The Impossible Dead

12



It wasn’t Fox’s fault that Evelyn Mills wasn’t answering her phone. The same was true of Bob McEwan – while Ray Scholes had gone AWOL. Fox found himself back in the police station’s reception area, staring at one of the notices on the wall. It was an advert for a local cab company. Five minutes later, he was in the passenger seat of a dented white Hyundai. The driver was keen to learn more about the suicide, but Fox offered him nothing. The cordon had been removed and there was no activity outside the cottage itself. The driver asked if he wanted him to wait.

‘Good idea.’

The man turned off the engine. He looked to be readying to get out of the car, but Fox stopped him.

‘Nothing to see,’ he stated.

So the driver switched the radio on, modern dance music sound-tracking Fox as he made for the front door.

It was locked.

He made a circuit around the house, but there was no back door. He peered in through the living-room window. There were flecks of blood on the insides of a couple of the panes. Fox’s fingers brushed a small plant pot balanced on the outside ledge. He lifted it and saw a key lying there. Either a spare, or left by the police. He unlocked the door and went inside.

Jimmy Nicholl’s basket was no longer in the living room. Fox wondered if he should have asked Teddy Fraser how the dog was doing. Didn’t pets often pass away soon after their owners? The room smelled of woodsmoke. The remains of a charred log sat in the grate, a fine layer of ash coating the top of the mantelpiece. Fox started leafing through the paperwork on the table. Sure enough, the news clippings related to the life and death of Francis Vernal. One lengthy story was headlined ‘The Inner Turmoil of the Activist Patriot’. It looked to Fox as though the media at the time had soon switched their focus from eulogies to something meatier: the dead man’s private life. There was a blurry photo of his attractive wife, and mention of Vernal’s ‘heavy-drinking lifestyle and string of affairs’. The same photo of the lawyer had been picked up by several newspapers. He was addressing a Scottish National Party rally. It was outside a factory earmarked for closure. Vernal was in full flow, one hand bunched into a fist, mouth open wide, teeth bared. Fox glanced through the window to check that the cab-driver was still in his car. He was whistling and had opened a newspaper.

Francis Vernal had died on the evening of Sunday, 28 April 1985, the same day Dennis Taylor played Steve Davis in the World Snooker final. His car had been spotted by a van driver. It had left the road near Anstruther. A Volvo 244. Must have been travelling at speed. Vernal was in the driver’s seat, dead. His body was taken to the Victoria Hospital, at which time the bullet hole in the side of his head was identified as such. A heavy drinker and smoker, he had also been prone to bouts of depression. His beloved Nationalists seemed to have stalled in the polls, and Vernal’s dream of a Socialist Scots Republic looked destined to remain unrealised in his lifetime. Fox sifted through the newsprint. Some passages had been underlined. Alan Carter’s handwritten notes were almost indecipherable. There were screeds of them. No sign of a computer or laptop, meaning nothing had been typed. Fox was wondering who had given him the job, and why. Suddenly, a photo caught his eye. Another rally, but taken longer ago, Vernal in his early twenties by the look of it. A bit more hair on his head, and slimmer around the chest and stomach, but still with mouth wide open and fist clenched. There was another young man standing next to him, and Fox was stunned to find he recognised him. It was Chris – his father’s cousin Chris – looking just the same as in the photo where he was carrying Jude on his shoulders. Fox lifted this picture from the table and stared at it. It had been clipped from the Fife Free Press. There was no date, and only a few lines of explanation: an SNP picnic on the links at Burntisland; ‘the noted Edinburgh lawyer Francis Vernal gives the speech of the afternoon’. With Chris Fox standing at his side, laughing and leading the applause …

Fox paced the room a couple of times, the photo still in his hand. Then he folded it into his pocket, looking around him as if fearing someone might have noticed. There was a telephone on a chest of drawers behind the door, and he crossed over to it. An address book sat next to it. It was open and had been turned over. Fox lifted it and saw that it was open at the page for surnames beginning with C. Paul Carter’s name was there – home and mobile numbers listed. Fox flipped through the book, not sure what he thought he would find. A few business cards fell out and he stooped to pick them up. One was for an Indian restaurant, another for a garage. But the third belonged to a man called Charles Mangold. He was senior partner in a firm of solicitors called Mangold Bain, with an address in Edinburgh’s New Town. Fox jotted the details into his notebook, then tapped his pen against the telephone receiver, and stared at the ‘C’ page again. Three names there, one with a thick line through it, probably meaning the person was no longer part of Alan Carter’s life, or had passed away. Leaving two names.

One of them Paul Carter’s …

Fox lifted the receiver and dialled 1471. The computerised voice informed him that the last number to call the phone had been Paul Carter’s mobile. The call had taken place the previous evening, barely an hour before Alan Carter had been found. He put down the receiver and started opening the various drawers in the chest below it. Neat and tidy: Alan Carter had kept his bank statements and utility bills filed away. The phone bills were itemised. There was no sign that Alan had called his nephew at any point in the past six months. No, because they weren’t close – hadn’t Alan said as much himself? But Paul, soon after his release from custody, had felt the need to phone his uncle. Fox wondered why. He looked around the room again. Where had the mess come from? Had something made Alan Carter angry, so that he swept papers from the table on to the floor? Or had someone else done it?

Fox flinched at the sound of tapping on the window. It was the cab-driver. Fox gave him a nod to let him know he was just coming. The man lingered, taking in the scene. Fox replaced the address book, made sure he was leaving the room as he had found it – the one borrowed photograph aside – and went outside.

His driver was apologising. ‘No skin off my nose, but the meter’s up to thirty quid …’

‘It’s fine,’ Fox told him. He locked the front door of the cottage and slid the key under the flowerpot.

‘Back to where we started?’ the driver asked.

‘Back to where we started,’ Fox agreed, getting into the passenger seat.

Calls to and from Ray Scholes’s home phone were now being logged and recorded. The news came in a text message from Evelyn Mills. The network provider for his mobile phone had also been contacted, and they would soon have access to information about calls made and received – but no access to the actual calls themselves, not without taking their request further and throwing money and manpower at it.

Fox had managed a word with Bob McEwan, letting him know that Alan Carter was dead. McEwan had sounded distracted – he was between budget meetings – and had thanked Fox for his ‘input’, a word presumably picked up at the earlier meeting.

Fox had told Kaye he’d try to track down Ray Scholes, but he now had another destination, the office of Superintendent Isabel Pitkethly.

‘What is it now?’ she asked, removing her glasses and rubbing at her eyes.

‘It’s a bit awkward,’ Fox said. She was immediately interested, repositioning her glasses the better to study him. When she gestured for him to sit, he did as he was told, brushing his hands across the knees of his trousers.

‘Well?’ she prompted, elbows on the desk, palms pressed together.

‘Paul Carter’s uncle is supposed to have committed suicide.’

‘I’m aware of that.’

‘It happened soon after he got a call from his nephew …’

She considered this for a moment. ‘What of it?’

‘They weren’t the best of friends,’ Fox pressed on. ‘It’d be good to know why Paul made that call.’

She leaned back in her chair. ‘Why? What difference does it make?’

‘Maybe none,’ he conceded.

‘And how do you know about this call, anyway?’

‘I dialled 1471.’

‘From the deceased’s home? And what in hell took you there, Inspector?’

Fox didn’t really have an answer to that, so he stayed silent.

‘This is way past your remit,’ Pitkethly said quietly.

There was a rap on the door and DS Michaelson stuck his head into the room. He had his mouth open to say something, but stopped when he saw Pitkethly had company.

‘I’ll come back,’ he offered.

‘What is it, Gary?’

Michaelson seemed to be weighing up his options, but he was too excited not to spit it out.

‘The thing is, Alan Carter can’t be dead, ma’am.’

Pitkethly looked at him. ‘What?’

‘He can’t be dead.’

‘Why not?’ It was Fox rather than Pitkethly who asked the question.

‘Because the gun he used doesn’t exist. It hasn’t done for twenty-odd years.’

‘You’re not making any sense.’

Michaelson produced a sheet of paper. Fox couldn’t tell if it was a fax or the printout of an e-mail. The detective approached Pitkethly’s desk and handed it over. She took her time reading it through. Then she looked at Fox.

‘We’ll finish our little chat later.’ She was rising to her feet. Michaelson accompanied her out of the room, Fox following for the first few steps until she stopped him.

‘Not your remit,’ was all she said, before continuing in the direction of the CID suite. Michaelson looked over his shoulder, giving Fox a huge, cold smile of satisfaction.

Fox pursed his lips and watched them go. Then he had an idea.

It took Alec Robinson a while to answer the desk buzzer. Fox could guess why.

‘Have you heard?’ Robinson said.

‘Some of it,’ Fox hedged. ‘I’m surprised how quick it all happened.’

Robinson nodded his agreement. ‘Not that many guns in Fife,’ he explained. ‘The register was put on computer last year. Can’t think why they backdated it, but they did.’

Fox still wasn’t sure he understood. ‘Twenty-odd years …’ he prompted.

‘Like I say, we don’t take many firearms off the street.’

‘No, but when you do …’ Fox was still feeling his way.

‘Broken up and melted down – that used to be the way. Once or twice a year, when there were enough to make it worthwhile.’

It was Fox’s turn to nod. ‘And this gun’s on record as having been disposed of?’

Robinson stared at him. ‘I thought you knew.’

‘Only some of it.’ Fox folded his arms. ‘So how come it suddenly turns up in Alan Carter’s cottage? Could he have swiped it?’

Robinson shrugged. ‘Not sure he was ever on the detail. Guns weren’t kept here anyway – Glenrothes, I think.’

Fox exhaled noisily. ‘It’s a mystery,’ he said.

‘That’s what it is,’ Robinson agreed. Then, eyes on Fox: ‘Don’t tell me there’ll be another inquiry now. That’s all we bloody well need …’