Skinner's Mission

29

‘Some day this job might pay us back all the lost weekends it owes us,’ said Detective Chief Superintendent Martin.

‘Some day,’ said Dave Donaldson.

‘Some hope,’ said Neil McIlhenney. ‘Anyway, what if it did. Can you imagine a hundred and forty-two consecutive weekends, all strung together, of being dragged round the Gyle Centre by the wife, with the kids yapping at your feet?

‘That’s one thing about really bloody high-profile murders; they’re great for getting you out of the way of drudgery.’

Donaldson laughed. ‘How many kids do you have, Neil?’

‘Two. Lauren’s nine, and Spencer’s seven.

‘The things we do to kids, eh. Olive named the first one after a model, and she turned out to be wee and fat. The second one she named after a shop, believe it or not. We were rolling along Princes Street one day, with Lauren in the pram and Herself about ten months pregnant, when all of a sudden she stops. I thought she was starting there and then, like, but no, she was staring up at the Marks and Spencer sign with her mouth hanging open. “Look,” she says, “isn’t that a lovely name when you read it? That’s what we’ll call him.” “Mark?” says I. “Okay.” She looked at me as if I was daft.’ He paused with a slow smile.

‘I often think to myself how lucky it was that we’d made it that far along Princes Street. I’d have hated the poor wee bugger to go through life called Littlewood McIlhenney!

‘How about you, sir? How many kids have you got?’

‘Jane and I have four,’ said Donaldson. ‘Tony’s seven, like your lad, then there’s Janet, she’s five, Stephanie, just turned four, and Ryan, eighteen months.’

‘You should be on schedule for another quite soon,’ said Martin, grinning.

‘Don’t joke,’ muttered the Superintendent, sleek-haired and well-groomed even though it was just after eight o’clock on a Saturday morning. ‘Jane’s expecting in three months. Another boy, we’ve been told.’

‘Maybe you should call this one Luke,’ said McIlhenney. His companions stared at him, puzzled. ‘As in “Luke, enough’s enough, okay!”’

‘So it is,’ said Martin, laughing and shaking his head. ‘Now down to business.’ He glanced around the mobile incident room in which they sat. It had been set up in the car park alongside the block of flats in which Carl Medina had died. The Chief Superintendent looked across the table at the fourth man in the room. ‘Arthur, would you give us a summary of what you found at the scene, please.’

‘Yes, sir,’ said Inspector Dorward. ‘First of all, as you supposed, Medina was overwhelmed at once by an unexpected, violent attack. The post mortem is being held this morning, but that’s just a formality.

‘We’ve established that just before midday an old lady on the top floor answered a buzzer call from someone saying he had come to read the electricity meters. She let him in, but he never arrived.’

‘Did anything strike you about the style of the attack?’ asked Martin. ‘Was there any trademark, any sort of signature?’

‘No, sir. There was no frenzy about this attack. It was cold, calculated and very efficient. The perpetrator went there specifically to kill Carl Medina. After the killing the flat was searched. There were traces of the victim’s blood all around, transferred by the plastic bags which the killer wore on his hands and feet.

‘The search was concentrated in a specific area, among papers and notes kept by the victim. They had been ransacked. Of course, we have no way of telling whether or not the killer found what he was looking for.’

‘Did our man leave any forensic traces?’ asked Donaldson.

Dorward smiled. ‘We went over that house all night, and didn’t find a thing. Not a scrap.’ He paused, as if for effect. ‘Then we looked at the inside of the binliner. Nothing.

‘Finally we looked at the four Safeway bags. Inside one of them, we found a fifth bag. It had eye-holes cut in it, making it clear that the killer wore this bag as a hood. Attached to it, on the inside, we found a single strand of hair.

‘We’ve established already that the strand didn’t come from the victim, or from his girlfriend. We’ve no way of establishing where it did come from, short of possibly testing every Safeway checkout person in Edinburgh.

‘Right now, we can’t tell whether the hair came from our killer. But when we find him, if it’s his, it’ll help put him away for life.’

Martin smiled. ‘Wonderful, Arthur. We’ve actually got some evidence; good old-fashioned evidence for your new DNA technology to work on.

‘Arthur, you and I will go together to obtain hair samples from Jackie Charles and Dougie Terry. We’ll promise them if we have to that if the tests prove negative the samples will be destroyed afterwards and that no DNA information will be retained.

‘There isn’t a cat’s chance that we’ll get a match from either, but let’s do it just to keep the pressure on them.’

He leaned back in his hard chair. ‘The Boss gave Jackie a good going over last night, but he still couldn’t get near him.’ He paused. ‘In fact, the wee bugger almost had me believing that he didn’t know a thing about Medina’s death. That reminded me that we mustn’t put all our eggs in one basket in this investigation.

‘Where’s the girl Muirhead?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Pamela Masters took her to a friend’s place in Learmonth Terrace,’ said Donaldson.

‘Okay, you and Neil go along and interview her,’ said Martin. ‘As gently as you can, but keep it formal. You don’t need to pull her in to St Leonard’s, but make it clear that it’s more than just a sympathetic chat. Ask her to tell you everything she knows about Medina. Then lean on her just a wee bit.

‘You never know, Medina might have had a rival, someone who fancied Ms Muirhead, with or without her encouragement. And maybe, that rival . . .’

‘Cut up rough, sir?’ said Neil McIlhenney.