Present Tense

by William McIntyre

  For most artists on the Blunt Instrument conveyor belt, their days in the sun lasted about as long as Frosty the Snowman’s summer holidays. Except for one: Glazed Over, a male duo even I’d heard of. Twin brothers, Greg and Tony Glass, had gone global thanks to Blunt Instrument’s marketing machine — that and the fact that, unlike Philip Thorn’s other protégés, the twins were actually talented, well able to write top-selling songs, sing and even play their own musical instruments. Their first two albums, Twintessential and Double-Glazed, had been chart-toppers across the world, and stadium tours sold out practically before they were announced. When suddenly the duo stopped recording, thousands of followers had gone into mourning, and they weren’t the only ones. Shares in Blunt Instrument plummeted and, with insufficient capital to cover new ventures, these days it merely ticked over on its share of Glazed Over royalty cheques. No wonder Thorn was exploring new avenues of business, not that I saw the airport at St Edzell Bay being much of a money-spinner.

  Thereafter most of the online information about Thorn fast-forwarded to his company’s recent bitter contractual dispute with Glazed Over. The boys, now men in their thirties, had written a musical based on their string of hits. Their plan was to take it to the West End and onto Broadway. Their problem was that when the Glass brothers had signed up with Blunt Instrument they’d been young, gifted and naive to a frightening extent. They didn’t own the songs they’d written, not even the performing rights. If they wanted to so much as sing in the shower, Blunt Instrument was due a major wedge of the soap. There would be no musical, not unless Philip Thorn called the shots and received the lion’s share.

  And so the brothers had decided they’d rather pack it all in than give the fruit of their labours to Thorn. The musical was shelved and the brothers took to the celebrity circuit, regulars on TV game shows and charity sporting events.

  It was all interesting enough, and yet it simply confirmed that Philip Thorn was hard-nosed. So were a lot of business people. I was standing facing one at that moment. I wanted a greater insight into the man’s character than how he dealt with employees.

  ‘Do you think he wants to do my client harm?’ I asked.

  Maggie frowned. ‘That’s a very strange question. I’m going to need caffeine before I can even think why you’d want to know that.’ She pressed a button on her phone console. ‘Coffee for two, Maria—’

  I coughed. ‘And...?’

  ‘And have cash-room draw up a banker’s draft to the account of Mr Robert Munro for three—’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Five thousand pounds.’

  We waited in silence until Maggie’s refreshment and my payment arrived on a silver tray.

  ‘Now,’ Maggie said, brain cells suitably revived by finest Arabica. ‘You were going to tell me where your client is.’ I noticed that while one hand held a china cup, the other rested firmly on the banker’s draft.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ I said, ‘but first of all I’d like to know if the reason Philip Thorn wants to learn the whereabouts of Billy Paris is because he wants to do him harm.’

  Maggie leaned back in her chair, took two or three sips of coffee and gave the question I’d posed a great deal of thought. ‘You know?’ she said, leaning forward to place the white china cup back on its saucer, ‘I honestly don’t care.’

  Unfortunately for me, I did care, if not sufficiently to reject a five thousand pounds finder’s fee. Billy Paris was my client and it was my job to care. Philip Thorn’s son had been killed in a helicopter crash. Billy, a man I felt sure was sufficiently skilled to arrange such an aviation disaster, had been at the scene at the time. Not only that, but he’d left his post shortly afterwards and was making himself even more scarce than usual. Now the police were looking for him. The sort of police officers who dealt with terrorism and matters of national security. If Philip Thorn was so keen to find Billy, I could think of only one reason: revenge for his son’s death. Was Philip Thorn the type of person who might arrange that? You didn’t spend years in the murky, drug-ridden world of popular music without making contacts with some seriously unpopular people.

  I looked down at the fingers still pinning the piece of paper to the hand-tooled, green leather surface of the giant desk and realised how much I also cared about money. ‘I’m meeting him at eleven o’clock.’ I thought I sensed the pressure start to ease on the banker’s draft.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Down at Stewart Street.’

  ‘Stewart Street? Why Stewart Street? Not Stewart Street—’

  ‘Police station? That’s right.’

  ‘Robbie, think.’ Maggie tapped the side of her head repeatedly. ‘The man Paris is no good to us in a police station. Philip Thorn offered me a fee to find him—’

  ‘And you have.’

  ‘Not if he’s in custody I haven’t.’

  ‘Yes you have.’ I couldn’t see what the big problem was. ‘You were asked to find him, you agreed to do so and now you have. There you are, Phil, your man’s down the nick, give me the cash. Contract offered, contract accepted, contract implemented.’

  Maggie’s head-tapping with one finger turned into a hair-tearing gesture with all ten. ‘How many days at law school did you miss, Robbie? If I tell Thorn he can find the wanted man in the nearest cop shop he’ll simply say it was the police who found him. Why pay me twent... ten thousand pounds for something which by then will be practically public knowledge?’

  ‘Well, if he’s not going to play by the rules...’

  ‘Rules?’ Maggie interrupted. ‘He’s Philip Thorn. He makes the rules!’

  ‘All right, all right. What am I supposed to do? Billy Paris is handing himself into Stewart Street in half an hour.’

  Maggie picked up the banker’s draft, tore it up into, I thought, unnecessarily small pieces and made a neat little pile of them on her desk. ‘Then you’d better stop him. Hadn’t you?’

  19

  If there was one thing a criminal defence lawyer could rely on it was the unreliability of his clientele when it came to time-keeping. It was amazing how prone your average accused person was to a diary malfunction. I spent a large portion of my court time apologising to Sheriffs for late arrivals. With reference to missed buses, faulty alarm clocks and mix-ups over dates, I would beg the men and women in the wigs and starched collars to recall failure-to-appear warrants and ask for cases to be heard though calling late.

  I hadn’t expected Billy Paris to be any more punctual. Just in case he’d booked an alarm call, I jumped in a taxi and charged the fare to Caldwell & Craig. By ten fifty-five I was on the concrete-slabbed terrace outside the police station, pacing up and down under the glass awning with the big ‘A Division Police Headquarters’ sign.

  I’d chosen to meet at Stewart Street Police Station because it was conveniently situated in the city centre, not far from the offices of Caldwell & Craig, and Billy Paris knew where it was, having visited there a few times previously, though on those occasions not under his own steam. Not only that, but, if Billy was a suspect, before he could be interviewed he would have to be formally arrested and go through the various statutory procedures. By law that had to take place at a police station.

  At ten past the hour I was looking up into the heavy stillness of a sky, thick with layers of dark clouds, when I heard the automatic glass doors behind me open and someone call my name. I turned to see Detective Inspector Christchurch in the doorway, his beard as ever a work of topiary.

  ‘Mr Munro? We’re ready when you are.’

  ‘Ready? Is he here?’

  ‘Arrived twenty minutes ago. We were beginning to wonder what had happened to you.’

  Five grand flashed before my eyes as Christchurch led me through a series of security doors to a small room, the walls of which had remained unsullied by fresh paint for many years. My client and the Bulldog sat waiting for us. There were CCTV cameras in the corners and a DVD recorder to the side of a scarred, plastic-coated table. The small room was hot a
nd stuffy. I took off my jacket and sat down opposite the police officers, joining Billy on a bolted down, metal chair that made the old wooden seat in my office seem like a lounger.

  If I were to have any chance of getting my hands on Sir Philip’s finder’s fee I had to get Billy out of there. The only chance of that happening was if he kept his mouth shut.

  ‘Let me take that,’ Christchurch said, relieving me of my suit jacket and carefully draping it over a spare bucket-seat in the corner of the room that was reserved for appropriate adults during the questioning of children. ‘All set?’ he asked the assembled company. ‘Good.’ And without further ado, the Bulldog pressed a button on the DVD recorder. ‘Although you are here on a voluntary basis, Mr Paris, it is still my duty to caution you that—’

  ‘Whoah,’ I said. ‘Voluntary? Who said anything about this being voluntary?’ The DI looked puzzled. I helped clarify. ‘When I arranged for Mr Paris to hand himself in, I assumed he would be arrested.’

  ‘Why would you assume that?’ Christchurch asked. ‘Mr Paris, as I was saying, I must caution you that you do not have to answer any questions, but if you do, your answers will be recorded and may be used in evidence. Understand?’

  ‘No, you understand,’ I said. ‘I may have been born in the morning, but it wasn’t this morning. I know what’s going on here. You question my client for ages, then when he gets fed up and wants to go home you inform him that he’s now being arrested, giving you a further twelve hours. I’d prefer it if you started the clock running now. Twelve hours of him saying no comment is long enough for me, thanks.’

  Christchurch shifted his gaze to my client, while the Bulldog silently fumed. The D.C. had clearly been put on his best behaviour. No more threats about my daughter. How long would that last? I didn’t think good-cop was a role he’d played before.

  ‘Is that correct, Mr Paris?’ Christchurch asked. ‘Is this to be a no comment interview?’

  Billy clasped his hands behind his head and reclined. It wasn’t possible to make yourself comfortable in metal seats the backs of which, like medieval torture devices, were tilted at the perfect angle to torment a sitter’s mid-thoracic vertebrae, but the big man looked like he was going to try. ‘Fire away,’ he said.

  And so, after the formalities of introducing each of us present in the room for the purposes of the recording, Christchurch did precisely that. ‘Did you deliberately cause to crash the helicopter carrying Jeremy Thorn and Madeleine Moreau on thirtieth November?’

  Some would have been surprised at the suddenness of such a question. Not me. Standard police interview technique dispensed with preamble, preferring to hit the suspect with a sledgehammer of an opening question. Wham! Did you murder him? Did you rape her? The supposed shock was intended to knock the interviewee off balance. I’d been at hundreds of such interviews. I’d seen a few suspects wobble. Billy failed to stifle a yawn.

  ‘No,’ Billy said, ‘I never.’

  ‘But you could have?’

  ‘I’ve just told you I never.’

  ‘I’ll rephrase the question,’ Christchurch said. ‘You’d have known how to go about it – if you’d wanted to?’

  Billy wasn’t going to answer that, was he?

  He was. ‘Not difficult. You can find everything you need to know on the Internet in about five minutes. Loosen a jack-screw in the tail rotor system. You’d need tools for that. Easiest way would be to interrupt the fuel link. Block the line someway or fill the tank with compressed air to fool the fuel gauge. Once the engine stops it’s possible to auto-rotate a distance and look somewhere soft for a hard landing, but basically a chopper glides like a brick.’

  ‘How would you do it?’

  ‘Don’t answer that,’ I said. Whether Billy was guilty or not, giving an answer from which special knowledge could later be inferred would make a defence to any charge that followed extremely difficult.

  Christchurch leaned forward. ‘Mr Munro, do I need to remind you that you are here to ensure fair play, not to interrupt?’

  ‘If my client is here voluntarily, I’ll interrupt if I think it’s in his best interests.’

  ‘Copper fragments,’ Billy said, while I locked eyes with Christchurch. ‘Put some in the air filter and they’ll liquefy enough to take out the Inconel fan blades, cause a chain reaction and destroy the engine. Either that,’ he laughed, ‘or an armour-piercing incendiary round from a point-fifty calibre BMG. One through the engine block would do the trick.’ He laughed. ‘But they’re not that easy to get hold of.’

  ‘Do you know someone by the name of Kirkton Perch?’ Christchurch asked.

  A question I wasn’t expecting. Kirkton Perch. An unusual enough name. Where did I know it from?

  ‘I do.’

  ‘How do you know him?’

  ‘I think you know the answer to that,’ Billy said, which didn’t help me much.

  ‘When was the last time you saw Mr Perch?’ Christchurch asked.

  Billy thought about that. ‘Three, four months ago. August I think. Could have been later. September maybe.’

  ‘Where did you meet him?’

  ‘Scotstoun Stadium.’

  ‘At a Glasgow Warriors’ game, is that right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You’re a rugby man?’ It had to be a rhetorical question. Christchurch might have been a DI, but even he couldn’t miss Billy’s squint nose and cauliflower ear. ‘Tell me what happened at Scotstoun.’

  Billy rubbed the back of his neck. ‘I don’t want to bring Group Captain Perch into this.’

  ‘Did he offer you a job?’

  Billy sighed. ‘We just happened to bump into each other and went for a pint after the game. I’d not seen him in years. Hardly recognised him.’

  The Bulldog had sat quietly long enough. ‘But you had bumped into each other before, hadn’t you? Your fist had previously bumped into his nose, hadn’t it?’

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘One minute you’re asking my client about a helicopter crash, the next you’re accusing him of assault.’

  ‘If you don’t mind, Detective Constable, I’ll deal with this.’ Christchurch said. ‘Mr Paris, for the benefit of this recording, you once assaulted Mr Perch who was at that time a senior military officer. Am I correct?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  ‘And you spent three years in the Corrective Training Centre at Colchester before being dishonourably discharged from the Army?’

  Billy nodded.

  ‘For the record, please?’ Christchurch said.

  ‘Yeah, I spent three years in the Glasshouse, D Company, and the Army let me go at the end of my sentence.’

  ‘What’s the point of these questions?’ I asked. ‘None of this can be used in court. It’s evidence of a prior conviction.’

  The DI ignored my interruption and continued. ‘In the course of your conversation with Mr Perch, after the rugby match, did he mention to you the name of Jeremy Thorn or his father, Sir Philip Thorn.’

  Billy nodded.

  ‘For the record?’

  ‘Yes,’ Billy said. ‘He mentioned Sir Philip.’

  ‘And the private airport at St Edzell Bay?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In what context?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Why did he mention Sir Philip and the airport?’

  ‘He asked me if I was working and I told him I’d applied for a job at St Edzell Bay. He said if I wanted I could put him down as a referee. I did and they hired me.’

  ‘The man whose nose you broke helped you find employment?’ the Bulldog snarled.

  ‘Thank you, Detective Wood. Again, I ask you to leave the questioning to me.’ Christchurch set his elbows on the table, made a steeple of his hands and used the tips of his index fingers to play with his bottom lip, a process which threatened havoc to his perfect beard alignment. ‘Mr Paris, do you know if the helicopter that crashed on thirtieth November, killing Jeremy Thorn and his fiancée, Madeleine Moreau, was
sabotaged?’

  ‘No comment.’

  No comment? What did he mean, ‘no comment’? Say nothing was always the way to go during a police interview. Unlike under English law, in Scotland no adverse inference could be drawn from silence, which was why the recording of a one hundred per cent no comment interview was never played in court. If a suspect was stupid enough to actually agree to answer questions, he had to keep going. It was definitely not a good idea to pick and choose. Do you know John Smith? Yes. Were you with him on Friday night? Yes. Did you have an argument? Yes. Did you murder him? No comment. No commenting the difficult questions sounded about as fishy as the Group Captain’s name. This had to stop now.

  On the basis that a solicitor was not supposed to answer questions or make statements on behalf of his client, there was not a lot I could do other than suggest that my client might wish to stop the interview momentarily in order to take some legal advice. That way, I could take Billy into a private interview room, ask him what he thought he was playing at and rehearse his lines. From now on there would be two of them: no and comment.

  ‘I’m fine. Carry on,’ was Billy’s response to my offer of a time-out.

  Christchurch continued. ‘Mr Paris, did Mr Perch ask you to sabotage the helicopter that crashed on thirtieth November—’

  ‘I told you. I don’t want Group Captain Perch brought into this.’

  ‘Then I’ll ask you my original question again. Did you bring down the helicopter that crashed on thirtieth November killing Jeremy Thorn and his fiancée?’

  ‘And I’ll give you the same answer. No.’

  ‘Do you know who did?’

  Billy smiled. ‘No comment.’

  ‘Did you telephone the headquarters of Police Scotland on the morning of second December to ask if there was a reward for the identity of the man who’d sabotaged the helicopter?’