and when he does, a lot of people will be after her.’ He opened the driver’s door, then stopped. ‘Hell, I almost forgot.’ He leaned in and across, to the back seat, produced a plastic bag, and handed it to me. ‘My people went over Glenn Milburn’s house. They got no meaningful evidence to help you, but they did find half a dozen pay-and-go mobile phones. They’re spares as far as we can make out, unconnected to the investigation and of no use to us, but I seem to recall you saying that you were looking for one. Long shot, but you never know. Sometimes all we can do is keep scratching away; we are all pencils in the hand of God, as Mother Teresa also said.’
I laughed as I took the bag. ‘And as Bob Skinner says, right now, fuck off back to Tyneside, and mind how you go.’
I wandered back upstairs, full of the huge frustration that came from the knowledge that in all probability I was going to have to let a triple murderer go free. The more I stared into it, the muddier the water became. Pettigrew had been right: attempted murder would never stick, and even a reduced charge, assault by presenting a loaded firearm, would probably fail against Ken Green’s defence.
With Jeff Adam on the ground, McFaul had gone in alone, without anyone to witness that he had identified himself properly, other than Vanburn, the nurse, who had been too busy protecting his patient to remember any of the detail. Yet again, I was stuffed by lack of corroboration. I decided to keep McGrew locked up for the rest of the day without charging him. At least that way I could keep his lawyer out of my hair, for until a charge was made, I didn’t have to give him access to a brief.
I gave the bag to Andy Martin, and told him what it contained. ‘Go through the call logs on each one, incoming and outgoing numbers, and see if any of them mean anything at all. It’s a balls-aching job, I know, but it has to be done.’
I retreated into my small office, nursing a mug of coffee. My team had the good sense to leave me alone. As I brooded, I had the wild thought of calling my friend Xavi at the Saltire newspaper, and telling him… don’t quote me personally, mate, but… that I had a man in custody who couldn’t be charged with murder because an English lawyer thought there was a one in five chance of an acquittal. I was tempted, but I’d have been taking a chance with McFaul’s career, so I stayed my hand. Instead I called Alison.
‘How goes your morning?’ I asked her.
‘Better than yours, from the sound of you. Good and bad, really. As we expected, Martina Chivers identified Mia Watson as the victim. But,’ she paused, ‘before you start doing a lap of honour, I’ve spoken to both of our witnesses and they’re adamant that the attacker was a man. So any notion of Mia Sparkles turning into Catwoman by night is right out the window.’
I growled at her, but she ignored me.
‘That lets me focus on Don Telfer. I’m expecting him inside half an hour; the Grampian car’s just handed him over to us this side of the Forth Bridge.’
‘Can I sit in?’ I muttered. ‘I feel the need to eat somebody.’
She laughed. ‘That bad, is it? You’re the boss. I can have him taken to Fettes if you like.’
‘No, I’ll come to you. The accommodation here’s full of a guy I don’t want to see for now.’
I drove to Torphichen and arrived there one minute before Donald Telfer and his escorting officers. Alison had him taken straight to an interview room, while we sat at her desk, with Alastair Grant watching from his kennel in the corner of the CID suite. ‘I’m guessing McGrew hasn’t confessed,’ she began.
‘It’s worse than that, but let’s not go there; let’s stay focused on the job in hand. You take the lead in questioning, I’ll just sit there and stare him down. The first thing you need to find out is how much he knows about what’s happened to his pals, given where he’s been for the last couple of weeks. If he doesn’t… it’ll be interesting.’
It’s a popular misconception that in the circumstances in which Telfer found himself that morning, the innocent are apprehensive and the guilty are angry. In my experience, the opposite is true, and our prisoner bore that out. He was as nervous as a man in the condemned cell, listening to the trap being tested just along the corridor. He looked up when we walked into the room; his face was white, his forehead was covered in sweat and his hands were clenched together so tightly that the bones seemed to show. I gazed at him, sizing him up. He was a strong-looking guy with clear blue eyes, and a complexion that might have been described as ‘fresh’ were it not for the day-old stubble on his chin and for two lines on his left cheek, criss-crossing to form a rough letter ‘X’, standing out pale blue against the paleness of his skin. ‘Scar on his face,’ Redpath had told us.
‘Good morning, Mr Telfer,’ Alison began, after she’d switched on the twin deck recorder and identified everyone. ‘Do you know why you’re here?’
‘I’ve got no idea,’ he replied. His voice had a crack in it.
‘Then I’ll enlighten you. We believe that you were involved just under three weeks ago in the multiple rape of a woman. You were with two other men, Andrew Weir and Albert McCann. The victim hasn’t made a formal complaint, but that doesn’t actually matter, because we have medical testimony that says she was, and from her clothing and body we recovered forensic samples from the men involved. I’ll require you to give us samples of blood and saliva, and I have no doubt that analysis will confirm your guilt, as we’re in the process of doing with your old school pals… academic as that might be, since it’s only you who’ll be standing trial.’
He frowned, and I knew that he was about to be given the biggest fright of his life. ‘Why?’ he protested. ‘Have those idiots turned Crown witnesses?’
‘My,’ Alison said, evenly. ‘You have been out of touch. Mind you,’ she continued, ‘I suppose that you’ll only get the Press and Journal on your platform. Edinburgh stories might not get the same prominence as in our papers. Your friends will not be tried because they’re both currently in the morgue. They were both murdered, one week apart, by the same man. We don’t know who he is yet, but we’re fairly certain that he’s waiting for your offshore spell to finish, so that he can complete the job.’
His eyes stood out, his mouth hung open. She took two photographs from a folder she’d brought with her and laid them on the table. They’d been taken in the mortuary, just before the post-mortems had begun. Until then I’d never actually seen a grown man piss his pants before, but he did. We let him sit there in the wet, and the rising steam, and the shame, his face in his hands.
‘Hey,’ I called out, ‘look at me, Don.’ After a while he did. I tapped my left cheek, where his scar was. ‘Where did you get this?’ I asked. He stared back, mute. ‘It goes back to your school days, doesn’t it?’
For the first time he showed something other than fear: anger. He nodded, forcefully. ‘That wee cunt Ryan Watson,’ he hissed. ‘He did it with that fucking razor he carried up his sleeve, at the school, in the middle of the playground at a break. The fucking jannie, Ramsay, his name was, he took me to the Royal, and he told me that if I opened my mouth it would probably be my throat got cut next time, so when the hospital called the police I told them I didn’t know who did it, not that they gave a shit anyway!’