‘Is… queer-bashing as you call it… something that you and Weir have done in the past?’ Alison snapped.
Wyllie shifted in his chair, glanced at me, and thought better of replying.
‘Had you ever seen this man before?’ I murmured, just loud enough to be picked up by the tape.
He shook his head, vigorously.
‘Say it!’
‘No, sir. I’d never seen him before.’
‘But the description you’re giving us now is accurate?’
‘Aye, I swear!’
‘It better be, otherwise next time you see me, we’ll be having an even more serious talk. Do you think that Archie Weir could have known him? Is that possible?’
‘Ah don’t think so. If he did, he never said. No, he didnae. I’m sure he didnae.’
‘What did he call him, when he spoke to you after he’d stabbed him? Tell us again.’
‘He called him “your pervie pal”. At least that’s what it sounded like; I could have got it wrong. Maybe he said “your pushy pal”; maybe that was it. Mister, I was bleedin’, and I still thought he was goin’ tae stab me again.’
‘Do you know what he meant?’ Alison asked him.
He shook his head, then looked at me and replied, ‘No, miss,’ loudly.
‘That would be Detective Inspector,’ she said, icily. ‘Come on, Weir was your pal, you must have an idea.’
‘He wasnae a big pal, though,’ he protested. ‘We were at the school thegither…’
‘Which school?’ I interrupted.
‘Maxwell Academy,’ he replied, then carried on, ‘… and we go out for a pint, but he wasnae best man at my weddin’ or anything.’
‘You’ve got a wife?’
‘Aye. Ah got married three years ago; we’ve got two bairns.’
‘So what were you doing out on the batter with Weir?’
For the first time, he seemed hesitant. ‘The wife chucked me out a couple of weeks ago. I was bunking wi’ Archie for a bit. But Ah’m back home now, ken,’ he added.
‘I see.’ She paused. ‘When you went out with Archie, did anyone else ever tag along, any other men?’
‘No, no’ really. It would be just the two of us usually.’
‘Archie was single, wasn’t he?’
‘Aye, lucky bastard.’
‘Yes, dead lucky,’ she said. ‘Does the name Albert McCann mean anything to you?’
‘Naw, I don’t think so. Naw, it doesnae. Why?’
I leaned forward, eyeballing him again. ‘Because, Mr Wyllie, Albie McCann was murdered on Sunday night by the man who killed Weir and stabbed you, the man you effectively protected for a week by giving us that made-up bloody story.’
‘And you havenae caught him yet?’ he squealed. ‘Ah want protection.’
I nodded. ‘We’ll protect you, Robert. You lied to us; that’s a criminal offence. You’re going to be charged with perverting the course of justice. You’ll be held here overnight and will appear in court tomorrow morning. You can apply for bail if you like and the sheriff will probably allow it, since we’ll have no real reason to object, or you can stay nice and safe in the remand section at Saughton. It’ll be up to you.’ I rose to my feet. ‘Detective Inspector Higgins, I’ll leave the formalities to you and DC McGuire.’
Alison followed me out into the corridor. ‘Do you really want to be that hard on him?’ she asked. ‘The fiscal will probably reduce it to wasting police time.’
I shrugged my shoulders. ‘He might, but my guess is he’ll let it run to secure a plea to the reduced charge. I know, Wyllie was a victim himself, and he was scared, but he concocted a story, and now we have two murders on our hands. There’s also the chance that he might still be in danger from this man, and we’ll be doing him a favour by locking him up. If the fiscal does query the charge, refer him to me and I’ll deal with him.’
‘Yes, sir,’ she replied, smiling.
I grinned back at her, awkwardly. ‘What’s your next move?’
She turned serious. ‘To look for a connection between Weir and McCann. These may be two random attacks by a psychopath out for kicks, but then again, if there is a link between the two victims, it might provide the motive for both murders.’
‘Absolutely. Where will you start?’
‘With Maxwell Academy.’
‘Logical, but if McCann was at that lunatic asylum as well, wouldn’t Wyllie have known him?’
‘They could have been in different years.’
‘True. Okay, run with it and see where it takes you. But I’m interested in what the man said to Wyllie as well. Maybe he got it right first time. Have another look at Weir’s background too.’
‘I will, but I’ll also get warrants to search both victims’ homes. There might be things there that put them together.’
I left her to charge Wyllie and went back upstairs. I took Fred Leggat into my glass-walled closet and gave him a rundown on how the interview had gone, and on Alison’s investigation in general. I didn’t expect him to be involved, but he was my de facto deputy in the Serious Crimes Unit, so it was only right for me to keep him in the loop on all of its business, even that which had been slung our way for reasons of convenience, office politics and public relations. When I’d been offered the job by Alf and the chief, they’d given me fair warning that would happen.
‘What’s your thinking, Bob?’ he asked.
‘I don’t have any yet. Same weapon, same killer, same approach, provoke and attack. Three possibilities: it could have been random, the man with the knife could have had a grudge against the victims, or someone else might have. I’m not going to make any guesses; Alison’s are as good as mine at this stage, and she’s running the inquiry.’ I paused. ‘How are we going on the other priority task?’ I asked, without much optimism. There were no grounds for any: we were seven days from the murder, five days into the investigation, no sign of any motive and our two major suspects were nowhere to be found.
‘Well,’ he began; something in his tone took my attention. ‘I don’t think we’re any further forward than we were, but this fax came in from Newcastle.’ He’d been holding a couple of sheets of paper, clipped together. He laid them on my desk and pushed them towards me. ‘It’s the full intelligence file on the man Winston Church; there’s something in there that jumped out at me.’
I picked it up and began to read through it. Church was an archetypal local hoodlum of his era. He was sixty-nine years old, and had emerged in the post-war period as a black marketeer, diversifying, when rationing ended, into just about anything that was criminal and, typically, some things that were not. He had been the top man in his city through the sixties, seventies and through the eighties, by force of arms; the feudal lord of Tyneside. His file suggested that he was the man who had got the real Carter, in the real-life gangland episode that had been fictionalised for the screen. In a biopic of his life he might have been played by Ricky Tomlinson or Warren Clarke, or even by Michael Caine.
But he was history, the file said; an old man with little power left to direct or restrain the new breed who had moved in on his patch. They tolerated him, in the same way that the outgoing chairman of a football club is made president for life, and they ignored him. Even his one-time loyal retainers, like Milburn and Shackleton, had gone freelance, their muscle and other services for hire.
I was wondering why Fred had wanted me to read his tired story when a name jumped off the page at me, one of a list of ‘former associates’.
‘Alasdair Holmes?’ I exclaimed. ‘What the fuck was Al Holmes doing with this guy?’
‘Probably supplying him,’ Leggat volunteered. ‘If you look at the timeline in the file, Church’s decline began after the Holmes brothers were shot.’
‘That’s of some interest,’ I conceded. ‘We both know that Al never did anything on his own initiative. His brother was his keeper, in every respect. But as you say, they were indeed shot. Al’s dead, and even if Perry wasn’t a cripple with round-the-clock care needs… he never went within miles, personally, of the likes of Winston
