Stay of Execution

59

‘Neither Aurelia Middlemass nor Señor Alsina showed up for work this morning,’ said Stevie Steele. ‘I’ve just confirmed that with the bank and with the professor of chemistry at Heriot-Watt. ’

‘Did you think either of them would?’ asked Mary Chambers.

The inspector shrugged his shoulders. ‘Not really, but you never know; I had to check.’

‘Of course you did; now where does that leave us? What more do we have to go on than we had yesterday?’

‘First off, I’ve got a report from Arthur Dorward. He’s examined the papers in the Bonspiel Partnership folder.’

‘Does it take us forward?’

‘Sideways. He’s identified Easterson’s prints on the documents from the samples he gave us yesterday, and Whetstone’s, from matches taken from the body. There’s a third set, though, as yet unidentified. Mr Fraser told me he never handled the documents, so I expect they’ll prove to be Middlemass’s, but we need something for comparison. Arthur’s sending a couple of people to the bank this morning; they’re going to look for a diary, or something else that she handled exclusively, and take what they can get from that. Once that’s done, they’re going to the house. I’ve got a warrant from the Sheriff to enter and search.’

‘So all three handled the documents; what do we read into that?’

‘Surely the presence of Whetstone’s prints is important? If Aurelia, or even Easterson, had set him up they wouldn’t be there.’

Chambers smiled. ‘Oh, no? Let’s say I’m one of those two, planning this thing. I’d have discovered that I was out of loan-application forms, then I’d have stuck my head in Whetstone’s office and asked him if he had a spare.’

‘The document runs to several pages. His prints were on every one.’

‘I’d have asked him to flick through it to make sure that all the pages were there.’

‘You’re too good at that, Mary. You’re not bent, are you?’ He gulped as the words left his mouth.

‘Hell of a question to ask me,’ the superintendent replied cheerfully. ‘Actually, I’ve made a point of studying the methodology in every fraud case I’ve ever worked on. That’s quite a common one; I’ve nicked a car salesman and a building-society clerk for setting up phoney deals, and both of them tried to set up their mates that way. So just having handled the document doesn’t prove he done it.’

‘There is something else about him,’ Steele said. ‘We know that Whetstone didn’t consult his Edinburgh GP about his illness, but I had a thought that I asked George Regan to follow up for me. It paid off yesterday. His doctor down in Kelso was a pal, and a member of the same golf club as him. Whetstone visited him just over three weeks ago, at his home, not his surgery. He listened to his chest and sent him for an X-ray on the spot. It came back with a big shadow on one lung and a smaller one on the other. He referred him straight away to an oncologist, a man called Nigel Goodyear, who has a private practice in Glasgow. George phoned the man, and when he heard that Whetstone was dead he was happy to talk to him. He saw him at Ross Hall Hospital within a couple of days. He put him through a CT scanner, then did needle biopsies that confirmed malignancy.’

‘And the prognosis?’

‘Goodyear said surgery was out of the question; it was way too late for that. He said he could only offer him chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and then purely as a delaying tactic. He had to tell Mr Whetstone that the best practical help he could give him was by arranging for him to go into a hospice when the time came.’

‘And when did he reckon that would be?’

‘Two or three months.’

‘Poor bugger. I guess he didn’t fancy the hospice idea, then.’

‘Apparently not; that dislocated shoulder still worries me a bit, though, just as it worried Sarah at the time. Her first thought was that he’d have needed help. What do you think, Mary? I’ve been involved in this from the start. You can stand a bit further back from it than me. How do you read it?’

The superintendent swivelled in her chair, round and back again, round and back again, as she thought. ‘Show me the money, Stevie,’ she murmured. ‘That’s where we normally find the answer in a situation like this. But it’s gone, hasn’t it? And so have Aurelia Middlemass and her husband.’

She gave a grim smile, a hunter’s smile. ‘Their disappearance changes everything; young Murphy must have been right. It wasn’t his dad who set up the Bonspiel Partnership, it was her, but to guard against discovery before she was ready she did it in a way that pointed at Ivor Whetstone. Maybe he found out about it, or just got suspicious. . we know from the widow that he never liked her. . and she and her husband killed him to shut him up. Or maybe he never knew about it, and just topped himself to save himself a lingering death. We’ll ask her about all of it when we catch her.’

‘That will be easier said than done,’ Steele said gloomily. ‘If we don’t know where the money is, we don’t even know where to start looking for them. We’ve no idea where they’re headed.’

‘No, but. .’

‘Sure, I know,’ he exclaimed briskly, ‘we can try to pick up their trail. I’ll start with the airports and railway stations, and get into her credit-card records, and her husband’s, to see whether they’ve been used to buy travel tickets.’

‘Yes, and another thing. Her car’s still at their house, so check whether he had one, and if he did, get a description out.’

Steele nodded. ‘I’ll get the boys on it right away. Then I think I’ll go and see Murphy and his mother. It won’t bring Ivor back, but it’ll be the nearest thing they’ve had to good news since he died.’