A Brush With Death

by Quintin Jardine

  ‘Go round the back and hope that they only empty the bins once a fortnight down this way.’

  Fifty-Four

  There was something indefinably sleek about Susannah Himes that helped Dan Provan understand how she had come by her nickname. He could picture her arrowing through the water, rows of teeth on display as she converged on her chosen prey. Facing her in the interview room, he knew that he was in her sights, but he had no intention of taking evasive action.

  ‘Where’s DI Mann?’ she demanded. ‘I was expecting to see her.’

  ‘She has somewhere else to be,’ the DS replied smoothly. ‘There’s another event taking place in Glasgow this morning that requires her attention.’

  Himes’ eyes flashed, but a sliver of a smile showed on her face for a second or two. ‘That was some stroke you two pulled last night,’ she complained. ‘I could have had Ms Bulloch home if you hadn’t put off interviewing her. From what she told me, your evidence is tenuous at best.’

  ‘You’re dreamin’ there, Ms Himes,’ he laughed. ‘We’d have been holdin’ her overnight regardless. As it is, I’ve got some good news for you. The fiscal’s decided not to proceed with the murder charge.’

  She sat even more upright than before. ‘He has? Then what are we doing here? Release her,’ she demanded, ‘and let her go home to her children.’

  Provan sighed and shook his head. ‘Ah, if only life were as uncomplicated as that. Ah havenae got round to the bad news yet. We’re holding her in custody pending an appearance before the sheriff this lunchtime. The charge will be attempted murder.’

  She switched instantly back into attack mode. ‘What kind of stroke are you pulling here, Detective Sergeant?’ she snapped. ‘Speight is dead. In what possible circumstances could attempted murder be a viable charge?’

  ‘They’re weird,’ he acknowledged, ‘but the charge is viable all right. Last Friday night at Speight’s farewell extravaganza at his hotel in Newton Mearns, your client was told something by a Crown witness that drove her into a rage. She was so angry, in fact, that her immediate reaction was to get into her car and drive down to his house. Leo was careless wi’ his keys; he’d no idea where they all were, but your client had one of them. We can trace her journey, there and back. We can also put her in the kitchen area, where he died.

  ‘We went there last night and we found in the fridge a carton of his favourite, if fairly disgusting, health drink. He drank two cartons o’ the stuff every day, and Faye knew that. She found one in the fridge and she loaded it with a lethal dose of paraquat, a herbicide that she’d found in the garden shed. To emphasise her intent, she actually found four cartons in the fridge, but to make sure he chose the one wi’ the poison, she dumped the other three in the dustbin. We found them there last night; from my level of smugness, you can guess that we also found Faye’s prints and DNA on all four.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Himes said quietly. ‘She poisoned his drink, but you found the stuff in the fridge. I don’t get this. Join the dots for me, please, Sergeant. Was Leo Speight poisoned or was he not?’

  ‘Yes,’ Provan retorted, ‘he was poisoned . . . only not by your client. Frankly, we don’t know how it was done, no’ yet, but Faye tried tae kill him sure enough, that we can prove.’ He smiled wickedly. ‘It wasnae her fault that Leo drank another carton, from another fridge, and not the one that she’d dosed and left for him. Oh aye, she did her damnedest tae poison him, and that’s why we’re chargin’ her. I don’t need to interview her again, so we’re going straight to court.’ He checked his watch. ‘That’ll be in a couple of hours,’ he said. ‘You can have as much of that time with her as you like . . . unless you want to catch the first train back to Edinburgh.’

  The solicitor winced. ‘That sounds like an attractive proposition, but I’ve started, so I’ll finish, like Magnus used to say. Will you oppose bail?’

  ‘That’ll be up tae the fiscal,’ Provan said, ‘but there’s another party could be at risk from your client. As long as the bail conditions are tough enough to secure her safety, ye might just swing it.’

  He left her alone in the interview room and went back to the CID suite, on its last day as a police facility. As he arrived, he saw his own desk being carried out by two removal men. ‘Out wi’ the old, eh,’ he chuckled, amused by the serendipity of the timing. His mind was filled with light and optimism and thoughts of a new era.

  ‘Come on, Willie,’ he called out to Gowans. ‘Let’s go round to the coffee shop in Sauchiehall Street. We’ll only be in the way here.’

  ‘It’s our last day here, Sarge,’ the DC pointed out.

  He shrugged his square shoulders. ‘So what, son? I’ve never been sentimental about buildings.’

  They walked downstairs and out into Pitt Street, past the line of furniture vans. As they turned into Glasgow’s most famous thoroughfare, a flight of large, long-necked birds flew overhead, seven of them, in single file rather than V formation. Provan thought they were beautiful.

  ‘Are they geese, Sarge?’ Gowans asked.

  ‘No, son, they’re swans,’ Provan replied. Then he laughed spontaneously. ‘And if ye listen,’ he added, ‘ye might even hear them singing.’

  Fifty-Five

  ‘Welcome to Glasgow, Professor,’ Graeme Bell said to his gowned colleague as he led her into his spotless new autopsy suite.

  ‘Why thank you, Professor,’ Sarah Grace replied. ‘This is very impressive; it’s at least the equal of our facility in Edinburgh.’

  The tall pathologist smiled. ‘That’s central Scottish politics for you; it wouldn’t do for either of our cities to have facilities superior to the other, although we did lag behind in Glasgow until this place was built.’

  ‘Tell me about it. When he was a chief constable in Edinburgh, my husband rarely had a good word to say for his colleagues in the west. Then he was appointed to the Strathclyde job and his attitude got adjusted.’

  Bell glanced up and to his left. ‘I’m glad he could join us for this one too; I thought his story about representing the insurers was just bullshit.’

  ‘It was,’ she said, ‘but it isn’t now. When they heard about the second post-mortem, the company contacted him and asked him to observe and report. We’ve got quite a crowd up there, in fact. The chief constable and the DCC; also Kirk Dougan, the Glasgow procurator fiscal, if I’m not mistaken. Who’s the large lady standing beside him?’

  ‘That’s Detective Inspector Lottie Mann; she’s well on her way to becoming a legend.’

  ‘Is she indeed?’ Grace murmured. ‘Bob calls her his female doppelgänger; I can see why. She’s formidable.’

  ‘You should see her sidekick. In fact I’m surprised that you can’t. They’re usually inseparable. It’s not like Dan Provan to miss a big event. Speaking of big events, there’s a rumour on the pathology grapevine that you did a celebrity autopsy a while back.’

  ‘If I did, Graeme,’ she replied discreetly, ‘it would be covered by the Official Secrets Act and I could not possibly comment. Let’s concentrate on today and give this crowd a show.’

  ‘Yes, let’s,’ Bell agreed. He walked over to a console and activated audio and video recorders, and also threw a switch that would broadcast their commentary to the viewing gallery.

  ‘I’ve viewed the recording of the original autopsy, Professor,’ Grace began. ‘I’ve read your report and also studied the results of the laboratory analysis of the samples you sent them. I hope we don’t have to wait for another week for results following this examination.’

  ‘We won’t. I’ve arranged for any testing we require to be carried out immediately, in this building.’

  ‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘I note that while the presentation, circumstances and specific cause of death, hypoxia, all pointed directly to cyanide poisoning, no traces of the substance were found in the victim, in his stomach or in his blood,
where it would normally have been evident. Nor was any found in the carton from which he had been drinking, although the almond smell of the substance was a further pointer to the initial suspicion. What I propose now is that the two of us repeat, detail upon detail, your physical examination and search for an alternative finding. I don’t believe that your procedure was flawed. The evidence for your conclusion was so clear that I’d have been of exactly the same view, and proven just as wrong. All we can do here, is do it again.’ She looked up at the viewing gallery. ‘Be aware,’ she told the watchers, ‘that this could take some time.’

  She pulled her mask over her face, as did her colleague, and they set about their grisly business. Leo Speight was reopened; his musculature, his organs and his brain were re-examined with painstaking thoroughness. The samples taken at the first examination were viewed under a microscope, displayed on screen, and the lab analysis was reviewed. Mostly they worked in silence, but occasionally Grace asked a question, and Bell replied.

  After ninety minutes, their work was almost complete. Sarah Grace was about to admit that she was baffled when she came to the last sample taken from the body almost a week before. It was little more than a blue smear.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘Oil-based paint,’ her colleague told her. ‘There was an artist friend of his working at his party. She told the police that they were fooling around, and she put a dab of paint on him. It wasn’t relevant, so I set it aside.’

  ‘Yes, I remember now from the recording.’ She went back to the autopsy table. ‘Graeme, can you show me where you found it?’

  ‘Sure.’ He joined her, leaning across the open torso and indicating an area just to the right of the laryngeal prominence, the Adam’s apple. ‘Right there.’

  She moved to the other side of the table, took a magnifying glass from her pocket and bent over the cadaver, examining the spot. When she was finished, she stood and handed the glass to Bell. ‘Take a look, Graeme. Can you confirm that there’s a small cut there; looks like a razor nick, probably sustained while shaving. My husband usually calls it a “fuck it!” cut; at least that’s what he says when he does it.’

  As he did what she asked, she returned to the paint smear, removed the top layer of glass and sniffed.

  ‘I want another blood test run immediately,’ she said. ‘I also want a chemical analysis of this paint smear. While that’s being done, I would like to speak to that artist, wherever she is.’

  Fifty-Six

  ‘I’ve seen something similar to this once before,’ Sarah Grace said, ‘when I was in general practice in America. A child was brought into my surgery as an emergency, a three-year-old boy in a very bad way, struggling to breathe. At first I thought it was anaphylactic shock, possibly a nut allergy, but when I smelled his breath I got something else. He’d been playing in his father’s garage and he had drunk turpentine.’

  She paused and looked at her audience, the witnesses to the examination all gathered in Graeme Bell’s office.

  ‘This was the same thing, but even more obscure,’ she continued. ‘Professor Bell and I have just had a discussion with Augusta Cambridge, the artist who was at Mr Speight’s event, in his hotel. I’m afraid we left her rather distressed. She told us that when she’s at a live event, it’s her habit to thin her paints with turpentine. Her brush will be heavy with the stuff. It’s been established that, playfully, she dabbed Mr Speight’s neck, leaving a smear of paint. When she did so, she landed on a fresh open wound. Detective Inspector Mann, I believe that if you check the victim’s personal effects and examine the razor he was using, you will find skin and blood traces on it. Tests have just shown the presence of turpentine in his bloodstream, minute but enough for a man who had an allergy to the stuff, as we reckon he did.’

  ‘That’s what killed him?’ Mario McGuire gasped. ‘An allergy to turps? God, my mother’s a painter.’

  ‘What killed him was histotoxic hypoxia,’ Sarah countered. ‘Tissue poisoning. That’s why it was natural to accept the likelihood of cyanide. But hypoxia can be caused by other things. In this case we have a spectacular cocktail; it wasn’t only the turpentine that was in play. You see, the paint that Ms Cambridge was using was cobalt blue. For those of you who are unaware, oil paints are essentially pigments in a suspension of oil, thinned in this case by a substance to which the victim was violently allergic. In addition to that, the cobalt blue pigment, which also entered his bloodstream through that razor cut, is extremely toxic.’

  ‘What we’re saying,’ Professor Bell added, ‘is that he was killed by either substance or both. Anything more precise would be speculation.’

  ‘So I can call it accidental death?’ Kirk Dougan, the procurator fiscal, asked.

  ‘You’re the lawyer,’ Sarah replied. ‘It’s down to you to decide what’s an accident, or to a jury if you deem that to be necessary. Speight didn’t put that paint on himself. We’re not suggesting seriously that you charge Ms Cambridge, because she had no way of knowing that a light-hearted gesture would have such consequences, but . . .’

  She looked at her husband. ‘She did die at the hands of another, Bob, so your insurer client could be looking at a claim for full value on the policy it so recklessly wrote. If it winds up in court, I’d rather be an expert witness for the claimant than the defender, that’s for sure.’

  ‘What a way to go,’ Chief Constable Maggie Steele murmured.

  ‘Yup,’ Sarah agreed. ‘One chance in a hundred thousand, I reckon. But the law of averages isn’t called that for nothing. Long shots do come up, time and time again. That’s why people gamble. Every time Leo Speight climbed into a boxing ring he was placing a bet, putting his life on the line. Every time each of us gets up in the morning to face the hidden perils of a new day, we do the same thing. Finally Leo lost, but in a way he never imagined.’

  Fifty-Seven

  There was a confident swagger about Moss Lee as he took his place in the office of Sheriff Rose Romannes, flanked by Scott Mann. He gazed across at his adversary; she was seated a few feet away, on her own.

  The door behind them opened and the sheriff entered, followed by her clerk, and by a tall young woman. She was a stranger to the solicitor; he was puzzled, even more so when she seated herself next to Lottie Mann.

  ‘Good morning, everyone,’ Sheriff Romannes began cheerfully. ‘Mrs Mann, Mr Lee, welcome once more.’ She looked at Scott. ‘You’ll be Mr Mann, I take it.’

  He nodded. ‘Free at last,’ he said. ‘Good God Almighty, free at last.’

  Lee tensed slightly at his flippancy, tugging his sleeve slightly. The sheriff’s smile disappeared. She looked at the newcomer. ‘I don’t know you.’

  ‘Alexis Skinner, solicitor advocate,’ she replied, ‘representing Mrs Mann.’

  ‘Mmm,’ the judge murmured. ‘A solicitor advocate no less. Have you done a child welfare hearing before, Ms Skinner?’

  ‘No, this is my first.’

  ‘Then I’ll explain proceedings. They’re informal – that’s why we’re here rather than in the courtroom – but not completely. The case is discussed by both sides, arguments are made and countered. I like to keep things non-adversarial, but sometimes that isn’t possible. At the close of the hearing I might make suggestions, or I might make an order. If I do that, it’s as if it was made in court. Non-compliance can be treated as contempt. Do you understand that?’

  She nodded. ‘I do. I understand also that witnesses aren’t called but that statements can be presented.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Sheriff Romannes confirmed, ‘but it’s up to me whether I take any notice of them. Let’s proceed. I will begin by saying that I’m concerned that this session is necessary. At the previous hearing I suggested that Mr Mann’s parents should be given rights of access to the child, Jake. I accepted a submission, also, that there was nothing about Mr Mann’s conviction and priso
n sentence that should disqualify him as a parent on his release. Now here you are before me, Mr Lee, asking that he be given full custody. Is that not just a bit precipitate?’

  ‘We don’t believe so, my lady,’ Moss Lee declared, glancing across at Alexis Skinner as if he was trying to assess how much of a threat she presented. ‘Last weekend, a crisis developed. The mother, Detective Inspector Mann, became embroiled in a very high-profile homicide investigation; that led immediately to a collapse in the care arrangements that you approved for Jake. As a result, the grandparents, Mr Mann senior and his wife, had to intervene and remove the child to their home, where he was happy and well looked after for the rest of the weekend.

  ‘Mr Mann senior had made arrangements for Jake to be interviewed last Monday for a place at the Glasgow Academy, which clearly would have been in his long-term educational interests. The mother interfered, removing the child, preventing him from keeping that appointment and placing him in the care of an extremely pregnant member of the extended family of the questionable Detective Sergeant Provan, a disreputable, dishevelled gentleman who seems to have a Svengali-like influence over Detective Inspector Mann, and more worryingly over the child at the heart of this matter. That is a situation which the father cannot accept. Mr Scott Mann has his liberty, he is employed by his father on working hours appropriate to a single parent, and he has accommodation that is of a higher standard than that offered by the mother. I submit that the time has come for Jake to be rescued from his unstable environment and given the security he deserves.’

  The sheriff nodded as he finished. ‘You don’t pull your punches, Mr Lee. I have to admit that the scenario you describe gives me cause for concern. Ms Skinner, do you need time to consult with your client and prepare a response? I’m happy to adjourn if you wish.’

  ‘Thank you, my lady,’ Alex replied. ‘I’m happy to say that I am in a position to rebut Mr Lee’s claims, one by one. I’d like to begin by doing something unusual, in response to the character assassination of Acting Detective Inspector Daniel Provan. I’d like to show you a series of photographs, taken yesterday evening, during and after a session at Max’s Gym in Glasgow.’