The Man with No Face

by Peter Turnbull

  Montgomerie had it easy that day. Very easy. He drove out to Busby with a police patrol vehicle in which two uniformed officers, one male, one female, followed him. He drove to Muckhart Avenue and to the house of Mooney. The house itself proved to be well set, stone built, well-tended gardens, he thought, he with a ‘garden’ which comprised a money plant in his kitchen. Before he knocked on the door he knew that there would be no one at home. An empty house is not just silent with no discernible movement, it also has a sense of emptiness. Montgomerie, followed by the two uniformed officers, crunched up the gravel drive and rang the doorbell, which made a loud but conventional ‘ding-dong’, echoing deeply within the villa. He turned and smiled at the two constables. ‘This one’s a bum steer.’ He turned and rang the bell again for good measure, and then turned and retraced his steps to the car. Such ‘visits’ suited him: he would return to P Division Police Station and record his entry into the file: 09.15, attended house of Mooney. No response to loud ringing of doorbell The uniformed officers left the locus to attend to normal policing and Montgomerie drove back to the city of Glasgow. He pondered the week. He pondered that, when an undergraduate at Edinburgh, he well recalled seeing ‘Annie’ Oakley disporting herself up and down Princes Street as if without a care, yet the terror of abduction and certain murder was just weeks, if not days, away. He pondered that he may well have been one of the last people to see her alive, yet he was present when the final film of unconsolidated soil was scraped from her grinning skull. Put that one in your box of coincidences. He pondered the pleasant drive down to the Southern Uplands to Traquair Brae Open Prison, the sights glimpsed from his car window, the tall, thin castle by a river, the large field, the two galloping horses in an autumn landscape. He pondered Jennifer returning. Something there, he thought, something really there. He thought perhaps that Richard King and Fabian Donoghue and others who seemed to enjoy settled marriages may have something after all. He had noticed it, a sense of contentment and a slightly fuller look about the face which comes over a man when he settles with a good woman. He was twenty-seven. High time really. High time.

  In Edinburgh. In a house in Barnton Avenue a man and a woman sat and spoke with a priest. When the priest had left the house the man went round the house and opened curtains that had not been opened for eight years. In one room at the rear of the house he and his wife stood arm in arm, pondering their garden.

  The man said, ‘We really must do something about that garden.’

  The woman said ‘Aye…we’ll make a start as soon as she’s laid to rest.’

  Richard King too had an easy time of it. He too attended a house in the company of two uniformed officers. He went to the house of Carberrie, Balcarres Avenue, G12. It was a new-build bungalow. It had a wrought-iron knocker, old of style but modern of manufacture, and very fashionable. He rapped it twice. He brought forth the response of a figure seen through the opaque glass of the front door bustling down the corridor as if fuming with anger, ready to give a row to whoever was banging on her front door at the unearthly hour of 09.15. The door was flung wide and Mary Carberrie revealed herself to be a squat, overweight woman who had squeezed into a dressing gown about three sizes too small, guessed King, whose faded red hair was everywhere and who paled when she saw the uniformed officers standing behind King. Behind her in the living room, King glimpsed a swathe of blue and as he did so he smelled the unmistakable smell of newly laid carpet. ‘Mary Carberrie?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We’d like you to accompany us to the police station. We have to question you about the murder of Ronald Grenn earlier this week.’

  Mary Carberrie’s jaw dropped, revealing a set of blackened, decaying teeth. ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘Didn’t really,’ King spoke softly. ‘Not until you said that. But you’re now under arrest.’

  Ray Sussock and Tony Abernethy also went to Busby, to the house of Westwater on Honeycomb Drive.

  The house was a tall, three-storey building of stone which stood in its own grounds and was clearly older than the suburban development which surrounded it. An ancient hunting lodge, thought Sussock, fighting sleep. Abernethy, alert and fresh after a night’s rest, saw the date 1740 AD carved in stone above the door and was awed that the building predated the 1745 Rebellion, Culloden and the flight of the Young Pretender to Skye and to the protection of Flora MacDonald. It was stone which predated the legend and the myth of the romance, because there was little romance about starving, shivering Scotsmen being shredded by English grape and run through with English steel. But here was this house, built as a house, used as a house during the period of the Peninsular War and the Napoleonic Wars, the American Wars of 1776 and 1812, the great wars of the twentieth century, through the fight against disease, the development of manned flight, the conquest of space…Sussock’s sharp rap of the doorbell brought Abernethy’s mind sharply back to the matter in hand. As did the yellow Jaguar parked in front of the house.

  The door opened silently, swinging smoothly on huge hinges. A woman stood on the threshold. She had dark hair and would, thought Sussock, have been attractive in her youth. She wore a long skirt and a blouse and a cardigan. She looked solemnly at the officers and slowly nodded her head.

  ‘Police,’ said Sussock.

  ‘I know,’ she said, spoken softly with only the faintest trace of a Scottish accent. ‘I’ve been expecting you. Tell you the truth, I’m really not sorry you’ve come. I’m Margaret Mooney.’

  The officers relaxed. This would not perhaps be so difficult. ‘Is Mr Westwater in? We need to talk to both yourself and him.’

  ‘Please step this way.’

  Abernethy and Sussock followed the woman into the gloom of the hallway and paused while she shut the heavy old door. She took the officers into a drawing room, expansive, thought the two men, but oddly low, with a heavily beamed ceiling and small windows. *A log fire crackled in the grate and finished the scene. A man sat in a large, high-backed fire chair by the fire. He seemed tall and thin with a craggy face. He looked silently at the officer.

  ‘Mr Westwater?’

  ‘Yes.’ He had stubble on his chin.

  ‘Police.’

  ‘Yes?’ His eyes were bleary.

  ‘We’d like you to accompany us to the police station in connection with the murder of Ronald Grenn four days ago.’

  ‘I see.’ But he made no move to stand. He had a soft, resigned voice.

  Margaret Mooney walked silently across the floor and opened a drinks cabinet. ‘Would you gentlemen care for a drink? Early, I know, but the circumstances are extenuating.’ She poured herself a generous Scotch, swallowed it in one and then poured two more glasses, one of exceptional generosity, in the eye of Sussock, which she handed to Westwater. Abernethy, watching closely, saw an eye contact between them, a knowing look. Then she turned to Sussock and Abernethy. ‘Can I offer you gentlemen a drink?’ she repeated.

  ‘No, thank you. We would like you to accompany us this instant.’

  ‘It’s the price of cooperation.’ Margaret Mooney sank on to a leather-covered settee. ‘Neither myself or Gary or Mary Carberrie will be having much of this where we’re going. We won’t wriggle out of it. So you can allow the condemned a last drink, even at’—she glanced at the clock above the fire—‘nine-fifteen in the forenoon.’

  Westwater glared at her.

  She held his glare and said, ‘It’s over, Gary, that’s why I gave you the drink, such a large one. It’s over.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes.’ He drank the whisky. ‘Yes…yes. Yes, it is.’

  ‘So, do you want to know the story?’ Margaret Mooney smiled at the officers. ‘Do take a seat.’

  ‘We’d rather stand. And we’ll do all the talking at the police station.’

  Westwater swallowed the whisky in deep draughts.

  ‘I’d like to tell you.’ She reached for a cigarette.

  Westwater stood. ‘I have to use the bathroom.’ He swayed towards the door.


  ‘Sarge’—Abernethy turned to Sussock—‘we shouldn’t…’

  Sussock closed his eyes and opened them. He shook his head. ‘He won’t be going anywhere.’

  ‘It’s not just that…’

  But Sussock shook his head. Abernethy fell silent.

  ‘So where do we start?’ Margaret Mooney smiled. She lit the cigarette.

  ‘At the police station,’ growled Sussock, who felt the thin line go across his eyes as he always did when tired.

  ‘Do you want to know only about Ronnie, poor, dear Ronnie, or shall we tell you about other things too?’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Insurance fraud, kidnap. How about things like that? The ones we got right, the ones we got wrong?’

  Sussock gasped ‘There’s more…?’

  ‘Than?’ Margaret Mooney drew deeply on the cigarette. ‘More than what?’

  ‘Sarge…’ Abernethy appealed to Sussock. ‘The guy, one of us had better

  ‘No. Stay here. I want a witness for this. All right, we know about “Annie” Oakley, we know about the Bath Street insurance job. So what else is there?’

  ‘It was Gary’s idea. The whole lot. It started…oh, ten years ago. The guy called Oakley came to see Gary about insurance for his business, garages here and there all under different names so they look like one-off family-run businesses, but in fact they were part of a big corporation. Gary realized how wealthy Oakley was, and then he found out he doted on his daughter, the original spoiled little rich kid. Eighteen years old and she had everything she wanted, I mean, money no object. It was Gary’s idea. Right from the beginning. His brain work. We abduct the girl, ransom her for a million, which we did, bundled her into a van we’d parked up in her parents’ garden. If you ever see the size of the garden, you’d know how we did it. It wasn’t a garden, it was the grounds of a palace. Anyway, we did it, took her to a cottage Gary had found in Kilsyth and kept her there, in a cupboard. It was Mary that came up with Ronnie Grenn. I don’t know where she found him, but he doted on her. We put him in charge of Ann Oakley in the cottage, but we laid it on the line to him, no funny business. Well, Mary laid it on the line. He did what Mary told him. I mean, you should have seen it, when Mary Carberrie yelled “froggie”, Ron Grenn would hop-hoppity-hop round the room.’

  ‘Kind of you to ensure that she wasn’t molested, since you murdered her anyway.’

  Margaret Mooney paused. ‘Gary did that. He didn’t tell us he was going to do that but he’d been right so far, the way he got the money delivered so it couldn’t be kept under surveillance…even if we had to stumble through a railway tunnel for the best part of half an hour. That was a close-run thing, all the police had to do was seal the tunnel, have men at either end and they would have had us cold but they didn’t. Gary said that that was a chance we had to take. He’d planned it that the police had been stretched so thinly, that if they had officers available at all they probably only had enough to watch the area where the money had been thrown from the train, but even there they could only arrive after it had been thrown. There was a just sufficient time window to pick up the bags and hot-foot it into the tunnel and hope that they didn’t seal the tunnel. That was the plan and it worked. So when he shot the girl…we didn’t go for that but by then it was too late. But he’d planned that all along, I think, he’d told Mary to tell Ronnie to dig a deep hole in the bottom of the garden and burn refuse in it. The hole was needlessly deep for refuse.’

  ‘We know now what it was for.’

  ‘Aye…’ She took a deep drag on the nail. ‘So we laundered the money. Again, that was Gary’s idea, it was tedious but foolproof. He kept the ransom money in a locked filing cabinet in his office at the insurance company. He gave it to us in batches of four hundred pounds. We laundered it by…’

  ‘We know how you laundered it. We worked that out.’

  ‘All those newspapers and magazines and cigarettes. Mind you, I read the glossies and smoked the fags. So we got something in return for the tedium.’

  ‘Sarge . . .’

  ‘No.’

  Then we decided to use the money for an insurance scam. Antique furniture and jewellery, we’d insure it in Mary’s name with Gary’s small insurance company. He’d force the pay-out but we’d only be burning rubbish anyway, take the valuable stuff out and trickle it on to the market, so we’d get the money for the pay-out, we’d sell the gems and the good furniture, our one million pounds became four. Mind you, a bit better police work at the time of the insurance claim and we could have lost everything.’

  Beside him Abernethy felt Sussock jolt, as if struck by a lance.

  ‘But’—Margaret Mooney raised her glass—‘we were very lucky. We lucked in at the tunnel, we lucked in at the insurance scam. We’ve still got a lot of good furniture in a lock-up in Barrhead. I’ll give you the address.’

  ‘Now you’ve lucked out.’

  ‘Thanks to Carberrie. I knew greed would be the end of her. We got Ronnie Grenn to agree to be implicated in the burglary of the antique furniture shop and let it be claimed that he set fire to it to cover his tracks. We said we’d see him all right when he came out. He was scared. He was in awe of Mary Carberrie and he was scared, he was a petty ned who was in too deep and he just wanted to go straight. We agreed to give him fifty thousand pounds in exchange for his cooperation.’

  ‘Generous of you.’

  ‘Fifty thousand pounds wouldn’t keep me for a year, but it would keep Ronnie Grenn in clover for the rest of his life. So he cooperated. Mary visited him in the slammer, just to tell him the plan was still on, “Keep eating your porridge like a good boy and you’ll collect.”’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He was released, called on the only woman he’d ever loved and, far from keeping her promise, she laughed at him, told him she’d changed her mind, so she admitted to us, told him he wasn’t to collect a penny. He threatened to go to the law, and so Carberrie, who fails to see beyond the end of her nose, did the only thing she thought fit and picked up a gun, which she keeps in defiance of the law and gun-club regulations, and sent him to meet his Maker. Then she called Gary and me in a panic and we in a panic carried his body out of her house on to an area of open space and…’

  ‘And we stand here.’

  ‘And you stand here.’ She poured another glass of whisky.

  That’s sufficient, Mrs Mooney, we’d like you to make a statement to that effect and more.’

  ‘More?’

  ‘You indicated other crimes?’

  ‘Did I? Greed was our crime, greed was our motivation and greed was our undoing. If Carberrie had only given him his fifty thousand all this would never have come out. And you would be none the wiser.’

  ‘So there are no other crimes?’

  ‘Perhaps. I’ll not be talking about them if there are.’ She drained her glass. ‘Well, thank you for listening to me. I should think Gary’s finished in the bathroom now.’

  ‘Finish— What do you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I should think he’s cut his throat.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Donoghue, it’s not a mess, it’s a complete disaster. What is it?’

  ‘It’s a complete disaster, sir.’

  ‘And you of all people…what have we got? We’ve got the Carberrie woman pacing up and down her cage screaming her rights and convincing herself of her whiter-than-the-driven-snow innocence, despite what she said to Richard King; we’ve got the Mooney woman sleeping off a lot of alcohol, we’ve got a verbal confession from her which she could have made before a hundred officers and it still wouldn’t be admissible because she was in the drink when she made it and she wasn’t cautioned. We can link the carpet fibre on Ron Grenn’s skull to the Carberrie house only by an invoice from the retail outlet, we can link Carberrie to Ron Grenn because she visited him once in prison, we can link Carberrie and Mooney and Westwater as a social group, we can link Westwater to the insurance scam through his company…It’s enough, just enough for the Fisca
l to proceed, I’ve known the Fiscal to proceed with less, but it’s still not the neat package we’d have had if you had pulled Westwater, he’s the prime mover. Why did you send Ray Sussock? He was tired, he needed his rest, if you’re tired you’re less strong, you don’t have the energy to say no to people…’

  ‘I felt he needed it, sir.’ Donoghue stood in front of Findlater’s desk.

  ‘He needed it like a hole in the head. And you of all people…your internal reports always have referred to your “healthy caution”, “never moving forward unless you’re sure of your footing”, “knowing the value of taking your time”, because of that observed behaviour you’re earmarked for greater things in the police force and now we find that those still waters of caution contain an impetuous spirit which darts about uncontrollably from time to time.’ Findlater paused. ‘Probably serves to make you human.’

  ‘I wouldn’t have sent him out at all if you hadn’t done what you did, sir.’

  ‘And what was that?’ Findlater’s door was open. Both men raised their voices. Both men were aware and unconcerned that their row was echoing down the CID corridor, and courtesy of gossip and scuttlebutt, far beyond, into all corners of the building. Eventually.

  ‘I saw him come out of your office this morning…doing what you did was spiteful and unfair, he didn’t need to be kept back so you could burn his ear about fouling up the Bath Street fire investigation four years ago. He didn’t need to go into his retirement with that, sir!’

  ‘So you sent him out to recover the ground, as it were?’

  ‘Frankly, yes, sir! Somebody had to give him something to make him feel good about himself. He hasn’t long to go, he has to go into retirement on a positive note.’

  Findlater buried his head in his hands then looked up at Donoghue. ‘So not only do you act with the overzealous impulsive stupidity that we see in eighteen-year-old cadets, but you compound the felony by acting on an assumption. You, with your rank, your experience, you shouldering the responsibility that you shoulder…Fabian, what’s happening, are you losing it?’