Aftershock

Sixty-seven

Theo Weekes’s car was in the driveway of his house. A second vehicle, an elderly Nissan Micra, was parked behind, its tail imposing on the pavement by a few inches. PC Mae Grey was sitting in the passenger seat, her eyes wide in her pale face, unaware of the two detectives as they approached.

McGurk crouched beside her open window, his right knee cracking as he did so. ‘Tell me,’ he murmured.

‘He’s in there,’ she replied slowly. ‘In the hall.’

Stallings led the way up the path. The front door was very slightly ajar, but even before she pushed it she could smell what lay behind: a mix of urine and something else, something slightly sweet.

A stairway ran from the hall to the upper floor of the house. Theo Weekes’s body lay in the space beside it, on its side, right arm extended, fingers pointing towards them in the doorway. The carpet beneath him, a dirty cream when the inspector had seen it twenty-four hours earlier, had turned deep, dark crimson. The walls on either side were streaked with blood. She stepped inside carefully, hearing a soft thump behind her as McGurk forgot to duck beneath the lintel. ‘Jack,’ she said, ‘go and ask her if she rang anybody else. If not, call the cavalry. And stay with her until they arrive.’

‘She didn’t do it. If she had she’d be covered in blood and there would be a trail out to her car. Besides, you can tell he’s been dead for a while.’

‘Don’t jump to conclusions, big boy. She could have been here twice.’

The detective sergeant whistled. ‘With a mind like yours, Wilding’d better behave himself.’

‘He knows that.’

As McGurk ducked back outside, Stallings stepped into the living room, on her left, then went to a second door that led to the rear of the hall and the kitchen area. It was closed. When she opened it, she saw that it, too, was splattered with Weekes’s blood. Not wanting to contaminate the scene any more than she could help, she grasped the door-frame on either side then leaned out as far as she could over the body. The man had died in the clothes he had worn when she had seen him last, but his vest was torn in many places, and his boxer shorts had been pulled down below his buttocks, perhaps, she thought, as he had tried to crawl away from his attacker.

As she looked closer, she could see stab wounds and slashes everywhere: on his back, arms, abdomen, side, face, and across his neck where, she suspected, the jugular had been severed. His mouth hung open. He had been stabbed in the cheek and through the left eye. She reached with her right hand and touched his left hip, one of the few parts of the body neither marked by a wound nor stained with blood. It was colder to the touch than the door-jamb had been.

Stallings pulled herself upright, and stepped back into the living room. She realised that she was trembling, and that her stomach was starting to churn. She went quickly to the exit, and stepped, with as much dignity as she could muster, back into the street.

Mae Grey was standing beside McGurk, leaning against her car as if for support, drawing heavily on a cigarette and staring ahead, at nothing at all. The inspector looked her up and down, from head to foot, and saw that her flat canvas shoes, which had been pale blue, now sported dark blotches.

‘Calls made?’ she asked the sergeant.

‘She didn’t,’ he replied. ‘I did. There’s a full uniform team on its way, plus scene-of-crime. I rang the boss too.’

‘McIlhenney?’

‘Yes. He’s coming too. I suspect we may see a few more big chiefs. Weekes was still on the payroll, after all, even if he was more than a wee bit tarnished.’

She turned to the woman. ‘Are you ready to talk about it, Mae?’

‘No,’ she whispered. ‘But I never will be, so. .’

‘Why did you come here?’

‘I’d left some stuff: a few CDs, some clothes. Plus, I wanted to shove his engagement ring up his arse.’

‘Maybe we should stop there,’ said Stallings, quietly.

‘It’s all right, ma’am, I didn’t.’ Her face twisted savagely. ‘If there is anything up there, it wasn’t me that put it there.’

‘I thought you told us you didn’t have a key?’

‘I don’t.’

‘So how did you get in?’

‘Back door: there’s a path three doors up that takes you there. When I got no reply to the bell, I thought he might be sitting out in the back garden. We did that sometimes. But he wasn’t. The kitchen door was open. I went inside and I found him. . like that.’

‘Did you touch anything?’

‘No. I stepped into the hall, though; just in case he was still alive. But then I felt the carpet all sticky with his blood and I realised he couldn’t be. I lost it a bit and I just ran straight out the front door. I nearly peed myself. I couldn’t go back inside, so I squatted down between the two cars and did it there.’ McGurk glanced to his right and saw a damp line leading from the driveway across the pavement to a roadside drain. ‘When I could get my breath back properly, I found your card and rang you on my mobile.’

‘He’s been dead for quite some time,’ Stallings told her. ‘I’m going to ask you this informally; one way or the other I have to. Have you been here before in the last twenty-four hours?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Exactly what I’ve just asked you.’

‘No, I haven’t,’ Grey protested.

‘If you have. . We’ve had cars doing regular drive-bys of this place. If you have, there’s a pretty good chance you’ll have been seen by one of them, if not by some of the neighbours.’

‘Ma’am, you can ask me informally, formally, any way you like. You can give me a fucking lie detector. I’ll tell you the same thing every time. I haven’t been here since last weekend. That was the last time I saw Theo.’

‘Very good,’ said the inspector. ‘Let’s leave it for now, but you’ll need to give us it formally for the record.’

‘Of course,’ said the constable, beginning to recover her self-control. ‘Can I do it soon? I’m on night shift.’

McGurk smiled. ‘We can get you the night off, Mae.’

‘So I can spend it staring at the ceiling and thinking about that in there? Thanks, Sarge, but I’d rather work.’

‘Okay. Look, you know what to do. Give us a statement: type it up, print it and sign it. If we need to interview you after we’ve seen that, we’ll get in touch. On that basis, you can go for now. You’ll need to leave us your shoes, though.’

‘But I told you exactly what happened. Do you still not believe me?’

‘It’s not that. They might have picked up something other than Theo’s blood, a trace left by whoever did for him.’

‘Yes, I see.’ She opened her car door, sat in the passenger seat and removed her shoes, then handed them to McGurk, who took them carefully from her, suspending them from a single finger on each hand.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘On your way.’

The detectives watched her as she reversed out into South Bughtlin Road and drove off, slowly and carefully, past an ever-growing number of neighbours who had emerged from their homes, realising that something was happening beyond the Sunday norm.

‘I hope I was right to do that,’ McGurk murmured.

‘It was my decision as much as yours. I’d have said if I disagreed. She’s given us her story, now she’s best off out of it. She’s not on my list of suspects.’

‘So who is?’

‘Who isn’t? Anybody who ever met that charmer in there. Realistically, John Dean’s got to be at the top, though.’

‘Agreed, because he and Weekes had a fight yesterday.’

‘And because he told me that he wanted to see him dead, when I spoke to him afterwards.’

‘He said that?’

Stallings nodded.

‘And then came right back and did it?’ McGurk queried. ‘How likely is that?’

‘Confession first, crime second? I wouldn’t rule it out. Maybe he felt it was something he had to do.’

‘And maybe not. If that was the case, wouldn’t he have called us as soon as he did it?’

‘If it’s not him, we have to move on to Lisanne.’

‘Lisanne didn’t do it.’

‘I’d expect you to say that; you’re seeing her socially. You realise that means you can’t have anything to do with any part of the investigation that involves her?’

‘Sure, boss, but how long’s he been dead?’

‘He’s cold and he’s stiff. Several hours. Maybe since yesterday.’

‘Then I repeat, Lisanne didn’t do it. I didn’t just drop her off on Friday: I stayed the night, and I was there all morning. About midday, she drove me to my place. I changed clothes and we went to the Botanics for the afternoon, then did an early movie and back to mine. We were there until this afternoon, when I came into the office to meet you and she went home.’

‘Lucky for her you were available and horny.’

McGurk shot her an uncharacteristically hostile look. ‘If you doubt me, you can send a SOCO to my place to go over the sheets.’

‘Hey, calm down, Jack. That’ll only happen if they find her DNA in the house.’

‘They probably will: she’s been there a couple of times, remember. If they find her prints in blood on the handle of a knife, that’s another matter, but they won’t.’

‘Fair enough,’ Stallings declared. ‘Whatever, I’m the one who breaks the news to her, once we’re set up here. Is the mobile police station on its way?’

‘Yes. I’m beginning to think we should put bunks in it.’ As he spoke, a blue people-carrier swung into South Bughtlin Road and headed towards them. ‘That looks like DI Dorward and his team.’

‘Good. I was beginning to feel lonely. We should get organised ourselves. Door-to-door interviews first.’ She looked at the houses on either side of the one in which the body lay. ‘Unless things have changed since yesterday, these are unoccupied.’

‘I’d guessed as much,’ McGurk agreed. ‘Since we’ve been here there hasn’t been as much as a twitching curtain either side. I don’t imagine that Weekes died quietly. If they’d been occupied, somebody would have been bound to hear something.’ He looked along the street. ‘It’s a shame this neighbourhood’s so quiet. It would have made life easier if there was a closed-circuit camera here.’

‘It would. Mind you, the closed-circuit coverage is quite extensive in Edinburgh. Find out where the nearest cameras are and arrange to review their footage for the last couple of days. See if anything or anyone jumps out at you.’ Stallings broke off as a red-haired man approached in a crime-scene tunic. ‘DI Dorward,’ she said. ‘Sorry about your Sunday.’

The newcomer shrugged. ‘What’s new? Weekends are our busy time.’ He took Mae Grey’s shoes from McGurk’s extended fingers and passed them to an assistant. ‘Thanks, big man. Whose are these?’

‘The woman who found the body.’

‘Have you been inside?’

‘I only stood in the doorway. DI Stallings has, though.’

Dorward turned back to her. ‘Yours too, please. There are some disposables in our van that you can have.’ He watched as the inspector slipped her shoes off. ‘Now there’s a shapely ankle,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Right,’ he called to his team. ‘You know what to do. I want the house taped off, front and back. Any sign of the doc?’

‘Just coming, Arthur,’ a female voice called from the roadway. Beyond her, Stallings saw DC Haddock emerging from a Mini.

‘Jack,’ she announced, ‘I’m going to take young Sauce and call on Lisanne. It’s best she hears about it sooner than later. You get things under way here when the HQ van arrives.’

‘Yes, boss,’ McGurk replied. ‘But, Becky. .’

‘Sure.’ She grinned. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll tell her that you’d have come but I wouldn’t let you.’