Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 92, No. 3. Whole No. 547, September 1988

Hugo Skillicorn and the Killing Machine by Peter Turnbull

© 1988 by Peter Turnbull.

A nurse in a starched white smock stood in the corridor, which smelled of disinfectant. The tall windows allowed the interior of the hospital to flood with light and permitted an impressive view of the rooftops of Battlefield and Langside. Sussock saw an orange bus go down Battlefield Road, and away in the far, far distance the sun caught a window of a house, causing it to gleam penetratingly, like a diamond in a sea of granite and concrete.

“Mr. Sussock?” said the nurse. Sussock found her demure and genuinely respectful, not just of him as a cop but of him as a human being. She immediately brought out his sense of protectiveness. He nailed felons to protect citizens like this nurse...

Donoghue pulled reflectively on his pipe and thought that they should come here, all those people who thought of Glasgow as square mile upon square mile of tenements, of disused mine and railway workings, of cranes against a grey sky hovering over an oily river, of pale children playing in stinking streets. They should come here, he told himself, to this quarter of the city, to houses like this — large, stone built, with fifteen rooms and landscaped gardens. And it was the home of just one man and his wife, exactly as the other houses in the street in Maxwell Park were single-family units. Not for these houses the ignominy of being split into bedsits or sold off as conversion flats within the shell of the original building, which in Donoghue’s values was only better than demolition.

He watched a swallow curl and dive in pursuit of a flying insect and he thought, too, that people who imagined the weather north of the border to be all mist, rain, sleet, and snow should visit Scotland at this time of the year — high summer, just a week after the longest day but still in the brief “white nights” period when it never really got dark.

It was only because he was a policeman with twenty years’ experience and because he was a professional that he had been able to muster the detachment to walk out of that house, to enjoy the evening and the neighborhood. He was aware that police work affects every cop and that the effect isn’t noticed by the individual officer until it has arrived and is entrenched. He had first realized this twenty years earlier when he was still a fresh-faced cop, still in uniform. He had been obliged, along with colleagues and ambulance and fire-service crews, to attend yet another car smash. It had been a very bad one — one car had been crushed into a mass half its original size and inside were the mangled remains of five human beings, none older than himself. He had helped remove the bodies.

Later he had gone home and eaten a plate of fish and chips, which he had smothered liberally with tomato ketchup, then he had gone to the pub and had a beer or two. Only at the close of the day did he suddenly realize that as a policeman, accumulating the sort of experiences that come to most people only once a lifetime, he had calmly taken in his stride a trauma that would otherwise have shaken him badly. Now, years later, he found himself calmly taking the air and enjoying the evening when inside the house was a woman whose life had all but come to an end, who now sat in a state of numbed shock in a chair in the drawing room, attended by W.P.C. Willems, while in the dining room her husband’s life had completely come to an end. Bloodily.

Dr. Chan, the police surgeon, had pronounced death within fifteen seconds of kneeling beside the body and then systematically began to count the stab wounds.

“Fifteen in the front of the torso,” he said. “There may be others in the rear of the body, but I won’t move him, of course — it might interfere with the work of the pathologist.” Chan was a small Oriental — always, thought Donoghue, highly professional. He had then stood, saying, “I’d like to stay to observe the pathologist’s work, but I have a sudden death in Maryhill.”

Donoghue thanked him as the doctor left the house, the locus of the offense. In the dining room, two constables stood reverently in the corner and a scene-of-crimes officer began to make ready his camera. The smell of death was beginning to rise. It was always the same smell — not unlike dried leaves, but sweeter and mustier. From women, from men, from the young, from the old, from the poor or from, as in this case, the rich, it was always the same. It was at that point that Donoghue, knowing his presence was not immediately required, had gone outside to enjoy the evening, and to wait for the arrival of Dr. Reynolds.

He strolled to the bottom of the drive and noticed the occasional curtain move in one or another of the neighboring houses as the police activity attracted attention. But the people who lived in Maxwell Park were discreet and polite, not venturing from their homes. In the sprawling peripheral housing schemes, any similar activity on the part of the police would cause a crowd to gather, blatantly staring, hoping to catch a glimpse of the corpse or of the arrest or whatever, but not here where the stockbrokers lived. Here, although they would surrender to a little curiosity, people minded their own affairs.

Donoghue turned and walked back up the driveway to the side of the house and then round to the rear. The only sounds were his shoes crunching the gravel and the birds singing in the warm, placid Sunday-evening air. He felt quite at home in these surroundings and, with his tailored three-piece suit, gold hunter’s-chain looping across his waistcoat, and his pipe with its slightly curved stem, he would, to an onlooker, seem indeed to be quite at home. The garden at the rear of the house was landscaped. There were rockeries, shrubberies, and croquet hoops in the lawn.

A car door slamming shut penetrated the still evening and Donoghue returned to the side of the house and saw Dr. Reynolds striding purposefully up the drive. He walked toward the tall silver-haired pathologist. “Good evening, sir,” he said.

“Good evening, Inspector.” Reynolds nodded cheerfully. “What have you got for me?”

“One male, middle-aged, sir,” said Donoghue. “Dr. Chan has pronounced him dead. Apparently from stab wounds.”

“Apparently?”

“Well, that’s really your department, sir.” Donoghue invited Reynolds to enter the house in front of him. “But even a layman could say that the number of wounds involved wouldn’t have done his health the world of good.”

Reynolds stepped over the threshold into the hallway. Oak panels, imposing stairway. “What was the deceased’s profession, do you know?”

“He was a medical man, I believe, sir. An obstetrician.”

“Opposite side of the coin to me, eh? He brings them into the world, I find out what caused them to leave. Where’s the corpse?”

“First door on the right, sir.”

Reynolds opened the heavy oak door and Donoghue followed him into the room. A camera bulb flashed. Elliot Bothwell was dusting the room for latents. The two constables still stood in a corner awaiting instructions. The body lay as it had been found, between the dining table and the crockery cabinet.

“I see what you mean,” said Reynolds. He looked down at the corpse, his heavily bloodstained shirt, the blood-soaked carpet. The dead man’s right hand was tightly clenched into a fist, his left was badly lacerated. “Tried to grab the knife with his left hand, I’d say,” Reynolds remarked. He knelt and prized open the right fist. A button fell onto the carpet. “Mr. Bothwell!” Donoghue called.

“Sir?” Elliot Bothwell blinked behind his thick-lensed spectacles.

“Do you have a cellophane bag? Small size?”

Bothwell walked across the room and handed Donoghue a small self-sealing cellophane sachet. Donoghue picked up the button between thumb and forefinger and dropped it into the sachet. “See if you can lift any latents from it,” he said, handing the sachet to Bothwell, “then send it to the Forensic Science Lab at Pitt Street.”

Reynolds glanced at Donoghue. “Most probably torn from the attacker’s clothing, you think?”

“It would seem likely, sir.”

Reynolds began to take notes. “Do you have any idea when this incident happened?”

“All we can tell is between three and five P.M. today,” Donoghue said. “Being the times when the deceased’s wife left her husband enjoyably reading the Sunday papers and returned to find him as we see him now. She didn’t touch anything and managed to retain self-control long enough to phone three nines. We arrived to find her still holding the telephone in a state of deep shock. Dr. Chan prescribed a mild sedative. She’s sitting in the next room — quite conscious, but not talking at all.”

“Who can blame her?” Reynolds slipped a thermometer into the deceased man’s mouth and used a second thermometer to measure the temperature of the room. “They’ve probably been married for thirty years and were looking forward to enjoying each other’s company for a good number more. One minute you see a golden road stretching before you and the very next there’s nothing there but a brick wall.”

“We’d like to begin interviewing as soon as we can,” Donoghue said. “The trail’s getting colder by the second.”

“No indication of motive?” Reynolds took the thermometer from the dead man’s mouth and noted the temperature.

“It doesn’t appear to be robbery,” Donoghue said. “There’s no indication of forced entry — no evidence of anything being disturbed as we would expect to find in the case of a burglary.”

Reynolds stood. “A personal motive, then?”

“It would appear so. Which is why we’re doubly keen to talk to his wife. Somebody didn’t like him.”

Reynolds looked down at the corpse in the scarlet-stained shirt and turned to Donoghue. “That, Inspector, even for you, is something of an understatement. Well, I can’t do anything else here. I’ll have the body removed to the Royal Infirmary. I’ll phone my findings in as soon as I can.”

“He had no enemies at all,” said the woman, wrapping herself tighter in a black shawl — the only suitable garment, she had apologized, that she had in her wardrobe. In the twenty-four hours since she had discovered her husband’s mutilated corpse, she seemed, to a stunned and shocked Elka Willems, to have aged ten to fifteen years. Richard King, who took the statement, never having seen her before, assumed that she normally looked like this — grey hair, drawn face, sunken, distant eyes, hunched frame — but Elka could recall the woman she had seen before, a full face atop a proudly held body. “He had no enemies,” the widow said.

“Mr. Skillicorn was a doctor, I understand,” King prompted gently. Detective Constable King had been introduced to Mrs. Skillicorn by Elka some ten minutes earlier and so far the only information he had been able to elicit from Mrs. Skillicorn was that her husband had had no enemies.

“Yes, Mr. King,” said the woman. “He was an obstetrician. He worked at the Victoria Infirmary but he also had private patients.”

King wrote neatly on his pad in ballpoint. He was a chubby, bearded man, twenty-five years of age. Elka Willems sat silently beside him. She was a tall, blonde policewoman, whose blue eyes and high cheekbones betrayed her Dutch ancestry as much as did her name. She kept her hair in a tight bun while on duty, but even in the full tunic in the winter months she would cause heads to turn.

“You left the house at three p.m. yesterday?” King asked.

“I did.” The woman paused long enough for King to have cause to worry that he was going to have to prize each word out of her, or even be content with a shake or a nod of the head. But then she continued: “I visited friends in Milngavie. I called in for tea — it’s a pattern which has established itself over the years, two hours on Sunday afternoon for tea and cakes. When I left our home, Hugo was reading the Sunday papers. When I returned—”

“You and Mr. Skillicorn lived alone, I take it?”

“Yes. We have a gardener and a maid, but they don’t live in. We have three grown children, each of whom lives abroad.”

“All three?” said King — sorry as soon as he had spoken.

“Yes. All three. Two sons and a daughter. All three are doctors, all have married other doctors. One lives in Australia, another in Canada — and our daughter is with her husband in Africa, where he is studying tropical medicine.”

“Have you contacted them?” King asked her.

She nodded. “I phoned Nigel in Perth — Perth, Australia.”

“Yes, of course.”

“He said he’d make sure he contacted the others and would then come straight home. That was yesterday. He’ll be home later today. I declare, the wonders of modern technology — telephone link-up by satellite and modern jet aircraft means that even if your son lives on the other side of the world he can still be home at the drop of a hat within twenty-four hours. Australia isn’t so far away if you look at it like that.”

“I suppose not,” said King. “When you returned home yesterday, you didn’t notice any sign of forced entry, no struggle?”

“There had been a struggle in the dining room. The furniture was disturbed a little and the carpet kicked up at the corner. I noticed that after I saw Hugo. We always keep a clean and tidy home. I managed to phone you—”

“Yes.” King nodded. “I understood that you kept calm long enough to do the right thing. Thank you. Nothing else was disturbed?”

“No. The constables checked every room, every cupboard, under every bed to see if he was still in the house. When they told me it was safe, I looked over the house quickly to see if anything was stolen and nothing has been touched. There was, in fact, some fifty pounds lying on the dressing table in the bedroom and it’s still there. Really, Mr. King, nothing has been taken.”

“No forced entry, no robbery, no sign of really violent struggle. A popular man with no enemies, yet he was stabbed several times in his own home.”

“Hacked to death would be my description,” said Mrs. Skillicorn.

Donoghue read Elliot Bothwell’s report. He found it spare, just the nuts and bolts, but its contents were nonetheless interesting. The locus of the offense was in Bothwell’s view “forensic friendly.” The phrase jarred Donoghue’s classically trained mind. He assumed Bothwell meant that the dining room was clean, the surfaces waxed, and good latents were able to be lifted. There were, apparently, four sets of latents, three of which could be identified as belonging to the deceased, the wife of the deceased, and the maid. The fourth latent could not be identified but did not belong to the gardener, whose prints Bothwell had taken that Monday morning. The fourth latent was also found on the button the deceased had had clenched in his fist. The mysterious latent was not on computer file in Glasgow. The Police National Computer at Hendon, England, had yet to come back to P Division, at the time of the writing, to indicate whether or not it was on the national records.

Donoghue set Bothwell’s report to one side and picked up the report submitted by Jean Kay of the Forensic Science Laboratory. Donoghue knew Jean Kay well and liked her. She was a small, wiry woman in her sixties and held a Ph.D. in Chemistry from one of Britain’s leading universities, Donoghue could not recall which one. Her reputation and the reputation of the laboratory she ran were such that her services were unashamedly sought by the police forces of the Highlands and Islands region, the Tayside and Grampian forces, the Central force, and the Dumfries and Galloway police. Only the professionally competitive Lothian and Borders force showed any reluctance to approach her.

Her report, as befitted a woman of her learning, was fuller than Bothwell’s but nevertheless gave Donoghue very little to go on. All the blood on the clothing was AB negative, the blood group of the deceased. If the attacker was wounded and bled in the affray, then he by sheer coincidence must also be blood group AB negative. But, she concluded, the balance of probability was that all the blood came from the deceased. There was little to identify the button which had apparently been found in the hand of the deceased, but it was not a part of the clothing worn by the deceased at the time of death. The deceased had obviously bled profusely, the attack had been carried out by a knife, as indicated by the slashing of the clothing. She expected the pathologist might have more to say on the matter, but she was certain the attacker must have left the locus of the offense well covered with his victim’s blood. It would have been a conspicuous site, she thought, on a Sunday afternoon in the middle of summer. She regretted, in a single-line paragraph, that she could not have been of greater assistance.

The phone on Donoghue’s desk rang. He took the pipe from his mouth and propped it in the huge black ashtray on his desk. He picked up the receiver and, turning to a blank page in his notepad, said, “D.I. Donoghue.”

“Reynolds here,” said the calm voice on the other end of the line.

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve completed the postmortem.” Reynolds spoke unhurriedly. “Death was caused by stab wounds. One wound particularly pierced the aorta but any of half a dozen others could have killed him.”

“I see.” Donoghue wrote on his pad.

“The weapon in question seems to be about five inches long, but wider than a kitchen knife.”

“Like a commando knife?”

“That sort of thing, yes. He sustained seventeen wounds in all, all to the anterior of the torso.”

“The front of the chest.”

“Yes. Nothing below the waist or above the shoulders. Six wounds were particularly penetrating and deadly. He was a well nourished man, unlike most of our profession.”

“Oh?”

“Well, you know what they say — an alcoholic is someone who drinks more than his doctor. There’s a lot of truth in jest. We are a notoriously alcoholic profession, but Hugo Skillicorn had a very healthy liver and kidneys. There’s really nothing else I can add. My report will be typed up and sent over to you as soon as possible.”

Donoghue thanked him and replaced the receiver. He picked up his pipe from the ashtray and held it by its stem as he scraped the bowl with his penknife. Then he pulled the stem apart and cleaned the interior with a pipe cleaner, wincing at the oily nicotine and tar that had accumulated. He refilled the bowl with a plug of the special mixture he had made up for him by a city tobacconist: a Dutch base for taste, with a twist of dark shag for depth of flavor and a slower burning rate. He placed the flame of his gold-plated lighter over the bowl and drew lovingly on the smoke. Now where do we go? he thought.

On the thirteenth of May, 1568, a Scots army under Mary Queen of Scots was defeated by another Scots army commanded by the regent, James Stewart, Earl of Moray. Battle was joined in a field south of the Clyde, close to the River Cart near the small town of Glasgow. The site of the battle was later appropriately named Battlefield. Glasgow expanded in the Nineteenth Century — “exploded” may be the better word — and the site of the battle was built over. Closely packed tenements for the new middle classes spread over the scene of the earlier carnage, and the new district of the city retained the name of Battlefield. In the center of the new housing on the hill called Battlefield Road, and adjoining Battle Place with the monument, a hospital was built. It was named the Victoria Infirmary in honor of the reigning monarch, who by then was Queen of both Scots and English.

Ray Sussock turned off Battlefield Road and parked his car on Langside Road. He left the window of his car slightly open to allow the interior to ventilate in the heat and then walked, enjoying the day, to the administrative block of “the Vicky.”

“Detective Sergeant Sussock,” he said to the receptionist, and showed his I.D. The receptionist was a handsome man, and a little smug because of it, thought Sussock. He nodded to Sussock a grudging acknowledgment of rank and Sussock enjoyed the young man’s confusion — respect for a cop, contempt for an old man of shabby, untidy appearance. “Yes, sir?” he said.

“I have an appointment with Dr. Paxton.”

The receptionist turned to the phone and dialed an internal number. It was an old telephone system of heavy black bakelite and Sussock distinctly heard the solid burr, burr as the phone rang at the other end of the line. He fancied that even at this distance he would be able to hear both sides of the conversation. He wasn’t disappointed.

“Porter’s lodge,” said the receptionist. “There’s a Detective Sergeant Sussock here to see Dr. Paxton.”

“Wait a minute. — Yes, he’s expected. Ask him to come up, please, and someone will meet him.”

“Okay.” The receptionist turned to Sussock. “If you’d like to take the lift to the fourth floor, sir—”

“Someone will meet me,” said Sussock. “Thank you.”

The lift, like the telephone system, was the original, the first to be installed and still providing sterling service, with brass telescoping doors and solid wood paneling smelling strongly of polish. Sussock pressed the button marked 4. The lift hesitated for a moment and then began a slow, uneven ascent. It slowed to a stop, then jerked up another six inches, and only then did the light behind the figure 4 above the door shine on. Sussock wrenched open the lift door, then the shaft door, and shut both behind him.

A nurse in a starched white smock stood in the corridor, which smelled of disinfectant. The tall windows allowed the interior of the hospital to flood with light and permitted an impressive view of the rooftops of Battlefield and Langside. Sussock saw an orange bus go down Battlefield Road, and away in the far, far distance the sun caught a window of a house, causing it to gleam penetratingly, like a diamond in a sea of granite and concrete.

“Mr. Sussock?” said the nurse. Sussock found her demure and genuinely respectful, not just of him as a cop but of him as a human being. She immediately brought out his sense of protectiveness. He nailed felons to protect citizens like this nurse.

“Yes.” He smiled.

“If you’d like to step this way, sir. Dr. Paxton is expecting you.”

Sussock followed her down the corridor, at her side, half a step behind. She didn’t talk, and Sussock felt that, like the children who were brought up in the era that the Victorian Infirmary was built, she would speak only if spoken to. The walk down the corridor was long, and silent save for his footfall. Like all nurses, she wore soft-soled shoes and made no sound as she walked.

They came to a ward. In an anteroom near the entrance, a middle-aged man sat at a desk. The nurse stopped at the door and said, “Mr. Sussock, sir.”

The man stood and extended a hand to Sussock. He had a warm, beaming face behind heavy-rimmed spectacles. Sussock, after his brief bad first impression at the porter’s lodge, was beginning to like the staff at the Vicky. “Paxton, Mr. Sussock,” said the man, shaking Sussock’s hand. “Please take a seat.”

Sussock sat. He thought Paxton was about as old as himself — sixty this year — but he looked to be fitter than Sussock — with his bad chest, a legacy of years of cigarette smoking — felt himself to be. But police work had helped Sussock to remain slim. Paxton was swelling noticeably about his middle and his face, though by his cheery manner it was clear that he wasn’t at all embarrassed by it. They had, Sussock thought, probably led a parallel existence in the city, though they were now meeting for the first time. How often in the last sixty years, he wondered, had they shared the same bus, passed each other in the town, shivered on the same cold days?

“What can I do for you, Mr. Sussock?” Paxton asked. “I gather you have called about the dreadful incident yesterday?”

“In respect to Mr. Skillicorn, sir? Yes, that’s why I’m here.”

“He’ll be a sad loss to the hospital. He was a good doctor, a good obstetrician.”

“He was a colleague of yours?”

“Well, he was a colleague of all of us. A hospital is like a ship — it doesn’t work unless we all play our part, from the captain on the bridge down to the chap who stokes the boiler. But I know what you mean. I daresay I worked more closely with him than anyone else.”

“He was murdered,” said Sussock. “His house wasn’t ransacked, there was no robbery, no forced entry. The murder took place when Mrs. Skillicorn was out of the house, which indicates that the murderer may have been watching the house, waiting for the moment to strike.”

“That’s chilling,” Paxton murmured. He sat back in his chair and slipped his spectacles off and laid them on the desk. “We knew he had been murdered, but I confess we know no details.”

“He seems to have been murdered for a personal reason.”

“Well, I can assure you he had no enemies in the hospital.”

“What about outside?”

“I know little of his personal affairs.”

“I see.” Sussock took out his pad and began to take notes. “What about his relationship with his patients?”

Paxton shuffled uncomfortably. “Well—” he put on his spectacles “—he was recently subject to a complaint.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. Not what I would call serious in nature. It was a question of alleged misconduct rather than negligence. He put up a defense and the British Medical Authority upheld his defense. In a nutshell, he terminated a pregnancy. The woman in question was psychiatrically ill. She suffered bouts of depression — not by any means acute enough to warrant her admission to hospital, but it was a significant illness. She asked her G.P. for a termination and the G.P. considered her to be sound enough of mind to know what she was asking. Hugo also spoke to her, and on the strength of the G.P.’s view and on his own discussion with her agreed to perform the termination. Weeks later, the husband — she was a married woman — the husband came storming in here, rowed with Hugo, and stormed out again. Then he made the complaint and, as I said, the B.M.A. upheld Hugo’s defense. That was the last we heard of it.”

“So the husband didn’t know anything of his wife’s termination before the fact?”

“No.” Paxton took off his spectacles again. Sussock had the impression Paxton wore his glasses when he felt under threat and took them off when he felt on firmer footing. “It isn’t a requirement in law nor is it a requirement in the National Health Service guidelines which we follow. We pursue a policy of the woman’s right to choose. I daresay it’s not wholly ethical to keep the husband in the dark, but it’s a dilemma that crops up in other areas of medicine. When should a doctor violate the confidentiality of the relationship with a patient? What does the family doctor do when the fifteen-year-old daughter of a patient asks for help with birth control? Does he give advice, in which case he is colluding with underage sex, or does he notify the girl’s parents, in which case he has violated the relationship with his patient, which ought to be as confidential as a confessional?”

“It’s not easy, is it?”

“It isn’t — and often as not, a termination is requested in order to save a marriage.”

“To save it?”

“Yes. If, for example, the father of the unwanted child is not the woman’s husband and for a variety of reasons the husband knows the child could not be his, that is something we would rather not be involved in. We believe that if the husband or father of the child should be informed, it is the responsibility of the woman to inform him. She has the right to choose termination, and she also has the right to decide whether the father of the child is to be notified. You may think sterilization is the male equivalent, but because it is virtually irreversible, we require the full consent of a wife before sterilizing a husband.”

“But abortion—”

“I don’t like that word.”

“I’m sorry — termination, then. That is entirely the woman’s decision?”

“Yes. It’s an emotive subject. We won’t terminate beyond the thirteenth week, when we deem the fetus to be alive, unless the mother’s health is in danger, and we won’t terminate if the woman is not of sound mind when she asks for the termination.”

“Which in this case she was — I mean of sound mind.”

Paxton’s eyeglasses were on again. “We were aware of her depressive episodes, but Hugo and the G.P. believed she still was able to retain a grasp of the issues. It may even be that Hugo and the G.P. felt that the danger of postnatal depression, on top of an already present depressive illness, would have been fatal for both mother and child, and as the woman in question was still well within her childbearing years a good argument could be made for allowing her time to recover from her illness before continuing to have her family.”

“Continuing?”

“She had two children already. Two kids, a difficult husband apparently, depression — not to be dismissed as an illness — an unwanted pregnancy for whatever reason. Yes, I can see why the G.P. and Hugo felt that termination was a reasonable request to accede to.”

“You certainly make a good case, Dr. Paxton, even to a layman.”

“Well, I think it was the illness that clinched it. Even otherwise-healthy mothers have been known to throw their babies out of the window when suffering postnatal depression. In some cases they follow the child down, so that it becomes a double tragedy. In this case, it seemed reasonable to agree to the termination.”

“Can I have the lady’s name, please?”

Paxton leaned toward his desk, shuffled some files, and selecting one. “Muirhead, Jean,” he said. “Aged twenty-five, address in Castlemilk.”

Donoghue phoned the Press Office and requested a press release: The Maxwell Park murder, Sunday between 1500 and 1700 hours, the murderer probably heavily stained with blood, did you see anybody, did anybody come home to your house or your neighbor’s house like that?

“That sort of thing,” said Donoghue. “I’ll leave the exact wording up to you, but will you clear the final copy with me before you release it? Thank you.”

From the Victoria Infirmary, Sussock drove the short distance to a house in Langside. He climbed the stairs and stopped when he came to a door marked WILLEMS. He tapped on the door. When she opened it, she had changed out of her uniform and her blonde hair was down about her shoulders. She was dressed in a short brown mini-robe that revealed her long slender legs. Behind her, in a recess just off the kitchen, steam was pouring from the shower cubicle.

“You’ll lose your hot water,” Sussock told her.

She smiled and went to the shower and wound the silver knob into the wall. “You’ve been known to call at more convenient times,” she said.

“I’ll leave if you like.” Sussock stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

“No, you won’t.” She slipped his jacket off his shoulders and pecked his cheek. “Now you’re here, you’ll stay.”

He held her about the hips. “I can’t stay that long. I’m at work. I’m just observing the old Glasgow tradition of dropping in on folk.”

“Well, just drop into the chair in the living room, old Sussock, and I’ll fix you a coffee.” She turned. Then she turned back. “Is that all I mean to you? Just someone to drop in on?”

He smiled. “I’ve come out of my way to see you. I should be rushing back to Donoghue with information, but I’m here.”

“I saw the paper,” said the sobbing woman. “I know he’s a violent man, I know he’s a bad swine when he’s got a drink in him, but I didn’t think he’d do anything like this.”

“Yes, madam.” Donoghue pinned the phone between his ear and shoulder while he struggled to free his ballpoint from the spine of his notepad. Then he asked, “Are you still there?”

Silence.

“Madam?”

“Yes—” She was fighting back emotion. “I’m still here.”

“You saw the paper — you mean the Evening Times?”

“Yes, the early edition — about the man who was stabbed to death.”

“Yes?” Donoghue coaxed. “Don’t hang up — in the name of heaven, don’t hang up—”

“My husband. It — was my husband.”

“Can I have your name, madam?”

“Mrs. Muirhead. Bogbain Road, Castlemilk. My husband is at home at the moment. He’s a violent man.”

“You’re not in your home at the moment?”

“No, I’m phoning from a neighbor’s.”

“We’ll be coming to arrest your husband on suspicion. It’s up to you whether you want to be there or not.”

“I’d rather not. My kids are here with me. Just don’t tell him I shopped him.” She hung up.

As Donoghue put the phone down, Sussock tapped on the door and entered Donoghue’s office. “I have a name and address,” said Sussock triumphantly.

“Muirhead — Bogbain Road, Castlemilk,” said Donoghue.

“How did you know that?” Sussock asked. Then belatedly added, “Sir.”

Donoghue and Sussock drove to Bogbain Road in Castlemilk. A patrol car with two uniformed officers followed in close company. Castlemilk sprawled over the hillside, a postwar project of high-rises and low-rises, densely packed. It is in terms of its population the largest housing scheme in Europe. Donoghue drew his Rover to a halt outside the address in Bogbain Road. It was an appropriate name for the road, he thought, as he negotiated the dog excrement on the footpath beside the untended front garden. The Muirheads lived two up left on the urine-stenching, graffiti-covered stairs. Donoghue rapped on the door.

It was opened by a well built man in his thirties, dressed in Army fatigues.

“Police,” said Donoghue. He flashed his I.D.

“You didn’t waste any time,” said the man. He showed not the slightest hint of violence, and Donoghue knew instantly that there would be no resisting of arrest.

“So you know why we’re here?” Donoghue asked.

The man said nothing, just turned and walked back inside the dimly lit flat. Donoghue, Sussock, and the two uniformed constables followed.

The living room of the flat was more in keeping with an Army barracks than a family home. There was little evidence of a wife and children living there, but plenty of evidence of a soldier — camouflage jackets, books, bayonets, knives, maps, compasses, everything short of a firearm.

Muirhead stood facing the policemen, deferential to authority, but the sort of man who would, thought Donoghue, lay down the law to his wife and children. “I’m in the Territorial Army,” he explained. “More or less full-time since I lost my job.”

“So which knife did you kill him with?” said Donoghue.

“That one,” said Muirhead, with a sudden frankness that disarmed the four men.

“We’ll have to take you in,” said Donoghue.

Sussock picked up the commando knife to which Muirhead had pointed. “Why did you kill him?”

“He killed my child.”

“There may have been a good reason for that.”

“Look, my wife is sick, I can see that. She sees our doctor for depression. She’s not in a fit state to decide whether she wants a child or not. He should have seen that. He had no right to pull my life out of her and throw it in an incinerator. That was my child — it wasn’t his life inside her, it was mine. He had no right to keep me in the dark.”

“You complained. That should have been enough.”

“It did no good. The medical people, they just cover up for each other.”

“So you killed him.”

“Aye. Wouldn’t you?”

“No.”

“I found out where he lived and I waited in the shrubs. I waited a long time. I’ve been trained in certain things. I went there late Saturday and waited. I didn’t get a chance to move until yesterday afternoon. Lying still for nearly twenty-four hours was tough, but I’m a warrior — I do what I need to do. When it was clear he was alone I went up to the door, rang the bell, pushed my way in when he answered it, and stuck him like a pig. He ran to the dining room, bleeding. I followed and made sure he knew who I was and why I was going to kill him. A life for a life, I said. Then I started to puncture him, around the heart. I’m a killing machine when I want to be. I’ve been trained like that.”

Later, Donoghue bought Sussock a beer in a bar.

“It’s never really cut-and-dried, is it, Ray?” he said, handing the older man his drink. “If he pleads guilty due to diminished responsibility, he’ll be out in three years. Good health.”