of CID. ‘Morning, gentlemen,’ he exclaimed, as he crossed the room.
‘Hello, Arthur,’ McGuire called out in reply. ‘Has the lab caught fire? I can’t remember the last time I saw you in a proper police office.’
‘They’re usually too messy for me. I do all my work in sterile conditions, remember.’
‘So what brings you to this smelly old rat-pit?’
‘Two things.’ He laid the bag down on Pye’s desk. ‘Those are Stevie’s effects; his watch, his wallet, some change, his keys, his warrant card, and a minidisk that I found in his pocket.’
‘That’s the interview of Keith Barker,’ said Wilding. He glanced at Montell and Singh. ‘You guys should listen to it: it’s a masterclass in how to sort out an awkward witness.’
‘I don’t know if I could,’ said the South African.
‘You’ll have to,’ Skinner told him sharply. ‘It’s relevant to your investigation.’ He looked back at Dorward. ‘What else?’
The inspector held up the envelope. ‘A copy of my report on Hathaway House. I’ve submitted another to Mr Cairns, down in Newcastle.’ He handed the document to Skinner.
‘You should really give it to Sammy,’ the DCC told him. ‘He’s the senior officer in this division, as of this morning.’
‘If you say so, sir, but can I have a word with you first, in private?’
From out of nowhere, Skinner felt a tingle run down his spine. ‘All right.’ He led the way into the room that had been Bandit Mackenzie’s. ‘What is it, Arthur?’ he said, when they were alone.
‘It’s something I want to talk through with you, before making an arse of myself in front of that lot. Can I have the report back for a minute?’ Skinner nodded and returned the envelope to him, then watched as he opened it.
‘I won’t go through it all,’ the technician said. ‘I’ll get straight to the point. Apart from Stevie’s, on the front- door handle, and those left by the officers who went to his aid, the only prints in that house belonged to Daniel Ballester. They were everywhere, including, as you’d expect, on the laptop where he typed his suicide note.
‘Now, take a look at this.’ He took out the document and riffled through the pages until he found the one he sought, then held it out for Skinner to see. ‘This is a photograph of the wire that pulled the pin on the grenade,’ he said. ‘You can see how it leads from the door handle, up through these wee steel eyelet things, and along the ceiling to where the grenade was taped.’
The DCC nodded. The area was blackened, and ripped by fragments, but despite the blast the tiny round conduits were still in place, two in the wood of the door and two in the ceiling. ‘Yes, very efficient. So what’s your point?’
‘There are no prints on them. They’re clean, all four of them, absolutely. The things are so small you wouldn’t expect to lift anything usable from them, but at the very least, there should be smudges on them. There aren’t, though. There’s nothing. They were put in place by somebody wearing gloves.’
‘And you’re wondering why Ballester would bother to wear gloves if he was about to top himself?’
‘You said it, sir. But he couldn’t have, even if he’d been so inclined. We went through that house like a dose of Andrews: there was no sign of a pair of gloves anywhere.’
‘Could he have used a handkerchief? To gain purchase on the things, maybe.’
‘In theory, but he didn’t have one of them either. There was hardly anything in the place: shirt, socks, shoes, underwear, a second pair of jeans and an outdoor jacket. That was all.’
A thin smile creased Skinner’s face. ‘Let me get this right, DI Dorward. You’re suggesting, on the basis of no concrete evidence, indeed on the basis of a complete lack of such, that Daniel Ballester’s apparent suicide was staged, and that the person who killed him then rigged the grenade that Stevie walked into. Does that sum it up?’
‘Either that’s what happened or, rather less likely in my opinion, especially in view of what was said in the suicide message on the laptop, somebody went into the place after he had strung himself up and did it. Now maybe you see why I wanted to bounce it off you before trying it on the rest of them out there.’
‘You’re crackers, Arthur,’ Skinner declared. ‘You’re the conspiracy theorist to end them all . . .’ he laughed ‘. . . or you would be if I didn’t exist, because I’ll go along with what you’re saying. There’s just one drawback, though. How did this person wire up the grenade from the outside?’
‘He didn’t, not completely. He ran the wire through the keepers, then he closed the door, reached through the letterbox and hooked it round the handle.’
‘The letterbox is big enough?’
‘Just. I did it myself, and if I could . . .’ The inspector held out a ham-sized right hand. ‘In the process, I scratched myself on a rough bit on the brass frame. I took a wee piece of skin off. But you’ll never guess: when I looked for it, with a magnifying-glass, I found two pieces there.’ He took two small clear plastic cases from his pocket and held them up. ‘One of these is mine. The other isn’t. I don’t know which is which, but DNA comparison will tell us soon enough. If you can find this bloke, sir, he might just have signed his name for us.’
For the first time in almost two full days, Skinner was beaming as he stepped back into the main office. He laid the report on Pye’s desk. ‘Read that, all of you,’ he said. ‘Read it and learn from the mad genius Dorward. Sammy, have we taken steps to acquire the autopsy report on Ballester?’
‘I’ve got it, sir,’ Wilding volunteered, ‘and the one on Stevie. I had them e-mailed to me an hour ago. There’s the Ballester printout.’ He handed over a folder. ‘It’s straightforward: death by strangulation.’
‘Sure, but . . .’ Holding the document in his left hand he flipped it open and scanned through it. ‘Obvious suicide,’ he murmured, ‘so how thorough was the pathologist?’ Suddenly his right index finger stabbed at a paragraph. ‘Very thorough,’ he exclaimed, then began to read aloud: ‘
He turned to another part of the report. ‘It says here,’ he continued, ‘that Ballester was one metre eighty-two centimetres tall, about six feet, weighed eighty-three kilos, thirteen stone, give or take, and that he was in good physical condition. Mario, how would you subdue a big guy like that?’
McGuire held up a massive fist. ‘Same way as you would, probably. If you two were concluding in there that Ballester’s suicide was assisted, to put it gently, then somebody bigger, or harder, banjoed him, I guess. Maybe when you lost it in the cottage and walloped him you covered up something that was there already.’
Skinner shook his head. ‘There were no signs of a fight, in the kitchen or anywhere else.’
‘Then what about a stun gun?’
‘That’s what I’m looking at. The picture in my head is showing me Ballester answering a knock at the door.’
‘Why would he do that? He was on the run.’
‘Then, whoever it was, he knew him; the door had glazed panels, remember, so he’d have been able to see who was on the other side. Either he knew the caller, or he reckoned it was one of us, knew he was trapped and was prepared to give himself up. He didn’t have the gun to hand, remember: it was stashed in the shed, so shooting his way out wasn’t an option. My thinking is that he let his guard down and the newcomer zapped him and, yes, probably with a stun gun. That would have been quick, effective, and afterwards virtually untraceable.’
‘Too right, sir,’ said Montell. ‘I’ve used one in South Africa. You shoot three-quarters of a million volts into somebody, it fucks up his nervous system big-time. He’s helpless, all yours.’
‘Why doesn’t it fry him?’ asked Singh. ‘That’s what I’ve never understood.’
‘That’s because you spell “physics” with an F, Tarvil. A stun gun delivers a huge voltage, but it has very low amperage, so it’s entirely non-lethal.’
Skinner looked at him impatiently. ‘Thanks for the lesson,’ he said. ‘But that’s my scenario. Ballester was knocked down so efficiently that his assailant or assailants ... it might not have been the Aeron guys, but there may very well have been more than one attacker . . . were able to hang him, unresisting, from the hook in the ceiling.’
‘But how did they know the hook was there, sir?’ asked Montell.
The DCC frowned. ‘You know, Griff, there’s a fine line between being a devil’s advocate and being a
