It did, so I got my phone out and carefully moved into a good position to snap a few magnified, high-res close-ups. I moved back again, stepping carefully, and showed them to him.
“So after he’d landed down here, Damien Price reached up to feel his head wound?”
“I’d say so.” Conall frowned. “Quite a trick if his neck was already broken at that point. You’ve got a couple of decent partial fingerprints there, so we can soon find out. Besides, the local forensics team may already have done that by now. I’ll check in with them from the office.”
There was nothing else there to see, so the captain took us back up to look at the outer deck areas. He was right. With crowds of people wandering around out here, spread out over the decks with outdoor access, nobody could have gone into the water without being seen. Conall’s van theory was looking likelier and likelier. He thanked the captain for his time, and we both shook his hand again and left him to get on with his busy, tightly scheduled day. There was nothing else for us here. It was time we went back to Church Street and really got cracking.
Seven
Back at the station, we settled into our little office by piling all the unwanted equipment onto one of the desks and buddying up at the cleared one, so we could see each other’s screens without constantly having to get up and move. I got my laptop talking to the scanner/printer and fed the file the captain had handed me through it.
Shay seemed fine, nothing to worry about there, although I could tell that Vanessa Price had got under his skin in a way that few people ever managed to. He was extremely good at packing that kind of unwanted baggage away, where it couldn’t distract him. Shay insisted that his memory was no better than anyone else’s. It was just that all our data retrieval and filtering systems were garbage. How were you supposed to find anything amongst millions of unlabelled files? It didn’t mean they weren’t there! I’d never bothered to argue the point. His brain just wasn’t normal, end of discussion.
Trish Morrison had helpfully sent me a useful departmental phone list with her report last night, so I pulled that up and put a call through to the local consulting pathologist’s office. Doctor Hamilton, who also worked at the Western Isles Hospital north of town, wasn’t there, but the assistant offered to forward the call to his mobile for me before I could even ask. They seemed to know who I was too, which made me wonder if Trish had sent out a general memo to warn everyone that the mainlanders were invading.
“Doctor Hamilton? Good morning, Sir. Inspector Keane here. I was wondering if you could spare me a minute?”
“Aye, I was warned you’d probably call,” a gruff, thickly accented voice answered me. “You’re a polite one, at least. Sir, is it? There’s a nice change! What can I do for you, son? And don’t ask why you haven’t got my report yet. You’ll get it when it’s ready… and if you could just leave me to get on with it, that might be sooner rather than later.”
I found myself smiling. Was Davie Baird giving lessons in how to deal with annoying, impatient inspectors or was it a universal reflex, born of exasperated experience?
“Of course, Doctor Hamilton, and I wouldn’t presume otherwise. I just wanted to ask you about a handprint found at the scene.”
“Oh, that, aye. Been to look around the ferry, have you?” He seemed to approve of my diligence, at least, from his more moderate tone. “Well, the partial prints are a match for Damien Price, if that’s what you wanted to know. So aye, he didn’t break his neck tumbling down those stairs. Someone did that for him afterwards, while he was lying there with his knee banged up and his head bleeding, the poor devil.”
“That’s all I needed to know, thank you. I’ll look forward to seeing your report in due time, Sir.”
He grunted and cut the call. Not a time-waster, that one. Shay glanced over.
“Well?” he asked.
“They were Damien Price’s own prints.” It wasn’t really any surprise, but the confirmation was enough to clinch a premeditated murder charge firmly.
My cousin turned back to his screen, icing over as he pieced the man’s last moments together. As a general rule, the colder Shay seemed, the angrier he was.
“Two of your vans were rentals. Want to get the constabulary looking out for them?”
“Sure, bounce them over.” He did, and I emailed them off to Trish, along with our black-and-white photo of the suspect, so she could spread the word. “What about the others?”
He just sniffed. “Two families on holiday, both with little kids, and three locals coming back after shopping trips. Besides, who’d use their own van to pull off something like that? Makes more sense to eliminate the rentals first.” He was tapping through Damien Price’s photos from the week before.
“Those are really good,” I said, getting a brief look at a few of the pictures as he zipped through them. Damien Price had an excellent eye, for an amateur.
“Mmm, he sold odd ones to magazines and things now and then. Nice hobby.”
I left Shay to it and assembled my scanned sheets into a single document to drop into the case folder before setting about writing up the morning’s activities so far. We hadn’t been formally interviewing Vanessa Price that morning, which had all been done properly yesterday, so there was no unnecessary recording or transcript to deal with. I might as well get as much as I could written up while I was waiting for Shay to find me something else to work on. My desk phone rang, and I picked it up.
“DCI Keane speaking.”
“What the hell, Conall?!” Trish Morrison exclaimed
