‘No idea,’ said Glendenning. ‘You’re the detective. He probably destroyed it if he had any sense. Evidence. Damn. I swore I wouldn’t, but I’m going to have another.’ He glanced towards Banks’s glass. ‘You? And before you say anything, it’s my day off, and I’m not going to be staggering over to the hospital to commit medical atrocities on an unfortunate corpse.’
This was a first, and Banks was certain he wasn’t going to miss the opportunity of having the doctor buy him a drink. ‘Things are pretty quiet for me, too,’ he said. ‘Same again, please. Landlord Bitter.’
Glendenning grunted and went to the bar, leaving Banks to think unwelcome and chaotic thoughts.
When the doctor came back, he plonked down the drinks and said, ‘And there’s another thing.’
‘Yes?’
‘It was impossible to tell at the scene or at the post-mortem, because the shot blew off the back of his head. Natalie is certainly blameless in all this. But when I managed to gather the skull fragments together — it was a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle — I found something odd. Odd and very disturbing.’
‘What?’
‘A slight indentation in the area of the exit wound.’
‘Indentation?’
‘Yes. It was very difficult to see because of the fragmentation of the skull, not to mention the general mess the bullet made. Even then I might have thought nothing more of it, assuming he just banged his head on the wall as he flopped down, or when he pulled the trigger. Those old cellar walls are rarely smooth. They’re full of bumps and pits.’
‘Why couldn’t it have happened that way?’
‘When I revisited the scene, I concentrated on the spot where his head hit the wall. It was smooth as a baby’s bottom. Hitting his head against it couldn’t have caused the depth of indentation I found over the skull fragments.’ He picked up his glass and took a long pull. ‘I rest my case.’
‘Are you trying to say what I think you are?’
‘Don’t try to stump me with riddles, laddie. What do you think I’m trying to say?’
‘That someone hit Edgeworth on the back of the head and fired the gun into his mouth. Murdered him.’
Glendenning sat silently for a while, swirling the liquid in the bottom of his glass. ‘Well, it’s certainly a possibility, isn’t it?’ he said finally. ‘But there could be other explanations. And I could be wrong. I’m a scientist. I’m uncomfortable enough speculating as much as I have done.’
‘I understand that,’ said Banks. ‘But see it from my point of view. Imagination and speculation are almost as much use to a policeman as reason and scientific evidence. Often more so.’ He took a swallow of beer. ‘Besides, it fits with one or two things that have been bothering me.’
‘All I’m saying,’ Glendenning explained, ‘is that it’s possible — only possible, mind you — that someone hit Edgeworth on the back of the head before any shot was fired.’
‘Hit with what?’
‘I don’t know. Some kind of hammer with a rounded head. A ballpeen, or machinist’s hammer, for example. Did you find anything like that at the scene?’
‘We’ve got everything from Edgeworth’s cellar locked up in evidence. There was a work bench, and we can certainly check all the tools for traces of blood and try to match them with the wound.’
‘The weapon would probably be among them,’ said Glendenning. ‘Or whoever used it might have brought it with him and taken it away.’
‘We’ll check,’ said Banks. ‘And then this person shot him?’
‘Well, he could hardly have done it himself. But it might not have been the same person.’
‘Possibly,’ said Banks. ‘But it makes for an odd sequence of events however you look at it. Someone hits him on the back of the head and leaves, then someone else comes and fakes his suicide. Or maybe Edgeworth came round from the blow and then decided to shoot himself?’
‘When you put it like that, it does sound rather far-fetched. But there’s more. The angle was off.’
‘What do you mean? What angle?’
‘It’s a small thing in itself, but taking into account all the evidence of the possible trajectory of the bullet, the angle at which the weapon was held, it would have been... well, perhaps uncomfortable is the best word, for Edgeworth to have held it the way it would inflict such a wound. He got it right. A lot of suicides don’t realise you need to hold the gun at an angle, pointing up, not straight at the back of your mouth. That likely wouldn’t bring about the desired result. I’m just saying that it would have been a bit of a twist for Edgeworth to hold it at the right angle from the way he was slouching against the wall. Not impossible, you understand, perhaps not even improbable, but uncomfortable.’
‘I understand,’ said Banks. ‘What about time of death?’
Glendenning sighed. ‘You know as well as I do that there’s usually plenty of leeway there, especially in a body that’s been dead as long as Edgeworth’s had when we found him.’
‘So he could have been killed earlier on Saturday morning, before the wedding?’
‘He could indeed. That was apparent from the start. The chill slows things down a bit.’
‘I’m just trying to get this all clear. The timing is such that the killer could have killed Edgeworth first and left the pile of clothes beside him, then used Edgeworth’s gun and RAV4 to carry out the shootings at St Mary’s, returned them to the house and left.’
‘Indeed. What are these other things that have been bothering you?’
‘First,’ said Banks, ‘there’s the scrapbook we found with the pictures and stories about Benjamin Kemp and Laura Tindall’s forthcoming wedding. I can understand why the killer might have kept such a record — it fits with his obsession — but why would he tape it to the underside of a drawer, where any police search was pretty certain to find it, if he was going to commit suicide after the murders?’
‘So in your speculative policeman’s way,’ Glendenning said, ‘you’re suggesting that someone else might have planted the scrapbook there, the real killer perhaps, to incriminate Edgeworth further, or to misdirect you?’
‘Well, someone might have realised that it would help to convince us we’d got the right man if we had some evidence to link him with the people at the wedding, and not just physical evidence, ballistics and so forth. The thing is that other than the scrapbook we’ve got nothing, no links at all between Martin Edgeworth and anyone in the wedding party, the church itself, the vicar, verger, curate, you name them.’
‘Maybe he’d just kept the scrapbook hidden so that no casual visitor would see it, and he forgot to move it before his suicide, or couldn’t be bothered to. After all, he had other things on his mind. I mean, he’d hardly take it out of his hiding place and put it on the kitchen table, would he?’
‘Well speculated, Watson. And we found no identifiable prints on the scrapbook, only smudges. But such things are notoriously difficult to get prints from, anyway. Edgeworth didn’t leave a suicide note, either.’
‘That happens so often, in my experience,’ said Glendenning, ‘as to be meaningless.’
‘True. And perhaps even more often with mass murderers. But on the other hand, there’s often a need to explain, or to demonstrate how clever he’s been. None of these little things add up to anything until you start collecting them all together. And there’s another thing. Nobody I talked to who knew Edgeworth believed him to be capable of committing such a crime. Oh, some people didn’t like him much, especially his ex-wife, and some admitted he had a short fuse and he didn’t like losing, but that’s about as far as it goes. Now, I know in itself that means very little. If I had a penny for the number of times I’ve heard friends, family and neighbours describe a sadistic killer as a decent, normal, sociable chap with a few flaws, I’d be a rich man today. But still...’