The Ardmore Inheritance by Rob Wyllie (best value ebook reader TXT) 📗

'Including our one?'

'Yes, including our one, but I'll get to that in a minute. So the professor left the forensic service four years ago and it was quite a sad story I suppose. He got cancer of the liver and had to take early retirement, but the treatment wasn't successful and he died not long afterwards. He was only sixty-three.'

'Aye, that's tragic right enough,' Frank said, sensing where the conversation was heading. He was no medical expert, but he knew what was the number one cause of liver trouble, having been warned plenty of times of the dangers by his own GP. 'So was he a drinker then, our Dr Whiteside?'

'Yes sir, it seems so. My sergeant says everyone knew about it at the time but it was just brushed under the carpet.'

'But now I'm guessing it's come out from under the carpet, am I right?'

'Yes sir, you're right. There was a case up here, before they started looking at all the other ones he had been involved in, and that's where it all started. A woman called Senga Wilson was sent down for murdering her lover mainly on the forensic evidence of Dr Whiteside. On the basis of the time of death and also some of her DNA which was discovered at the scene of crime.'

'Yeah, I think I remember the case vaguely.' It wasn't the case he remembered, but the name. Senga, that peculiarly Glasgow epithet immortalised in Billy Connelly's classic comic song. Three men frae' Carntyne and five Woodbine and a big black greyhound dug called Boab. It made him laugh out loud just thinking about it, and he wondered if Lexy, a generation and a half younger than him, knew of it too. He doubted it, and he wasn't going to embarrass them both by asking.

'Aye, Senga Wilson, that's right,' he said. 'She battered him senseless then cut off his todger, is that the one?'

He heard her laugh. 'Yes that's the one sir. It was in all the papers up here. But she'd always claimed she'd been at home with her husband at the time of the murder. The trouble was, he wouldn't corroborate the alibi, obviously because he thought she'd been shagging around and he was pretty sore with her.'

'Understandable,' Frank said, laughing. 'But something's happened I'm guessing, to bring it onto our radar?'

'She took an overdose sir. In Cragton Valley.'

Frank knew all about Cragton Valley prison, the principal place of incarceration for women offenders in Scotland, having sent quite a few of his customers there in the past. It also held the unenviable record of having more of its inmates commit suicide than any other jail in the UK, a record which a succession of governors seemed unable or unwilling to do anything about.

'Dead?'

'Yes sir. They couldn't save her. She had three children too sir. Poor wee things.'

He sighed. 'Aye, they always have. Kids I mean, and I expect they're in some god-forsaken care home somewhere. With their mother having been in jail and all that.'

'Actually no sir, they're still with their father. In Sighthill. He's got a wee council flat up there.' Frank knew the place well. Leafy Surrey it wasn't, and he feared for their life chances growing up in a dump like that.

'Fair play to the guy then. But I'm guessing he's got some involvement in our wee story, right?'

'Yes sir, he has. You see, these flats are all stuffed with CCTV aren't they? So he knew they could prove his wife had been with him on the night of the murder, and he'd gone to the trouble of getting a DVD made, from the security guy who was a friend of his. It showed her coming home from work at about half-past six and then not leaving again until seven the next morning.'

'And this didn't come up at the time?' Frank said, struggling to hide his disbelief. 'What I mean is, the investigation team didn't look at the CCTV?'

'I don't know sir. I've not really had time to look thoroughly at the file. It's quite thick. But no, maybe when Kenny Wilson trashed his wife's alibi they didn't think to look.'

Couldn't be arsed to look more like, he thought, especially when they already had the word of the country's top forensic guy that she had done it. Why look any harder? But he knew it was easy to be clever in retrospect, and what was it they said about people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones? He'd been there himself, burying the private doubts and throwing a case over the wall for the CPS and the jury to sort out later. Although of course it was the Crown Office of the Procurator Fiscal up there, not the CPS. Same difference.

'Aye, I guess that's it,' he said. 'So what changed?'

'Well sir after his wife died Kenny Wilson had a change of heart. His local MP runs a surgery in the community centre once a fortnight and he went along to one of her sessions with his DVD and his story.'

'And then I'm guessing that's when the shit really hit the fan?'

'Well, sort-of sir,' she said, sounding unsure. 'His MP went straight to the Procurator Fiscal's office but apparently she had quite a job to get them to re-look at the case.'

That didn't surprise Frank. In his experience the prosecutors on both sides of the border weren't interested in justice. They were only interested in statistics, and re-opening a case that had already been neatly shut down screwed up their spreadsheets and so was something to be resisted at all costs.

'That figures,' he said. 'But I assume they must have agreed in the end?'

'Yes sir. They sanctioned a review of the evidence first of all as I understand it.'

'Aye, they would do that,' he said, smiling to himself. 'Lexy, you must promise me you won't turn into a grizzled old cynic like me, but you know why they did that don't you?'

'No sir