Gallery Whispers

7

Although Brian Mackie's patch took in a big rural area, the divisional CID Commander's office was in the St Leonard's Police Station, on the east of Edinburgh. The detective superintendent did not care for the modern brick building, and would have preferred to have been based in Haddington, beside his deputy. Detective Chief Inspector Maggie Rose, but he kept these feelings to himself, understanding the thinking behind Andy Martin's deployment of his CID resources.

He was at his desk, in mid-aftemoon, reading his way through faxed witness statements taken from the neighbours ofGaynor Weston in Oldbarns, when there was a light knock on the door.

'Come in,' called Mackie. He had expected a uniformed officer with more statements from Maggie Rose, and so he looked up in surprise as Dr Sarah Grace Skinner stepped into the room.

'Hello, Doc,' the thin, bald detective exclaimed, standing, with his unfailing courtesy. 'An office consultation; this is an honour.'

Sarah grinned at him. Suddenly it struck him that the drab, wet day outside was just a little brighter. 'All part of the service in this new era of forensic pathology,' she said, as the took a seat at Mackie's conference table.

'Coffee?' he offered.

'No thanks, and you shouldn't either. I'm trying to cut down Bob's consumption just now too. You desk jockeys drink far too much of that damn stuff.'

'Desk jockeys indeed,' Mackie grunted, but with a smile. 'You'll wind the boss up if you call him that to his face. 'S not true anyway; where was I at six o'clock this morning?'

'Yeah, I know. I was only kidding with you… not about the coffee, though. To be serious, I've just finished the autopsy on Mrs Weston. My report is being produced right now and should be with you before five o'clock, but I thought I'd call in and talk it through with you inDamn.' She broke off as her mobile telephone warbled its call signal, frowning slightly as she produced it from the pocket of her jacket.

'I'm sorry, Brian. I forgot to switch it off.' She took the call nonetheless, pressing the 'Receive' button.

'Bob, hi. Look I'm in a meeting right now. Yes. Okay.' Mackie watched her as she listened, for almost a minute. 'Yes,' she said eventually; she was hesitant, and wore worried frown on her face. 'I can do that. I'll need to be careful to avoid ethical problems, but…

Yes, okay. I'll do it after this. Give me the address.' She switched the phone to her left hand, took a notebook and pen from her bag and scribbled a few words, quickly. 'Got that; I know where it is too. See you tonight. Bye.'

She ended the call, switched off the phone and put it away.

'Problem?' asked Mackie.

'I hope not,' Sarah replied, the worried look lingering on her face.

'Something that Bob volunteered me to do, that's all.' She snapped her gaze back on to the detective. 'Okay, once more: Mrs Weston.

'I've done a full postmortem examination and had most of the lab work rushed through. The plastic bag over the head was a precaution … or maybe it was meant to distract us, I don't know… but it was unnecessary. Gaynor Weston died from a massive overdose of diamorphine, injected into her left thigh. She would have lost consciousness in seconds and died within two minutes. There was no question of suffocation.

'There were no signs of violence on the body, and nothing at all to indicate that the subject had been restrained before the injection was administered. Shortly before her death, she ate a fillet steak — mediumrare — with courgettes and French fries. Also, over a longer period, she drank the best part of a bottle of red wine and followed it with black coffee.'

'Any sign of recent sexual activity?'

'No, Brian, none at all. I can't help you with a DNA trace, I'm afraid.' She shook her head.

'There were no romantic goodbyes here. When the meal was over, Gaynor sat in her kitchen chair — placed where it could be seen from outside, after the event — and allowed herself to be put to death.'

Mackie leaned forward. 'You could state on oath that there was no possibility of the injection being self-inflicted?'

'No. But what I will say is that, even if she fixed the bag over her own head first, there was no possibility of the victim injecting herself directly into an artery, then disposing of the hypodermic before she lost consciousness.

'You didn't find the tape at the scene, and if you didn't find a hypo, or a bottle with traces of diamorphine'

'which we didn't.'

'Then that will rule out the possibility of suicide. The minimum any jury could possibly do would be return a verdict of culpable homicide, dependent on the mental state of the perpetrator, but this was so premeditated that you will have about a ninety-nine percent chance of a murder conviction in any trial, assuming that you can place the accused at the scene at the time.'

'Excellent,' said Mackie. 'But why? Why did Gaynor Weston let herself be switched off?'

Sarah looked at him, unblinking. 'About two weeks ago, Mrs Weston had an operation to remove a growth from her left leg. There was another growth on her foot, and the fact,that it hadn't been excised indicates to me that it had developed since then. I removed it and had it analysed.

'The woman had a malignant melanoma, a form of cancer which offers little prospect of a cure, unless it is discovered at a very early stage. In this case, from the depth of the earlier excision, when I explored it, if that too was a melanoma — as I am quite certain it was from the nature of the procedure — I would say that the size of the tumour removed would have pointed to a prognosis of death within three to four months. The disease had already metastasised to the spine, liver and lungs. Any treatment would have been purely palliative: the most honest course of action would simply have been to keep the patient as comfortable as possible for the time she had left.

That would have meant, in effect, limited chemical treatments supported by tranquillisers and increasing sedation. Diamorphine would have been used in increasing quantities to keep Mrs Weston out of pain. In the event, she took the lot at once.'

Brian Mackie let out a great sigh. 'Very neat and tidy for her,' he said. 'But a right bloody mess for us. Shit, why didn't she top herself down in Hawick, say, on John McGrigor's patch. Big John's a pragmatist. He'd probably have washed the glasses, planted a roll of tape and a syringe at the scene and closed the book on it.

'We'd better find out where she had this operation two weeks ago, then take a close look at her circle of friends.'

'I can help you with the first part of that,' Sarah offered. 'Normally, a procedure like this one would have been performed in the Department of Clinical Oncology at the Western General Hospital. I checked with them. It wasn't. The Royal Infirmary has no record of it either, nor has St John's in Livingston, nor Bangour, nor Roodlands. I asked at Murrayfield Hospital, and they said no. But then I checked with St Martha's, a little private clinic on the South Side of the city.

'The administrator there said that she was bound by confidentiality and wouldn't talk to me. I told her who I was, and what I was doing, but she still would not open her mouth. "Not without a Court order", she insisted. So if you want to search her records, you better go get a Sheriff's Warrant.'

'I'll talk to her myself before I go that far,' Mackie replied. 'But maybe Andy Martin and I should short-circuit all that and go to see the ex-husband. Given his profession, his has to be the main name in the frame.'

'Only if you can place him at the scene.'

'We can probably do that. According to witness accounts he was a regular caller at Oldbarns, so he'll have left traces of himself. The big problem is placing him, or anyone else for that matter, in the house at the time of Gaynor Weston's last supper.' He picked up the witness statements. 'None of the neighbours saw a bloody thing.

'Even if someone walked in this minute and confessed, we wouldn't have enough to go to trial. At the moment our only hope of that rests with the clever people in Arthur Dorward's forensics lab, but I can't see how even they're going to help this time.'