68
‘Did they have much trouble getting it out of the hole?’ One of the things Skinner liked most about Professor Joe Hutchison was that he was always matter-of-fact.
The policeman shook his head. ‘Not a bit. The ground was soft a good way down after last night’s rain, and we were lucky in that it turned out to be a solid oak box with proper brass fittings. The handles took the weight, no problem. They just tied on ropes and lifted it out. We were on our way here in only an hour and a half.’
As he looked at the coffin, lying newly washed on the floor of the examination room in the Edinburgh City Mortuary, he remembered the first occasion on which he had seen it, when he had been at the head of a queue of traffic halted in Aberlady’s main street by the old man’s funeral. The gleam of that day had gone from its varnish, but otherwise, its months in the ground had done it no apparent damage. The name, Orlach, etched on the brass plate on the lid, stood out clearly.
Hutchison turned to his two assistants. ‘Right lads, get it open. Let’s just hope they didn’t bury him in his good suit, or in his robes.’ He glanced heavenwards. ‘An ordinary shroud, please, or we’ll be here all bloody night getting it off.’
As the men began to unfasten the big brass screws on the coffin lid, he pulled his face mask into position. Skinner, McIlhenney and Sheriff Boone did the same.
The policeman felt the Sheriff flinch between them as the oak chest was opened, and steeled themselves to ignore the smell which seemed to flood into the room. As they watched, the assistants bent, lifted the body, and placed it on the steel post-mortem table. They saw at once that Hutchison’s informal prayer had been answered. The old judge had been wrapped in a linen shroud, which had once been cream in colour.
As the pathologist leaned over the table, and began to unwrap the winding sheet, Skinner pressed the mental button which switched on his professional detachment, but the sight of the old man’s blackened corpse was too much for Sheriff Boone. ‘Excuse me,’ he murmured. ‘He’s dead all right . . .’ He slipped from the room, his face ashen, in contrast to that of the late Lord Orlach.
Hutchison looked after him. ‘No stomach, these lawyers,’ he exclaimed. ‘They should all be made to attend one of these, so that they really know what they’re dealing with.’
He glanced at Skinner, over his mask. ‘So, Bob, Sarah reckoned suffocation was favourite, did she, if Milord here didn’t die of natural causes.’
‘That’s right.’
‘In that case, that’s where we’ll look first.’ He picked up a scalpel, then looked meaningfully once more at the policemen. ‘Better prepare yourselves, lads,’ he warned. ‘If you thought he smelled bad before . . .’
69
The acting Chief Constable shuddered, in spite of himself. Lord Archibald threw him a shrewd and perceptive glance. ‘Bad, was it?’
‘I’ve had more entertaining nights,’ Skinner replied, ‘but this one’s been pretty unforgettable in its own way. Christ, and that’s my wife’s chosen profession.’
‘Never mind, Bob,’ said the Lord Advocate, ‘have some breakfast. That’ll help dull the memory.’
‘What’ll it do for the smell in my nostrils?’ Nevertheless, he accepted gratefully the plate of bacon, eggs and mushrooms which his friend passed across to him, and nodded thanks to Lady Archibald as she handed him a mug of coffee.
Across the table, Lord Murray poured milk into his muesli. ‘Hutchison was quite certain, then?’
Skinner nodded vigorously as he spread a slice of toast. ‘Beyond any shadow of a doubt. He said that he would declare under any oath you cared to specify that Lord Orlach was suffocated. Apparently his heart was in remarkably good condition for a man of his age, but his lungs were “classically distended”, as Joe described them.
‘He was even able to identify the facial haemmorrhaging associated with asphyxia. My Lord, your late colleague either held a pillow to his own face and put it back under his head after he was dead . . . or he was murdered.’
The Lord President looked at the Lord Advocate, their breakfast host. ‘How does that affect Norman King’s position, Archie?’
‘At the moment, it doesn’t. The fact that he is definitely placed by two witnesses as being at the scene of Barnfather’s death still weighs heavily against him. Old John could have been murdered by a common or garden house-breaker.’
Skinner snorted. ‘Nothing was stolen.’
‘Maybe he panicked,’ said Lord Archibald, lamely.
‘Archie!’
‘All right, all right. The discovery of a third murder raises the possibility of a connection with the other two, and we’re certain that King couldn’t have killed Orlach. But it still is only a possibility; it would still be very dangerous, politically, if I backed off from charging him, given the evidence I have on my desk.’ He picked up his knife and fork once more.
‘It would help beyond measure, David,’ he ventured, ‘if you could come up with a judicial connection linking the three old boys, and if you could suggest another suspect.’
Lord Murray nodded. ‘I understand that. And as a matter of fact . . .’
Something in his tone made the others look up from their plates. ‘. . . a thought has occurred to me. I recalled it last night, in fact, at home.
‘Archie, do you remember in our early years at the Bar, twenty years ago, a criminal case which became something of a
The Lord Advocate’s eyes narrowed. ‘Yes, I do. Murder, wasn’t it.’
‘That’s right. It happened in Dundee. Mr and Mrs Gates were a childless couple in their late thirties, affluent and living in some comfort. He was a bookmaker, and successful at it.
‘They’d been married for sixteen years, until one morning Mrs Gates, according to her story, woke up in bed beside her husband. They were both covered in blood, and he had a kitchen knife right in the middle of his chest.
‘She summoned the police. From the outset she denied killing Gates, and maintained that the murder must have been committed by an outsider, someone with a grudge against him; a disgruntled gambler, she suggested. It was her assertion that she had slept through the whole thing. She insisted that she was an exceptionally heavy sleeper, something which her sister, with whom she holidayed on occasion, confirmed to the police, and which was tested later by the defence and found to be true.
‘Unfortunately for her, there were no signs of forced entry to the house. Even less fortunately, her fingerprints were found on the handle of the knife. Her defence to that was that she had grasped the knife on awakening, to pull it out of her husband’s chest, only to find that it was stuck fast.
‘Her small chances of convincing the jury of her innocence vanished altogether when the bookmaker’s mistress came forward to the police. She told them that she had visited Mrs Gates, informed them of the affair, and pleaded with her to divorce her husband so that he and she could marry. Mrs Gates denied this at first, but eventually, under some fairly aggressive police questioning, she admitted that it was true.
‘She stuck to her defence all the way through the trial, but the jury looked at the evidence and convicted her. She was sentenced to life imprisonment by a particularly dyspeptic judge who took it upon himself to impose a minimum recommendation of fourteen years.’
The Lord President paused in his account, pleased by the effect which it was having on his two companions, whose eggs and bacon were now as cold as his muesli.
‘The fact is that Mrs Gates’ defence did no particular credit to Scottish justice. The mistress was given an easy time of it in the box, and the police witness who testified to the security of the premises was not cross- examined at all. Worse than that, the defence team failed to have the woman physically examined.
‘When she was given a medical on her admission to Cornton Vale, it was discovered that she was in the early stages of muscular sclerosis. This accounted for her exceptionally heavy sleep pattern. It also cast serious doubts
