Game Over

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  ‘OK,’ he said, letting Joanna out. He helped her to her feet, and as her face reached a level with his, he saw that she was nervous now. ‘This is silly,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you some new clothes.’

  ‘You will not,’ she said. ‘That would be silly.’

  He walked up the path with Joanna behind him, scanning the house for any signs of change, scanning the path for any hint that anyone else had been there. He got the key out, inspected the lock and the door, turned it cautiously, and let himself in.

  The door opened without resistance, and a tiny alarm bell rang in his head before he realised what it was: there should have been a heap of junk mail impeding it, but there was no mail at all lying there. How many days in the year was there nothing in the post? He couldn’t remember a single one, except for bank holidays. He had stepped in as he thought this. The windowless hall passage was always dark, and Joanna, stepping in behind him, reached automatically for the light switch, just at the instant that his nose and brain, working separately, suddenly joined forces in a flash of horror. His hand shot out, grasping her wrist, and he turned her with its leverage and pushed her with his whole body back out of the door.

  ‘Gas!’ he said as he ran her back down the path. She stumbled because he was pushing her, but he had his arm round her now and bore her up as well as along. Out of the gate, across the pavement. There was a big plane tree growing opposite the next door house, and he pushed her into the shelter of its trunk. ‘Stay there,’ he snapped and flung himself at the boot of his car.

  ‘Bill! What are you doing?’

  He rummaged frantically in his tool kit and found a big screwdriver.

  ‘Bill!’ Joanna cried, her voice rising in terror as he headed back to the house. ‘Bill, don’t!’

  ‘Stay there!’ he flung over his shoulder.

  Under the small bay window of the sitting-room stood the white meter box. He flung himself to his knees with frantic haste, wrenched open the flap with the screwdriver, and twisted the shut-off lever closed. Then, with the horrid sensation of the sweat of fear in his armpits, he ran back to Joanna, reaching for his mobile.

  She was so white he thought she was going to be sick. But her fear turned itself nimbly into anger. ‘How dare you? How dare you risk yourself like that?’

  ‘I had to turn off the gas,’ he said. ‘Thank God the meter box was outside.’ She began to cry. He conducted her across the road, further from the house. It could still go up, though the worst was averted now the gas was shut off at the main. ‘I have to ring the bomb disposal squad,’ he said. ‘Hush, it’s all right.’ He put his arm round her, and let her cry on his shoulder while he spoke to them. It was just her hormones, he told himself.

  The subsequent fuss took a big chunk out of the day. The road had to be sealed off and the house and the ones either side had to be evacuated – though fortunately, because of the time of day, that only involved one old lady and a cat, the rest of the flats being empty. Then the squad went in to do a sweep. There were two triggers, it turned out. One was the light switch by the front door – it was damn lucky, said Cattishall, the head of the squad, that Slider’s reactions had been so fast.

  ‘It’s lucky I’ve got a good sense of smell,’ Slider countered.

  The other trigger was in the kitchen, and was particularly cunning and nasty. It was a friction device fixed in the runner of the sash window, so that if Slider had smelled the gas and come in without using the light, as soon as he pushed up the window – the natural first action – it would have acted like a match striking a matchbox. All the gas taps had been left fully open and there was a considerable volume of gas inside the house.

  ‘Makes you nostalgic for the old shilling-in-the-meter days,’ Cattishall said. ‘It would have run out before too much harm was done.’

  Once everything had been made safe, Slider and Joanna both went in to pack up everything they thought they might need to take with them, before the flat was boarded up completely. Packing a suitcase, Joanna was calm, but unhappy.

  ‘I hate this. I’m sick of it. How can people be allowed to ruin your life like this? It’s my home! I hate that blasted Bates.’

  ‘You’re not meant to like him.’

  ‘Oh, Bill,’ she said tragically, ‘when will it all be over?’

  ‘When we catch him,’ Slider said.

  Seventeen

  No Tern Unstoned

  The landlord of the Sally identified Thomas Mark from his photograph a little doubtfully, but one of his bar staff said much more definitely that she had served him. She had noticed him because he was talking to Dave Borthwick, who was a regular, and he looked so far out of old Dave’s class that the anomaly had amused her. Not that she said anomaly, of course. She asked Jerry Fathom, who had been doing the asking, what was happening with old Dave.

  ‘I never would have thought he had the balls to do something like that. He just used to come in here and sit with his couple of pints. He seemed like an ordinary bloke.’ She gave herself a pleasurable shiver. ‘To think all the time I was serving a murderer! Anyway, what’s this bloke got to do with it?’

  ‘Well, I can’t tell you anything at the moment,’ Fathom said, ‘but when the case is all over, I could tell you all the details, if you’d like to come out with me one night.’

  For a moment the thought of being in the know flickered greedily through her eyes, and then she looked properly at Fathom and said scornfully, ‘Get bent!’

  The forensic sweep of the black Focus had revealed a number of fingermarks, though none of them belonged to Bates.

  ‘But they might well belong to Thomas Mark,’ Slider said, when he was back in circulation in the afternoon. ‘We haven’t got his on record to compare them with, but when we find him, it’ll be another nail in his coffin.’

  There was also a lot of mud under the wheel arch and a sample was being analysed to see if it matched the mud in the lane where Masseter was killed.

  ‘But I think we can assume, for working purposes, that it was him who killed Masseter, because otherwise what was he doing up there and why did he take away the papers and computer?’

  ‘Why did he do that anyway?’ Hart said.

  ‘Well, let’s come back to Masseter later,’ Slider said, unwittingly driving a thorn in her heart. ‘Let’s look first at what we’ve got linking Bates to the Stonax murder.’ He could call it that with impunity as Emily was out of the room, still beavering away on the computer, with Atherton’s assistance.

  ‘At about the same time Ed Stonax was killed, the next-door neighbour Mrs Koontz sees a motorbike courier come out of the building with a large Jiffy envelope in his hand. The bike had a white box on the back with a circular logo on it, with, she says, a “little telephone” in it, which is the logo of Ring 4. Also a file was missing from Ed Stonax’s filing system. So it’s a promising inference that the courier was the murderer and that he took away the file.’

  ‘After smearing oil on the victim’s pockets and cuffs, which he got from Dave Borthwick’s bike, to make it look as if Borthwick did the job,’ Hollis added.

  ‘And leaving some faint oily smears on the filing cabinet,’ Swilley said.

  ‘I suspect those weren’t intentional,’ Slider said. ‘The residue left after sullying Stonax. But he won’t have cared much. If the file was that important, presumably he will have thought getting hold of it made him invulnerable. And anyway, it was Dave’s bike’s oil, so if found he knows it goes to Dave’s account.’

  ‘Yes, but who is “he”, boss?’ Swilley asked. ‘We know Thomas Mark set up the lock disabling, but was he the one that did the murder?’

  ‘I think the one thing we can be sure of is that he didn’t do the actual killing,’ said Slider. ‘Remember we had the footmark by the filing cabinet, and it was too small to be either Borthwick’s or the victim’s. Now I don’t know Thomas Mark’s shoe size, but he’s a big man and I think we can take it as read that his feet will match the rest of him.’


  ‘Which leaves – Bates,’ said Swilley.

  Slider nodded. He had been coming to this conclusion ever since his talk with Solder Jack, who had reminisced that Bates was a ‘little runt of a man’ with ‘little fingers twinkling away’.

  ‘Bates is not a tall man,’ he said. ‘He’s quite slight in build, too, though he keeps – or used to keep – himself very fit. And he has small hands – very useful for fiddling about with miniature circuitry – so he probably has small feet as well.’

  ‘But could a small man have coshed a tall man that easily?’ Fathom asked.

  ‘I’ve got a picture in my head. Let me run it by you,’ Slider said. ‘The courier lets himself in by the disabled front door, pops down and gets some oil on one of the gloves from Dave’s bike, and goes up to the flat with a large envelope and a clipboard. He rings the doorbell. Stonax answers it. “Could you sign for this please?” says the courier. He hands over the clipboard, and then says, “Oh, I’m sorry, I seem to have mislaid my pen. Have you got one?” Stonax turns back into the flat to get one. As soon as he’s taken a step away from the door, courier says, “Oh, it’s OK, here it is,” and takes a step forward himself to hand it to Stonax. Stonax bends his head over the clipboard—’

  ‘Right!’ said Swilley. ‘That’s how you get him to put his head within reach! And when the courier whacks him he drops the pen and then falls on top of it.’

  ‘But why all the pen malarkey anyway?’ Hart said.

  ‘The courier needs to get him to step away from the door. If he fells him actually in the doorway, he won’t be able to get the door closed without moving him, and that will take time and make noise. The courier’s purpose is to get in and out as fast as possible without alerting anyone. It takes just seconds to empty his pockets and take the watch, and a few seconds more to find the right file. He stood still by the filing cabinet just long enough to leave his impression in the thick-pile carpet. The hall carpet outside the front door was far too thin and old, and the vestibule has a tiled floor, and he didn’t stand still anywhere else.’

  ‘Then he pops Stonax’s watch in an envelope and puts it under Borthwick’s door, shoves everything else in the Jiffy bag, and walks calmly out to his bike,’ said Hart.

  ‘To be seen by Mrs Koontz,’ said Mackay, ‘which is no bad thing, really, because Borthwick has leathers and a helmet with a dark visor, so it helps shove it on him.’

  ‘So you think the courier was Bates, then, boss?’ Swilley said.

  ‘There’s been a car and a motorbike all the way through,’ Slider said, ‘and it seems logical that if Thomas Mark was driving the car, Bates must have been on the bike. He was careful not to be seen by Borthwick, or to leave any fingerprints, because he’s on our files and Mark isn’t. But Jack Bushman instantly thought of Bates as being the likely manufacturer of the device that disabled the Valancy House door.’

  ‘Likely manufacturer,’ Hollis said. ‘It seems to me that while we’ve got a lot of supposition that fits the facts, and we’ve got Mark definitely implicated, we can’t actually prove Bates was there at all. He’s worked it out right well.’

  ‘I know,’ said Slider. ‘That’s the problem. We need to know what was in that file. That’s probably where all our evidence is. If we knew why Stonax died, we might be able to prove who did it. Because at the moment we can’t connect Bates with Stonax at all.’

  ‘Unless we can get Mark to roll over,’ Hollis said. ‘And given that Bates has put him in the shite up to his oxters, he might well do that.’

  ‘But we’ve got to find him first,’ said Hart.

  There was a gloomy moment of silence.

  ‘What about Bates’s escape?’ Mackay said.

  ‘What about it?’ Slider said.

  ‘Well, he had to have had someone on the inside. What if that someone was Tyler, and offing Stonax was the quid pro quo?’

  ‘You’re saying he got Bates out of jail to do it?’ said Hollis. ‘It’s an idea.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t Tyler do it himself?’ Swilley said. ‘We know he’s willing to kill, and to do it with his own hands.’

  ‘But he wouldn’t do Stonax himself,’ Mackay said. ‘Too risky. He’s got too much to lose now, and he can’t hope to be let get away with it again.’

  ‘And he’s out of the country,’ Hart added.

  ‘No, he isn’t,’ Swilley said. ‘I came across it on a website when I was checking Bates’s contacts. He doesn’t take up his new appointment until October, but he came back in July. There was a photograph of him attending a performance at the Royal Opera House.’

  ‘He could have been just visiting,’ Hart said.

  ‘But his term in Brussels ended in July, and he’d want to get himself set up, find somewhere to live and everything,’ Norma said.

  ‘Find out,’ Slider said. ‘Find out if he’s here, when he came, and where he’s living. If he did come back in July, it makes a lot more sense.’

  Atherton had gone through page after page of Waverley B references without gaining any insights, except that it confirmed what Sid Andrew had said, that it was an unlucky site. Industrial relations seemed to have been particularly bad, and there were stoppages and strikes as well as an unusually high absentee rate. He was staring at the screen in frustration when all the hairs stood up on the back of his neck and his nostrils twitched as he caught Emily’s scent. She had come up behind him, and now leaned lightly on his shoulder to look at the notes he had made, which were lying on the desk beside him.

  ‘Are you working back chronologically?’ she asked.

  ‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘Just going through references as I find them. Why?’

  ‘Nothing here dates from before the fifties. But all these old shipyards on the Clyde go back to the nineteenth century at least. They were all terribly proud of their history.’

  ‘True. Well, there must be stuff. I just haven’t come across it yet.’

  ‘Or maybe it changed its name,’ she said, ‘and the history is under the old name.’

  He made that an excuse to look at her. ‘Come to think of it, “Waverley” is a bit of an Edinburgh name for a shipyard on the Glasgow side.’

  ‘Yes, it does seem rather tactless. They should have called it St Enoch at least.’ She looked down his notes again. ‘I wonder if they’re calling the new leisure centre by the old name? That would be a smart move if you wanted to endear it to Glaswegians.’

  ‘Clydeview? But it’s a bit of a girl’s blouse of a name for a horny-palmed shipyard.’

  ‘Yes, it sounds more like a suburban bungalow.’

  ‘Wait a minute, though,’ Atherton said, sitting up straight so suddenly he almost knocked her out. ‘What about Clydebrae? The first word on Danny Masseter’s list.’

  ‘It was underlined,’ she said, ‘as though it was a heading.’

  ‘Wait here,’ he said, and dashed off to get it. When he got back Emily was sitting in his place at the keyboard, so he dragged up another chair, more than happy to work with her.

  She had already put in ‘Clydebrae’ and had got a number of references to Clydebrae Street, Govan. There was a map, showing a road that ran up to a small promontory on the Clyde and stopped there. There seemed to be nothing on it, but it was named in very small letters, Clydebrae. Emily’s fingers flew, found a better map, scrolled across and found the Waverley B shipyard next door to the promontory, sticking out much further into the water.

  ‘Why would they build a road to nowhere?’ she said.

  ‘An estuary is like the seaside,’ Atherton said. ‘The water is an object in itself. It’s never nowhere.’

  She was looking at the other Clydebrae Street references. There were photographs on one. ‘It’s terribly derelict. Looks as if it hasn’t been lived in for years. Derelict tenement blocks, a few breeze-blocked houses, and you can see there must have been houses here, where it’s all flat. They’ve been knocked down. I wonder when?’

  ‘There were big slum clearance projects i
n Glasgow in the fifties and sixties. People moved out to new estates.’

  ‘Or maybe it’s part of the leisure centre development? But now, look here.’ She had gone in to another reference. ‘You’re right. They wanted to redevelop it in 1962. Here’s a plan of a new council estate. I wonder why it never came off?’ She scrolled on. ‘The Scottish Ornithological Union notes that there are now no more red-throated divers or Forster’s terns at Clydebrae. I’m devastated. The Clydebrae ferry closed in 1959. It used to carry people across to Partick, where the thistles come from.’

  Atherton looked up. ‘It doesn’t say that?’

  ‘Of course it doesn’t.’

  He looked down again at the list. ‘It looks as if he was interested in history, anyway. Scottish War Museum. Clyde Maritime and Shipping Museum. Public records.’

  ‘Maybe he’d found what you’ve found – that he couldn’t get further back than the fifties.’

  ‘What’s this Meekie book?’

  ‘If he was going to look for it at the university, it must be something rare.’ She put in ‘Meekie’ and started working through the results, which were startlingly unhelpful and nothing to do with shipping. ‘Did you know that a meekie is a person with an abnormally large head?’ she said. Patiently she scrolled on.

  ‘Hager Loch,’ Atherton said, looking at the next heading. ‘I never heard of a Hager Loch. You carry on – I’m going to get the atlas.’ He brought it back with him to be companionable, and there was silence, except for her clicking. ‘There is no loch called Hager. I thought not.’