22
Sticks and Stones
‘Here she comes, the tart with the heart.’ It was an unfair description of April Lavender, but then again Crosbie’s inner monologue was never known for its fairness. ‘What does a fifty-six-year-old pudding like her think dyeing her hair peroxide blonde looks like anyway? Mutton dressed as mutton is what. Pathetic.’
Crosbie’s self-dialogue may have been unkind, but his outward persona was the complete opposite. As long as the inner didn’t become the outer, Crosbie felt he could handle it. He’d given up any notion of going to see the force’s psychiatrist. This double murder investigation was eating up all of his work and spare time. His little problem would have to remain in check until both were solved.
As agreed with Connor, the detective planned to get one case wrapped up as quickly as possible with a little bit of assistance from April Lavender. DCI Crosbie turned on the charm. ‘So nice to meet you, Miss Lavender. I’ve been reading your articles for years.’
She roared with laughter, and playfully slapped the cop’s shoulder, saying, ‘Oh, you do know how to make a lady feel old.’
They were sitting in Crosbie’s office at Strathclyde Police Headquarters in Glasgow’s Pitt Street. He poured her a tea and judged correctly that she wouldn’t object to the three assorted biscuits he placed on her saucer. She ate two and pocketed the third ‘for later’.
‘So, how do you fancy turning detective for us?’ Crosbie asked casually.
‘Do I get a cop’s pension?’ April answered with a full mouth, firing a hail of crumbs in Crosbie’s direction.
Crosbie adopted a more serious expression. ‘I can’t offer you that, but I can offer you an exclusive – the capture of Selina Seth’s murderer.’
‘I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but she was a ghastly woman, you know,’ April said, digressing as usual.
‘Even the ghastly deserve justice,’ Crosbie offered, ‘you fat fuck.’ His grin remained fixed. He wasn’t sure if he’d just called April Lavender of the Daily Herald’s Special Investigations team a ‘fat fuck’ to her face. If he had, she certainly hadn’t seemed to notice.
‘Okay dokey, I’m off to meet Martin Seth again. If he tries to kill me I hope your big strong policemen will be nearby at the ready?’
‘Don’t worry,’ Crosbie reassured her, having regained his composure, ‘we’ll have you rigged up with all the state-of-the-art equipment.’
‘Are you going to turn me into Robocop? Half human, half robot?’ April giggled playfully.
‘I’m sure we could arrange that.’ He grinned as he moved towards his door to show April out.
As the ageing reporter swept past him, she stopped suddenly to place her hand gently on Crosbie’s forearm. In barely more than a whisper, she said, ‘Your Tourette’s won’t get any better by itself, you know. You need to get help. Insults have never bothered me – in my line of work I’ve been called far worse – but if you call your superior officer a “fat fuck” you’re going to seriously damage your career.’
Crosbie’s face turned crimson as April rooted around in her sizeable handbag until she found what she was looking for. ‘Ah, my contacts book,’ she said triumphantly. The moth-eaten old book had once been bound in black leather, but the colour had long been scuffed off to leave a sickly grey. The pages inside contained a mass of numbers written in various colours of ink, with several scored out to be replaced with newer numbers. Old dog-eared business cards were wedged randomly into the spine of the book.
Crosbie was convinced not even his forensic scientists would have been able to make head nor tail of this jumble of names and numbers.
But April whistled gleefully as she quickly flicked through the pages before declaring, ‘Ah, here it is,’ and handed Crosbie a faded business card, which read, ‘Watt Wilson – a healthy mind makes for a healthy body.’ Surprisingly it didn’t have any of the credentials he imagined were required for a psychiatrist, with no long line of letters after his name. April seemed to read his thoughts. ‘Oh, he’s not a real shrink, but he will fix you. He sorted me and my husbands during our divorces – all three of them,’ she added with a cackle. And with that she waddled off to be greeted by Crosbie’s trusted sergeant, leaving the detective alone with his thoughts.
‘She may be a mad old bat, but she’s right. I do need help.’ This time it wasn’t Crosbie’s inner monologue doing the talking.
An hour later April arrived at the Seths’ mansion, which somehow seemed to be suffering from Selina’s loss. It looked older, more decrepit, from the withered vines to the overgrown lawn.
When widower Martin answered the door after letting April through the security system at the front gates, he looked like he’d rapidly gone downhill, too.
April held up two grande lattes she’d brought with her from Starbucks and said with a smile, ‘Coffee, Martin? You look like you could do with a hit of caffeine.’
‘Thanks,’ he mumbled, greedily grasping the disposable cup as if for warmth, adding, ‘I haven’t got any tea or coffee left – or milk for that matter.’
‘I thought as much,’ April said. ‘Then again, you’ve had so much on your mind, you poor thing.’ She produced four bacon rolls wrapped in brown paper, which were already soaked through from grease and contained in a thin white plastic bag. ‘One bacon roll is never enough, I say, and you look famished. To tell the truth I’m a bit peckish myself.’
Martin and April sat in silence as they feasted on the coffee and bacon rolls.
When they were finished Martin gave a satisfied burp, before apologising, ‘Sorry, my stomach’s not used to it. I haven’t eaten anything in days.’
For less than a tenner’s worth of hot food and drink, April had made a friend.
They stared out at the spectacular views across the Kelvin valley with the Forth and Clyde canal up to the Kilsyth hills.
‘In the winter, Selina said they looked just like mini Alps,’ Martin reminisced. ‘My parents bought this place in 1967. They wouldn’t recognise it now, right enough. Selina had it knocked down and rebuilt from scratch when we began earning money. There wasn’t even any electricity pylons running through Dullatur when I was growing up here. Imagine that. We had unspoilt views to feast our eyes on every day.’
It was only natural Martin should regress to much happier times after his days of trauma. But April needed to haul him back to the present. ‘You know, everyone thinks you murdered your wife. My editor, our readers and the cops. But I don’t, Martin. I truly don’t believe you killed Selina. Help me prove them wrong.’
Martin gazed at his feet for a long time. Eventually he said, ‘What does it matter now? Everything is ruined.’
‘Oh, but it does matter, Martin,’ she added. ‘It matters a lot. If not to you, then to your children. How is life going to be for them with their mother killed and their father locked up for her murder?’
Martin began to weep. Slowly at first, with just a few tears staining his cheeks. But they soon made way to great howls of pain as Martin finally set free his agony.
April had been here many times before. She’d always had a way of tugging at folk’s heartstrings long before she joined newspapers. Most people do feel better after bawling their eyes out, although she hadn’t allowed herself to cry in years. She knew only too well if she opened those floodgates she would never be able to stop.
The sobs finally grew further and further apart. April discreetly switched on her voice recorder and placed it on the coffee table beside them. This was for April’s own benefit, as every word said had already been recorded by a wireless transmitter, which was placed in her ample handbag – the microphone disguised as a peacock brooch on her jacket. ‘Now’s the time, Martin. Tell me what really happened.’
23
The Im-Patient
Badger was holding court as usual, cigarette in hand, telling a mixture of old stories peppered with a colourful mixture of obscenities.
&n
bsp; Connor couldn’t help looking at him from a distance through admiring eyes. What was it about this foul-mouthed, cantankerous old sod that left such a lasting impression on all who knew and worked with him?
As Connor approached, Badger burst into his familiar greeting, chanting ‘El-vis, El-vis – give us “Blue Suede Shoes”.’
‘You know,’ Connor said in reply, ‘one day I might just do that and then you’ll be sorry.’
Badger’s raucous laugh made way to a hacking cough. ‘Come here, lad,’ he eventually managed to splutter, before hugging Connor roughly. It was an awkward embrace with the younger reporter bent over his mentor’s wheelchair. Badger whispered in his ear in a conspiratorial tone, ‘I’m gubbed, son. My tea’s out, but don’t start blubbing yet. I’ve got to give those daft cunts over there some hope.’ He motioned over his shoulder to various members of his family, who had assembled outside the main entrance of Gartnavel hospital, on Glasgow’s Great Western Road.
Badger’s wife Rita squeezed Connor tightly, kissed his cheeks and said, ‘I’m so glad you’ve come – you’ve made Russell’s day.’
‘Right,’ Badger announced returning to his bullish ways, ‘I’m fed up with all the tears and snotters around here. I’ve been given six months to live and I’m not going to spend it looking at your greetin’ faces. Elvis, push me over to that bench to give some of these poor sods a seat. Don’t worry about me – I’ve brought my own.’
Connor found the lever to release the wheelchair’s brakes and pushed Badger slowly over the twenty feet of hospital pavement to a row of benches. But with every crack and pebble the chair passed over, Badger winced agonisingly in pain.
‘Careful, you twat,’ he snapped. ‘If I wanted to be handled as roughly as this I’d have stayed in the ward.’
Connor was no medical expert, but he thought his mentor’s six-month life sentence was extremely optimistic, reasoning that if he had lost the power of his legs, then the cancer must surely have already spread.
‘You know,’ Badger said, his smile replacing his scowl, ‘the doctors haven’t told me to stop smoking. I thought that’d have been the first thing to go. “Now, Mr Blackwood, you must give up the ciggies since you have tumours growing in both lungs.” But nope, nothing, not even a ticking off. Can you believe that?’ He fired up another cigarette.
Connor never ceased to be amazed by the West Coast of Scotland’s reckless attitude towards health. The region had consistently come top of the binge-drinking, coronary heart disease and lung cancer leagues for the whole of Europe and no matter how much money the government pumped into it, the statistics just got steadily worse. He suspected that many Glaswegians were secretly proud of the statistics – at least the country was top of something. But it always made grim reading for Connor. In the city’s worst postcodes, life expectancy was just forty-eight years of age. Some developing nations could expect to live longer than that.
Connor gave a wry smile. ‘Well, I guess it’s a little too late to quit the ciggies now.’ Although he dared not show it, inwardly Connor was grieving over his stricken mentor. His time left on the planet would be short. Connor hoped his final days wouldn’t be spent in pain. He already looked like a bag of bones.
‘Too fucking true,’ Badger offered. ‘The strange thing is I haven’t missed the drink. Weird that, eh?’
Unbeknown to Connor, Badger had already been in hospital for a week when he received the call from Rita. She had told him bluntly how the doctors hadn’t given him long to live, six months at most. That was clearly a lie, probably told because everyone – including the terminally ill – needed hope.
After the phone call Connor had wept as he hadn’t wept before. Not even the death of his grandparents had triggered such an emotional response. He just couldn’t imagine life without Badger. His mentor had always been there for him, whether it was for help and advice on a story, or just for a chinwag. They had been inseparable at the Daily Herald, with Connor accompanying Badger on his many fag breaks, even though the younger man never smoked. The age gap was fifteen years, but they seemed the only ones who were oblivious to it. As the exclusive splashes continued to roll in for the pair, professional jealousy and resentment set in with a small core of staff. They began spreading wicked rumours of a gay affair – why else would a haggard old hack be hanging around with a handsome upstart?
The gossip stopped abruptly one day when Badger suddenly excused himself from the smoking shed regulars to slam a passing reporter against the outside wall of the Daily Herald building. With barely concealed fury, Badger had gone eyeball to eyeball with the understandably frightened reporter and warned him that if he spread any more malicious rumours about himself and Connor then his wife would somehow find out he’d been ‘screwing one of the telesales girls’.
The reporter had made a feeble attempt to deny everything, before his shoulders visibly sagged. He’d been caught bang to rights by an old journalist who had simply used his reporting skills – mixed with hints of menace and violence – to find the source of the gay rumours. With his target firmly in his sights he then set about digging up some dirt on the man.
That had been the easy part. Over a coffee with the editor’s PA Moira – who had been on the Daily Herald’s staff as long as Badger – he had begun his conversation with, ‘I need your help with this cunt, McKay.’ Half an hour later he left armed with the name of McKay’s mistress and how the gossipmonger had been warned about putting meals and hotel stays for his illicit affair on expenses.
Like a true gentleman, Badger had escorted Moira back to her desk, before kissing her on both cheeks saying, ‘You are a darling, my dear.’ The fact that Badger and Moira had once had a steamy, illicit affair of their own twenty years ago was neither here nor there.
That afternoon, as the unfortunate McKay was being slammed into the concrete wall of the building, a large and extravagant bouquet of flowers was delivered to the desk of one Miss Moira McMillan. Paid for on Badger’s expenses. The whole episode had only enhanced the ageing hack’s already formidable reputation.
But soon his stories would be all people would have to remember him; what they forgot about his career would be stored electronically in the archive. The next time his name appeared in the newspaper he once loved it would be no more than a three-paragraph filler mentioned on page two about his passing.
But that was all to come.
Connor laughed and smiled as Badger retold tales of old outside Gartnavel’s Beatson cancer unit before a nurse was sent to retrieve her patient at dusk. Connor wondered how many more sunsets Badger would see. His final words to Connor before being wheeled away were, ‘Did my Crosbie tip help you out, son?’
‘It did, Badg, it did.’
That’s all the dying reporter needed to know as he disappeared back into the ward with a huge smile stretched across his gaunt face.
24
The Confession
Osiris had finished another meeting over lunch with yet another transport boss, Stevie Holt, in the Bullion Bar in Edinburgh. The double murder stories had moved off the front pages of the newspapers as there was nothing left to report. Osiris knew that would all change within the next forty-eight hours.
‘When you heading back south?’ Stevie asked.
‘Tomorrow, I reckon. Thursday the latest. I’ve got a few loose ends to tie up but I want to beat the Friday traffic.’
Osiris actually didn’t mind heavy traffic. Sitting in jams gave him more time to listen to his self-help CDs. He enjoyed them most after a successful kill. He felt he could really relate to every sentence about positive energy when a plan had come off.
Now he needed a few more pieces – and players – to fall into place. He was certain that once that was achieved he would have completed several of his ‘goals’.
He was about to make Martin Seth an offer he couldn’t refuse.
Crosbie’s inner monologue remained unusually silent as he listened int
ently to the conversation between April and Martin Seth, which he was hearing broadcast live from the surveillance equipment. What he heard disturbed him greatly.
April had been at her persuasive best, squeezing every last drop of information from her interviewee, then going over each fact and timeline again. But the alarm bells were ringing. Something just wasn’t right. Martin Seth still wasn’t telling the truth. All Crosbie’s experience, training and plain gut instinct told him Martin was lying. Strange, considering Martin Seth had just confessed to murdering his wife.
April was having similar thoughts. Like Crosbie she’d spent her whole career interviewing people from all walks of life – and she knew bullshit when she heard it. But what to do? She had a confession in the bag. She needed to speak to Connor before facing the Weasel or Crosbie.
That wasn’t going to be possible. No sooner had the electronic gates of the Seths’ mansion closed behind her, an unmarked police car flashed its headlamps, summoning April to pull over.
The detective got out of the passenger door and invited April into his car. ‘So what do you think of Martin’s confession, you stupid bitch?’ is what Crosbie heard himself ask, but hoped he’d managed to censor the offensive remark in time. His fixed grin became almost painful as he prayed he hadn’t once again insulted one of Scotland’s premier journalists.
‘I’m not so sure,’ April replied.
‘Phew, got away with it again,’ Crosbie thought with relief. But his moment of calm was shattered when April added with a smile, ‘And who are you calling a stupid bitch?’ Crosbie had been caught out again. ‘Did you go and see Watt Wilson?’ she asked.
‘No, not yet, but I will. I’ll call him today, I promise,’ Crosbie said shamefaced.
‘Right, what are we going to do about Martin? He didn’t kill Selina, so that means he’s covering up the real killer’s identity, which is very, very strange. I mean, why would he do that?’
Crosbie played back the recording on his digital receiver, which had captured every word transmitted from April’s brooch microphone. Martin’s voice filled the inside of the silver Mercedes. ‘She’d been cheating on me … I’d been humiliated one time too many … I was the brains behind Seth International … She got all the credit and nearly drove us under with all those stupid celebrities she thought were her friends.’
‘It’s a plausible motive, pity it’s not true,’ Crosbie stated, adding, ‘We have Martin’s mobile phone records from the day she was killed. He was at his parents’ house with his kids. All of them have been questioned, and even the six-year-old said his daddy took him to school that morning. My pathologist places the time of Selina’s death at around 9 a.m. The exact time Martin was on the school run. So why the cover-up? Any ideas, cow face?’
April and DCI Crosbie sat in silence, mulling over the confession compared to the facts. She had come to find the barrage of insults from this high-ranking police officer amusing, especially when she let him know his inner conscience had escaped again.
‘I’ll need to interview him once more,’ she said, ‘lay the facts on the table that I know he was nowhere near the crime scene, and see if he’s more forthcoming. And since you’re now reduced to farmyard insults, if I’m an old cow, then you must be a cock.’
Crosbie sighed, ‘I’ll phone your witch doctor now, fatso.’
April laughed, ‘This bulk doesn’t maintain itself, you know. I am absolutely starving. I need to eat now.’