Game Over

Seventeen

No Tern Unstoned

The landlord of the Sally identified Thomas Mark from his photograph a little doubtfully, but one of his bar staff said much more definitely that she had served him. She had noticed him because he was talking to Dave Borthwick, who was a regular, and he looked so far out of old Dave’s class that the anomaly had amused her. Not that she said anomaly, of course. She asked Jerry Fathom, who had been doing the asking, what was happening with old Dave.

‘I never would have thought he had the balls to do something like that. He just used to come in here and sit with his couple of pints. He seemed like an ordinary bloke.’ She gave herself a pleasurable shiver. ‘To think all the time I was serving a murderer! Anyway, what’s this bloke got to do with it?’

‘Well, I can’t tell you anything at the moment,’ Fathom said, ‘but when the case is all over, I could tell you all the details, if you’d like to come out with me one night.’

For a moment the thought of being in the know flickered greedily through her eyes, and then she looked properly at Fathom and said scornfully, ‘Get bent!’

The forensic sweep of the black Focus had revealed a number of fingermarks, though none of them belonged to Bates.

‘But they might well belong to Thomas Mark,’ Slider said, when he was back in circulation in the afternoon. ‘We haven’t got his on record to compare them with, but when we find him, it’ll be another nail in his coffin.’

There was also a lot of mud under the wheel arch and a sample was being analysed to see if it matched the mud in the lane where Masseter was killed.

‘But I think we can assume, for working purposes, that it was him who killed Masseter, because otherwise what was he doing up there and why did he take away the papers and computer?’

‘Why did he do that anyway?’ Hart said.

‘Well, let’s come back to Masseter later,’ Slider said, unwittingly driving a thorn in her heart. ‘Let’s look first at what we’ve got linking Bates to the Stonax murder.’ He could call it that with impunity as Emily was out of the room, still beavering away on the computer, with Atherton’s assistance.

‘At about the same time Ed Stonax was killed, the next-door neighbour Mrs Koontz sees a motorbike courier come out of the building with a large Jiffy envelope in his hand. The bike had a white box on the back with a circular logo on it, with, she says, a “little telephone” in it, which is the logo of Ring 4. Also a file was missing from Ed Stonax’s filing system. So it’s a promising inference that the courier was the murderer and that he took away the file.’

‘After smearing oil on the victim’s pockets and cuffs, which he got from Dave Borthwick’s bike, to make it look as if Borthwick did the job,’ Hollis added.

‘And leaving some faint oily smears on the filing cabinet,’ Swilley said.

‘I suspect those weren’t intentional,’ Slider said. ‘The residue left after sullying Stonax. But he won’t have cared much. If the file was that important, presumably he will have thought getting hold of it made him invulnerable. And anyway, it was Dave’s bike’s oil, so if found he knows it goes to Dave’s account.’

‘Yes, but who is “he”, boss?’ Swilley asked. ‘We know Thomas Mark set up the lock disabling, but was he the one that did the murder?’

‘I think the one thing we can be sure of is that he didn’t do the actual killing,’ said Slider. ‘Remember we had the footmark by the filing cabinet, and it was too small to be either Borthwick’s or the victim’s. Now I don’t know Thomas Mark’s shoe size, but he’s a big man and I think we can take it as read that his feet will match the rest of him.’

‘Which leaves – Bates,’ said Swilley.

Slider nodded. He had been coming to this conclusion ever since his talk with Solder Jack, who had reminisced that Bates was a ‘little runt of a man’ with ‘little fingers twinkling away’.

‘Bates is not a tall man,’ he said. ‘He’s quite slight in build, too, though he keeps – or used to keep – himself very fit. And he has small hands – very useful for fiddling about with miniature circuitry – so he probably has small feet as well.’

‘But could a small man have coshed a tall man that easily?’ Fathom asked.

‘I’ve got a picture in my head. Let me run it by you,’ Slider said. ‘The courier lets himself in by the disabled front door, pops down and gets some oil on one of the gloves from Dave’s bike, and goes up to the flat with a large envelope and a clipboard. He rings the doorbell. Stonax answers it. “Could you sign for this please?” says the courier. He hands over the clipboard, and then says, “Oh, I’m sorry, I seem to have mislaid my pen. Have you got one?” Stonax turns back into the flat to get one. As soon as he’s taken a step away from the door, courier says, “Oh, it’s OK, here it is,” and takes a step forward himself to hand it to Stonax. Stonax bends his head over the clipboard—’

‘Right!’ said Swilley. ‘That’s how you get him to put his head within reach! And when the courier whacks him he drops the pen and then falls on top of it.’

‘But why all the pen malarkey anyway?’ Hart said.

‘The courier needs to get him to step away from the door. If he fells him actually in the doorway, he won’t be able to get the door closed without moving him, and that will take time and make noise. The courier’s purpose is to get in and out as fast as possible without alerting anyone. It takes just seconds to empty his pockets and take the watch, and a few seconds more to find the right file. He stood still by the filing cabinet just long enough to leave his impression in the thick-pile carpet. The hall carpet outside the front door was far too thin and old, and the vestibule has a tiled floor, and he didn’t stand still anywhere else.’

‘Then he pops Stonax’s watch in an envelope and puts it under Borthwick’s door, shoves everything else in the Jiffy bag, and walks calmly out to his bike,’ said Hart.

‘To be seen by Mrs Koontz,’ said Mackay, ‘which is no bad thing, really, because Borthwick has leathers and a helmet with a dark visor, so it helps shove it on him.’

‘So you think the courier was Bates, then, boss?’ Swilley said.

‘There’s been a car and a motorbike all the way through,’ Slider said, ‘and it seems logical that if Thomas Mark was driving the car, Bates must have been on the bike. He was careful not to be seen by Borthwick, or to leave any fingerprints, because he’s on our files and Mark isn’t. But Jack Bushman instantly thought of Bates as being the likely manufacturer of the device that disabled the Valancy House door.’

‘Likely manufacturer,’ Hollis said. ‘It seems to me that while we’ve got a lot of supposition that fits the facts, and we’ve got Mark definitely implicated, we can’t actually prove Bates was there at all. He’s worked it out right well.’

‘I know,’ said Slider. ‘That’s the problem. We need to know what was in that file. That’s probably where all our evidence is. If we knew why Stonax died, we might be able to prove who did it. Because at the moment we can’t connect Bates with Stonax at all.’

‘Unless we can get Mark to roll over,’ Hollis said. ‘And given that Bates has put him in the shite up to his oxters, he might well do that.’

‘But we’ve got to find him first,’ said Hart.

There was a gloomy moment of silence.

‘What about Bates’s escape?’ Mackay said.

‘What about it?’ Slider said.

‘Well, he had to have had someone on the inside. What if that someone was Tyler, and offing Stonax was the quid pro quo?’

‘You’re saying he got Bates out of jail to do it?’ said Hollis. ‘It’s an idea.’

‘Why wouldn’t Tyler do it himself?’ Swilley said. ‘We know he’s willing to kill, and to do it with his own hands.’

‘But he wouldn’t do Stonax himself,’ Mackay said. ‘Too risky. He’s got too much to lose now, and he can’t hope to be let get away with it again.’

‘And he’s out of the country,’ Hart added.

‘No, he isn’t,’ Swilley said. ‘I came across it on a website when I was checking Bates’s contacts. He doesn’t take up his new appointment until October, but he came back in July. There was a photograph of him attending a performance at the Royal Opera House.’

‘He could have been just visiting,’ Hart said.

‘But his term in Brussels ended in July, and he’d want to get himself set up, find somewhere to live and everything,’ Norma said.

‘Find out,’ Slider said. ‘Find out if he’s here, when he came, and where he’s living. If he did come back in July, it makes a lot more sense.’

Atherton had gone through page after page of Waverley B references without gaining any insights, except that it confirmed what Sid Andrew had said, that it was an unlucky site. Industrial relations seemed to have been particularly bad, and there were stoppages and strikes as well as an unusually high absentee rate. He was staring at the screen in frustration when all the hairs stood up on the back of his neck and his nostrils twitched as he caught Emily’s scent. She had come up behind him, and now leaned lightly on his shoulder to look at the notes he had made, which were lying on the desk beside him.

‘Are you working back chronologically?’ she asked.

‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘Just going through references as I find them. Why?’

‘Nothing here dates from before the fifties. But all these old shipyards on the Clyde go back to the nineteenth century at least. They were all terribly proud of their history.’

‘True. Well, there must be stuff. I just haven’t come across it yet.’

‘Or maybe it changed its name,’ she said, ‘and the history is under the old name.’

He made that an excuse to look at her. ‘Come to think of it, “Waverley” is a bit of an Edinburgh name for a shipyard on the Glasgow side.’

‘Yes, it does seem rather tactless. They should have called it St Enoch at least.’ She looked down his notes again. ‘I wonder if they’re calling the new leisure centre by the old name? That would be a smart move if you wanted to endear it to Glaswegians.’

‘Clydeview? But it’s a bit of a girl’s blouse of a name for a horny-palmed shipyard.’

‘Yes, it sounds more like a suburban bungalow.’

‘Wait a minute, though,’ Atherton said, sitting up straight so suddenly he almost knocked her out. ‘What about Clydebrae? The first word on Danny Masseter’s list.’

‘It was underlined,’ she said, ‘as though it was a heading.’

‘Wait here,’ he said, and dashed off to get it. When he got back Emily was sitting in his place at the keyboard, so he dragged up another chair, more than happy to work with her.

She had already put in ‘Clydebrae’ and had got a number of references to Clydebrae Street, Govan. There was a map, showing a road that ran up to a small promontory on the Clyde and stopped there. There seemed to be nothing on it, but it was named in very small letters, Clydebrae. Emily’s fingers flew, found a better map, scrolled across and found the Waverley B shipyard next door to the promontory, sticking out much further into the water.

‘Why would they build a road to nowhere?’ she said.

‘An estuary is like the seaside,’ Atherton said. ‘The water is an object in itself. It’s never nowhere.’

She was looking at the other Clydebrae Street references. There were photographs on one. ‘It’s terribly derelict. Looks as if it hasn’t been lived in for years. Derelict tenement blocks, a few breeze-blocked houses, and you can see there must have been houses here, where it’s all flat. They’ve been knocked down. I wonder when?’

‘There were big slum clearance projects in Glasgow in the fifties and sixties. People moved out to new estates.’

‘Or maybe it’s part of the leisure centre development? But now, look here.’ She had gone in to another reference. ‘You’re right. They wanted to redevelop it in 1962. Here’s a plan of a new council estate. I wonder why it never came off?’ She scrolled on. ‘The Scottish Ornithological Union notes that there are now no more red-throated divers or Forster’s terns at Clydebrae. I’m devastated. The Clydebrae ferry closed in 1959. It used to carry people across to Partick, where the thistles come from.’

Atherton looked up. ‘It doesn’t say that?’

‘Of course it doesn’t.’

He looked down again at the list. ‘It looks as if he was interested in history, anyway. Scottish War Museum. Clyde Maritime and Shipping Museum. Public records.’

‘Maybe he’d found what you’ve found – that he couldn’t get further back than the fifties.’

‘What’s this Meekie book?’

‘If he was going to look for it at the university, it must be something rare.’ She put in ‘Meekie’ and started working through the results, which were startlingly unhelpful and nothing to do with shipping. ‘Did you know that a meekie is a person with an abnormally large head?’ she said. Patiently she scrolled on.

‘Hager Loch,’ Atherton said, looking at the next heading. ‘I never heard of a Hager Loch. You carry on – I’m going to get the atlas.’ He brought it back with him to be companionable, and there was silence, except for her clicking. ‘There is no loch called Hager. I thought not.’

‘Maybe it’s not in Scotland. Do they call lakes “loch” anywhere else? What about Canada? That’s very Scottish in places, isn’t it?’

‘But what could be the connection with Canada? I can’t believe his mother wouldn’t have noticed if he’d gone there.’

‘Maybe it’s a misspelling. He couldn’t spell “university” or “museum”.’

‘But a misspelling of what? I can’t find anything even remotely resembling Hager.’

‘I’m getting bored with Meekie. What’s the next thing?’

‘This bit of scrawl. Hart thought it was Newark, but if we can’t allow him to have gone to Canada, he can’t have gone to New York either.’

‘Let me see. I’m good at bad handwriting. Dad’s was pretty terrible.’ She studied the word and said almost at once, ‘That’s not an “n” at the beginning, it’s a “v”. That bit is the upstroke, see?’

‘Vewark?’

‘I don’t think that’s a “w” either. Look at his “m” in “Museum” – the small one. Doesn’t it look the same to you? And here, and here.’

‘You’re right. It is an “m”.’

‘So that makes it Vemark – which is pronounceable, at least,’ Emily said. ‘I suppose we ought to be thankful for small mercies.’

‘And for big ones,’ Atherton said, and the tone of his voice made her look up at him. ‘Not Vemark but Vemork. Put it in. Vemork, 1942.’

‘You know something?’ she asked, tapping.

‘There’s no end to the wonder of what I know,’ he said. ‘It comes of having an interest in history.’

‘And a brain the size of a planet?’ she said. She had been around the station long enough to have heard that friendly jibe. ‘Here it is. Vemork 1942. But it’s in Norway, not Scotland. Geographically not unrelated, I admit, but if he didn’t go to Canada or the States . . .’

‘Well, he didn’t have to go there, did he?’ Atherton said. ‘Only tippy-tap away on his rinky-dinky little computer. Vemork was the subject of a daring bombing raid during the war, because the Germans had taken it over. It was a source, they discovered, of heavy water.’

‘Heavy water? I’ve heard of it, of course, but I don’t really know what it is.’

‘It’s water enriched with an extra atom of deuterium. I don’t know all the science, but I do know it’s used in nuclear fission.’

‘And even I know the Germans were experimenting with nuclear fission towards the end of the war. Don’t they say they were on the brink of making a nuclear bomb?’

‘They do,’ Atherton said, though his voice was far away now as his brain processed. ‘But what’s Vemork and heavy water got to do with—?’

‘What?’

‘Hager Loch. It’s just ringing bells like anything, but it’s not in Scotland, it’s in Germany. You asked if they called them lochs anywhere else. Try Hagerloch, all one word, in Google.’

She tapped, and read out the prompt that came up, ‘Did you mean Haigerloch?’

‘I think we did, Danny old bean. Spelling really wasn’t your strong suit, was it – even when you were copying things down?’

‘Haigerloch, now a museum,’ she read. ‘A heavy-water test reactor. The Germans conducted experiments in nuclear fission in a cave under the Schloβkirche in a small town in Germany. The Atomkeller – cute name!’

‘It’s a cute place.’

‘The Atomkeller is now a museum. For opening times click here.’

‘That’s where the heavy water from Vemork ended up, and why the RAF had to conduct its daring bombing raid. I remember doing it at school. World War Two was just becoming compulsory, but my history teacher was a real buff, and liked to go into a lot more detail than was strictly necessary.’

‘But what’s all this got to do with Dad and Clydebrae and all the rest of it?’ Her eyes widened. ‘You don’t think—?’

His eyebrows went up. ‘That the reason we haven’t got anything on Waverley B before the Fifties is that they changed the name, and the reason they changed the name was that they were doing the same sort of experiments there during the war?’

‘Well, if they knew about Haigerloch, they’d obviously want to try to catch up,’ Emily said logically. ‘And they’d obviously have to keep it secret.’

‘Thinking’s all very well, but we need some evidence. I wonder if it’s all in this Meekie book, whatever that may be. Maybe you gave up on Meekie too soon.’

‘Spelling!’ Emily exclaimed. ‘He’s a bit of a phonetic speller, isn’t he? And suppose he’d only heard the word, never seen it written down?’

‘M-e-a-c-h-i-e. The good old Scottish name of Meachie, sept of the Mcdonalds if my memory serves me right.’

‘How can you possibly know that?’

‘I don’t, I’m just making it up,’ he grinned. ‘How do you think I got my reputation for omniscience? People hardly ever check up on you.’

‘You charlatan!’ She put Meachie into Google and hesitated. ‘There’ll be five million entries.’

‘Try Meachie and Clydebrae,’ Atherton suggested.

She added the word and hit enter. ‘Bingo,’ she said softly. ‘Angus Meachie: The Clydebrae Glory. The Scottish maritime historian and archivist tells the story of the Clydebrae shipyard from 1869 until its takeover in 1943 by the Ministry of Defence.’

‘We’ll have to get hold of that book. And I wonder what else he found out at the Scottish War Museum – the clue is in the title, folks – and the other places. If it was secret, there won’t have been much in the public record office, you can bet.’

‘Whatever he did find out,’ Emily said, ‘he will have passed on to Dad. And that’s probably what was in the file they took away.’

‘But your father wouldn’t have had only one copy, would he?’

‘Not if it was important.’

‘He didn’t have a safe, or a safe-deposit box or anything?’

‘Not that I know of. But I still don’t understand what this has to do with Richard Tyler and Anderson-Millar and all the rest of it, and why it was important enough to want to . . . to kill Dad for.’

Atherton laid his finger beside the last line of Danny’s list. ‘Cad and Ber. There’s a full stop after each word. They’re abbreviations. Dopey old Mrs Masseter said he talked about Cadbury’s and someone called Beryl. If she remembered those words, he must have repeated them a lot.’

‘I’m not there yet,’ Emily confessed.

‘Cadmium is used as a barrier to control nuclear fission. And beryllium is an isotope moderator.’

‘How do you know these things?’

‘I read a lot. But the thing you need to know about cadmium and beryllium is that they’re both extremely toxic, particularly beryllium.’

She looked stricken. ‘The Scottish Ornithological Union notes there are no more red-throated divers at Clydebrae,’ she said quietly. ‘Or Forster’s terns.’

‘Or much of anything else, I imagine. We’d better go and see the guv.’