Кит Мори - Deadly Still

Torquil jotted more bullet points under the title ‘Scene findings’. Once he had finished he asked Penny, ‘What about his laptop?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘There wasn’t one in the cabin.’

Torquil raised his eyebrows momentarily, then went on. ‘Yesterday, Lorna reported the main post-mortem findings to me. Dr Giles Lamont said that he sustained a blunt facial injury called a Le Fort type 2. This effectively means that the middle of his face was shoved inwards. It is usually caused by a high velocity injury, like a fall from a height rather than a fall forward onto the face. The latter apparently causes a Le Fort type 1 or floating palate injury, which is not as severe.

‘The post-mortem also showed a contrecoup injury, that is injury to the back of the brain as it bounced back and struck the inside of the cranium. That too is consistent with a high velocity injury. Also, there were petechial haemorrhages over his brain, which implied he’d had a convulsion. Whether that was before he fell or after he’d struck his head is not clear. The pathologist wasn’t sure.’

He jotted the information further down the board as bullet points under the title ‘Post-Mortem Findings’. Then he picked up the typed out reports that Penny had given him and looked at notes he had jotted down in the margins.

‘The next points come from testing of the blood samples that Ralph McLelland took and also the ones from the post-mortem. Dr Lamont also took samples of the stomach contents and body fluids, including from his eyes. First, he had high, toxic and almost certainly lethal levels of methanol in all of these. They use testing called head space gas chromatography with a flame ionisation detector and they can work out all of the toxins in his system. It was predominantly methanol in his case as death occurred soon after. The blood results also showed extremely low blood sugar.’ He added the notes about these findings as another series of bullet points. ‘What does that mean to you?’

Penny raised her hand and pointed to the board. ‘There were two empty insulin bottles, one fast-acting insulin and the other long-acting insulin. And an empty syringe.’

‘So presumably he’d recently taken a big dose of insulin?’ suggested Morag.

‘Aye, insulin drops the blood sugar, so it would show a low blood sugar right enough,’ said Wallace.

‘And a low blood sugar like that along with a skinful of peatreek, never mind whether it is methanol or good ordinary whisky would make him wobbly legged to say the least,’ Douglas said, nodding his head in agreement with his brother.

Torquil circled the methanol readings in all of the tests with a green marker. Beside them he wrote in capital letters — HIGH.

‘Look at that, we are all agreed, the readings were high. But look at this,’ he said, exchanging marker pens and circling the blood sugar in black marker and beside it writing in capital letters — LOW. He tapped them both. ‘High and Low!’

Morag stroked her chin pensively. ‘I can’t see what you are getting at, Piper. The pathologist and the forensics haven’t flagged anything up, have they? It fits, doesn’t it? He drank, felt his sugars going up so took a big dose of insulin then collapsed, maybe having had a fit.’

Torquil sucked air through his lips. ‘Something didn’t seem right to me, which is why I went to St Ninian’s cave for a play on my pipes. I was just playing pieces at random and when I came to Loch Lomond it struck me.’

Ewan began to sing the words, ‘You take the high road and I’ll take the low road and I’ll…’

‘That’s it,’ Torquil interrupted. He tapped the two words High and Low again. ‘High and low. High methanol and low blood sugar. I rang Ralph McLelland about it and he agreed, there is an anomaly. Alcohol lowers your blood sugar. I asked if it would even do that in a diabetic and he said that methanol certainly would.’

‘So taking insulin would lower it still further?’ Penny asked.

‘It would,’ agreed Torquil, ‘but my point is that Robbie Ochterlonie was a diabetic and he’d recognise if he was having hypoglycaemia, or low blood sugar. Even drunk, he would know that insulin would make it worse and he would have gone for sugary drinks, chocolate, anything sweet instead. What he wouldn’t have done is take insulin and certainly not as much as he apparently took.’

The news evoked surprise in everyone in the room.

‘After taking so much insulin it is doubtful that he would have made it through to the sitting room and drunk more peatreek. But there is more to say. Dr Lamont took several swabs at the post-mortem. I have the results in the report Penny obtained from Ian Gillesbie. There was spermatozoa in his urethra.’

Morag frowned. ‘Does that mean anything, Torquil? As I understand it ejaculation can occur at death.’

Torquil nodded. ‘Aye, it can occur, I believe. But swabs were also taken and the lab found condom lubricant oils on the swabs from the shaft of the penis. It looks as if he had sex soon before death and he was wearing a condom.’

Penny urgently started flicking through the pages in her file. After a few moments, she said, ‘There were no condoms either used or unused found in the cabin, boss. All the bins were gone through, of course.’ She tapped her pen on her file. ‘And I don’t think the tests reported any evidence of body fluids from a sexual partner on him?’

‘If he was wearing a condom there wouldn’t necessarily be any,’ Torquil pointed out.

Ewan winced. ‘This is looking bleak, boss.’

‘So he wasn’t alone when he died?’ Penny asked.

‘Was this person male or female?’ Douglas asked. ‘Is there any way of knowing?’

Torquil shrugged. ‘That I don’t know. But if there was a second person, then it explains things. Like the blunt injury, this Le Fort type 2 facial fracture. It’s possible that someone threw him down or ground his face into the floor. And it could explain the insulin. He may have been given the insulin after getting very drunk. I talked all this over with Ralph McLelland and he thinks this is all plausible.’

Penny stared at Torquil in horror. ‘Gosh, I’m sorry, boss. I didn’t have any suspicions that there was another person present.’

‘Nor was there any reason to suppose so from the facts. But it begins to look like murder. Especially when two things aren’t here that should be. No condoms and no laptop. Remember, he wanted to be a writer, but there is no laptop recorded here in the cabin.’

He added the words ‘no condoms’ and ‘no laptop’ under the scene findings label and drew stars beside them. He picked up his tea and took a sip. ‘I’m going to have to talk with the Procurator Fiscal about it all, which is why we need to get our ideas together first. So, with the knowledge that the two bottles contained the same composition of peatreek it is likely that they came from the same illicit source.’

With a green marker pen he wrote in capital letters the word ‘WHISKY’ at the top of the middle section of the board. Halfway down he wrote the word ‘Peatreek’, and then enclosed them both in squares. From the peatreek square he drew arrows to the pillbox and Lochiel’s Copse squares and then to each of the teenagers and to Robbie Ochterlonie.

‘We have two bona fide distilleries on the island; Abhainn Dhonn and Glen Corlin,’ he said.

Under the label ‘whisky’ he put the names of the two distilleries in circles and inserted arrows from the whisky square to each distillery. Below each one he wrote the names of the owners and of the people who worked at them.

‘So you’ll need the names of the four illicit peatreek still owners,’ said Wallace. ‘Tosh MacNeill, Larry Kennedy, Norman Smith and Drew McQueen. Drew is a crofter and the others are fishermen. We confiscated their stuff. They were the only stills we could find out about.’