‘I don’t understand.’ A slow dread began to dawn on Donoghue.
‘You would if you’d have come to me picking a fight. I don’t mind people doing that if it prevents catastrophes outside. Fabian, watch my lips…I didn’t keep him back from going home on time, he was here anyway when I arrived, working over, his shift was running over…“so I asked him to pop into my office so I could talk to him about the Bath Street fire, to tell him not to worry about it, not to take the guilt of lack of thoroughness about it into his retirement. All right, he could have wrapped it up then, but no harm was done because we’re wrapping it up now and because the felons didn’t commit any further crimes of a similar nature, that we know of, and that he might have prevented. I said that to him as one soon-to-retire officer to another.’
Fabian Donoghue bent forward as if kicked in the stomach by a mule. ‘I didn’t know…’
‘And you also didn’t know that he was working late because he’d spent the shift sorting a double murder in Riddrie. Man stabbed his girlfriend or wife or whatever when he found her in bed with another guy. Stabbed the guy too, ordinary kitchen knife, but it is Scotland’s number one murder weapon and it was put to good effect in an apartment in Gala Street about four o’clock this morning. We’ve got the guy. He didn’t get far, Ray Sussock saw to that. He made a better job of wrapping up his investigation than you did of yours…’
‘He…he didn’t say.’
‘Why should he? He was probably too tired to protest, it can get you like that. If you remember the days when you worked shifts, you’ll recall the feeling of succumbing to pressure that you would otherwise withstand. And he felt a loyalty to you, he knew that you were short-handed, he may have been receptive to your wanting to do him a favour and didn’t want to throw your good intentions in your face, but whatever, he was sent to the house of Westwater with a relatively inexperienced CID officer who looked to him for leadership and he hadn’t the energy to control the house, and what happened, happened.’
‘I feel sick.’
‘And well you might. God knows what Ray Sussock is feeling. If one of us has given him something he’ll have to live with in his retirement, it’s not me.’
Three weeks later Mary Carberrie occupied a cell in Cornton Vale, having been charged with kidnap, extortion, conspiracy to murder in respect of Ann ‘Annie’ Oakley and the actual murder of Ronald Grenn. On a daily basis she threw her food about and screamed her innocence. In an adjacent cell Margaret Mooney spent her days reading romance novels, having instructed her solicitor to plea-bargain with the office of the Procurator Fiscal. She would, she said, offer a full and complete confession in which she would fully implicate Mary Carberrie and the deceased Gary Westwater in the abduction and murder of ‘Annie’ Oakley, and the Bath Street fire insurance fraud and Mary Carberrie in the murder of Ronald Grenn. She would also fully cooperate with the efforts to recover what illegally obtained monies could be recovered.
In return she requested reduced charges and that mention be made of her cooperation in her pre-sentence report. Privately, with some confidence, and with good behaviour, she expected to walk in five years.
Three weeks later Fabian Donoghue called at the offices of the Glasgow and Trossachs Insurance Company. He wanted to interview Mr Pulleyne, just to clarify one or two details for the report he was to send to the Procurator Fiscal. He found the executives excessively drunk in the boardroom. Being overcommitted and underfunded, the company had gone into receivership, the directors were financially ruined. They had thought to a man that the only thing that they could do was to get very, very drunk. The receptionist, whom Donoghue found to be a self-possessed young woman, who was clearly capable of answering a torrent of abusive phone calls whilst simultaneously scanning the situations vacant pages of the Glasgow Herald, advised Donoghue that ‘something had happened’ to Mr Pulleyne. So far as she heard, he had been unable to believe that his half-brother could betray the company like he had done and he had disappeared. He was found wandering along the side of the motorway. He was now in Gartloch Hospital. She believed the diagnosis to be severe clinical depression.
Three weeks later there was still a distance between Donoghue and Ray Sussock, despite a four-cornered full and frank discussion about the matter among Donoghue, Sussock, Abernethy and Findlater, during which Donoghue offered his full and unreserved apology. Three weeks later Donoghue intuitively knew that the distance between himself and Ray Sussock would never properly be bridged. Something had been lost.
The Man with No Face Page 26
