Fatal Last Words

Fifty-seven

‘I have to say this, sir, this is impressive,’ Michael Giarratano drawled. ‘After my boss spoke to Scotland, I was expecting a phone call from somebody in Edinburgh. Three hours later, you’re here. Did you beam down here, Scotty?’

As the massive detective chief superintendent stared down at him, the Australian realised that he was several chuckles short of being amused. ‘Let me explain something to you, Inspector,’ Mario McGuire said, in a voice that made the winter night seem even colder. ‘Just because you and I happen to make up one complete Italian name between us, that doesn’t imply any kinship, and it sure as hell doesn’t entitle you to patronise me like some hick from the bloody outback. I’ll tell you how I got down here. I was on effing holiday in Sydney when I had a call from my oppo back home, telling me about this situation. I left my partner back there, and caught an effing plane at about an hour’s notice, with one minute to spare. Now I’m standing here, at going on eleven at night, in an effing crime tent with an effing comedian, freezing my effing nuts off, and there’s no effing body. So why the fuck,’ he barked, ‘did your people bring me here?’

Giarratano straightened as if he had come to attention. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he replied formally, ‘I was ordered to offer full cooperation, and my assumption was that you’d want to visit the crime scene.’

McGuire shivered. ‘Inspector, it’s dark, any potential witnesses are long gone and I’m looking at a chalk outline on the ground. I’ve seen chalk outlines before, although mostly in dodgy movies. I’d like to make the acquaintance of the late Mr Mount, preferably before your pathologists start carving him into sections. Can we do that?’

‘Yessir. I’m sorry.’

The Scot relented. ‘Ah, me too. I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I’m a lousy traveller at the best of times, and I had to pass up the Proclaimers live at the Sydney Opera House to come down here. Where have you taken him?’

‘The deceased has been taken to the city mortuary.’ There was still a certain stiffness about Giarratano’s tone as they stepped out of the tent that covered the spot where Henry Mount had fallen. ‘It’s not far away, just across the Yarra River, down in Southbank.’

‘And where’s the Yarra River?’

‘Federation Square, where we are now, backs on to it.’ He pointed to a large, baroque building on the other side of the street. ‘And that over there, that’s Flinders Street station. It looks pretty good in the daylight.’

‘I’ll check it out, if I’m still here when the sun rises.’

The Australian led the way across the square, to a waiting police vehicle. ‘They’re not doing the post-mortem till tomorrow morning,’ he told McGuire as it moved off. ‘Our pathologist takes the view that they won’t be any less dead after a few hours, or any more.’

‘I’m not so sure about the “any more” part,’ the DCS grunted. ‘Check him out after a couple of weeks and see how bloody dead he’ll look then.’

As the inspector had promised, the mortuary was no more than a couple of minutes away. Their driver used the ambulance entrance and parked in a yard. Giarratano was familiar with the layout; he went straight to an unmarked door and rapped on it, then spoke briefly to the attendant who opened it. He looked over his shoulder. ‘OK, sir,’ he called. ‘Come this way and they’ll bring him out of the fridge for us.’

Just as well we know when he died, McGuire thought. Refrigeration wouldn’t help determine a time if they needed to.

The two men were shown into a room. If he had been blindfolded, the Scot would still have known that they were in the autopsy theatre, from the overpowering disinfectant odour. Behind them a double door crashed open, as Henry Mount’s body, on a trolley, was wheeled in.

The attendant pulled off the covering sheet and they could see that the corpse was still clothed, in jeans, a casual shirt emblazoned with a crest that McGuire recognised as that of Archerfield Golf Club, and a light jacket of smooth black leather. He frowned. ‘Wouldn’t he have been cold in that gear?’

‘He’d only just stepped outside,’ Giarratano told him. ‘But it was quite warm for August, this afternoon. He’d just done a panel discussion. The Festival director told me that once they’re finished on stage, the writers go outside to sign books. The desk was set up in the sun, so he’d have been OK.’

The big Scot leaned forward, examining the dead author’s big head, shaved close by clippers. Bereft of life, the skin of Mount’s face was like parchment, emphasising a faint stubble along the jawline, and it was unmarked, save for an old scar on the chin, a relic of a childhood fall, perhaps. ‘Where’s the wound?’ he asked.

Giarratano nodded to the attendant, who stepped forward and turned the body on to its side, so that McGuire could see the back of the head. At the base of the skull, the remaining hair had been darkest and there, just at the point where it met the spinal column, was a dark mass of blood, flecked with white chips of bone.

‘Indeed,’ he said.

‘Quite a shot,’ the Australian murmured, professionally dispassionate, as if he was admiring a display of sporting skill. ‘We don’t have a witness who saw it fired, or who saw the moment of impact, but we think we’ve worked out the spot from where the shot was fired. Our ballistics people reckon the victim must have been bending forward at the time. They reckon it’s a small-calibre bullet, maybe soft-nosed, since it’s still in there. A heavier calibre would have taken half his face off.’

‘I can’t fault that thinking,’ the DCS murmured. He raised Mount’s right hand, examined it, nodded, and laid it down again. ‘Tell me, what was he doing when he was killed?’

‘According to his publicist, and his Book Festival minder. . I didn’t get much sense out of either of them, they were both so shocked. . he’d just signed a book for the last lady in his queue.’

‘Yes, but what was he doing?’

‘His publicist. . she’s from Sydney. . had just handed him a bottle of beer, James Squire’s Pilsner. You should try it while you’re here; bloody good. And he was smoking a cigar.’

‘What happened immediately after he went down?’

‘The guy from the Book Festival leaned over him, and saw pretty quickly that there was plenty wrong. He ran off inside and found a doctor in no time at all. She felt for a pulse, didn’t find one and started to give him CPR. When she went to tilt his head back to try mouth-to-mouth, she felt the blood at the back, took a look and figured out that he hadn’t done that when he fell. She was pretty good; she took charge until we arrived, and had all the people moved back.’

‘There were people gathered around him after he went down?’

‘Yes, naturally.’

‘Sure, but after you arrived and your crime scene team, what happened?’

‘Standard procedures. We roped off the area, covered the body, took photographs from all angles, and began to interview witnesses.’

‘Did you do a ground search?’

‘Of course. We were looking for a shell casing, until the ballistics guys worked out that any casing must be on the roof of Flinders Street station. By that time it was too dark to search up there; we do that tomorrow morning, first light, before the commuters start to arrive.’

‘You’ll be wasting your time,’ McGuire told him. ‘You won’t find any shell casing up there.’

‘What makes you say that?’ asked Giarratano, clearly resenting the dismissal of his pet theory.

‘My partner, the lovely Paula. . she has an Italian name too, Viareggio. She’s my guiding light. Your people bagged up everything they found at the scene, yes?’

‘Sure they did, sir. It’s all gone to the lab.’

‘Do you remember if they found a cigar stub, the one that Mr Mount was smoking when he was shot?’

The inspector shook his head. ‘I remember that they didn’t. I asked them about it specifically. It must have been blown away by the wind, or carried off on some bystander’s shoe.’

‘Neither of those. It wasn’t there.’

‘Eh?’

McGuire sighed. ‘I’ll explain. . it’s Michael, isn’t it?’ The Australian nodded. ‘But first and foremost, Michael, I’m fucking starving, and if you’ve been working all night you must be too. I’ve got a room in the Grand Hyatt. Let’s go there to check me in, find a place to eat, and then I’ll tell you what happened to Henry Mount.’