Quintin Jardine - Gallery Whispers

'Very good, sir. I'll nip along and tell Neil now.'

'You do that.' The detective inspector started for the door. 'Hang on a minute,' the DCS called out. 'Are you happy that you've got enough manpower for this job?'

'Well,' McGuire answered, slowly, 'since you ask. Another set of legs with a sharp brain to drive them wouldn't do any harm.'

'Okay. I'll lend you Karen Neville or Sammy Pye from my personal staff. Take your pick.'

The DI frowned, considering his choice. 'Are either of them firearms trained?'

'Both. First class shots, the pair of them.'

'Then it's hard to choose between them. But I'll take Neville;

Maggie's worked with her, and rates her pretty highly.'

'Okay, you've got her. Pick her up on your way out and brief her.

Remember, though, she only needs to know that we're looking for this guy. She doesn't need to know why.'

McGuire nodded and turned towards the door once more, only to hear a knock, then see it open, as Brian Mackie stepped into the room.

Martin looked up, surprised. 'Hello, Thin Man,' he said. 'What brings you here?' He waved a hand in farewell as the Special Branch Commander left. 'Cheers, Mario. Good luck.'

'With what?' asked Mackie, casually, as the door closed.

'His Lottery ticket. So what's up?'

The tall detective looked up, glumly. 'This Oldbarns investigation, that's what.' He handed a folder to the Head of CID. 'That's Sarah's postmortem report. The woman was full of cancer: undoubtedly she'd have died within months. Someone helped her on the way with a great big dose of pharmaceutical heroin.'

'Any thoughts on who?'

'I don't want to jump to any conclusions here. I've sent Maggie and young Stevie Steele, from Clan Pringle's Division, out to interview the boyfriend, to see how he reacts. However, someone performed an operation on Mrs Weston two weeks ago. There's no record of it in any of the main hospitals, or at the Murrayfield, but Sarah found a wee private clinic on the South Side that's acting a bit shifty. They clammed up when she asked them about it.

'I'm wondering whether her ex-husband, who's a surgeon, remember, did the exploratory op, and then' 'did her a favour when she asked.' Martin finished his colleague's supposition for him. 'He'd have had access to the drugs, I suppose.

Ach, I'd be heart sorry for the poor bastard if he did that… even although it's against my principles.'

'Unless…' Mackie began, hesitated for a few second, then gathered his breath and went on. 'Unless we succumb to a rare burst of professional incompetence and close the book on this one: write it up for the Fiscal as a suicide.'

The Head of CID looked at his friend in silence for around thirty seconds, then he opened Sarah's report and read it, still without a word. Finally, he looked up.

'Brian, I'd hate to see this man lose his career and his liberty for doing something that he wasn't cruel enough to refuse. But we're only investigators, mate; not judge, not jury, not even prosecutors. Whatever our different private feelings, we have a public duty to establish facts and report them to the Fiscal, and we can't neglect it. Not ever.

'Let's you and I follow this for a bit, one step at a time. First, let's pay a joint visit to this clinic that obstructed Sarah and give them a hard time until they tell us whether Mrs Weston was a patient there, and if so who treated her.

'We'll see where we go from there.' Martin paused. 'What have you done about the press?'

'Royston's told them that we're waiting for the result of the PM before reporting to the Fiscal. Sarah's still waiting for a small piece of lab work, so technically that's still true.'

'Fine. It can stay like that overnight. Let's go and see this clinic.

What's it called, by the way?'

'St Martha's.'

Andy Martin grunted, with a grim anger which surprised his colleague. 'She won't be much help to them if they get in my way.'

Olive Mcllhenney was not an easy woman to take off guard. Her husband had been trying for many years to achieve this, but with very few successes. However when she opened her front door, and saw who was standing on the step, a green Barbour thrown over her shoulders to protect her from the rain, her normally imperturbable expression changed to one of complete surprise.

'Dr Skinner,' she exclaimed. 'Come in, quick, out of the rain.'

'You remember me then,' said Sarah, as she stepped into the narrow hall way of the semidetached villa. The two women had met only once, at a social event more than a year earlier.

'Of course I do. Here, give me your coat. What brings you here, anyway?'

As well as being unshakeable. Olive was quick witted. Even as she was hanging the waxed cotton rain-coat on one of a row of hooks behind the front door, she answered her own question.

'Has that husband of mine been talking to you?' she asked, quickly: too quickly, for the cough took her unawares, racking her body, sending colour to her cheeks, making her visitor realise how pale they had been before, and highlighting the contrast of the dark circles under her eyes. She produced an inhaler from the pocket of her cardigan and took two quick puffs.

'No,' Sarah replied, truthfully, as the fit subsided. 'Neil hasn't said a word to me. But my husband has been worrying about him, and this afternoon, finally, he made him tell him what was wrong. So if you want to blame anyone for this visit, blame Bob.' As she spoke, she followed her hostess into the living room, where Lauren and Spencer were watching Grange Hill, intently. Neither turned as the two women passed through into the kitchen, although the chocolate-point Siamese cat which lay on the floor between them did flick an ear in their direction.

Olive's complexion had paled once more, after the paroxysm.

'Maybe I shouldn't say this to you, but Neil never has trusted doctors,' she said, as she closed the door on the children. 'He's just being silly.

My GP says I have a touch of asthma; that's why she gave me the inhaler.'

'And does it help?' asked Sarah, very quietly, catching her eye as she did so, not allowing her to look away.

'No, it doesn't,' she answered, in a whisper.

'No, I didn't think it had. Olive, I'm here as a friend, and the last thing I want to do is to undermine your confidence in your relationship with your family doctor, but I have to ask you; have you had a chest X-ray recently?'

The other woman shook her head. 'Not in the last seven years. My last one was clear, though,' she added, quickly.

'Has your doctor suggested an X-ray?'

'No.'

'How long have you had this cough?'

Olive frowned, leaning back against a work-surface and looking at the ceiling. 'I suppose it would have been around the end of June when it started. I had a bit of bother when we were on holiday just after that. Neil and I like to walk, but I found that I was getting short of breath if we went too far. We gave up on the walks, and the problem went away. I put it down to a chest infection at the time.

'Then at the end of September, it came back. I went to see Dr Jones then. She said it was probably asthma and gave me the inhaler.'

'I see.' Sarah paused. 'Listen Olive, I have to be honest here. If you were my patient I'd have sent you for an X-ray straight away, to eliminate certain possibilities if nothing else.' She glanced at her watch. 'I have a friend who works in the chest clinic at the Western. I checked with her earlier; she's on duty now, and she'll fit you in.

'If you like, I could take you along there. Best have this cleared up, yes?'

Olive Mcllhenney looked at her shrewdly. She knew exactly what was being said; what her visitor meant by 'certain possibilities'. She had smoked too many cigarettes in the years between ages fifteen and thirty-four not to have been aware of them. Still, those were possibilities for others, not for her.