Murmuring the Judges

18

A garishly decorated traffic car stood at the entrance to Saughton Prison as Martin drove up the approach road. One of the two uniformed officers who stood beside it stepped forward, holding up a hand, but stopped as soon as he recognised the occupants, and waved them through the outer gates, which, unusually, lay open.

Skinner identified himself tersely to the prison officer who waited inside, showing the warrant card which hung on a chain round his neck.

‘Very good, sir,’ the man replied. Despite the growing heat of the day, he still wore his heavy blue tunic, rather than shirt-sleeves. ‘You’re expected. If you’ll drive through the inner gate and park in the reserved space by the main office block, I’ll let the Governor’s secretary know you’re here. The offices are round the first corner then first on the right. I’ll send someone with you, if you’d like.’

Skinner shook his head. ‘Thanks, but that’s okay, I’ve been here before.’

The great steel inner gate slid open, and Martin drove through, taking the turns which the officer had described. The parking space which had been kept for them was beside the door of the administration block, in which Detective Superintendent Dan Pringle stood waiting. As always he wore his bleary-eyed look, the usual signal of a late night.

‘Morning, sir,’ he said, as Skinner stepped from the car.

‘Hello, Dan. What was it last night then?’

‘Masonic dinner dance, sir. We got home at two.’

‘That sounds pretty quiet for the masons,’ Skinner grunted. ‘Where’s the Governor, then?’

‘In his office. Big Neil’s with him, trying to keep him calm.’

‘McIlhenney?’

‘Yes. I called him out. I thought you might want him here, and he agreed.’

The DCC laughed out loud. ‘Too fucking right he did. Big McIlhenney would go dookin’ for turds at Seafield to get out of going to Sainsbury’s with Olive.’

The grin left his face as quickly as it had appeared. ‘The Governor’s shaky, is he?’

Pringle nodded. ‘And then some. He’s taking it personally.’

Martin shrugged his shoulders as he locked the car. ‘So he should, on the face of it. Let’s go see him.’

Pringle led the way into the office, his business suit contrasting with the casual dress of the senior officers. The Governor’s room was on the first floor, looking out on to the roadway. It was accessed through an outer office, through which Pringle marched, with the briefest of nods to the officer who was seated there.

Ian Whiterose, the Governor of Saughton Prison, was seated behind his desk as Skinner and Martin entered, his hands clenched together, twisted, wringing. He was in his mid forties, bespectacled, with dark, untidy hair, and wearing a creased grey suit. As he looked up at the policemen his jaw was clenched.

‘Good morning, Governor,’ said Skinner extending his hand as the man stood up. Whiterose shook it, limply.

‘Good morning, Mr Skinner, Mr Martin. I can’t tell you how sorry I am that you’ve had to be called here. It’s appalling. I know that things like this aren’t unprecedented in prisons, but it’s never happened to me before.’ The man’s voice rose as he spoke, accentuating his tension and distress.

‘Sit down, sit down,’ the DCC insisted, putting a hand gently on the man’s shoulder and pressing him back into his chair. He looked round at his assistant, who stood impassively beside the desk. ‘Sergeant, if you’ve been here more than two minutes, you’ll have sorted out the coffee. See if you can find some for Mr Whiterose and us.’ McIlhenney threw him a dubious look, but said nothing as he withdrew to the outer office.

‘Okay, Governor,’ Skinner began as he took a seat facing the man across his desk. ‘First things first. What’s the state of the prison as of now? Where are the inmates?’

‘Locked up,’ answered Whiterose. ‘Every one of them. My staff are conducting a detailed search of every cell.’

‘Oh? Well, stop them at once, please.’

The Governor’s eyes widened and his eyebrows rose. ‘Why?’

‘Because that search must be conducted by the police.’

‘Why?’

‘Do I have to spell it out? If this thing was planned, we can’t rule out the possibility that one of your officers might have been involved. If that was the case, you could be helping them recover and conceal evidence.’

‘You don’t believe that, surely?’

‘I don’t believe anything yet, but I don’t discount anything. Now issue the order, please. Get your men out of those cells.’ Whiterose nodded, picked up the telephone, pressed a button and spoke to the man in the outer office, just as McIlhenney returned with a tray of coffee. Skinner took a mug, sipped from it, and knew at once why the sergeant had given him the doubtful look. It was the sort of brew that went straight to the heart. ‘No wonder he’s shaky, drinking that stuff,’ he thought as he looked across the desk.

‘Tell us, then, Governor, what happened.’

‘It’s all very confused,’ the man began, sounding apologetic. ‘We exercised the remand prisoners at nine-thirty as usual, separately from the convicted men. We give them an hour.’

‘How many do you have on remand?’ asked Martin.

‘Sixty-seven.’ Whiterose paused, then continued.

‘No one seems actually to have seen what happened. Some of the men were circling the yard, some were standing smoking, others had a game of football going on. Bennett was with a group walking the yard, when all of a sudden he went down.’

‘None of your officers saw him fall?’ Skinner queried.

‘No. I had eight of them on supervision, but most seem to have been watching the football.’

‘Did any of them hear anything?’

‘No, but it was very noisy in the yard, with the game going on.’

The detective nodded. ‘I appreciate that. How did the men nearest to Bennett react, when he hit the ground?’

‘As it was described to me, they backed off and stood in a circle, looking down at him.’

‘And what did your officers do, once they’d torn themselves away from the football?’

Whiterose hesitated. ‘Well, as it was told to me, when it became clear that Bennett wasn’t going to get up, the senior officer in charge approached him. Carefully, you appreciate, just in case it was some sort of a ruse. The man was lying on his side, motionless, with his head bent and his face almost touching the ground. The officer spoke to him without response. Eventually, he bent over him and shook him. It was then that he noticed the blood running down his temple, and realised that he was badly hurt.’

Skinner nodded. ‘That’s clear up to now. What did he do next?’

‘He cleared the exercise yard. All the men were escorted back to their cells. Then he sent for the MO.’

‘Were any of the prisoners searched before they left the yard?’

‘No.’

‘When you said the MO, I take it you meant the prison doctor.’

‘That’s right. He was on site, so he was there in only a couple of minutes. He took one look at Bennett and said that he’d been shot.’

‘Was any search made of the yard before my people arrived?’

‘Yes, by the escorting officers when they returned. Nothing unusual was found.’

The DCC leaned back and stared at the dirty ceiling. ‘How easy would it be to hide a gun in this prison?’ he asked.

Whiterose sighed. ‘Mr Skinner, in my experience, the inmates could hide almost anything in a prison.’

Piercing blue eyes swept down from the ceiling and fixed him suddenly across the desk. ‘What a pity, in that case, that your officer cleared the yard. If he’d kept the men contained there until he’d found out what had happened to Bennett, they could all have been searched on the spot, with no possibility of concealing a weapon.’

The Governor nodded. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘There’s no fucking suppose about it. Still, it’s happened, and it’s your problem. What it means is that my people will have to tear your jail apart looking for a gun. However disruptive that might be, you’re going to have to live with it.’ He looked round at Pringle. ‘Dan, how many men do you have on the scene?’

‘Just the two uniforms so far, sir, and half a dozen CID. They’re making a list of the men who were in the yard, and getting ready to interview them one by one.’

‘That’ll take forever. I want a hundred uniforms here, to begin the search and to help the CID people with the interviews.’

‘On a Saturday, Boss?’

‘I don’t care what bloody day it is. A hundred, I said.’ He paused, as Pringle nodded. ‘What’s happening about the press? Does anyone have wind of this yet?’

‘The Prison Service has its own press office,’Whiterose interrupted.

Skinner shook his head. ‘Not for this, you don’t. Our Media Relations Manager will handle all enquiries about this.’ He turned back to Pringle. ‘Dan, Maggie Rose will have roused Alan Royston by now to deal with press about her investigation. Obviously you and she will need to co-ordinate, and take Royston’s advice on statements and all of that.’

The Superintendent looked puzzled.

‘Sorry, Dan,’ the DCC burst out as he realised his oversight. ‘There’s no way you could have known this. When you called me on the mobile I was at another murder scene. . Nathan Bennett’s sister, Hannah. Someone killed her last night.’

On the other side of the desk, he heard Whiterose gasp. ‘That’s why your men can’t undertake any searches, Governor. Clearly, this wasn’t a prison feud. Bennett was killed to silence him, as, we believe, was Hannah. He was shot in the head, to make sure of the job. Maybe a prisoner pulled the trigger, but he surely didn’t do it without help.

‘Dan, when you speak to Alan Royston, tell him I want to know everything that’s being said to the press.’

Abruptly, he stood up. ‘Lead on, Governor, take me to visit the scene. I take it that the body’s still there. Andy, you’d better speak to ACC Elder, to soothe his feathers over a hundred of his uniforms being called out. Neil, with me.’

‘Sir.’ Mcllhenney rose from his chair in the corner, to follow Skinner and Whiterose from the room.

Outside the Governor broke into a brisk stride. ‘Is the doctor still there?’ Skinner asked him.

‘Yes. I asked him to remain with the body, until you agreed that it could be taken to the prison mortuary.’

‘It won’t be going there,’ muttered the DCC, grimly. ‘We may as well stack it with the rest. It’s going to be a busy day for Prof. Hutchison.’

As they walked on, towards the exercise yard, McIlhenney tugged gently at his commander’s sleeve, and dropped a few paces behind their escort. ‘Boss, I didn’t like to interrupt in there, but when you get to the yard take a look outside the fence.’

‘What d’you mean?’

‘You’ll see.’

They took another corner, and the fenced-in exercise yard was ahead of them. It was unpaved, rough earth, the grass that it had once boasted largely worn away by footsteps. The gate was open, with a prison officer standing just inside. Halfway across the open ground, close to the wall which served as its eastern boundary, the body of Nathan Bennett lay under a blanket. A man in a tweed jacket stood beside it.

‘Doctor?’

The man nodded. ‘Hoy, prison MO.’

‘DCC Skinner. You sure this is a shooting?’

‘Oh yes,’ answered Dr Hoy, immediately and emphatically. ‘Take a look at his face.’ He drew back the blanket. For the second time that morning, the detective summoned up all his self-control. He bent over and looked closely at Nathan Bennett’s head.

Dark blood was matted in his hair, at the back of his cranium, and dried on his temple. ‘Has the photographer done his stuff?’ he asked the sergeant.

‘Aye, Boss. He’s finished.’

Carefully, he rolled Bennett’s corpse on to its back, and winced. There was a ragged black hole in the centre of the forehead. ‘See what I mean?’ said the MO. ‘Exit wound.’

‘And some.’ Skinner straightened up, frowning. He looked around the yard, then remembering McIlhenney’s muttered comment, turned and looked at the fence behind him. The top four storeys of a high-rise housing block rose above its highest point. ‘Of course,’ he whispered, then turned to McIlhenney.

‘How far away are those flats, would you say, Neil?’

The big sergeant smiled. ‘There’s the width of a football field outside the yard, then a hundred yards to the road, then the car park of the block. Four hundred yards, I’d say; five hundred tops.’

‘I see what you mean, Sergeant. It’d be an easy shot from that roof over there for someone with the right equipment. How tall was Bennett?’

‘Looking at him, I’d guess he was about the same height as Mr Martin.’

‘Okay, say five eleven. And with that red hair he’d stand out like a Belisha beacon, even in a crowd.’

Skinner drew the blanket back over Bennett’s body, and stepped over to stand by its feet, with his back to the fence and the high-rise block. He put two fingers to the back of his head, plotting the entry wound, then looked at the ground a few yards ahead of where he stood.

‘Before we start searching for a gun, Neil, let’s look for a bullet. . a high-velocity rifle bullet, bashed out of shape.’ He pointed to a wide area in front of the entry to the yard. ‘And let’s look over there. When the first of the uniforms arrive, grab them and put them to work sifting through that patch of ground.

‘While you’re doing that, Mr Martin and I will go across and take a look at the roof of that block, to see if we can find any signs of a sniper.’

‘Aye, and if you do, the hundred polis we’ve called out will spend the day interviewing every resident in those bloody flats!’

Skinner smiled. ‘They chose the job, each one of them. Listen,’ he added. ‘That was a good spot, Neil. Just as well that you didn’t mention it in there, otherwise Dan Pringle would have been well embarrassed. He should have seen that.’

The big sergeant shrugged his shoulders. ‘The sun’s over there, Boss,’ he chuckled. ‘I think the Superintendent’s avoiding bright lights this morning. I was at that dance last night, too. I saw the state he was in when the taxi came for him.’

‘You seem to have survived all right.’

McIlhenney looked at him disdainfully. ‘Olive’s mother was baby-sitting for us. Not even you would dare to come home rat-arsed to the Wicked Witch of the West!’