The fair-haired man laughed bitterly and rose to his feet. ‘Oh sure, I admit that I was sacked. But it had bugger-all to do with dishonesty. Carole fell out with me. It was her that put the boot in with Jackie.’
‘Come on, man. It’s easy to plead the innocent now. But you backed off from your threat to take Mr Charles to an industrial tribunal, didn’t you.’
Carl Medina looked down at him, in what seemed to be genuine surprise. ‘I never mentioned the word Tribunal, far less backing off from one. I knew there was no point.’ As the man paused, Donaldson glanced at Rose and saw a brief smile flicker around the corners of her mouth. ‘Listen, Superintendent,’ he went on. ‘I was accused of nicking small amounts of cash, here and there. That was nonsense on two counts.
‘One, if I was bent - which I’m not - I’m too good an accountant to do anything as obvious as adding up a few columns wrong. Second, for all you CID people may believe, there’s no cash flowing through a business like Jackie Charles Motors. No-one buys a Ferrari for readies these days, not even a lottery winner. It’s all cheques, in and out.
‘The only way to make a bit on the side is through backhanders from insurance brokers and finance houses. That doesn’t happen much, and when it does the sweeties don’t get anywhere near the book-keeper.’
‘So what did happen?’ asked Donaldson.
‘Carole fiddled the books herself, showed them to Jackie and said I did it. She told him to sack me. That was that. I haven’t worked since.’ Medina gave a weak smile, devoid of humour, and flopped down once more on the couch, shaking his head.
‘But why didn’t you go to a tribunal, if you’d been fitted up?’ asked Maggie Rose.
‘Like I said, there would have been no point. It would have been my word against Carole. Not just that either; I knew enough about Jackie Charles to realise that it would have been a bad idea.’
‘What did you know about him?’ snapped Donaldson.
‘Oh, things I’d heard. Not so much about Charles himself, but about that guy who works for him in his other businesses, Dougie Terry. He used to come around the showroom every so often, to see Jackie.’
‘What had you heard about Terry?’
Medina paused. ‘I work out a bit, in the gym at the Commonwealth Pool. I met a guy there once - about five years back, just before I started working for Charles - who told me that he knew a guy who did odd jobs for cash for Terry. We were just bullshitting, ken, about how you could make a few quid out of the bodybuilding. I was talking about Arnold Schwarzenegger, but this guy started on about Dougie Terry.’
‘Did this man describe the sort of odd jobs he was talking about?’
He nodded. ‘Aye. He said they involved breaking people’s arms and legs: even, on occasion, breaking them so they’d never be right again.’
‘Did he mention anyone specific?’ Rose cut in, softly.
The man hesitated. ‘Aye, he did. Mind you, at the time I thought it was crap. I thought it was all crap until I saw Dougie Terry. This guy mentioned a footballer, a lad named Jimmy Lee, played for the Jam Tarts. He had a bad gambling habit, and he was rotten at it. He owed a bookie a stack of cash, far more than he was making, and the Hearts didn’t exactly look like winning the European Cup that year.
‘One Saturday night, after a Tynecastle game, Lee was on his way home in Wester Hailes when he was jumped in the hallway of the building where he lived.’
‘I remember that case,’ said Dave Donaldson.
‘The whole of Edinburgh remembers it. The boy’s kneecaps, and both his ankles, were smashed to bits. He’ll never walk right again, never mind play football. The guy I met at the Commonwealth Pool said that the guy he knew had been involved in it and that it had been set up by Terry, to settle the boy Lee’s score with the bookie.’
‘Can we put some names to this story, Mr Medina?’ asked Rose.
‘I don’t know the guy’s name. Working out you see people to talk to, between exercises, like, but you don’t usually get to know them.’
‘Have you ever seen the man since that conversation?’
‘Once or twice, but not in the last three years or so. He just stopped coming to the Commonwealth. Maybe he ruptured something. That can happen to the real keen guys, like this bloke was.
‘Could you pick him out if you saw him again?’
Medina nodded. ‘Sure. I don’t remember much about his face, other than that it was red and sweaty and that he had a big moustache, but he had a big vulture tattooed on his right shoulder. That was a one-off, and no mistake.’
‘Maybe we’ll take you on a tour of the gyms and health clubs, Mr Medina,’ said Donaldson, suddenly and sharply. ‘But let’s get back to the point here, okay?
‘You’ve said that Mrs Charles made false allegations against you, and had you sacked. You’ve told us that she fell out with you. You were the company book-keeper, and she was its finance director. If you were good at your job, as you say, why would she just “fall out with you”?’
‘Carl?’ The voice came from the hallway. All three heads turned and looked towards a slim, dark-haired woman as she appeared, framed in the doorway. She looked tired, concerned, and not a little puzzled as she frowned at them. The two men stood up, and Medina moved towards her.
‘Angie, love,’ he said, helping her out of her heavy, navy-blue woollen coat, ‘these people are CID officers. There’s been a death at the place where I used to work. The boss’s wife was killed in a fire, and they’re treating it as murder. It’s in the Evening News.’
Angela Muirhead looked at the detectives. ‘But why come here? It’s been years since Carl worked there.’ She turned to Medina. ‘How long is it since you were made redundant, Carl, two years now?’
The man looked at Donaldson, a plea in his eyes. ‘Look, Superintendent, can we finish this later?’
The detective shook his head. ‘Sorry, we either finish it here or you come down to the station with us right now, and we do the whole thing again, formally and under caution.
‘I think it best if Ms Muirhead knows the truth anyway, don’t you?’ Without waiting for a reply he looked at the girl. ‘Mr Medina wasn’t made redundant. He was sacked, so his former employer tells us, on grounds of dishonesty. Mr Medina denies that. He says that his boss’s wife, the victim in last night’s fire, fell out with him and made up evidence against him.
‘When you came in we were asking why she would do that. So, Mr Medina?’
The man looked from Donaldson to Angela Muirhead, who stared back at him, her frown deepening, then to Maggie Rose, who sat silent, returning his gaze, and finally back to the Superintendent.
‘Okay,’ he said at last, in a hard, bitter tone. ‘Carole Charles made a pass at me and I turned her down.’
‘Sure she did,’ said Donaldson, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
‘She did!’ cried Medina, insistently. ‘She liked the young lads, did Carole. She was always flirting when she came into the office. It was nothing that anyone else would notice, just the odd wink, the odd suggestive remark. It used to piss me off a bit, but I was hardly in a position to do anything about it.’
‘Except resign?’ said Rose.
‘Exactly, Chief Inspector, and I wasn’t about to do that. Angie and I were saving up for a new house, and jobs were even less thick on the ground then than they are now. So I put up with it. Anyway, Carole was nearly twenty years older than me. I thought it was all a bad joke.’ He paused.
‘Finally, one night I was working late, getting ready for the auditors, when she came into the office. We were the only people there. She came straight round the desk, pushed the books to one side, pulled up her skirt and sat on my lap, straddlin’ me.