Quintin Jardine: Gallery Whispers

'Something that Bob volunteered me to do, that's all.' She snapped her gaze back on to the detective. 'Okay, once more: Mrs Weston.

'I've done a full postmortem examination and had most of the lab work rushed through. The plastic bag over the head was a precaution … or maybe it was meant to distract us, I don't know… but it was unnecessary. Gaynor Weston died from a massive overdose of diamorphine, injected into her left thigh. She would have lost consciousness in seconds and died within two minutes. There was no question of suffocation.

'There were no signs of violence on the body, and nothing at all to indicate that the subject had been restrained before the injection was administered. Shortly before her death, she ate a fillet steak — mediumrare — with courgettes and French fries. Also, over a longer period, she drank the best part of a bottle of red wine and followed it with black coffee.'

'Any sign of recent sexual activity?'

'No, Brian, none at all. I can't help you with a DNA trace, I'm afraid.' She shook her head.

'There were no romantic goodbyes here. When the meal was over, Gaynor sat in her kitchen chair — placed where it could be seen from outside, after the event — and allowed herself to be put to death.'

Mackie leaned forward. 'You could state on oath that there was no possibility of the injection being self-inflicted?'

'No. But what I will say is that, even if she fixed the bag over her own head first, there was no possibility of the victim injecting herself directly into an artery, then disposing of the hypodermic before she lost consciousness.

'You didn't find the tape at the scene, and if you didn't find a hypo, or a bottle with traces of diamorphine'

'which we didn't.'

'Then that will rule out the possibility of suicide. The minimum any jury could possibly do would be return a verdict of culpable homicide, dependent on the mental state of the perpetrator, but this was so premeditated that you will have about a ninety-nine percent chance of a murder conviction in any trial, assuming that you can place the accused at the scene at the time.'

'Excellent,' said Mackie. 'But why? Why did Gaynor Weston let herself be switched off?'

Sarah looked at him, unblinking. 'About two weeks ago, Mrs Weston had an operation to remove a growth from her left leg. There was another growth on her foot, and the fact,that it hadn't been excised indicates to me that it had developed since then. I removed it and had it analysed.

'The woman had a malignant melanoma, a form of cancer which offers little prospect of a cure, unless it is discovered at a very early stage. In this case, from the depth of the earlier excision, when I explored it, if that too was a melanoma — as I am quite certain it was from the nature of the procedure — I would say that the size of the tumour removed would have pointed to a prognosis of death within three to four months. The disease had already metastasised to the spine, liver and lungs. Any treatment would have been purely palliative: the most honest course of action would simply have been to keep the patient as comfortable as possible for the time she had left.

That would have meant, in effect, limited chemical treatments supported by tranquillisers and increasing sedation. Diamorphine would have been used in increasing quantities to keep Mrs Weston out of pain. In the event, she took the lot at once.'

Brian Mackie let out a great sigh. 'Very neat and tidy for her,' he said. 'But a right bloody mess for us. Shit, why didn't she top herself down in Hawick, say, on John McGrigor's patch. Big John's a pragmatist. He'd probably have washed the glasses, planted a roll of tape and a syringe at the scene and closed the book on it.

'We'd better find out where she had this operation two weeks ago, then take a close look at her circle of friends.'

'I can help you with the first part of that,' Sarah offered. 'Normally, a procedure like this one would have been performed in the Department of Clinical Oncology at the Western General Hospital. I checked with them. It wasn't. The Royal Infirmary has no record of it either, nor has St John's in Livingston, nor Bangour, nor Roodlands. I asked at Murrayfield Hospital, and they said no. But then I checked with St Martha's, a little private clinic on the South Side of the city.

'The administrator there said that she was bound by confidentiality and wouldn't talk to me. I told her who I was, and what I was doing, but she still would not open her mouth. "Not without a Court order", she insisted. So if you want to search her records, you better go get a Sheriff's Warrant.'

'I'll talk to her myself before I go that far,' Mackie replied. 'But maybe Andy Martin and I should short-circuit all that and go to see the ex-husband. Given his profession, his has to be the main name in the frame.'

'Only if you can place him at the scene.'

'We can probably do that. According to witness accounts he was a regular caller at Oldbarns, so he'll have left traces of himself. The big problem is placing him, or anyone else for that matter, in the house at the time of Gaynor Weston's last supper.' He picked up the witness statements. 'None of the neighbours saw a bloody thing.

'Even if someone walked in this minute and confessed, we wouldn't have enough to go to trial. At the moment our only hope of that rests with the clever people in Arthur Dorward's forensics lab, but I can't see how even they're going to help this time.'

Andy Martin and Mario McGuire sat in the Head ofCID's office, on the second floor of the Fettes headquarters building, half an hour after the visitors had departed. After Skinner and Mcllhenney had withdrawn, the chief superintendent had continued the briefing for a few more minutes, until he was sure that each of the visiting officers had a complete grasp of the situation, and that everyone's priorities in the search for the assassin were the same.

All of Scotland's police forces have points of entry to the country within their territory, even Central, which although it has no ferry ports or air terminals, does have docking facilities at the BP oil installation at Grangemouth. Martin's concern was that every possible route into Scotland should be identified and covered as far as possible.

'If you were him, sir,' asked McGuire, 'what would you do?'

The DCS's vivid green eyes flashed as he smiled grimly at his colleague. 'What's the most obvious thing?' he said, throwing the question back.

'Fly into the busiest airport, I suppose, which has to be Heathrow, then catch the Shuttle, or hire a car and drive to Scotland.'

'And if you were Hawkins, where would you fly from?'

McGuire stroked his chin. His black beard grew fast; a dark shadow always showed by mid-aftemoon, for all that he had a wet shave every morning. 'Anywhere but South Africa,' he answered eventually.

'Right. But if you were South African and your real name was van Roost, maybe your natural inclination might be to route through Holland. The Low Countries' airlines are making a real effort to pinch travellers from Scotland away from London. You can access just about anywhere in the world out of Glasgow, Edinburgh or Aberdeen, through Schiphol and Brussels. That works in the other direction too, so you'd better check out Kim and Sabena landings. Their computers should tell you the origin of each passenger's journey, even if they were onward travellers from outside Holland or Belgium.

'Damn it,' Martin scolded himself. 'I should have come up with this clever thought that at the briefing. Mario, make sure that big Neil passes that on to McGuigan and Macintosh, so that Glasgow and Aberdeen landings are checked too.'

'Ach, I'll tell them myself 'No. The boss has set up the chain of communication through Mcllhenney so that he can keep in touch with everything that's happening. Let's do it his way.'