Dead And Buried

Seventy-two

‘Who the fuck are you?’ asked Eddie Charnwood. The eyes that looked up from the interview room chair were emotionless, and cold as ice.

‘I’m Detective Superintendent Neil McIlhenney, and you are done.’

‘What happened to Mackenzie?’

‘He’s on holiday.’

‘On suspension, more like; he’s a mug.’

‘He’s on holiday, and next time you say anything disrespectful about him I’ll hit you so fucking hard you’ll leave an imprint on the wall behind you.’

‘Tough guy.’

‘Usually I don’t have to be. You can have it either way.’

‘You can’t touch me.’

McIlhenney turned to DS Wilding. ‘Ray,’ he said, ‘would you step outside for a minute, please?’

‘Certainly, sir: as many minutes as you like.’

Charnwood raised his manacled hands. ‘Okay, okay. I get the message. Where’s Ollie Poole? He should be here by now.’

‘Mr Poole has declined to represent you, as is his right. You can nominate another lawyer if you like, but this interview is going ahead right now. We’ll do it informally for the moment. We’re going to be joined by officers from Dundee: I’ll switch on the tape when they get here.’

‘So get on with it.’

McIlhenney nodded. ‘The first thing I have to tell you is that I wasn’t kidding when I said that you’re done. We’ve got a nice fingerprint from Big Ming’s doorbell, and from the handle of Joe Falconer’s fridge. We’re so clever these days that we should be able to extract DNA from them, so be in no doubt, Eddie, you’re looking at life imprisonment. The only question is, how long will your tariff be? Guilty pleas usually get you a few years less than if you go to trial.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘He’s not kidding, Eddie,’ said Wilding. ‘That’s how it works.’

‘As for the drugs,’ the superintendent continued, ‘we’re not going to bother about them. Soraya’s going down for that end of it. Her brothers were the suppliers and she was the distributor, through Gary Starr, Falconer, and maybe other people we don’t know about yet. You probably thought when you shot Big Ming and Joe, your own cousin, as we’ve discovered, that all the potential witnesses were taken care of, but we’ve got enough circumstantial evidence to send her to Cornton Vale till your boy leaves school. . maybe longer if we decide to charge her as an accessory to Gary Starr’s murder. Who else could have provided the drugs that were used on him, before you sawed the poor bastard’s hands off and bled him to death?’

For the first time, Charnwood’s arrogance cracked: fear showed in his hard blue eyes. ‘I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,’ he shouted.

‘Sure, pull the other one. You decided to kill Gary Starr when the stunt with the bayonet went wrong. You knew it would attract our attention to his sad wee bookie’s shop and that sooner rather than later we’d happen upon his other business. So you killed him in a way that you hoped would make us forget everything else and pin it on the boy with the missing digit.’

‘I bloody didn’t!’

‘Sure you did. What I don’t understand is why you left the drugs and the money in the safe for us to find. You had all Saturday to clear it out.’

‘I didn’t because I didn’t fucking kill him.’

‘Maybe you just made a mistake, and thought we wouldn’t look there. I don’t suppose you thought that Ming would blab about his trip to Pamplona either. You may have thought that the drugs racket would survive Starr’s death. But once Ming did talk, he and Joe had to go: as the couriers, they could identify Sorry’s brothers. When I think about it, we’ll probably do her as an accessory there too.’

Charnwood banged his hands on the table. ‘Leave her out of this! I’ll do you a deal, all right. Sorry never knew what was happening. Her brothers approached me directly, not through her: I set the whole thing up with Gary and Joe. Leave her alone and I’ll plead guilty to all that, and to the shootings.’

McIlhenney gazed at him. ‘I might consider such an arrangement,’ he said slowly. ‘But what about Starr?’

‘I’m telling the truth about Gary. I didn’t kill him. I’d have emptied that safe as soon as I heard he was dead, but I never had a chance. You guys were all over the shop like bugs. I had to act the daft laddie when Mackenzie asked me to open it.’ His eyes narrowed. ‘You twigged because I knew the combination, didn’t you?’

‘It helped, but we’d have got you from the prints, and because you’d killed all the other contenders.’

‘Not all. How many times do I have to say it? I never killed Gary.’