The Man with No Face

by Peter Turnbull

  Montgomerie laughed.

  ‘I kid you not, this soccer team was doing just that. The other purchase was a lady called Carberrie, the manager remembered her because she said the colour would match her hair. The rest of the batch they sent back to the factory. It was such a loud colour that fortunately for them, they’d accepted it on a sale-or-return basis.’

  ‘Carberrie. Now that is a name that crops up from time to time.’

  ‘It’s more than that now. Fibre from this carpet was found upon the person of the deceased. It means Ronnie Grenn was shot in the changing rooms at Muirhead Athletic or Mary Carberrie’s front room.’

  ‘Fabian will be impressed. You may even score a point of approval, not easily given.’

  Abernethy couldn’t fail to notice the sourness and cynicism underlying Montgomerie’s voice, but he didn’t comment. Instead he asked Montgomerie if he knew where Fabian Donoghue was and Montgomerie, settling in his chair, told him about Oak Cottage and the garden and the hole in the ground at the bottom of the garden and what lay therein.

  ‘He won’t be back for a wee while then?’

  ‘If at all today. He’ll be going with the body to the GRI, representing the police at the postmortem. Something he usually delegates but he’ll be doing this himself.’

  ‘Shall we pull Mary Carberrie?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’ve got grounds enough, her name keeps cropping up…her address, it’s just round the corner from where the body was found…she visited the deceased in prison…what more do you want? I mean, can’t see a weedy little guy like Ronnie Grenn setting foot inside a soccer club’s changing area, so Athletico Muirhead is out of the game.’

  ‘No.’ Montgomerie’s jaw set hard. ‘I like your enthusiasm, but no. No, no, no, no. Not yet. We don’t do anything without clearing it with Fabian. That’s the rule. I mean, you’re still new, Tony, control your zeal.’

  ‘Softly, softly catchee monkey, is it?’

  ‘In a word, yes. That’s how Fabian works. He moves in on his prey by stalking in ever-decreasing circles, never moving until he’s sure of his footing. Before they know it, he’s standing over them licking his paws. He knows the value of taking his time.’

  ‘I suppose…’ Abernethy cleaned the end of his ballpoint.

  ‘It’s not like she’s a multiple murderer that could strike at any time, or has a kidnap victim that puts us under time pressure

  ‘Now you’re thinking like a seasoned cop. I know what it’s like…when I was new in CID I found the waiting game a bogey too, but then I came to see the sense in it. So where does Mary Carberrie live?’

  ‘Balcarres Avenue. That’s less than a hop and a skip from where the body was found, like I said.’

  That’s true enough. The other point is that we know other people are involved. If you read the file, three people were seen dumping the body, you remember some confusion over time because the clocks went back an hour this week…and Fabian’s recording indicates the kidnap of “Annie” Oakley was thought by the Lothian boys to have a feel of three culprits about it. So it’s the Carberrie female and two sidekicks. If we pull Carberrie, we could tip the others off. With money on this scale you could be talking false passports and overseas accounts. So we don’t want to do that.’

  ‘Softly, softly.’

  ‘Scots Guards.’

  ‘Good enough.’ King smiled.

  ‘Fifteen years with the colours, left as a colour sergeant. That was ten years ago, this club had just opened then. They wanted a steward who could run things and also knew a little about guns. I applied, they must have thought I fitted the bill.’

  ‘You like guns?’

  ‘I respect them. There’s a difference, and you’ve actually put your finger on it. Club members have respect for guns. They’ll tell you a gun is as safe as the person who’s holding it, they’ll tell you that more people are killed by cars in a month than are killed in a year by handguns. They’ll tell you that if some bampot with murder on his mind can’t get hold of a gun he’ll use something else.’

  ‘And you, what do you say? Off the record.’

  ‘I’ve got to work here, Mr King.’

  ‘Off the record. For my interest only.’

  ‘I don’t like civilians having hold of guns. Allow the farmer his shotgun, but that’s it, that’s as far as it goes.

  After that, only the military and the special section of the police Tactical Firearms Unit.’

  That’s what it’s called? Well, only them. You know, there’s less control of live rounds in civilian gun clubs than in the army. Did you know that?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Not so much in total war, but in policing engagements like Northern Ireland, each squaddie has to record every round discharged, what location, what time, what direction. In this club, members buy live rounds on production of a certificate and bang them off here at the club, but who’s counting? Nobody. Britain hasn’t got a gun culture, yet, and the only reason for that is the continued level of responsible behaviour of gun enthusiasts. But there’s no built-in safeguard to protect the public, should the gun enthusiasts turn irresponsible overnight, not necessarily by shooting people but by allowing their guns and ammunition to fall into the wrong hands. Selling them for cash in the car park of a pub one night and reporting the firearm as stolen. The fact that they all say that they wouldn’t do that is no safeguard. Not in my book.’

  ‘Not in mine, either, Mr McGuire, not in mine either.’

  McGuire, erect even when seated, twirled his moustache and awaited the next question. Behind him on his office wall hung a print of Landseer’s ‘Monarch of the Glen’.

  ‘So,’ King brought the interview back in the tracks, ‘Westwater, Mooney and Carberrie

  ‘All three are members here, as you believed. Longstanding members. Joined at different times, but met each other here, and became a gang of three. I confess I don’t care for any of them but like finds like, as they say.’

  ‘Tell me about them.’

  ‘As a group or as individuals?’

  King resisted the urge to say ‘you choose’ because he felt that McGuire, having been drilled to unquestioning obedience in the Scots Guards, would be uncomfortable about making such a decision, that he would rather be told how to address the question. ‘As a group, then as individuals.’

  ‘Mr Westwater and Mrs Mooney are partners. They don’t live together, not according to the register of members, but they have “a thing” going. Mary Carberrie hangs on to them. I get the impression that she’s tolerated by them rather than being welcomed, if you see what I mean.’

  ‘I think I do. It ties in with what else has been said about Mary Carberrie. Not a woman who enjoys universal popularity, it would seem.’

  ‘Aye, well, that’s a mild way of putting it. You know, I could never work out the relationship between Margaret Mooney and Mary Carberrie.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well, they gossiped with each other something dreadful. But the things they’d say about each other, even to me who’s not supposed to socialize with the members. You see, it was like this, if you’d talk to Margaret Mooney you’d get the impression from her that Mary Carberrie was the lowest of all crawling things, and if you talked to Mary Carberrie you’d get the impression that Margaret Mooney was the lowest of all crawling things, yet if you were to catch sight of them when they were together you’d see them chatting away to each other like a couple of inseparable mates. It’s dangerous to be part of that, you know, so when Margaret Mooney came up to me in the refectory with a mug of coffee in her hand and sat down next to me and began complaining about someone who said something and said, “You know who I mean, don’t you?” I just hid behind my copy of the Glasgow Herald and then she shut up.’

  ‘Sensible of you.’

  ‘The only thing to do, Mr King. Play safe.’

  ‘I, the police, have yet to have the pleasure of meeting them. Over and above the fact that they’re coming a
cross as three deeply unpleasant individuals, Carberrie especially, what else explains their friendship, in your view?’

  ‘Money. They are three very greedy individuals, Mr King. Margaret Mooney and Mary Carberrie have a taste for female finery that I can’t see how they can afford, and Gary Westwater is always talking very loudly about money-making plans he’s got. They’re all “self-employed”, according to the registry.’

  ‘Which of course covers a multitude of sins.’

  ‘But they’re not very employed, self or otherwise. There are self-employed members who rarely get the time to come to the club, but Westwater, Mooney and Carberrie are near-daily visitors; Mary Carberrie in particular, though I confess, having said that, I haven’t seen any of them all week, not since last Friday, a week ago tomorrow. Been quite quiet,’ McGuire smiled. His eyes, King thought, had a sincerity about them, as if he were a man who was a ‘man’s man’, or a ‘good bloke’. ‘Aye, we all know when Mary Carberrie’s in the club, that voice, can’t talk without shouting, you know yon way. Confess I don’t think that I have ever met a woman who talked so much but said so little. And that she enjoys small-bore shooting…how appropriate.’

  ‘I cared little for him.’ Buchanan sat forward at his desk, grey suit, silk shirt. Like Pulleyne, King noted, he was also an ex-rugby player by the photograph on the wall behind him. He had a round face, small mouth, thin lips, white hair, pink eyes, verging on, but not quite, albino. King found him to have an aggressive manner, touchy, ready to explode at the slightest provocation; King found himself to be walking on glass. ‘I’m pleased he’s gone, left this company in a mess.’

  ‘His brother, half-brother, didn’t seem to think so.’

  ‘His brother, half-brother, is the reason why you’re in my office talking to me, not him. You want an honest measure of the man. Right?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘His brother, half-brother, has about him a naivety I find chilling, especially for a businessman. Because of Gary Westwater, we are now suffering from a surfeit of proposals. Which may sound a pleasant state of affairs, but we are underfunded, the premiums are too low and our proposal agreements are far too generous, in the clients’ favour, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t be a worried man. Ultimately the insurance industry is in the hands of the Almighty, and every company depends on not having to have all its customers registering claims at the same time. But even allowing for that, our premiums have been stupidly, criminally low, and our agreements, if we have to meet them, are so stupidly, criminally generous that we couldn’t meet ten per cent of our claims in full if we had to do so. What that idiot Westwater did, compounded by the lunacy of his stepbrother in settling the Bath Street claim, was to declare this company as a target for fraudulent claimants. A source of easy money. I bet you haven’t been told about all the claims’ we’ve been fielding in the last few years, have you?’

  ‘No…’

  ‘Well, that’s the other side of this coin that John Pulleyne is probably not so keen to talk about. Yes, we’ve had plenty of proposals, Mr King, but we’ve had plenty of claims too. You want money for a new motor, no problem, buy a wreck, overinsure it with this company then roll it off a cliff, and we’ll pay out. We won’t even investigate it. Such is our reputation.’

  ‘You’re angry.’

  ‘Oh, I’m pleased it shows. I just wish it would register with that idiot Pulleyne. All he sees is a halo around Westwater’s head and nothing else, all he says is, “We’ve got Gary to thank for all this,” and I say to myself, “Yes, I couldn’t agree more. We have got Gary to thank for all this.” We would disagree about what exactly “all this” is. To Pulleyne it’s coffers full of gold and silver, for me it’s a financial catastrophe waiting to happen. I can’t get out easily, I’m in too deep; as a director, my personal finances are tied up with the company. All I can try to do, me and the other directors, is to turn this ship around before it falls over the edge of the world. And it’s all down to that spineless, self-serving, womanizing careerist Westwater.’

  ‘What do you know about him?’

  ‘He pulled this company into a pit it’ll probably never get out of and then he got suddenly rich, him and his yellow Jaguar, and sold up and left. We were told that the police had been asking questions, do we assume…?’

  King held up his hand. ‘Sorry, as I said to Mr Pulleyne on Tuesday, you cannot assume anything.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Buchanan smiled. King found it hard to age him. Fifties, he thought. And that, he also thought, may well explain why the man was remaining with Glasgow and Trossachs Insurance Company, as much as does his personal financial stake in the organization; at his age he had little working-life time left to go elsewhere. Not in these days of downsizing of companies and voluntary downshifting of stressed-out executives moving from the city to the croft.

  ‘But it’s worth cooperating, perhaps. What do you know about his personal life?’

  ‘Large house in Busby. Has a thing about a woman, Margaret somebody, who still has traces of Rubenesque beauty, of whom I know little. He’s a bachelor, he and Margaret have a relationship but have not merged their houses. It apparently works a lot better if they live separately, but see each other frequently. She’s got money by her trappings but I don’t know where it comes from, but this is information that’s years out of date, you understand. I haven’t seen Westwater since he left the company.’

  ‘I appreciate that, Mr Buchanan, but the fact is that any information is good information.’

  ‘He has a strange friend, at least he had when I knew him, a woman, Mary somebody.’

  ‘Carberrie?’

  That’—Buchanan held up a finger—‘was the name. I confess I only met her the once and I do not want to repeat the experience. Odious creature, but she and Gary Westwater knew each other and I suspect may briefly have “known” each other in the biblical sense at some point in their personal histories. She had a house in the West End, a new-build bungalow, well appointed though a trifle garish, brilliant-red carpet in the living room.’

  ‘You don’t say?’

  ‘Oh, I do say, the memory of it still hurts my eyes. Gary Westwater and I were on our way back from a business meeting in Perth, my home town, incidentally, and on our return to Glasgow we detoured to the West End so he could drop off a parcel, he intended only to hand it over at the door but we were offered tea and accepted.’

  ‘And you encountered the red carpet?’

  ‘And also the knowing look between the Carberrie female and Westwater, which made me think that there had been something between them, and that there was still a spark, despite the fact that Margaret was on the scene by then. There was also a wee guy in the house who seemed to run around doing Mary Carberrie’s least bidding with a twinkle in his eye, though I felt that she was embarrassed by him.’

  ‘Do you remember his name?’

  ‘Short name, three letters, that sort of name, one syllable. Tom…Bill…’

  ‘Ron?’

  ‘Could be, he was making himself useful, answered the door, made the tea for us. Carberrie never left her seat and really only became animated when she tore open the parcel that Westwater had given her and the money came out.’

  ‘Money?’

  ‘Not a lot, pound coins, loose change, five- and one-pound notes…you know, I thought I felt Westwater stiffen with anger as she did that, as if she’d forgotten I was there and couldn’t wait to get her paws on the money. Then she tossed the bag to Ron the eager beaver, who trotted out of the room with it. Westwater said, “It’s all there, I counted it,” but there was tension in the room and the Carberrie woman looked uncomfortable. When we were driving away, Westwater said that was sub money for the gun club.’

  ‘Did you believe him?’

  ‘No. Darts teams in pubs pay their club subscriptions in notes and loose change. Gun enthusiasts pay their subscriptions by cheque. So I thought that there was something
that they didn’t want me to know about, but in itself it wasn’t criminally suspicious. It was a comparatively small amount of money, about one hundred and fifty quid, in the context of the people and setting, it’s not a large amount of the folding green stuff. But you know, there was something odd about his behaviour in Penh. It turned out that he had got the time of the meeting wrong, we were over an hour early and that wasn’t like him. Stickler for timekeeping, was Westwater. Anyway, he was keen to separate for an hour and rendezvous at the bank, where we were to see the manager, so we did. I walked around the streets, but Perth being such a small place, I saw Westwater scurrying about. I watched him, followed him for a wee while and I kid you not, if he went into one newsagent he went into six. Each time he came out of a newsagent’s he was carrying a newspaper and each time he walked out of the shop he walked straight to the nearest wastebin and tossed the paper in the bin and went off at a rate of knots, and dived in and then out of another newsagent’s and repeated the sketch. That was about six or seven years ago. Funny though, that behaviour.’

  ‘Probably not as funny as you think, Mr Buchanan.’ King stood. ‘Thanks for your time.’

  The body of Ann ‘Annie’ Oakley lay on the stainless-steel table in the pathology laboratory in the basement of the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. It lay on its side in a near-foetal position, the soil had been carefully scraped away, a gold bracelet had been removed from her wrist, as had a watch on the reverse of which, after it had been cleansed with industrial alcohol, was the clearly visible inscription, ‘To Ann, from her mother on her eighteenth birthday’.

  ‘I understand that you believe you know the identity of this lady?’ Reynolds addressed Donoghue, but did not take his eyes from the skull of the deceased as he slowly sifted through the hair, still identifiable as blonde.

  ‘We do, sir. “Annie” Oakley. You may recall she was abducted about eight years ago?’