Deadly Still

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

‘Where’s Penny?’ Torquil asked Morag when he returned to the station.

‘She’s in her office, boss. The Drummonds are on their way in. What is it? I can see you’ve got that look on your face.’

‘I’ll tell you soon, Morag. Call me when the whole team is here.’

Penny came out of her office upon hearing his voice.

‘Ian Gillesbie sent through the reports, boss. I’ve printed them out and put them on your desk.’

‘Good, that’s just what I needed to hear. While I’m reading it gather all the information you have on the pillbox event and on Robbie Ochterlonie.’ Turning to Morag, he said, ‘When the twins arrive gather the team in the rest room. Ask Ewan to get the whiteboard ready and have different coloured marker pens and notepaper ready for everyone.’

Ten minutes later, after he had digested the reports and called Dr Ralph McLelland to ask for some medical advice, Torquil went through to the rest room where the others were waiting.

As usual, Ewan had made a big pot of tea and handed cups to everyone before they began.

Torquil took a drink of tea then went over to the whiteboard. ‘Well folks, things are pretty bad as you all know, but things have just gotten a whole lot more complicated. We’re going to have a brainstorming session. Penny, you take minutes and everyone else make notes as we go along.’

He tapped the whiteboard. ‘Right, so we have two incidents here. The first is the pillbox where the three teenagers were drinking peatreek and having a post-exam get-together. The teenagers were Jamie Mackintosh, Vicky Spiers and Catriona McDonald.’

On the left hand side of the board at the top Torquil wrote PILLBOX and drew a square around it. Underneath he drew three circles in a row, each with an arrow pointing to the pillbox square. Inside each he wrote the name of one of the teenagers. Under Jamie Mackintosh’s he put a cross and the letters RIP. Similarly, under Vicky Spiers’s name he wrote ‘missing,’ and under Catriona McDonald’s, ‘hospitalised, dialysis, visual problems.’

‘OK, what do we know about them?’

‘They were all doing their Highers,’ said Ewan.

‘Jamie’s dad, Angus Mackintosh is a carpenter. He was on a bender at the time,’ said Wallace.

‘Vicky Spiers’s parents are Jeannie and Brock Spiers. Brock is disabled after an accident at the Glen Corlin Distillery seven years ago. He’s wheelchair bound,’ said Morag.

‘Catriona McDonald’s parents are divorced,’ said Penny, reading from her file. ‘Charlie McDonald is a local councillor and her mother Bridget has her own internet business. They share custody of Vicky.’

Torquil added ‘Student-Highers’ under each teenager’s circle. Then he picked up a red pen and wrote each parent’s name and surrounded each with their own circle and drew arrows between them to show the relationships. He tapped Jamie’s circle with the end of his pen and asked, ‘OK, Jamie’s post-mortem, what do we have?’

Penny summarised. ‘Inhaled vomit and aspiration pneumonia. Brain and lungs showed evidence of asphyxiation. That is from little blood haemorrhages called petechiae — kidney disease called renal dysplasia. Effectively he only had one functioning kidney — high methanol level and other toxins — his blood tests showed he had metabolic acidosis.’

Below Jamie’s circle Torquil added these details as a series of bullet points. ‘And Catriona McDonald also had this metabolic acidosis, didn’t she? Ralph McLelland treated her for it.’

He added bullet points under her circle, underscoring the methanol poisoning under both teenagers’ entries.

‘And she had visual problems, also undoubtedly methanol caused,’ he added as he wrote. ‘Ralph said it was called optic neuritis.’

Swapping marker pens again, on the top right of the board he wrote ‘Lochiel’s Copse’ and drew a square around it. Lower down he wrote Robbie Ochterlonie’s name and circled it, adding underneath the cross sign.

‘What else?’ he prompted.

‘He was the manager of the Old Hydropathic Residential Home,’ said Ewan.

‘He was an ex-fisherman, like us,’ said Douglas.

‘And he liked his peatreek,’ added Wallace.

‘He was a type 1 diabetic, which means he had to take insulin,’ replied Penny. ‘And apparently he wanted to be a writer. He was always on his laptop, writing his novel or short stories. At least that’s what they thought and what he told them he was doing.’

Torquil added bullet points with the information under his circle. Then to Penny, he said, ‘First let’s put down the findings at the scene, amalgamated with any tests from forensics.’

Penny turned pages in the file to the appropriate entries. ‘Body discovered by Norma Ferguson on Monday morning. She had been concerned because he had not shown up for work so she went round to his cabin after breakfasts at the home had been served. Nor had either of the two teenagers, by the way. The body was lying face down in the sitting room. A whisky glass and a bottle were lying near the body and in the kitchen a couple of empty insulin bottles and a syringe were lying on the table along with his mobile phone. The bottle contained illicitly distilled whisky. It exactly matched the residue found in the bottle the teenagers had used.’

Torquil jotted more bullet points under the title ‘Scene findings’. Once he had finished he asked Penny, ‘What about his laptop?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘There wasn’t one in the cabin.’

Torquil raised his eyebrows momentarily, then went on. ‘Yesterday, Lorna reported the main post-mortem findings to me. Dr Giles Lamont said that he sustained a blunt facial injury called a Le Fort type 2. This effectively means that the middle of his face was shoved inwards. It is usually caused by a high velocity injury, like a fall from a height rather than a fall forward onto the face. The latter apparently causes a Le Fort type 1 or floating palate injury, which is not as severe.

‘The post-mortem also showed a contrecoup injury, that is injury to the back of the brain as it bounced back and struck the inside of the cranium. That too is consistent with a high velocity injury. Also, there were petechial haemorrhages over his brain, which implied he’d had a convulsion. Whether that was before he fell or after he’d struck his head is not clear. The pathologist wasn’t sure.’

He jotted the information further down the board as bullet points under the title ‘Post-Mortem Findings’. Then he picked up the typed out reports that Penny had given him and looked at notes he had jotted down in the margins.

‘The next points come from testing of the blood samples that Ralph McLelland took and also the ones from the post-mortem. Dr Lamont also took samples of the stomach contents and body fluids, including from his eyes. First, he had high, toxic and almost certainly lethal levels of methanol in all of these. They use testing called head space gas chromatography with a flame ionisation detector and they can work out all of the toxins in his system. It was predominantly methanol in his case as death occurred soon after. The blood results also showed extremely low blood sugar.’ He added the notes about these findings as another series of bullet points. ‘What does that mean to you?’

Penny raised her hand and pointed to the board. ‘There were two empty insulin bottles, one fast-acting insulin and the other long-acting insulin. And an empty syringe.’

‘So presumably he’d recently taken a big dose of insulin?’ suggested Morag.

‘Aye, insulin drops the blood sugar, so it would show a low blood sugar right enough,’ said Wallace.

‘And a low blood sugar like that along with a skinful of peatreek, never mind whether it is methanol or good ordinary whisky would make him wobbly legged to say the least,’ Douglas said, nodding his head in agreement with his brother.

Torquil circled the methanol readings in all of the tests with a green marker. Beside them he wrote in capital letters — HIGH.

‘Look at that, we are all agreed, the readings were high. But look at this,’ he said, exchanging marker pens and circling the blood sugar in black marker and beside it writing in capital letters — LOW. He tapped them both. ‘High and Low!’

Morag stroked her chin pensively. ‘I can’t see what you are getting at, Piper. The pathologist and the forensics haven’t flagged anything up, have they? It fits, doesn’t it? He drank, felt his sugars going up so took a big dose of insulin then collapsed, maybe having had a fit.’

Torquil sucked air through his lips. ‘Something didn’t seem right to me, which is why I went to St Ninian’s cave for a play on my pipes. I was just playing pieces at random and when I came to Loch Lomond it struck me.’

Ewan began to sing the words, ‘You take the high road and I’ll take the low road and I’ll…’

‘That’s it,’ Torquil interrupted. He tapped the two words High and Low again. ‘High and low. High methanol and low blood sugar. I rang Ralph McLelland about it and he agreed, there is an anomaly. Alcohol lowers your blood sugar. I asked if it would even do that in a diabetic and he said that methanol certainly would.’

‘So taking insulin would lower it still further?’ Penny asked.

‘It would,’ agreed Torquil, ‘but my point is that Robbie Ochterlonie was a diabetic and he’d recognise if he was having hypoglycaemia, or low blood sugar. Even drunk, he would know that insulin would make it worse and he would have gone for sugary drinks, chocolate, anything sweet instead. What he wouldn’t have done is take insulin and certainly not as much as he apparently took.’

The news evoked surprise in everyone in the room.

‘After taking so much insulin it is doubtful that he would have made it through to the sitting room and drunk more peatreek. But there is more to say. Dr Lamont took several swabs at the post-mortem. I have the results in the report Penny obtained from Ian Gillesbie. There was spermatozoa in his urethra.’

Morag frowned. ‘Does that mean anything, Torquil? As I understand it ejaculation can occur at death.’

Torquil nodded. ‘Aye, it can occur, I believe. But swabs were also taken and the lab found condom lubricant oils on the swabs from the shaft of the penis. It looks as if he had sex soon before death and he was wearing a condom.’

Penny urgently started flicking through the pages in her file. After a few moments, she said, ‘There were no condoms either used or unused found in the cabin, boss. All the bins were gone through, of course.’ She tapped her pen on her file. ‘And I don’t think the tests reported any evidence of body fluids from a sexual partner on him?’

‘If he was wearing a condom there wouldn’t necessarily be any,’ Torquil pointed out.

Ewan winced. ‘This is looking bleak, boss.’

‘So he wasn’t alone when he died?’ Penny asked.

‘Was this person male or female?’ Douglas asked. ‘Is there any way of knowing?’

Torquil shrugged. ‘That I don’t know. But if there was a second person, then it explains things. Like the blunt injury, this Le Fort type 2 facial fracture. It’s possible that someone threw him down or ground his face into the floor. And it could explain the insulin. He may have been given the insulin after getting very drunk. I talked all this over with Ralph McLelland and he thinks this is all plausible.’

Penny stared at Torquil in horror. ‘Gosh, I’m sorry, boss. I didn’t have any suspicions that there was another person present.’

‘Nor was there any reason to suppose so from the facts. But it begins to look like murder. Especially when two things aren’t here that should be. No condoms and no laptop. Remember, he wanted to be a writer, but there is no laptop recorded here in the cabin.’

He added the words ‘no condoms’ and ‘no laptop’ under the scene findings label and drew stars beside them. He picked up his tea and took a sip. ‘I’m going to have to talk with the Procurator Fiscal about it all, which is why we need to get our ideas together first. So, with the knowledge that the two bottles contained the same composition of peatreek it is likely that they came from the same illicit source.’

With a green marker pen he wrote in capital letters the word ‘WHISKY’ at the top of the middle section of the board. Halfway down he wrote the word ‘Peatreek’, and then enclosed them both in squares. From the peatreek square he drew arrows to the pillbox and Lochiel’s Copse squares and then to each of the teenagers and to Robbie Ochterlonie.

‘We have two bona fide distilleries on the island; Abhainn Dhonn and Glen Corlin,’ he said.

Under the label ‘whisky’ he put the names of the two distilleries in circles and inserted arrows from the whisky square to each distillery. Below each one he wrote the names of the owners and of the people who worked at them.

‘So you’ll need the names of the four illicit peatreek still owners,’ said Wallace. ‘Tosh MacNeill, Larry Kennedy, Norman Smith and Drew McQueen. Drew is a crofter and the others are fishermen. We confiscated their stuff. They were the only stills we could find out about.’

‘We’ll need their peatreek analysing as soon as possible,’ Torquil replied as he added their names under the peatreek box.

‘Don’t forget that Catriona McDonald and Vicky Spiers worked at the Hydro,’ said Morag.

Torquil nodded and made a new square for The Old Hydropathic Residential Home and under it added their names and those of Norma Ferguson, Doreen McGuire and Millie McKendrick. He added arrows from the two teenagers’ circles to the Hydro box.

‘It’s quite a tangled web already,’ Penny said.

‘Aye, or a skeleton framework. Now we need to add flesh to the bones. Photographs, we want all the ones you’ve all taken. Print them out and stick them up here.’

‘I forwarded the ones from Stan Wilkinson’s phone and already printed them out, Torquil,’ said Morag. ‘They’re in my drawer.’

‘Ah yes, Stan Wilkinson,’ said Torquil. ‘He took Catriona to hospital and he also found and took Angus. We’ll put him on the board, too.’ He added the postman’s name to the bottom left of the board and circled it, then added arrows to Angus Mackintosh and to Catriona McDonald. Underneath it he wrote ‘Good Samaritan’.

Ewan suddenly smacked himself on the forehead. ‘Boss, I just realised, the burglary! Stan Wilkinson’s phone was among the things that were taken from the station. And among the other bits and pieces were things that Morag’s search team had found.’

‘Including Vicky’s trainer,’ agreed Morag.

‘And my murder shoes,’ Ewan added. ‘They were brand new and unworn.’

Torquil made another list under the title ‘Burglary’ and drew an arrow between Stan Wilkinson’s name and the mobile phone and between Vicky’s trainer and the pillbox. He continued, ‘When I interviewed the staff at the Old Hydro Millie McKendrick told me she suspected that Robbie Ochterlonie may have had a secret relationship. She also thought that Norma Ferguson had a soft spot for him. Then Doreen McGuire said she thought she might be right about that.’

He added the words ‘secret lover’ to the right of Robbie’s circled name then underlined it twice for emphasis. Then he added a question mark and an arrow between Norma Ferguson and Robbie and a larger question mark beside the ‘secret lover’.

‘So, the first question is whether his secret lover is also his secret killer? The second arises if we conjecture that there is more than coincidence about the two events being linked, because the same peatreek was consumed in both cases.’

‘It all puts a different light on our search too, Torquil,’ said Morag.

‘Exactly,’ Torquil replied with a nod of his head as under Vicky’s circle he added the words ‘alive or dead?’ He looked round the room. ‘Or, which seems increasingly likely, as we have found no sign of her apart from two trainers found six miles apart from each other, is she being held somewhere against her will?’

Torquil left the others to reflect on the board while he went through to his office to make calls. He talked the cases over with Josephine Pengelly, the Procurator Fiscal in Oban, updating her on the search for Vicky Spiers and outlining his concerns about the death of Robbie Ochterlonie. She agreed that there was urgency now in finding Vicky Spiers and also discovering the source of the illicit whisky. The pillbox inquiry was now a potential culpable homicide case, because of Jamie Mackintosh’s death, but possibly also one of abduction in the case of Vicky Spiers. She also agreed that Robbie Ochterlonie’s death was highly suspicious and that it should now be considered a murder investigation.

Detective Superintendent Ross listened and agreed on Torquil’s conclusions and his proposed plans of action and asked to be kept briefed on all developments.

Both Josephine and DS Ross agreed that he needed to go public on the way the cases were opening up, so Torquil phoned Calum. Both he and Cora were busy writing articles fort the next edition of the Chronicle.

‘It’s bad news, Piper. So you think that poor Robbie was murdered?’

‘Aye, and there is a strong possibility that whoever murdered him is also responsible for poisoning the youngsters at the pillbox. That may mean that they may also have abducted Vicky and be holding her against her will.’

‘Have I your blessing to write it all up, using these terms? As you know, I am not one given to scare-mongering, but this is huge.’

‘You have carte-blanche, Calum.’

‘Then the West Uist Chronicle is at your service. We’ll not let you down, Piper. Oh, and by the way, pass on our best wishes to your fiancé.’

As Torquil put the phone down he realised that Calum had just put in his best man bid. It had inevitably gone out of his mind the last few days and he felt guilty about even thinking of anything else other than the cases in hand, both of which had taken momentous leaps in importance.

His next phone call was to Kirsty Macroon at the Scottish TV newsdesk. As before, they recorded the interview on Torquil’s iPhone, which he then emailed to her.

Following that, he talked with Fearghas Mac an Fhilidh at BBC Alba, the Gaelic language television channel based in Stornoway and after that, with Donald McGregor at the BBC Scotland newsdesk in Glasgow.

Finally, he went back through to the rest room, to find the others clustered around the table tennis table looking at batches of freshly printed photographs of the pillbox, Jamie Mackintosh’s body, Robbie Ochterlonie’s cabin and his body, and all the other photographs appertaining to each case.

‘We were just seeing what we have before we stick them up, Torquil,’ said Morag.

He nodded. ‘Good, we want everything up here. I’ve talked to Superintendent Ross and with Josephine Pengelly and they both agree and know that I’m starting a murder enquiry to run alongside the search for Vicky Spiers. I’m calling this an abduction case. Do you want to tell Lumsden or shall I?’

A half smile crossed Morag’s lips, followed by an emphatic shake of the head. ‘Much as I’d like to, I think I’m in enough trouble with him as it is. Do you mind, Torquil?’

‘No problem. It doesn’t need to be a long call as I’ve too much to do now. I’ll tell him he needs to start knocking on doors.’

Calum and Cora had wasted no time at all.

‘Short, pithy and prompt, that’s what we have to be with these bulletins, Cora. We have to keep ahead of the big TV stations, but remember that we are the main information stream for the island. These little pieces will have everyone eager for the actual paper copy tomorrow. Are you ready?’

‘It’s all loaded up, master.’

‘Then press the button, lassie.’

Moments later, across West Uist the messages, texts and emails beeped, buzzed and rang out, with the three line message in capital letters:

PIPER MCKINNON SAYS ROBBIE OCHTERLONIE WAS MURDERED

HAS VICKY BEEN ABDUCTED?

SEARCH FOR THE DEADLY STILL

As before, readers were given the link to the West Uist Chronicle blog and the details of the cases.

The killer read the West Uist piece with mounting anger. So the plods had stumbled onto something. Planting the second trainer far from the first seemed to have worked. A Super Plod had come over to the island to take over the search, but what could he possibly have found to make the quantum leap about Ochterlonie?

Bugger! Bugger! Bugger!

There was only one thing for it now.

The kid had to be terminated, like the other one.