‘What was the nature of the service you provided?’
‘General. I handled all his legal requirements: my practice is mainly criminal but not exclusively so. I made sure his licence was always up to date, I handled his conveyancing, when he bought his house and his shop, and I acted for him in his divorce.’
‘What were the grounds?’
‘Irretrievable breakdown; Kitty left him, simple as that. Her main complaint was that he was a skinflint.’
‘Was she right?’
‘I don’t believe so. The truth was that his business made him a living and that was all. Kitty thought that all bookies own Rollers, not Ford Sierras and the like. If she had the idea that she’d walk away from the marriage with a lot of money, she was wrong, way off beam.’
‘Do you know where she is now?’
‘Yes. She’s remarried and living in Gilmerton. She rang me first thing this morning: she wanted to know whether Gary’s original will was still valid, or if he’d changed it.’
‘And had he?’
‘Happily, yes. His mother is still alive; she’s in a nursing home in Joppa, and the new will leaves everything to her.’
‘How did she sound when you told her?’ asked Wilding.
‘As you’d expect: a little disappointed.’ Poole chuckled. ‘I imagine you’ll want to speak to her. I’ll let you have her address. Her name is Philips now.’
‘What do you know about Mr Philips?’
‘Nothing. I’ve never met him.’
‘Mr Starr’s business associates,’ said Mackenzie. ‘What do you know about them?’
‘What business associates? There was the clerk, Eddie Charnwood, and the board man-cum-gofer, the smelly bloke, but that was it. Gary was a small independent bookmaker, Chief Inspector. The only other people in his life you could call associates were his punters.’
‘Are you a punter yourself?’
‘Very occasionally; but I’m what Gary would have called a big-event player. I’ll have a bet on the Grand National and the Derby, and sometimes on the Open Championship. Naturally, when I did that I’d bet with him. He used to smile every time I came into the shop.’
‘Did he have any awkward customers that you knew of? For example, were there any disputes over pay-outs? Have there been any threats of legal action, since the new legislation was floated allowing people to sue over gambling matters?’
‘None. A bookmaker of Gary Starr’s size can’t afford to alienate customers. Word would get out and he’d find his shop empty.’
‘Was he a violent man, Mr Poole? Was that incident last week typical of him?’
‘If he was, he never showed it to me. We weren’t close friends, Mr Mackenzie; we had a normal business relationship, but it had become established to the point of cordiality. I found him quiet, occasionally short-tempered, but nothing more than that. I know what you’re leading up to. He contacted me on Friday afternoon and told me what had happened. He asked if I thought there was any chance of him being prosecuted.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I told him that I’d bet against it, but that I’d accompany him to the interview for safety’s sake. He asked me what odds he should give me, and I repeated what he’d often said to me, that the odds don’t matter when you’re going to lose, as he would have if he’d taken my bet.’
‘There’s no chance of him being prosecuted now, that’s for sure.’
‘There never was. You know that as well as I do.’
‘Probably not,’ Mackenzie conceded. ‘Mr Poole, since you are the executor, you’re in a position to help our investigation. We have an open mind on Mr Starr’s murder.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
‘I am a criminal lawyer, Chief Inspector. I have seen things.’
‘You haven’t seen this, I promise you. Take it from us that it was brutal and leave it at that. The only thing we do know for sure is that there was nothing random about it; it wasn’t a housebreaking gone wrong, or anything like that. We’re going to need access to everything about his life, business and personal. It’ll save us a hell of a lot of time if you can give us a written authority to access his papers, bank accounts, shop records, all that stuff.’
‘You need it in writing?’ asked Poole. ‘Yes, I suppose you do: bankers can be very stuffy if they put their minds to it. Okay, that’s easily done.’ He opened a drawer of his desk, took out a sheet of headed notepaper, picked up a pen and began to write. When he was finished, he folded it, placed it in an envelope and slid it across to Mackenzie. ‘There you are: that’s all you require. If anyone questions it, put them on to me.’
‘There are safes in his office and house. There’ll be no comeback if we have to force them, will there?’
‘None: that note lets you go everywhere and do anything in pursuit of your investigation. Good luck, gentlemen. When you find the bastard who did this, I can promise you I won’t be defending him. I don’t have all that many straight clients, so I don’t like losing any of them.’
Twenty-six
‘That was quick, Jack,’ said Proud. ‘I wasn’t expecting to hear anything from you today.’
‘I’m afraid it’s nothing positive, sir,’ the towering McGurk replied, filling the door-frame as he looked into the chief’s office. ‘I thought I should tell you straight away, though. The DSS check shows no social-security payments by either Bothwell or Gentle since the time of their disappearance. It’s the same with the NHS: they were each registered to different Edinburgh practices, but nothing’s been added to their records since then.’
‘Mmm. It was too much to hope for, I suppose. In truth, I’m surprised that the health records are still accessible after all this time.’
‘There is one thing that might interest you, though. Gentle’s records show that on her last visit to her GP, she was prescribed the contraceptive pill.’
‘Was she, by God? It was only just becoming available back then. When did they put her on it?’
‘The February before she vanished.’
‘That was the first time she took it?’
‘Yes, sir; her only other visit to the surgery was for laryngitis, a year before that.’
‘That ties in, Jack. Annabelle told her sister at Easter that she’d met Bothwell and she was going to marry him. Going on the pill indicates that she became sexually active again, or at least she made plans to, just before that. I assume that having got herself pregnant once before, she’d learned her lesson.’
‘There’s something else, sir. I ran a check on Montserrat Bothwell too.’
‘Would she be an NHS patient, if she was a foreign national?’
‘She would as the wife of a UK subject, sir, and she was. She only used the service once, in the middle of June in that same year, when she had treatment for a broken nose. There was a note on the record that said she’d fallen at home.’
‘And you think?’
‘I wonder, sir, that’s all, whether she might have found out about Bothwell and Gentle, confronted him, and got a thumping for her trouble.’
‘You’re making me wonder the same thing, Jack. Well done, Sergeant. Off you go to the General Register Office and see what you can dig up there.’
Twenty-seven
At one point in her career, Dottie Shannon had been a Police Federation representative: in that role she had been a member of a delegation that had gathered in London to lobby Members of Parliament, canvassing their support for improvements in police working conditions.
