Keep cool. 'Any idea where he was on his week's leave?'
Frances shook her head slowly. 'Said he might go up north.
That's all I know, I'm afraid. Sorry.'
Irvine wondered at that. Why keep his plans secret from the girlfriend? Had Scott been hiding something? 'Tell me what he was like, Frances. Nice guy? Well liked by his pals?'
'Ken was quite ordinary. Nothing special, but he was nice. He had good manners,' she blushed again, looking involuntarily at Omar Fathy. 'That's always a plus, isn't it?'
'What about other family?' the Egyptian detective asked.
Frances shook her head. 'Nobody. His parents were both dead and he was an only child. Never spoke about aunties or cousins or that.'
'What did he do at Christmas, then? That's a time for family gatherings.'
'I don't know. He was vague about that,' the girl said, her eyes narrowing as she tried to remember. 'Mind you, that was just after we got together. Too soon to ask him to join my family, you know?' she looked at the two officers guiltily then put her hand to her mouth as though to stifle a sob. 'I still can't believe.. 'Hey, it's okay,' Irvine put a comforting arm around the girl's shoulder. 'Isn't it better to remember good stuff about him? Eh?'
'I know,' Frances sniffed, pulling a hankie from her cardigan pocket. 'And it's not as if we were dead serious or anything. It's just such a terrible thing to have happened. First he loses his wife then…' she shook her head, not trusting herself to continue.
Annie Irvine's eyes narrowed. Loses his wife. An odd expression to use, surely. The ex-wife wasn't dead after all. But splitting up from her must have been a big deal. There was something more to all of this, she was sure. And if Frances Donnelly couldn't supply the missing pieces, then who could?
CHAPTER 7
Billy Brogan's flat was two floors up in an old Victorian tenement that had seen better days. As he dodged the crumpled chip papers and discarded beer cans that littered the entrance the man's trainers made no sound, stealth being a habit he practised nowadays without thinking. Getting in had been easier than he'd expected; the outer door had been left ajar for some reason and a young Asian boy had emerged just as he had been about to press the buzzer for Brogan's flat. The lad had scarcely looked at him.
What would he see? A fellow in nondescript jeans and jacket, a baseball cap pulled down to hide his face, he resembled lots of other blokes in lots of other cities. Should anyone attempt to describe him, they would struggle to find any distinguishing features.
Not that he had none, but so long as he was on a job his tattooed arms were kept out of sight.
Brogan's flat had a pair of old-fashioned storm doors that were pulled back, revealing a half glazed front door. A light was on in the hall but, as the gunman raised the flap of letterbox he could hear not a single sound coming from within. He stood, blinking for a moment, wondering what to do. The element of surprise was essential, after all.
He turned the ancient wooden doorknob and the door opened with a sigh. Stepping inside, he closed it carefully, making certain there was no sound of a click to alert listening ears.
A few steps further into the flat showed him that his caution had been completely unnecessary.
The place was trashed.
In the main lounge tables were overturned, cupboards broken and lying on their backs, their contents strewn all over the floor. A damp patch of something sticky lay underneath a pile of papers.
He took a step back then bent down to investigate a bit more.
Eventually one gloved hand rolled over an empty bottle of Ribena that had been deliberately spilled on the dusty carpet.
Everywhere was the same; curtains slashed to ribbons in the back bedroom, dishes smashed on the kitchen floor, a jar of coffee emptied over the mess. His boots crunched the dark grains as he tried to step around the shambles.
The gunman's eyes narrowed; someone else with a grudge had got here before him. So where the hell was Brogan? And where the hell was his money?
Doctor Rosie Fergusson waddled around the stainless steel operating table, her eyes never leaving the naked cadaver. Apart from the obvious hole in the middle of his forehead, he looked perfectly fine. There had been no nasty toxins in his blood to suggest the victim might have been a dabbler in illegal substances, nor even a trace of alcohol.
In death, Kenneth Scott appeared to be a nice looking chap, the muscles in his limbs had been well toned, his fingernails and toenails were trimmed and not ragged like so many blokes' tended to be, and his white, even teeth showed evidence of regular dental checks. In life? Rosie tended not to think too much about what a victim had been like in life. Her task was to find out what had caused the cessation of that final heartbeat and to record it all as carefully as she possibly could. In this case it was fairly straightforward. The preliminary X-rays had shown the bullet lodged inside the brain after it had penetrated the skull, so this would be a delicate piece of surgery.
She glanced up at the viewing window where the ballistics officer stood, waiting for her to retrieve the bullet.
'Okay, Em, open him up,' she instructed her technician. Emma came forward, scalpel in her gloved hand, bent over the cadaver and opened his scalp from ear to ear, reflecting it back so that the interior was visible. She was good at this, Rosie thought, and she needed to be. One false slip with that metal instrument and the rifling on the bullet might become damaged if it were close to the surface.
Rosie lifted up a pair of plastic forceps, ready to delve into the mass of tissues whenever the technician had finished her part of the job. The sound of the saw filled the room with its metallic buzz as the skull was opened for surgery. The pathologist stepped forward and paused. Forceps or fingers? It was a tricky bit of the procedure now to remove the object. Rosie decided on forceps.
Carefully, carefully she reached into the wound, dipping her instrument into the exposed tissues. Then her steady hand drew out the bit of metal that had killed the man on her operating table.
Rosie let the bullet fall into the kidney-shaped dish, hearing it clatter. The man at the viewing window above would take possession of it, Rosie signing the production bag before he took it away. Every step of this long process of determining the man's death and finding his killer needed to be executed following all the rules of bagging and recording evidence. One slip and a later court case could come tumbling down with serious repercussions for the professional involved.
'Need to keep the brain and fix it for neuropathology so we can determine the precise track of it with regard to its direction,' Rosie said aloud. It was important that the ballistics officer could not only see what was going on but could hear everything the pathologist said through the sound system in the post-mortem room. 'We also need to determine what structures are damaged,' she added.
Rosie kept some thoughts to herself, though. It was a professional job, all right. She'd seen enough of them to say that with a high degree of certainty should she be asked in her capacity as an expert witness. He'd probably used a silencer. They all did, the pros. Her glance fell on the waxen body. He probably hadn't even seen it coming.
There was no mystery being found out in this post-mortem. It was a routine job, like so many others. The only mystery was who had killed him and why. And that was something for Lorimer and his team to discover.
'Couldn't it be a case of mistaken identity?'
Lorimer looked up sharply. 'What makes you say that?'
Detective Sergeant Niall Cameron drew in his breath before replying. 'He seems to have been such an innocuous sort of person, sir. No previous. No toxins in his bloodstream. Place of employment giving him a glowing character.' Cameron shrugged a narrow shoulder as if to reinforce his argument.
'A man opens his door in the middle of the night. He's shot at point-blank range, killed instantly. Nobody can make sense of that at the best of times, can they?' Lorimer replied. Tut I see your point, Niall. Scott had no known association with the criminal world. As far as we know he hadn't hacked anyone off enough to deserve this.'
'Not a football referee, then?' DS Alistair Wilson joked. A ripple of laughter ran through the officers assembled
