The Man with No Face

by Peter Turnbull

  They’d need four.’ Donoghue spoke quietly. ‘They’d need four.’

  Stamp inclined his head.

  ‘Two in the tunnel.’

  ‘Right.’

  They’d have to be dropped off at that locus at least one hour before the train you were travelling in arrived. Couldn’t afford to cut it any finer.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘Only one vehicle, possibly an ex-Post Office van plus driver, possibly female.’

  ‘Yes.’

  They would have left Glasgow three hours before you switched from the Stirling train to the Intercity. Two hours to get to the Dumfries area, one hour to take up positions. Two in the tunnel, and the driver tucking the van away out of sight somewhere.’

  ‘Yes.’ A puzzled note in Stamp’s voice.

  They’d have to have a fourth person watching you to make sure you entrained at Glasgow Central and who phoned the information from a public phone at the station to the person in the van who had a mobile. Who then, armed with a timetable, would know which train you were on, would phone as you approached Carlisle with instructions to change trains and had visual contact with said train as it approached the tunnel, called you up and told you to drop the ransom as you left the tunnel. The person in Glasgow may only have been a gofer, an errand boy, a bagman, junior in the hierarchy, but he or she had to have been there.’

  ‘You’re right. It was at least a four-man operation.’

  ‘Not wholly right, Tom, and you’re not wholly wrong. The important and dangerous bits could have been done by three—three, incidentally, is the most powerfully loyal of all human groups. Two will fall out, four will split into two groups of two, but three remain constant.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Something I picked up along the way. But it may still be a group of three, the fourth person may have been hired to spy on you without knowing the reason why, maybe told to make a phone call without knowing who it was going to, “Watch for a guy carrying two army kitbags, he should get on the such and such train to London which always leaves from platform one at such and such a time. Watch from a safe distance. When he gets on the train, wait until the train leaves and then phone this number and say, ‘He’s on his way. Here’s fifty quid. If it all goes all right, there’ll be another fifty for you tomorrow, then forget me, forget this, it never happened.” It could be like that, so maybe we are looking for a gang of three.’

  ‘Maybe. One a woman with red hair. And being that Scotia is famed the world over for red-haired women

  ‘What did the prints in the shrubbery tell you?’

  ‘As I recall, one was definitely a man, a tall man, he had huge plates of meat, but was quite light-stepping. The other could have been either man or woman of about nine or ten stones, wearing trainers, so could be either sex.’

  ‘A gang of three, one tall man, one red-haired woman, one who could be either sex. All possibly middle aged. None with previous convictions, at least of an underworld nature. But intelligent, I mean here be planning, here be self-restraint and here be ruthlessness.’

  ‘That chilled me. It appears that once they’d got the money, little Miss Oakley was history.’

  ‘So back to the money.’

  ‘Well, after the Fair holiday…oh incidentally, they pursued the spend as much as you can at every outlet policy on the Tuesday after the Fair Monday. I suppose that they reasoned it would take at least one working day for the banks to report the ransom notes had been placed in circulation, but less money was recovered from the Tuesday, so we reckoned that part or all of the gang may have some form of employment. In fact, they could have carried on spending at that rate for another day because it was not until the Thursday after the Fair Monday that we realized how they were laundering the money and only then could we ask publicans and newsagents and the like to take note of people making small purchases with twenty-pound notes, by which time the money had stopped emerging and they seemed to go to ground. Then weeks went by, into August now, and after August Bank Holiday Monday the same thing happened, only this time it was here in Edinburgh and one thousand pounds’ worth of ransom money, again as till receipts from small retail outlets or pubs, was recovered. And so the pattern was set, on the Monday after a weekend, or the Tuesday after a holiday weekend the banks in one specific town in Scotland, or the north of England, would recover a four-figure sum of the ransom-money notes. Once the gang appeared to have spent an expensive week in London and the South Coast. In between times, it surfaced midweek in one’s and two’s and this pattern continued for three years, by which time all fifty thousand bits of paper had been recovered and we were none the wiser about the identity of the kidnappers, and by which time Mrs Oakley had begun her periodic bouts of hospitalization. Mr Oakley had become a hollow man, the Oakley mansion was sliding into ruin and the garden overgrown. Desperately so.’

  Donoghue asked: ‘Where would you put that money? I mean, allowing for a loss of ten to twenty per cent on each laundering purchase, they’d still have to put upwards of eight hundred thousand pounds somewhere. Can’t put that in your Post Office account, not without raising eyebrows, you can’t.’

  ‘Careful planning and middle age, Fabian.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the hallmark of the kidnap was planning and preparation, people like that wouldn’t let themselves be in possession of two kitbags full of cash and say, “Right then, where do we put this lot?” My guess is that bank accounts would have been opened months beforehand, and building society accounts too. Or were already in existence. You see, as the years have gone on—I’m in my forties now

  ‘So am I, Tom.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s the same for them, but I seem to have accumulated building society accounts over the years, there’s been a few times when I’ve been in possession of a cheque on a Saturday morning, all banks shut, wanting to pay it in somewhere and so I walked into a building society, showed some ID and used the cheque to open an account. Just to put the money somewhere safe. Then once I bought a house and the money was advanced by a bank I didn’t deal with, my solicitor made all the arrangements, and I remember it was explained to me that “we open an account and then close it again”. I didn’t fully understand it but I went along with it, as you do in these circumstances, and anyway, when all was done and dusted there was fifty pounds left in the account we’d opened to purchase the house and I was invited to come and collect it so the account could be closed. I asked if it was possible to leave it there and keep the account open. Delighted, they said. So over the years, I’ve accumulated two bank accounts, one deposit account and four building society accounts, and not much money in any of them, I might add. My wife’s been much neater: one current account, one deposit account and one building society account. We have also opened building society accounts for both of our sons. The point I make is that as a family we have twelve separate bank or building society accounts amongst us. If we were the gang and had eight hundred thousand pounds of laundered money to salt away, we’d distribute it amongst these accounts, a little bit at a time over three years. We wouldn’t draw suspicion on ourselves, just make the branch managers happy men or women.’

  ‘I see your point. So, months prior to the abduction the gang of three, possibly four, opened as many bank or building society accounts as they could in their own names.’

  ‘It’s a way of doing it. So is putting it in a Swiss bank in a single obvious lump sum, but I don’t think they did that. Apart from the week they clearly enjoyed on the South Coast, they seemed to be locally orientated.’

  ‘And with no contact with the underworld, as you’ve pointed out. Yes, I can see that distributing what change they had out of the original million into various accounts would make sense.’

  ‘We were talking about this at the time, and one of the team who has since retired—guy called Petty, Alisdair Petty, nice fella—he picked up the Yellow Pages for the Edinburgh area and he counted in excess of thirty separate
financial institutions of the type that a member of the public can walk in off the street, more or less, and open an account. Building societies tend to be easier to open an account with than a bank, banks require written references, but that would not be a problem. If push had come to shove they could have written each other references, I dare say. But I remember we took thirty as a round figure, and working on the assumption of three gang members…’

  ‘Ninety separate accounts.’

  ‘Right. With, we assume, eight hundred thousand pounds among them…’

  Donoghue did some rapid mental arithmetic. ‘That’s about twenty-five thousand plus in each account, probably a bit more. Yes, a bit more, maybe nearer twenty-seven thousand.’

  ‘A figure in that region, but also remember that those accounts would have inflated by that amount over a period of three years. It wouldn’t really have been noticed as would a single large deposit.’

  ‘That’s the way to do it, if you have to do it.’

  ‘I confess, I have felt awkward about this case. It’s the one I want to crack. What do you think? I mean off the record. Can I live in hope?’

  ‘Tom…’ Donoghue shook his head. ‘Don’t ask me that. The last thing I want to do is build up your hopes. All I can say, as I said, is that two days ago a burnt-out ned was found with his brains blown out and the belongings in his bedroom in his mother’s flat included newspaper cuttings about “Annie” Oakley’s abduction and a map on which was circled a building. It all may be connected. It all may not.’

  ‘But you’ll keep me informed?’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’

  Tom Stamp escorted Donoghue not just to the uniform bar of Fettes Avenue Police Headquarters, but walked outside the door with him. The two men stood side by side. Donoghue took the gold hunter from his waistcoat pocket. ‘Midday,’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Still has a one p.m. feel to it, doesn’t it? Confess it takes my body a few days to adjust each time the clocks change, no matter what direction.’

  ‘Aye.’ Donoghue repocketed his watch. ‘It’ll seem late for the signal gun from the castle right enough. Confess I haven’t heard the one o’clock gun for weeks.’

  ‘You in a hurry to dash back to Glasgow?’ Tom Stamp turned to Donoghue.

  Donoghue paused. ‘No…not especially.’

  ‘I have lunch at midday. A pub ten minutes from here, excellent menu, generous portions, reasonable prices, they’ve just started doing bar meals so they’re loss-leading at the moment to drum up a regular clientele…if you’d care to join me?’

  ‘Love to.’

  Tom Stamp gave a single vigorous nod of his head. ‘I’ll nip back and get my jacket.’

  Montgomerie woke at ten a.m. He enjoyed back shifts because of the late start to the day they allowed, without actually turning night into day as the run of night shifts always seemed to demand. The night shifts really were disorientating for Montgomerie, the difficulty of staying awake for that last hour from five to six a.m., difficult for all officers, was for him particularly difficult, when it was compounded by the inevitable experience of going to bed and waking up again in the same day. There was always something he found particularly unnatural about that experience, and something deeply and fundamentally right and proper about waking up, refreshed, with each new day. But the back shifts, 14.00 hours to 22.00 hours, or when the job finished, were tolerable, and later the slumbering in a half sleep, listening to the rush hour thunder down Highburgh Road and knowing that he needn’t be part of it, was, he thought, passing acceptable. But going to his bed and then leaving it again on the same day never ceased to feel strange to him.

  He rolled from under the duvet and showered as cold as he could tolerate it and then allowed himself a blast of warm water before stepping out and towelling off. He wrapped himself in his blue dressing gown and walked into his kitchen and sat on a pine bench at the pine table, looking out on to the swing park as he savoured his first coffee of the morning. First coffee, first nail in his smoking days, first drink of a session. Always the best. His attention was drawn to two boys in the swing park, clearly dogging school. They sat on the swings, side by side, smoking cigarettes with manly and accustomed mannerisms. Then one took a packet of crisps and opened them and tipped the contents on the floor. Then he took a tube from his pocket and squirted a substance into the packet. He then put the packet to his face so that it covered his mouth and nose and began to inhale and exhale causing the bag to inflate and deflate, inflate and deflate. Then the boy handed the bag to his mate as he stood up and staggered around the swing park, laughing, swaying, flailing his arms. The second boy also began to inhale the fumes in the bag and he too soon joined his friend, laughing, turning in circles, staggering in the swing park, Highburgh Road on one side, four-storey tenements on the other three sides, at ten a.m. Montgomerie thought them both to be about twelve years of age. But that’s the way the city’s going, he felt. Once you never saw glue-sniffers, just came across their detritus, rock-hard, screwed-up crisp packets on waste ground, now they do it after breakfast in swing parks. It’s also become a rare sight to see smackheads shooting up on street corners: once you never saw it at all. He stood and reached for the telephone where it hung on the wall and reported the incident in the swing park to Partick Marine. It’s in their patch, they can send the cops. It then occurred to him that in the 1930s in this city, children and adults alike were escaping by passing coal gas through milk, then drinking the milk, so perhaps nothing is changing after all. Glasgow, like every major city, has its underbelly, always had, always will have. Magnificent place though it be. Live street theatre was Montgomerie’s job. He cared not to see it from his window over his breakfast and so he carried the mug of coffee to his living room, padding across the polished, varnished floorboards, on which lay a dead sheep for a rug, and sank into the futon.

  His doorbell rang.

  He left the living room and walked down his hall to the heavy wooden door, turned the key in the mortise and casually opened the door. Wide.

  Their eyes met instantly. She wore the brown-and-yellow-striped rugby shirt. He had once told her that young women in rugby shirts did something for him, speaking as they did of athleticism and health and energy and all things physical. Faded jeans and trainers completed the picture. A dark-blue fleece jacket lay atop a holdall at her side on the concrete landing. In her left hand she held a bottle of white wine. She held up the bottle. ‘I know it’s a bit early for this, but it needs chilling.’ Montgomerie remained silent.

  ‘I’ve come back.’

  ‘So I see.’

  ‘Well, are you going to invite me in? Or have I been replaced? I mean, ten days is more than ample time for you to find a replacement, big Mai, superstud.’

  Montgomerie smiled. ‘No.’ he said. ‘No, you haven’t been replaced.’ He stood to one side. She, blonde and blue-eyed, picked up her bag and walked across his threshold.

  Richard King awoke refreshed at 9.00 a.m. He lay in bed in this house in Bishopbriggs. He had lain awake enjoying the leisurely start to his day which he, like Montgomerie and other officers, had found to be one of the compensations of shift work. He had been awake for ten minutes when Rosemary glided into the room—shoulder-length hair, a long skirt in pastel shades—and placed a steaming mug of tea on the bedside cabinet. They smiled at each other and she left the room, hardly making a sound. King propped himself up in bed and sipped the tea. He remained in bed until he had drained the mug and then rolled out from under the duvet and climbed into his dressing gown. He walked to the bay window of the bedroom and pondered Bishopbriggs on an October morning. Neat semi-detached houses, each with a front garden and a back garden and a drive alongside the house leading to a garage, a small pocket of English-style suburbia in a city of tenements and closes, and gushets and middens. He turned from the window and went into the bathroom and drew a long bath, enjoying the steam as much as the water.

  Later, downstairs in the kitchen, he saw Rosemary glancing a
t the lengths of wood in that quiet Quaker way of hers. The wood stood against the wall where he had placed them upon his return from the DIY store as he murmured something about putting up the shelves ‘later’. That had been during the previous November. He padded past her and picked up a length of wood and ran his eye along it, held it up at various heights on the wall where Rosemary had requested her shelves and then, unable to resist the gargling, gurgling squeal being made by Iain, put the length of wood back against the wall and rolled around the floor making eye contact and enjoying quality time with his son.

  The message was in Donoghue’s pigeonhole when he returned to P Division Police Station after a relaxed lunch with Tom Stamp in Edinburgh. (Having phoned their respective wives, the ‘ had arranged that on the Sunday after next, Mr and Mrs Donoghue and their children would “be at home for lunch to Mr and Mrs Stamp and their children; twelve-thirty for one.) Dr Jean Kay from the Forensic Science Laboratory in Pitt Street phoned at 11.00 a.m. Could he phone her back? Once in his office, pipe glowing and smouldering, he did so.

  ‘We were lucky with the carpet, Inspector.’ Jean Kay spoke with a certain precision of the type Donoghue often associated with schoolteachers. ‘The diameter is unusual, slightly thinner than that adopted by major manufacturers of carpet fibres. We took a single fibre, as agreed, and melted it by placing it on a hot surface

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It melted at two hundred and twenty-five degrees centigrade. That means it’s a specific type of nylon known as “sixty-six”.’

  A pause.

  ‘And that’s it?’ Donoghue couldn’t help a note of surprise, if not indignation, creep into his voice.

  ‘That’s quite a lot, Inspector,’ Jean Kay replied huffily. ‘If you did but know how rare “sixty-six” is as a nylon, how rarely it is used in the manufacture of carpets, and how possibly rarer is the sort of blood-red dye clearly used in this case, especially as the strands have a subordinate colour, another lighter shade of red. You need to trace the manufacturer. I’ll fax my report as soon as it is typed up.’ Then she hung up and Donoghue was left with a phone against his ear which made an angry purring sound.