12
As Skinner’s meeting was taking place, his team had their first small stroke of luck. An early-shift railway worker, interviewed by uniformed police at the end of his day’s work, produced the first possible sighting of the quarry.
‘Aye, it would be a bit before six o’clock. Ah wis on ma way to that early mornin’ roll shop in Cockburn Street for ma breakfast. Ah was walkin’ over Waverley Bridge when this fella goes tearin’ off doon Market Street as if he had jist landed a big treble, then heard that the bookie was packin’ his suitcase.’
‘Can you describe him?’
‘Well it wis dark, ken, but he looked like wan o’ they ninja fellas. He wis wearin’ a black suit and some sort of black bunnet. Ah couldnae see his face.’
‘What happened then?’
‘Well, like ah say, he goes tearin’ off doon Market Street. Then a car starts up, and this big white motor goes shootin’ back up the hill.’
‘Did you get the number?’
‘Gie’s a break, lads.’
‘Didn’t it occur to you, after two murders that something might have been up?’
‘Naw, wi’ the shifts ah work, ah see odd buggers a’ the time. And onyway, ah’d had a few bevvies the night before. All ah could think about was two fried egg rolls, a mug o’ tea and a fag.’
Skinner seized the statement when it was put before him in his High Street office. ‘Bring him in. Now!’
An hour later, Arthur Murphy, consenting but complaining, found himself in the High Street facing Edinburgh’s most famous copper.
‘Right, Mr Murphy, I’ve read your statement, and I thank you for it. Maybe you can recall a few more things if you concentrate, and put your healthy eater’s breakfast out of your mind. For example, was the fellow carrying any sort of weapon?’
The man knitted his brows and thought hard for a minute or so. ‘Well he’d this sort of sheath or holster thing at his back, and there could hiv been somethin’ in that.’
‘That’s a good start. Now what about the car? What make was it?’
‘God, a dinna’ ken yin frae anither!’
‘Well was it a Sierra?’
‘Naw, it wisnae yin o’ thon.’
‘Vauxhall?’
‘Naw, no that either. Ah tell, ye,’ said Murphy with a sudden flash of inspiration, ‘it could have been yin o’ thon German motors, an Oddy, is that it? Or maybe it was yin o’ thon Jap jobs.’
Skinner sighed inwardly. That was as much as they were going to get from the man, and even that might have been dredged from his imagination.
‘Right, Mr Murphy, that’s all. Thank you for coming in, you’ve been a great help. We’ll arrange a lift home for you.’
‘Eh, could yis jist take me back tae the pub where ye lifted me from?’
‘Fine.’
Skinner shook his head as their first witness left the room.
‘Doesn’t take us much further, does it, Andy?’
Martin had slipped into the room at the beginning of Skinner’s questioning of the bewildered Murphy.
‘A wee bit, sir. We can tell the troops to look out for a white vehicle, possibly an Audi. And for a man in dark clothing. But of course the driver of the car wasn’t necessarily our man.’
‘He had to be. If that had been anyone else getting into his car, he’d have been face to face with our man, and then he’d have been a goner. Tonight, we double last night’s strength, in the area from the Castle to Holyrood Palace. Everyone warned about the car. And I want a dozen armed men in the area. That includes you and me.’
13
Rachel Jameson arrived home at 6.45 p.m. She still ached from the loss of Mortimer, but she had decided against asking the Dean to grant her leave from practice. Instead, she had chosen work as her solace. In her line of business, that had meant acting for the defence in a nasty rape trial in the High Court in Glasgow.
The first day had been taken up by the empanelling of the jury, and the opening statements of counsel. The second, which had ended that afternoon at 4.25 p.m., had seen the alleged victim spend four and a half hours in the witness box.
Patrick McCann, Rachel’s client, was a dark man in his late twenties. The rape of which he was accused was particularly brutal, with the victim having been mutilated after the attack.
The trial troubled Rachel; she knew with utter certainty that her client was guilty. The girl, who had been attacked in her own home, had known McCann by sight and reputation. The weapon had been found, with blood patches, consistent with the victim’s group, on the handle, and with clear prints of the accused’s thumb and two fingers.
All the forensic evidence backed up the Crown argument. To cap it all, the victim, who had been forced to have every kind of sex with her attacker, had described in detail a brown mole on the right side of the man’s penis.
Rachel’s advice to her client, endorsed by the instructing solicitor, had been quite clear. ‘Plead guilty. If you go to trial you will be convicted and the judge will probably give you a life sentence. Plead, save the woman the ordeal of a trial, and keep detailed evidence from the Bench, and I might, just might; be able to keep it down to about eight years.’
McCann had looked at her with the arrogant eyes of a psychopath. ‘No way, miss. She was wantin’ it all. The stuff with the knife she made up.’
Occasionally, an advocate will come across a client who is pure evil. Rachel recognised this in Patrick McCann. She knew that at fifteen, he had knifed a schoolmate to death in a brawl which had followed McCann’s attack on the boy’s sixteen-year-old sister. She knew also that he was the chief suspect in two recent, and still unsolved, murders of drug users.
But an advocate does not have the option of shunning such a creature Justice and the Faculty regulations demand that any person on a criminal charge should have the benefit of the best available defence. Rachel’s performance in the Chinese trial had added to her reputation as a High Court pleader. Her clerk’s recommendation that she should be given the McCann brief was sound and natural, and she was available.
All that day, as the Advocate Depute had extracted skilfully from the terrified victim, an account of the night that had changed her life, Rachel had looked on, hardening her heart against thoughts of sympathy. Occasionally, she had glanced across at her client. All the while that the woman stood in the witness box, McCann had kept his dark gaze fixed upon her. The victim’s evidence in chief had ended with the day’s session. Tomorrow Rachel would cross-examine.
Normally she would have been preparing her examination in her mind. Instead, as she soaked her neat little body in her pink bathtub, sipping occasionally from a gin-and-tonic on the cabinet by her head, Rachel wept softly.
Everything about the trial reminded her of Mike Mortimer, with whom she had made love in the same bathtub only a week before. It reminded her of his style of advocacy, direct, yet sympathetic, in difficult situations like the Chinese trial, where he had been as kind as possible to the parents of the victim, while fighting as hard as possible for his client.
She knew that in the cross-examination to come she would be unable to mix consideration with effectiveness. That poor woman was in for a hard time, just as hard as Lord Orlach, the trial judge, would allow.
And even as she planned her strategy for the next day, the secret fear which had been growing in her all
