With My Little Eye (7 page)

The sergeant thought about it and then nodded. ‘I think you should avoid the subjects of promotion. And matrimony. I'll make myself scarce, for the moment,' DS Dodson said. He slipped outside.

‘A proper respect for seniority, do you think?' Douglas said. ‘Or does the sergeant have something on his conscience?'

‘The former, I hope,' Tash said.

The entryphone announced that Chief Inspector Laird had arrived and was on the way upstairs. For Douglas, the penny suddenly dropped. So there had been two DCI Lairds. It came back to him that he had read in one of the local tabloids that the Lairds were a married couple – most unusual in the police and not often permitted unless each is extremely well thought of. The paper had reported, with cruel relish, that Mrs Laird had been promoted to equal rank with her husband. It had hinted that trouble might be expected in the marital nest. That had been some little time ago. There had been a photograph of Mrs Laird: beautiful and very well turned out, as indeed she should be with two good salaries in the family and, according to the press, an extremely well-heeled daddy. She had been born Honoria Potterton-Phipps, so that the nickname Honeypot had been inevitable. The sergeant's well intentioned but incautious remark now made sense. It did not require any great feat of deduction to realize that Mrs Laird had come to outrank her husband.

Detective Chief Inspector Alexander Laird turned out to be a well built man of around forty with pale, gingery hair and an off-the-peg suit that fitted him adequately. If he had been in a bad mood he had risen above it, because his bland face showed little expression. His eyes flickered over the tray that Tash had provided, and when the four were seated around Douglas's desk he accepted tea and a sandwich with what was almost a cheerful smile. The sergeant had correctly guessed that Mr Laird would bear his apparent humiliation more easily away from the company of his colleagues.

‘I had rather hoped to start with Professor Cullins,' he said.

‘If there was a large, red, Japanese four-by-four at the door when you came in, he's back,' said Douglas. ‘If not, not.'

‘Ah. I rather wanted a little technical help and he does have a – um – partner who is a technician in biological sciences, so I'm told.'

‘They usually travel together,' Tash explained.

While helping himself to another sandwich the DCI nodded. He had learned the habit of taking small bites so that he could take in food without suspending his enquiries. ‘I'll come to the point. The post-mortem examination of Mr Eastwick's body will take some time. There's no obvious physical evidence. We'll have to wait for the results of analysis. All we know meantime is that there are very few signs of a cause of death. He seems to have died from some sort of suffocation but there are no signs of violence as would be the case with strangulation.'

Douglas at one time had done a great deal of commuting by train and had consumed innumerable murder stories to pass the journeys. In so doing, he had picked up some knowledge of forensic science. ‘The hyoid bone was intact?' he asked before he could stop himself. ‘Were there petechiae?'

‘Yes.' The DCI looked at him in some surprise. ‘You know about strangulation?'

‘Only what I've read in murder mysteries. There was a time when I commuted by train for an hour each way. I read hundreds of them.' Douglas wondered whether to say something wise about Tardieu spots but decided that enough was enough.

DCI Laird looked at him hopefully. ‘I didn't have the advantage of your upbringing and my medical colleagues enjoy mystifying me. Can you tell me what hypercapnia is?'

‘I have heard the word,' Douglas said. He paused and thought back. ‘It was in connection with an elderly uncle of mine whose heart was giving out. When he wasn't on oxygen he gasped for breath and he was said to be hypercapnic.'

‘Thank you.' The DCI looked disappointed, but whether this was at the information or because he had finished the last sandwich Douglas was unsure. Tash was making shorthand symbols in her secretarial book.

Chief Inspector Laird asked her, ‘Are you making notes?'

Tash put down her pen hurriedly. ‘I didn't think you'd mind.'

For the first time a smile broke through the DCI's features. ‘I don't mind. While my sergeant's otherwise engaged and he is monopolizing the wire recorder I have to make my own record, and I have a great dislike of trying to remember what everybody said almost as much as I hate making notes at the time and taking down my own words as I'm saying them. If you can make a record or even just a précis of our discussion I'll be in your debt.'

Returning his smile, Tash picked up her pen again.

‘And there were no signs of his face having been covered?' Douglas asked helpfully.

‘They'll be looking for signs now but I'm not very hopeful. Unless somebody's very sick or feeble or doped, signs of violence are usually very evident. My – um – wife had just such a case recently.' The DCI took a second to remove the faintly pained expression that had accompanied the word ‘wife'. ‘A preliminary comment by the pathologist suggests that the carbon dioxide level in his blood was slightly raised. Of course, the body was found in a very confined space but not nearly small enough for his own breathing to account for it and there were no signs that he had been indulging in much physical activity.'

‘There are drugs that paralyse the breathing,' Douglas said.

The DCI seemed to be relaxing. It would be unusual for an officer to discuss technical details of a case with a lay witness, but if he was sensitive about his wife's promotion he might well be in need of another knowledgeable person off whom to bounce ideas. ‘So the pathologist said. No doubt he's testing for them while we speak, but that can be a lengthy process. So we'll find out all we can by less technical means. I have the general background – a large old house subdivided into luxury apartments, with what may ultimately turn into a granny flat in the semi-basement being sold to the deceased against an undertaking to maintain the garden. I fear that you may have made a bad bargain there.'

‘So do I,' Douglas said. ‘The only redeeming feature is that it gave all the occupiers a motive to keep him alive, which may simplify your enquiries a little.'

‘Possibly true,' said the DCI. ‘So we'll just have to hope that no motive for his death, even stronger than any desire to protect your investment, raises its head.'

Douglas tried to smile but the DCI did not seem to have been joking. ‘We don't know if he made a will,' Douglas said, ‘nor what it says if he did; but I suppose it's too much to hope that he left his apartment to a keen gardener on condition that he takes over responsibility for the gardens.'

The chief inspector chuckled without showing a sign of genuine amusement. ‘You should be so lucky,' he said. ‘What can you tell me about the deceased?'

‘Not a lot.' When he came to think about it, Douglas was surprised to realize how little he had known about the late Stan Eastwick. ‘He was introduced by the professor, who knew that Stan had been second in command of gardening at the university. From my own university days, I know that that's quite a responsible job. Universities have acres of gardens and greenhouses and some of those are used for research or teaching projects in biological sciences. Three or four of us interviewed him and he satisfied us that he knew his stuff and wanted to make use of it in his retirement. I checked to make sure that he owned his own flat and so could afford our price for this one, and that he was not averse to physical work. Beyond that point he seemed to be inoffensive. He liked dogs,' Douglas added, ‘and dogs liked him.'

The chief inspector brightened. Rowan had already settled against his leg and was snuffling with pleasure at having his ears pulled. ‘That's your criterion, is it?'

Douglas laughed. ‘Not the only one. Dogs can take to a person who smells of dog biscuits or other dogs. But sometimes their first impression is more reliable than mine. What else can I tell you? He was a very handy person – not just in the garden, although he could arrange picked flowers to look better and last longer than anyone else could. But if anyone wanted his help with anything electrical or mechanical he could usually manage it. He'll be missed.'

‘By you, perhaps, but not by Miss Jamieson. She looks disapproving whenever his name's mentioned.'

As far as Douglas was aware the DCI had hardly ever looked directly at Tash. Either he could be observant out of the corner of his eye or he had brought telepathy to a fine art.

‘He was a bum-pincher,' Tash said defensively.

Now that the building was more or less finished and paid for, Douglas was only an owner-occupier among others, but he still felt a responsibility. ‘Why didn't you say something?' he asked. ‘One of us could at least have given him a good talking-to.'

Tash was turning pink. She paused to order her thoughts. ‘It wasn't serious enough for that. It was never anywhere you might call intimate. Just fleshy, if you see what I mean.'

Douglas was distracted for a moment by the thought that he would have loved to see what she meant. ‘Did you catch him looking at you?'

‘Yes. But girls rather expect that. Most of us begin to wonder what's wrong if men's eyes don't follow us.'

While Tash was in this mood of unusual outspokenness, Douglas would have been interested to pursue the subject; but this was not the occasion. The chief inspector seemed to be of a like mind. ‘But he was on good terms with the residents?'

‘I never heard of any quarrels,' Douglas said. ‘He was generally liked.'

Tash shrugged her answer.

‘Did he have any special areas of interest outside horticulture?'

Douglas decided that he could safely leave rumours of an amorous past to be mentioned by others. ‘Not that I know of,' he said.

‘Very well. Let's move on. George Eastwick. Tell me about him.'

‘A surly and evil-tempered man. If I had to sum him up in a single word, I think it would be “malevolent”. He rubbed along with his brother for most of the time, but even those two could snap at each other. Just let anyone else rub George up the wrong way and he can turn ugly. Of course, he had nothing to lose. The worst we could have done in return would have been to forbid him the place, which would only have cost Stan the help he was getting. Where we go from here, God alone knows! We'll just have to wait until Stan's will has been read, if he ever made one.'

‘What's George's job, trade or profession?'

‘I never heard him talk about it, but putting together bits and pieces of conversation, I think he must have been a gamekeeper or a general handyman on some sporting estate.'

DCI Laird pondered quietly. Then he said, ‘Now tell me about the adult residents here.'

‘Very well,' Douglas said. ‘Starting with me?'

‘I'll hear about you from the others. Nobody ever has a clear vision of himself, and if he had he'd keep it under wraps. Give me your origin and CV in a nutshell and then tell me about the professor.'

Tash seemed to be listening intently while he gave a summary of his upbringing in Perth, the move to Aberdeen to suit his father's work in the civil service and his introduction into surveying by an uncle. Ah well. Curiosity was a woman's perquisite.

‘I
know about one per cent of damn all about the professor,' Douglas said. ‘Mrs Jamieson introduced him, so perhaps she can wise you up. But perhaps not. I'm a bit nervous of homosexuals, for no good reason that I can think of, so I've been steering clear of him and his partner. I can only say that he's been well behaved. He sometimes flavours his speech with minor swear words, but he explains that that's to help the scansion. The rhythm of the sentence, you understand? I don't think that anyone but himself would notice the difference. Apart from that, he and his partner are polite and friendly to everyone but they don't go out of their way to be sociable. Mostly they keep themselves to themselves. They often go out in the evening but they never bring anybody back here.'

The chief inspector shifted his eyes to Tash. She seemed to feel their arrival because she looked up from her shorthand book.

‘All I could add,' she said slowly, ‘is that the professor seems to like young people. He always stops for a chat with any of the children and he bought me chocolates for Christmas, pushing them at me gruffly as though he was ashamed of it.' She lowered her eyes to the laptop screen before returning them to her very neat shorthand.

‘Thank you. And now I'll ask you not to interrupt while Mr Young tells me about your mother and Mrs McLeish. That's if Mr Young doesn't mind talking openly in front of you.'

Tash mimed zipping up her lips.

‘I don't have a problem. To me, they're just two pleasant and very well preserved ladies,' Douglas said. ‘They get on well together, which is a blessing. Tash's mum is the more forceful and outspoken one while Mrs McLeish is the retiring sort. They go off to the kirk together on Sundays – not, I think, because they're seriously religious but because it's what one does. They do most of the cooking although they keep off the fatty foods themselves; they care about their figures. They represent the backbone of society, two ladies who don't care about much beyond home and children, but when confronted with a problem come down on the side of common sense. Tash's father was home on leave for a few weeks in … December, was it?'

‘January,' Tash said.

‘January sounds right. I saw very little of him because he spent the whole time painting and papering. Betty McLeish's husband is an old friend of mine. He owns and runs his garage, service and filling station and has an agency for new cars, but he's surrounded himself with competent staff so he's never too busy to take a little time off. He shuts everything down on Sundays except for a small team of part-timers manning the pumps. He keeps the day for himself. He has a temper but he's learned to control it – he'd have to, running a business with a substantial turnover.'