Fatal Last Words

Twenty-one

‘Come in, Sergeant,’ said Carol Glover, ‘but forgive me for hoping this will be your last visit.’ She stepped aside to let Ray Wilding and DC Alice Cowan pass into the hall of her first-floor tenement flat. She had changed, from the T-shirt and jeans she had worn at their earlier meetings, into a black blouse and a dark grey skirt.

‘I quite understand that,’ the DS assured her. ‘I wish I could guarantee that it will, but in the new circumstances-’

‘New circumstances?’ she exclaimed.

‘You haven’t been listening to the radio or had any calls from the media?’

‘No, I haven’t, and my number’s ex-directory, so it’ll take them a while to trace me. Are you telling me that my father’s death wasn’t caused by a heart attack? Did he overdose on insulin? Is that why you wanted those ampoules earlier?’

‘Can we sit down and talk about this?’

‘Of course, sorry; go on through into the living room.’

They preceded her, and as they entered they saw two young men standing in front of the hearth. One was short, dark and chubby, the other taller, slim, square-shouldered and fair-haired. Their only common feature was a day-old stubble. The smaller of the two was red-eyed; his companion was pale, and frowned as he approached the detectives.

‘I’m Ed Collins,’ he told them, ‘Carol’s fiancé. This is her brother, Wilkie.’

Wilding introduced himself, and Cowan. ‘I’m sorry about your loss,’ he said awkwardly. He had never been confident when dealing with the bereaved, always afraid to go beyond the most basic courtesies.

‘It’s unreal,’ Wilkie Glover muttered, looking at Cowan, younger, closer to him in age, rather than the sergeant, as if he hoped to find more comfort in her. ‘I saw my dad yesterday morning, and he was fine. Some bloody doctor I’m going to make if I couldn’t see the signs.’

‘Don’t be hard on yourself,’ the DC told him. ‘There was nothing you could have noticed.’

‘Things seem to have moved on,’ his sister explained as she offered the visitors places on a low white sofa, then moved beside her brother to face them, both still standing.

‘Listen,’ Collins volunteered, ‘I’ll leave you to it. I’ll go and get us a takeaway for lunch. A couple of pizzas maybe. What do you fancy?’

‘No,’ Carol insisted. ‘I want you here.’ He shrugged, and took a seat at a table by the window. She looked down at Wilding. ‘So tell us. What happened to my dad?’

‘When I came to collect your father’s insulin supplies,’ he began, ‘I told you that there were some more tests we needed to run. They’re now more or less complete. A short time ago we announced that his death is now the subject of a full-scale investigation. Mr Glover was killed by fatally high levels of glucose in his bloodstream-’

‘Hold on,’ Wilkie interrupted. ‘I’ve just been studying that area. Like I said, I saw him yesterday and he was showing no signs of hyperglycaemia.’

‘He wouldn’t have been,’ Wilding replied quietly. ‘He was drugged, immobilised and then injected with massive quantities of the stuff.’

As both siblings stared down at him, he saw their faces go from pale to chalk-white. He rose from the couch. ‘I think it’s you two who need the seat,’ he said.

Carol looked towards her fiancé. ‘Ed,’ she gasped, ‘did you hear that?’

‘I sure did.’ He moved towards her, and put his arms around her, then eased her on to the space that the DS had vacated.

‘We came to take a statement from you, Miss Glover, and we’ll need one from your brother since he’s here. They’re not formal, but even so, the book says they should be done separately, I’m afraid. Do you have another room where we could interview you?’

‘There’s the kitchen.’

‘You don’t need to do that,’ Collins declared, looking at the officers. ‘Wilkie and I will go and get those pizzas, OK?’

‘Fair enough,’ the sergeant agreed.

‘How long should we be gone?’

‘Fifteen minutes will do fine.’

‘It’ll take us that long anyway.’ He nodded to Wilkie and headed for the door.

‘What do you want to ask me?’ said Carol as it closed. ‘I can’t think of anything that I can tell you that would help.’

‘Let’s take it in stages,’ Alice Cowan murmured. ‘Let’s begin with the last time you saw your dad.’

‘Yesterday morning, like my brother; we were all here. The flat Wilkie’s in just now is pretty crappy, so he’s here quite a lot. I’ve told him he can have my spare room, but he says it would cramp my style. . although I think he really means Ed’s.’

‘You’re a close family, would you say?’

‘Very. We always have been. Wilkie and I were both still at primary school when our mum died, but our father. . he filled both roles, I suppose.’

‘Did he have anyone else in his life?’

‘You mean women? He had lady friends, but he didn’t have a partner, if that’s what you mean. There was Sandy Rankin, the Herald writer; they had dinner from time to time, but she couldn’t be seen chumming him to book things because she’s a reviewer and didn’t want to be accused of bias. There was Karla Hiaasen, from the university; they were friendly. And of course there was June.’

‘From the university?’ the sergeant noted. ‘Wasn’t your father a full-time writer?’

‘More or less, but he still lectured on some of the postgraduate courses in the accountancy school. . so he could keep calling himself “Professor” mainly.’ She smiled, faintly. ‘He was very proud of that title, because my grandfather was one too. . plus I reckon he was a bit of a closet academic snob. But back to the ladies; yes, he was closest to June Connelly, his agent. He used to stay with her when he went down to London, and she stayed at his place when she came up here. You don’t ask your dad about his sleeping arrangements, but I suppose. .’ Her hand went to her mouth. ‘Oh God, she’s due here today. She’ll be on the train. Dad said he was meeting her at Waverley at two thirty; she travels by train because she can work better on it than on aircraft,’ she explained. ‘She won’t know about this.’

‘Maybe Mr Collins could meet her.’

‘He doesn’t know June. Besides, he has to go to Tynecastle. No, it’ll have to be me.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Wilding assured her, ‘we’ll attend to that. But let’s get through this first. How has your father’s demeanour been recently?’

‘He’s been fine.’

‘Has he mentioned any disagreements with anyone? Rows with his publisher, for example?’

‘No, they love him; they make lots of money out of him, and he’s happy with them.’

‘How about the university? Any problems there?’

‘No, he’s a fixture there. He hasn’t been Head of School for a few years, so he hasn’t had any management role. There’s been nothing to cause him problems.’

‘Dissatisfied students?’

‘No. I told you, his people were all postgrads. They finish the course, they get their Masters; that’s it.’

‘So there was nothing troubling him, and he had no enemies that you knew of?’

‘No.’›

‘Did he ever mention Dr Bruce Anderson?’ Wilding asked.

Carol Glover nodded. ‘That he did. I know that Anderson didn’t like him, and I know why, but Dad didn’t take him seriously. He called him a shallow bully of a man. He didn’t regard him as an enemy, though; he didn’t regard him as anything, really. For fun, I asked him if he’d get me tickets for his event at the Book Festival so I could go along and heckle, but he took me seriously, and said he wouldn’t do it. But why do you ask about Anderson? Is he a suspect?’

‘He and your father had an. . encounter. . last night. But it was in a room full of people.’

‘That doesn’t answer my question.’

The sergeant met her gaze. ‘It’s as much of an answer as you’re going to get, at this stage of the investigation at any rate. Let’s change tack. Do you know who’ll benefit from your father’s estate?’

‘We will. Wilkie and me. Dad told us about his will. He said there’s money in trust for us already, there’s a private pension fund that comes to us in the event of his death before its maturity, and then there’s the house and everything else. It’s split down the middle.’ She paused, her hands trembling in her lap. ‘Does that make us prime suspects?’ she asked.

‘Not unless you were hanging about the Book Festival at midnight last night.’

‘We were hanging across the bar in Deacon Brodie’s at midnight,’ she retorted ‘Wilkie, me, and a few hundred others, to judge from the noise in the place.’

‘What about Mr Collins?’

‘He was at a late-night Festival show, just along the road in the Bedlam Theatre; he joined us about quarter past.’

‘Then you’re all in the clear, no worries. So, to sum up, your father’s been acting perfectly normally of late, and unconcerned about anything.’

Her brow creased. ‘Not quite normally.’

‘So what’s been unusual about him?’

‘He’s been using my email, and using this place as a correspondence address.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Cowan.

‘What I’ve just said. For the last few months, mail’s been arriving here for him, marked care of me.’

‘Why?’

‘It was to do with his website, he said. He gets. . got. . feedback from readers and sometimes they want to send him things. He didn’t want them to have his own address, so he asked if once or twice he could use mine.’

‘So instead they know where you live, and if he gets an obsessive. .’ the DC began, frowning.

‘I’ll be moving out of here in a few months, when Ed and I get married. We’re buying a waterside flat in Leith.’

‘Was there much of this mail?’

‘Some, but not loads. A lot of it had foreign stamps.’

‘What about the email?’

‘He set up his own screen name on my AOL subscription, for the same reason. . “Annie Wilkes watch” he called it. That’s the name of the nutter in that Stephen King novel. He called himself fatallyg, as in Fat Ally G. Get it?’ Cowan nodded. ‘Ally was his nickname,’ Carol went on, ‘not generally used, though, only by his real friends, people like June, Fred Mount and Henry Noble, his author chums, and maybe Denzel Chandler. . his partner’s the new Book Festival director.’

‘We know,’ Wilding told her. ‘She found your father’s body.’

‘Poor soul.’ She looked up at him. ‘Sergeant, you said earlier that Dad was found when they unlocked the author tent. If he had been found earlier. .’

‘Would he have survived? From what Professor Hutchinson, the pathologist, told us, he’d have been affected very quickly, beyond recovery.’

‘Didn’t he have that palm pilot thing of his? Wouldn’t he have been able to phone?’

‘He did use it. He sent Dr Mosley an email, but she didn’t get it until this morning. That’s what made her go to the yurt. I know,’ the DS said, ‘you’re asking yourself, “Why didn’t he phone her? Why email?” We’re advised that he’d have been in a very confused state, not thinking normally. Plus there would have been a very small window before he lost consciousness.’

‘I see.’ Her eyes moistened. ‘Poor old Dad,’ she whispered. ‘It’s just horrible; I’ve got an image in my head that I don’t think I’ll ever lose.’

As she spoke they heard the front door open, and muffled male voices.

‘Thanks,’ said Alice Cowan softly. ‘Unless there’s anything else you can think of that might help, that’ll do for now.’ The dead man’s daughter shook her head. ‘In that case, maybe you could help Mr Collins cut up the pizzas, and ask your brother to join us for a couple of minutes.’