William Bankier - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 92, No. 3. Whole No. 547, September 1988

Reynolds opened the heavy oak door and Donoghue followed him into the room. A camera bulb flashed. Elliot Bothwell was dusting the room for latents. The two constables still stood in a corner awaiting instructions. The body lay as it had been found, between the dining table and the crockery cabinet.

“I see what you mean,” said Reynolds. He looked down at the corpse, his heavily bloodstained shirt, the blood-soaked carpet. The dead man’s right hand was tightly clenched into a fist, his left was badly lacerated. “Tried to grab the knife with his left hand, I’d say,” Reynolds remarked. He knelt and prized open the right fist. A button fell onto the carpet. “Mr. Bothwell!” Donoghue called.

“Sir?” Elliot Bothwell blinked behind his thick-lensed spectacles.

“Do you have a cellophane bag? Small size?”

Bothwell walked across the room and handed Donoghue a small self-sealing cellophane sachet. Donoghue picked up the button between thumb and forefinger and dropped it into the sachet. “See if you can lift any latents from it,” he said, handing the sachet to Bothwell, “then send it to the Forensic Science Lab at Pitt Street.”

Reynolds glanced at Donoghue. “Most probably torn from the attacker’s clothing, you think?”

“It would seem likely, sir.”

Reynolds began to take notes. “Do you have any idea when this incident happened?”

“All we can tell is between three and five P.M. today,” Donoghue said. “Being the times when the deceased’s wife left her husband enjoyably reading the Sunday papers and returned to find him as we see him now. She didn’t touch anything and managed to retain self-control long enough to phone three nines. We arrived to find her still holding the telephone in a state of deep shock. Dr. Chan prescribed a mild sedative. She’s sitting in the next room — quite conscious, but not talking at all.”

“Who can blame her?” Reynolds slipped a thermometer into the deceased man’s mouth and used a second thermometer to measure the temperature of the room. “They’ve probably been married for thirty years and were looking forward to enjoying each other’s company for a good number more. One minute you see a golden road stretching before you and the very next there’s nothing there but a brick wall.”

“We’d like to begin interviewing as soon as we can,” Donoghue said. “The trail’s getting colder by the second.”

“No indication of motive?” Reynolds took the thermometer from the dead man’s mouth and noted the temperature.

“It doesn’t appear to be robbery,” Donoghue said. “There’s no indication of forced entry — no evidence of anything being disturbed as we would expect to find in the case of a burglary.”

Reynolds stood. “A personal motive, then?”

“It would appear so. Which is why we’re doubly keen to talk to his wife. Somebody didn’t like him.”

Reynolds looked down at the corpse in the scarlet-stained shirt and turned to Donoghue. “That, Inspector, even for you, is something of an understatement. Well, I can’t do anything else here. I’ll have the body removed to the Royal Infirmary. I’ll phone my findings in as soon as I can.”

“He had no enemies at all,” said the woman, wrapping herself tighter in a black shawl — the only suitable garment, she had apologized, that she had in her wardrobe. In the twenty-four hours since she had discovered her husband’s mutilated corpse, she seemed, to a stunned and shocked Elka Willems, to have aged ten to fifteen years. Richard King, who took the statement, never having seen her before, assumed that she normally looked like this — grey hair, drawn face, sunken, distant eyes, hunched frame — but Elka could recall the woman she had seen before, a full face atop a proudly held body. “He had no enemies,” the widow said.

“Mr. Skillicorn was a doctor, I understand,” King prompted gently. Detective Constable King had been introduced to Mrs. Skillicorn by Elka some ten minutes earlier and so far the only information he had been able to elicit from Mrs. Skillicorn was that her husband had had no enemies.

“Yes, Mr. King,” said the woman. “He was an obstetrician. He worked at the Victoria Infirmary but he also had private patients.”

King wrote neatly on his pad in ballpoint. He was a chubby, bearded man, twenty-five years of age. Elka Willems sat silently beside him. She was a tall, blonde policewoman, whose blue eyes and high cheekbones betrayed her Dutch ancestry as much as did her name. She kept her hair in a tight bun while on duty, but even in the full tunic in the winter months she would cause heads to turn.

“You left the house at three p.m. yesterday?” King asked.

“I did.” The woman paused long enough for King to have cause to worry that he was going to have to prize each word out of her, or even be content with a shake or a nod of the head. But then she continued: “I visited friends in Milngavie. I called in for tea — it’s a pattern which has established itself over the years, two hours on Sunday afternoon for tea and cakes. When I left our home, Hugo was reading the Sunday papers. When I returned—”

“You and Mr. Skillicorn lived alone, I take it?”

“Yes. We have a gardener and a maid, but they don’t live in. We have three grown children, each of whom lives abroad.”

“All three?” said King — sorry as soon as he had spoken.

“Yes. All three. Two sons and a daughter. All three are doctors, all have married other doctors. One lives in Australia, another in Canada — and our daughter is with her husband in Africa, where he is studying tropical medicine.”

“Have you contacted them?” King asked her.

She nodded. “I phoned Nigel in Perth — Perth, Australia.”

“Yes, of course.”

“He said he’d make sure he contacted the others and would then come straight home. That was yesterday. He’ll be home later today. I declare, the wonders of modern technology — telephone link-up by satellite and modern jet aircraft means that even if your son lives on the other side of the world he can still be home at the drop of a hat within twenty-four hours. Australia isn’t so far away if you look at it like that.”

“I suppose not,” said King. “When you returned home yesterday, you didn’t notice any sign of forced entry, no struggle?”

“There had been a struggle in the dining room. The furniture was disturbed a little and the carpet kicked up at the corner. I noticed that after I saw Hugo. We always keep a clean and tidy home. I managed to phone you—”

“Yes.” King nodded. “I understood that you kept calm long enough to do the right thing. Thank you. Nothing else was disturbed?”

“No. The constables checked every room, every cupboard, under every bed to see if he was still in the house. When they told me it was safe, I looked over the house quickly to see if anything was stolen and nothing has been touched. There was, in fact, some fifty pounds lying on the dressing table in the bedroom and it’s still there. Really, Mr. King, nothing has been taken.”

“No forced entry, no robbery, no sign of really violent struggle. A popular man with no enemies, yet he was stabbed several times in his own home.”

“Hacked to death would be my description,” said Mrs. Skillicorn.

Donoghue read Elliot Bothwell’s report. He found it spare, just the nuts and bolts, but its contents were nonetheless interesting. The locus of the offense was in Bothwell’s view “forensic friendly.” The phrase jarred Donoghue’s classically trained mind. He assumed Bothwell meant that the dining room was clean, the surfaces waxed, and good latents were able to be lifted. There were, apparently, four sets of latents, three of which could be identified as belonging to the deceased, the wife of the deceased, and the maid. The fourth latent could not be identified but did not belong to the gardener, whose prints Bothwell had taken that Monday morning. The fourth latent was also found on the button the deceased had had clenched in his fist. The mysterious latent was not on computer file in Glasgow. The Police National Computer at Hendon, England, had yet to come back to P Division, at the time of the writing, to indicate whether or not it was on the national records.