by Alex Walters
‘Only the mystery of what persuades him to abandon the delights of daytime telly for the first time in months. And how he managed to get the back-door open.’
‘People with dementia don’t always behave consistently,’ Henderson pointed out. ‘Even when it’s well advanced, they’re sometimes capable of more than you think. In their more lucid moments.’
‘You sound like you’ve some knowledge, Jock?’
‘Aye, well. My dad, you know. He was far gone by the end, but there were odd times when he was almost his old self. It’s a cruel fucking business.’
‘It is that.’
‘What about Bridie?’ Henderson asked. He was looking mildly embarrassed, as if he’d unintentionally exposed more than he’d intended. ‘You think she could be in the frame? Hell of a job looking after someone in that state.’
‘The thought had occurred,’ McKay said. ‘She was away from the house for no more than fifteen or twenty minutes, so I don’t suppose we’ll be able to ascertain whether Jackie was dead before she got back. My instincts say no, but my instincts have been wrong before.’
‘My guess is,’ Henderson said, taking another draw on his cigarette, ‘that even if she is the guilty party, no one’s going to bust a gut to convict her. The poor woman’s suffered enough, and Jackie Galloway was no great loss to the world. There won’t be many back at HQ wanting to open that can of worms.’
McKay said nothing, but they both knew that Henderson had a point. ‘Aye, well,’ he said, finally, ‘you tell your mate Pete to get his arse in gear. Some of us have things to do, you know.’
As if invoked by the mention of his name, a white-suited figure loomed into the doorway behind Henderson. ‘Arse back in neutral,’ he said. ‘Job done.’ This was Pete Carrick, a heavily-built, slightly lumbering Examiner who somehow had been landed with the unenviable role of Jock Henderson’s sidekick. McKay wondered what sins the young man must have committed in a previous life. But he was an amiable and competent enough lad, all red hair and rosy cheeks.
‘Anything interesting?’ McKay asked.
‘Difficult to say. Fair few different fingerprints in the sitting room and kitchen.’
‘We’ll need to exclude Galloway and Bridie,’ McKay said. ‘And get matches from the care workers. Beyond that, I can’t imagine they had many regular visitors.’
‘There’s no sign of any struggle,’ Carrick said.
‘But then, I don’t imagine Galloway would have offered much resistance,’ McKay said. ‘Poor old bugger would probably have done anything you told him. What about the bolts on the back-door? You check those for prints?’
‘Obviously,’ Carrick said, in a tone that he’d presumably learnt from Jock Henderson. ‘There are a few partials. Look as if they’re all the same.’
McKay glanced at Henderson. ‘We’ll have to get those checked against Bridie. She’s presumably the only one who’d go in and out of that door normally.’ He smiled at Carrick. ‘Thanks for your efforts, son.’
‘Suspect it’s been a waste of time. We’ll be lucky to find anything useful.’
‘Time in this job’s never wasted,’ McKay said. ‘Even by Examiners. Am I okay to go in there now?’
‘Aye. Knock yourself out.’
McKay left Carrick and Henderson to stow away their equipment, and made his way through to the small sitting room. It was homelier than the place he’d agreed to rent – presumably because of Bridie’s efforts – but probably no larger. There was an old-fashioned television, a couple of shabby-looking armchairs, a folded dining table that looked like it was never used, and a small sideboard. Nearly thirty years’ service, and this was how Jackie Galloway had ended up.
McKay stepped over to the sideboard and pulled open the left-hand drawer. At the front of the drawer, as Bridie Galloway had said, there was a small stack of envelopes bound together with an elastic band. McKay dug out the pack of disposable protective gloves he always carried. There was probably little chance they could obtain any forensic evidence from the letters, but better not to risk missing any trick. He eased off the elastic band and looked at the top envelope. It was postmarked Inverness, dated about five weeks earlier. The address looked to McKay’s inexpert eye as if it had been laser-printed. He slid out the letter. It was a single sheet of A4, folded to fit the small envelope, containing nothing but the printed words: “NOT FORGOTTEN. NOT FORGIVEN.”
The other letters were identical, other than variations in the print and font. There was more than a dozen in total, dated roughly six months apart. Bridie had said she suspected there’d been earlier letters, but Galloway had destroyed them. It was only when he became incapable of looking after his own affairs that she’d seen and opened them as they arrived.
‘I’d no idea what they meant,’ she’d said. ‘But they scared me.’
‘You should have approached us,’ McKay had said, though he knew fine well Bridie Galloway could never have brought herself to do that.
‘Ach, what would you have done?’ she’d said, and he’d had no honest answer.
McKay pulled an evidence bag from his pocket and slid the letters and envelopes carefully inside. There was no way of telling if they were linked to Galloway’s death, even assuming his death was anything other than accidental. Galloway had made more enemies than most in his thirty years on the force, and some might well bear long-standing grudges. Whether that would have been enough to lead to murder – well, in Galloway’s case, who could tell?
He looked at his watch. He’d left Bridie Galloway in the care of a neighbour who, even before McKay had left, had begun to subject her to an interrogation far tougher than his own efforts. He’d said he’d let her know when she could return to the bungalow, if that was what she wanted. However she might feel about Jackie’s death, returning here might still be preferable to spending more time with the nosy neighbour.
It was already mid-afternoon, and he’d promised the letting agents he’d drop into their office on his way back into town. Then, he’d have to debrief Helena Grant on all this. Not to mention catching up on a stack of ongoing cases at various stages in the legal pipeline. He’d left his number two, Ginny Horton, dutifully working her way through a mound of paperwork. She was good at that sort of stuff, and seemed to enjoy it – a lot more than McKay did, at any rate – but he couldn’t just abandon her to it.
Another late night, then.
But, then, he told himself, it wasn’t as if he had anything much else to look forward to.
5
Ginny Horton was watching the conversation with the air of a spectator observing an evenly matched game of tennis. Dialogue between McKay and Helena Grant tended to have that kind of adversarial quality. Finally, Horton said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, but who exactly was Jackie Galloway?’
Grant leaned back in her chair and smiled, exchanging a look with McKay. ‘Ah, the innocence of youth,’ she said. ‘Undisturbed by the troubled memories of the older generation.’
‘Galloway,’ McKay said, clearly choosing his words with care, ‘was an utter shiteing bastard. A complete buggering arsehole. A –’
‘We get the idea, Alec,’ Grant said. ‘I imagine he wasn’t your greatest fan, either.’
‘Funnily enough, that’s where you’re wrong,’ McKay said. ‘According to Bridie, he was a secret admirer.’
Grant raised an eyebrow. She was a short but nonetheless imposing woman, who, by now, had more or less learnt how to keep McKay in his place. ‘Must have been a well-kept secret in the days when we were part of his team. Or maybe Bridie was flirting with you?’
‘Jackie Galloway?’ Ginny Horton prompted again.
‘Like Alec says, he was the bastard’s bastard, even in the days when all coppers were bastards. He was a DCI doing pretty much the job I’m doing now,’ Grant said. ‘Serious crime. He’d been with the force a long time. Not far off his thirty years. And he got results.’
‘The question,’ McKay added, ‘was how he got them.’
&nbs
p; ‘We’re talking twenty years ago,’ Grant went on. ‘Things were different. But even then, Galloway was old school. His interrogation techniques were – well, let’s say crude but effective. On the physical side.’
‘That’s one way of putting it.’ McKay pulled out his customary strip of gum and began to chew. ‘Ten, fifteen years before that, he’d have been getting away with it. But times were changing. There were complaints.’
‘An increasing number of complaints,’ Grant agreed. ‘At first, he managed to ride it out. Usually by shifting the blame on to someone else.’
‘Aye,’ McKay said, with feeling. ‘Including me, on one occasion. I was a young DC. Had just joined the team. Galloway was interviewing some drunken clown who’d gotten into a knife fight in a pub on Union Street. In the course of the interview, said drunken clown somehow ends up with two broken ribs. Galloway denies all knowledge and tries to pin the blame on me. You know, young lad, got a bit carried away. I hadn’t even been in the sodding room. Only escaped a disciplinary because no bugger believed him, but they still couldn’t prove he was responsible. Quietly dropped. There were a few like that.’
‘Aye, but they were getting harder to ignore,’ Grant said. ‘There were too many rumours.’
‘Some of us were sure he was on the take,’ McKay said. ‘That was how he got some of his results. Taking backhanders to protect one or two interested parties who then grassed up the competition.’
‘I can see how he might have made a few enemies,’ Horton commented.
‘And very few friends by the end,’ Grant said. ‘He was a sexist bastard as well. I wasn’t with his team long, but he made my life a bloody misery.’
‘Happy days,’ McKay said. ‘And now look at you. Doing the same to me and Ginny.’
‘Sod off, Alec.’
‘So, what happened to Galloway?’ Horton asked. ‘It doesn’t sound like he enjoyed a long and happy retirement.’
‘Proverbial finally hit the fan,’ McKay said. ‘And you and I were both there to witness it, isn’t that right, Helena, hen?’
‘More or less.’ Grant shifted uncomfortably in her seat, as if the memory was an unwelcome one.
‘It was a drugs bust-up in the Ferry somewhere,’ McKay said, referring to the area known formally as South Kessock. ‘Some dealer operating out a council house. We were expecting trouble, so a bunch of us went up there. Safety in numbers, you know.’
Grant nodded. ‘Aye, looking back, I reckon it was one of those tip-offs Galloway had got from his dodgy mates. Drugs supply was largely sewn up among a few suppliers in the city. This lot were interlopers. Kids, really, up from Edinburgh.’
‘It went smoothly enough to start with,’ McKay said. ‘We turned up with the uniforms. Got the front door in. They didn’t know what had hit them. All the gear was out there. Most of them were shit-scared and gave us no bother at all –’
‘We were downstairs, getting them charged and out to the vans,’ Grant went on. ‘Galloway and a couple of his cronies went upstairs.’ She stopped and looked at McKay.
McKay said, ‘What happened after that – well, Galloway’s version was that this wee ned was resisting arrest and pulled a knife from somewhere. There was a struggle, and the ned ended up with the knife in his stomach.’
‘Christ.’ Horton sat back in her chair. ‘You said that was Galloway’s version?’
‘Aye, well. Obviously, there was an enquiry. Galloway was suspended. And some of the stories didn’t quite match up. I don’t know the full details, but at least one of Galloway’s supposed cronies got the jitters that they might be dragged down with him. There was doubt about where the knife had actually come from, and whether the poor bugger had really been resisting arrest in the way Galloway suggested. Nobody was actually prepared to point the finger, but by then, other things were coming out of the woodwork about Galloway.’
‘There was talk of a prosecution,’ Grant said. ‘But it never happened. In the end, Galloway was sacked for gross misconduct. Not just that incident, as I understand it, but a litany of things that were emerging. Lost his pension, everything.’
‘But escaped prosecution?’ Horton said.
‘Aye, well, I suspect they didn’t want the dirty linen washed too publicly,’ McKay said. ‘Galloway blustered about unfair dismissal and the like, but he knew he’d gotten off lightly.’
‘Sounds a real charmer.’
‘I suppose he suffered for it in the end,’ McKay said.
‘Though not as much as poor Bridie,’ Grant pointed out, ‘and none of it was her fault.’
‘Which, after the history lesson, brings us back to the million-dollar question,’ McKay said. ‘Did he jump, or was he pushed? To coin a phrase.’
‘You think Bridie could have done it?’ Grant asked.
‘Ach, it’s possible, obviously. She had the motive, the means and the fucking opportunity. I had a look at that fence. It had been decent enough in its day, but it was rotting in various places, including the spot where Galloway fell through. It wouldn’t have taken much – maybe just his weight, maybe that bit of an additional push.’ He stopped. ‘I shouldn’t say it, but I’m with wee Jock Henderson on this one. If she did it, maybe good luck to her. No one but her’s going to miss Jackie Galloway, and I don’t see how we’d ever prove it either way.’
‘I don’t suppose forensics will be able to tell us anything,’ Grant said.
‘What could they tell us? No doubt Bridie’s DNA will be on Galloway’s clothes. Maybe her fingerprints were the ones on the back-door bolts. Unless they come up with evidence of some unknown third party in there, we’re no further forward.’
‘What about the letters?’ Horton asked.
‘What about them? Even if we get something from forensics on them – doubtful, if they’ve been sitting in Bridie’s drawer all this time – all that tells us is that someone was sending Galloway vaguely threatening letters. Plenty of people had good reason to do that. Doesn’t necessarily make them a killer.’ McKay shrugged. ‘And if they were, why wait ‘til now? Galloway was probably not far from death’s door, in any case.’
Grant nodded. ‘Okay. So, we play it by the book. Get a formal witness statement from Bridie Galloway and anyone else relevant. The care workers who were there that morning, maybe. Anyone else?’
‘No one seems to have seen him fall. It was Bridie who spotted the body. The garden belongs to a holiday let, which is currently unoccupied. Bridie went down there with a neighbour, and they called us in. We can interview the neighbour and the woman who runs the convenience store, just to confirm the time Bridie was in there. Maybe double-check with other neighbours whether anyone saw or heard anything. That seems to be about it.’
‘Get someone on to that, and then, we’ll wait to see if the forensics or the autopsy tell us anything we don’t know. Not much else we can do.’
McKay had been sitting still for long enough. ‘Fair enough, boss. Ginny and I have plenty on our plates as it is. Can’t see this pushing its way up the priority list, unless something new emerges.’
‘Thanks for the debrief, anyway.’ Grant waited until McKay and Horton were both standing and then added, ‘Actually, Alec, can you spare me a minute on something else?’
‘Aye,’ McKay growled, ‘so long as it is just a minute. You seen how much crap’s piled up on my desk?’
‘And you’ll welcome any excuse not to go back to it.’ Grant waited until Horton had left the room, then said, ‘Just wanted to check how you were, Alec.’
‘Aye, well. I’m grand. Can I go now?’
‘You get more like a naughty schoolboy with every passing day, you know that? What’s the situation with Chrissie?’ She knew that McKay would have told anyone else to bugger off and mind their own business, but the two of them had been through enough for him to recognise that, at some level at least, it was her business.
‘She’s staying up with her sister up near Strathpeffer,’ McKay said. ‘But that’s not ideal for either
of them. That’s why I want to get out.’
‘You don’t have to do anything, Alec. She’s the one who walked out on you.’
He shrugged. ‘I’ve no great desire to be living in that place at the moment. Better if I bugger off and she goes back there. Might help her get her head straight.’
‘And meanwhile, you’re stuck in some pokey old dump up in the Black Isle.’
‘Ach, it’s got a sea view and everything.’
She shook her head. ‘If I went in for cheap psychology, Alec, I’d say you were still trying to punish yourself.’
‘It was cheap psychology got us into this mess in the first place,’ McKay said. ‘I’m just looking for a place I can afford to rent. I’m still paying the mortgage on the house, you know.’ He stopped, as if thinking. ‘Anyway, it’ll only be short term.’
‘Aye, I hope so, Alec. I hope so. I’m here if you want to talk, you know.’
‘I’m not really the talking kind. Not that kind of talking, anyhow. You may have noticed that.’ As if to prove the point, he was already on his feet, eager to leave the room. ‘Now I’d best get back to the piles of crap.’
‘Well. Like I say.’
‘Aye, hen, and it’s much appreciated. Thanks.’
He was already out of the door before she could offer any further response. She contemplated following him, but knew there was no point. He was just the typical middle-aged Scots male. If he felt like talking, he would, but the chances were, it would never happen. He’d bottle it all up and throw himself back into the job, and he and Chrissie would never sort it all out and get themselves back together.
As she sat there, staring ruefully at the closed door, Helena Grant wasn’t entirely sure how she felt about that.
