Night Sessions, The (12 page)

This struck Ferguson as a fair enough point. Unlike the previous suggestion, it was one that had been bugging him. He was about to concede this possibility and move on when Thomas leaned forward.

“That's easy enough to explain,” he said. “Look at yesterday's date. Third of September.”

“What about it?”

“Check Father Liam's date of birth.”

When Ferguson did so, it was all he could do not to smite the side of his head.

“It was the padre's birthday,” said Thomas. “That's why he waited.”

He looked pleased with himself for having solved the problem. Peter Wilson's expression was quite the opposite. Ferguson could sympathise: seldom could the lawyer have had a client so determined to dig himself deeper into the hole.

“Why do you keep calling him ‘the padre’?” Hutchins asked.

Ferguson couldn't see the point of this but was grateful for the diversion.

“It's old army slang for ‘chaplain,’” Thomas said. “That's how Graham knew him. Graham's no a Catholic, never even visited as far as I know, but he remembered Father Murphy from the Faith Wars. The Father was a chaplain in the Royal Irish Regiment, see.”

Ferguson couldn't keep the surprise out of his voice. “Murphy served in the Faith Wars?”

“Father Murphy,” said Thomas, “was with us in the tanks at Armageddon.”

Ferguson had a split second in which to react. Peter Wilson was already brightening, poised to press home the advantage—his client had just tossed a tactical nuke into the interrogation.

“Tell us more about Graham,” said Ferguson.

Thomas shrugged. “I can't say I know him well. Just from the meetings, like, over the past three or four years. He doesn't talk much about the war or what happened to him. I'm not even sure he was with the Royal Irish. I do know he worked with combat mechs. Knows a lot about robotics, he's helped me out on a few technical things. Not professionally, like—I'd just ask him a question after a meeting, or as we were walking down the street afterwards, say, and he'd have the answer off the top of his head.”

“What kind of things?”

“Circuits. Joint articulations. Fiddly stuff.” Thomas looked frustrated. “It would take too long to explain. Nothing to do with bombs, if that's what you're thinking.”

“Do you know his surname? His address? His phone number?”

Thomas shook his head. “
Mutilados
anonymous,” he repeated. “We don't keep names and addresses. We don't check service records. We don't ask for any name except what anyone wants to be known as. We don't even go to the pub afterwards.”

“Why not?”

“It would make those who don't want to go—who don't like to show their face, or what's left of it—feel even more isolated.”

“Commendable,” said Ferguson. “So the upshot of all this is that you have no information about him except that he knows about robotics and that he knew Father Murphy from his military service. In fact, you have no evidence that he exists. Why should we believe that he and not you placed the bomb in the package?”

“I'm no trying to shift the blame onto Graham,” said Thomas. “I don't
think he did it either. I'm no saying I know him well, personally like, but I canna conceive of him killing a padre. Specially no one he'd been in combat with. I mean, come on, man! You'd have tae be a downright psycho tae be capable o’ that! And Graham's no a psycho, I know that. Maist sympathetic guy ye could hope tae meet.”

“How, then, do you account for the evidence?”

“I can't,” said Thomas. “And I don't have tae. I've telt you the truth.”

Ferguson leaned back and spread his hands. “Enough,” he said. “I think we've gone as far as we can with this line of questioning. I'd now like you to answer some questions from my colleague Inspector Polanski, of Fife Constabulary.”

“One moment, please,” said Anna Polanski. She tilted back her head and went into a five-second information-retrieval dwam. She blinked her way out and shook her head.

“Right,” she said. “Mr. Thomas. Why did you leave your rifle on your boat, instead of taking the rifle ashore and storing it, as common sense would suggest and the law requires?”

For the first time, Thomas looked uncomfortable. He rubbed his hands on his thighs, as if his palms could still sweat.

“I'm sorry about that,” he said. “I was feart you'd ask if I'd fired it, and I couldna deny that I had.” He raised his hands. “The powder's on me, nae doubt.”

“Why should that worry you?”

“Well,” said Thomas, “I'd done something a wee bit no legal with it. I'd shot at a seal.” He cracked a smile. “Missed the bugger and all.”

“You shot at a seal?”

“Aye, well. It was in my fishing grounds, like.”

“Where was this?”

“Off St. Andrews, not long before Mr. Ferguson gied me a bell.”

“You say you missed. Where did the shot go?”

“Inta the water. Where else?”

“Are you aware that a man walking by the shore at St. Andrews was shot around that time?”

Thomas frowned. “You're no suggesting my bullet did that?”

Polanski said nothing.

“Couldna have happened,” Thomas said firmly. “I was a mile or more out tae sea. I wasna even aiming inland. The seal was seaward of me at the time. And my rifle disna have that kindae range anyway. You're welcome to check
it. And if you want to charge me under the Wildlife Protection, aye, I'll put my hands up to that. Many's the fisherman does the same.”

This, Ferguson knew, was true.

“Mr. Thomas,” Polanski asked, “have you tuned your contacts—uh, your eyes to news since this interview began?”

“Course not.”

“So it's news to you that the Bishop of St. Andrews has been shot dead, and a policeman seriously injured?”

Thomas rocked back in his seat. “It is and all!” He put his hands to his head. “Now it's a bishop shot! A bishop! What in the name of God is going on?”

“That,” said Polanski, “is exactly the question that's on our minds. What in the name of God, as you say, is going on?”

She stood up. “I'm now going to print off a map and satellite image.”

She stepped over to the interview-room printer and returned with a sheet of high-res photographic paper, which she slid across the table to Thomas.

“As you can see,” she said after he had examined it, “one possible trajectory of the shot extends to the approximate location of your boat at the time.”

Thomas pushed the paper sideways to his lawyer, who frowned down at it.

“Aye, it does,” Thomas said. “It also extends past two or three dots that could be other boats or coastal mechs. And maist of the spread is over the headland. Anyway, like I said, my rifle doesn't have that range.”

“This is absurd,” said Wilson.

“I put it to you,” said Polanski to Thomas, “that the rifle now on your boat wasn't the only rifle you fired today. That, in fact, you fired that rifle for no other purpose than to give an explanation for the firearms-discharge residue on your hands and clothes. That you fired another rifle, a much more powerful one with a telescopic sight, at the bishop.”

Thomas snorted. “A head shot from two miles away, in a rocking boat? I'd have to be the most miraculous shooter since Lee Harvey Oswald.”

“With a sniper rifle, which you then dropped overboard. Yes.”

Thomas appeared more amazed than fazed.

“And the coastal mechs never noticed? I ken they're a bit rusty now, but a military rifle shooting inland from the sea is just the kind of thing they're supposed to look out for, aye? They'd have all opened fire on
me
!”

“The coastal mechs are junk,” said Polanski. “Rusty, yes. Unlike your shooting skills, which your own profile says you take some trouble to keep up.”

Thomas turned to his lawyer. “Mr. Wilson,” he said, “I don't have to answer any more questions, and I'm no going to.”

“My client is within his rights,” said Wilson, “and is aware that not answering may—”

“Just one more question,” said Polanski. “Mr. Thomas, how did you know it was a head shot?”

Thomas rubbed his eyebrows.

“I assumed it must have been.”

“None of us had mentioned that. The fact hasn't been released on the news.”

“A trunk shot disna kill in this day and age,” said Thomas. “Not wi’ proper and prompt medical attention, anyway.”

“There's no need to say anything further,” Wilson advised.

“So we're looking for
another
experienced military shooter, somewhere along the same lines of fire at the same time,” said Polanski. “Fine.”

“Aye,” said Thomas, ignoring Wilson's advice and his own resolution, and as if eager to help. “That or a coastal mech that's malfunctioning or been corrupted.”

“My client,” said Wilson, “is not answering any more questions.”

He said it more to Thomas than to his questioners. Thomas took the hint, sat back and shut up. Polanski glanced at Ferguson and moved her hand.

“Very well,” said Ferguson. He stood up. “I'm very far from convinced by your stories, Mr. Thomas. Nevertheless, I'm releasing you on bail, with the requirement that you report in to Greensides every day for the next seven days. That should give us time enough to gather more evidence, and for you to think of more convincing ways to account for it. A lead to your friend Graham would not go amiss in this respect. You can start by helping us make a photofit of his face.”

“I protest,” said Wilson. “My client should be released unconditionally.”

“Take your protest to the sheriff,” said Ferguson. “This interview is over.”

17:30. The middle of the homeward rush hour. The top of Leith Walk was bumper to bumper, the pavements elbow to elbow. The low whir of cars moving, the squeal of cars stopping and the whine of cars restarting mingled with the tramp of feet. The sunlight was at an angle that made Ferguson look in awkward directions. Polanski sucked hard on her cigarette. Hutchins sat on a bollard and scowled down at the litter of dog-ends. Skulk fixed its attention on a dirigible drifting towards the Turnhouse moorings.

“I still say we should have held him,” Polanski said. “He actually delivered the bomb. He admits as much.”

“He admits he delivered the package that at some point or other contained the bomb,” said Ferguson. “That's different.”

“Huh,” said Polanski.

Ferguson suspected that, although she was as Scottish as he was, Polanski's name had subtly influenced her to look to tough American fictional cops and detectives as role models. Maybe he could use this to persuade her to chew gum instead of smoking.

“
Cherchez la femme
,” said Hutchins, looking up from the dog-ends.

“How d’you mean?” Ferguson asked, impatient that Hutchins might be considering the homicidal-little-old-lady angle again.

“Look at it this way,” Hutchins said, jumping up. “Suppose Thomas is telling the truth. When Thomas said he'd mentioned Graham's name to Murphy, I had this thought that maybe Graham expected Murphy to recognise his name. OK, so we have three men here, all Faith War veterans—”

“All celibates too, as far as we know,” Ferguson pointed out. “So where's
la femme
?”

“In intensive care at the Western General,” said Hutchins. “Bernadette White, the priest's housekeeper.”

“Housekeeper, nudge, nudge,” said Polanski. Ferguson frowned at her, turned again to Hutchins.

“And she's a Faith War widow,” he said. “Or so the bishop told me this morning.”

“I'm sure he believes that, but I don't see why we should.”

“Point,” said Ferguson. “We can check that easily enough, I should imagine.”

“We might have to dig,” said Hutchins.

“Tell me why you think that would be worthwhile,” said Ferguson.

Hutchins looked awkward. “This'll maybe seem cruel, but…when I was looking at Connor Thomas, I couldn't help feeling a bit squeamish. Yes, I know the prosthetics are very, very good, and he has sensation and everything, but…it's still a bit…off-putting, and I wondered…you know, what it would be like to be with someone like that. If, maybe, he'd had a wife or girlfriend who just couldn't accept him. And all along, at the back of his mind, he knows the only reason he has these problems at all is the Catholic dogma about stem cells being babies. If he wasn't a Catholic he could get full regeneration. I mean, that's got to rankle, right?”

“So he takes it out on a priest, and on two innocent bystanders?” said Polanski. “That kinda makes sense.”

“The priest was an innocent victim too,” Ferguson snapped. “But, that aside…yes, I see where you're going, Shonagh. If there was any prior relationship between Mrs. White and Thomas—or Graham, for that matter—then this could all be something personal. It's also occurred to me that we've all along assumed Father Murphy was the prime target and his housekeeper was collateral damage.”

“And the other woman, too,” Hutchins pointed out. “The mother. Let's not forget her.”

Ferguson chewed a lip. “Damn, damn, damn. If only Mrs. White could speak to us we could clear up this angle in no time.”

Hutchins shook her head. “Not a chance, sir. Not for days. Maybe a week.”

“OK, Shonagh, dig.”

Hutchins looked like she was about to dash off when Skulk bestirred itself.

“DS Hutchins,” it said, “you mentioned not forgetting the mother. Her name's Marjorie Broughton, by the way. She's in the same condition as Bernadette White—still in intensive care, stabilised until she's ready for further treatment for internal and spinal injuries. We can't ask her anything either, but we can ask her husband, Derek Broughton, who's right there at the hospital, when he's not looking after their child.”

“I'll get onto that, too,” said Hutchins.

“Shit,” said Polanski, “why can't Paranoia come up with points like that?”

“To ask the question is to answer it,” said Skulk.

“However, speaking as a non-human myself, permit me to point out that in your natural human pattern-recognition this whole tabloid-headline Priest Love Triangle concept may have misled you into ignoring the awkward fourth corner: Bishop Black.”

“We're not exactly ignoring him,” said Polanski. She tapped her phone clip. “Fife Constabulary and Lothian and Borders are going full tilt at it. They're tearing up that estate on the headland as we speak, just in case Mr. Thomas's sniping abilities aren't as brilliant as I suspected.”

“What I mean,” said Skulk, “is that he doesn't fit what DS Hutchins suggested. I've run searches on him, and he has no connection with the people involved in the Murphy case. Not even the PNAI has any dots to join. He wasn't even involved in the Faith Wars, apart from opposing them. Practically a pacifist, I gather.”

“That's involvement,” said Polanski.

“Along with most of the Scottish Episcopal clergy, if I remember right from my days on the God Squads,” said Ferguson. “Nah, we'd need more than that. Skulk's got a point.” He turned to the leki. “Do you have a theory?”

“Only a hypothesis,” said Skulk. “I now think it more likely than I did before that we should be looking for a robot. A humanoid robot passing—in some contexts at least—as a
mutilado
. Only a robot could have fooled Thomas about what it was putting in the package,
and
shot the bishop from the range the sniper must have done.”

Polanski and Hutchins remonstrated, and Skulk seemed to dig itself into its initially tentative idea, until Ferguson held up a hand. “Enough, everyone. This is for an Incident Room meeting.” He glanced at his watch.

“Canteen, then everyone together in, let's see, an hour. Six-forty-five sharp.”

“I'll put the message out,” said Skulk.

Ferguson didn't get as far as the canteen. Just inside the main entrance he was waylaid by DCI Frank McAuley.

“Time we kept our belated appointment,” McAuley said. Ferguson followed him to the lift, then to his office, his stomach grumbling that it hadn't had anything since breakfast. Nothing like dealing with a decapitating sniper shot to ruin your afternoon, Ferguson thought as he sat down in front of McAuley's desk.

McAuley was old school, recruited to the force under the New Labour governments back in the zeroes. Severe on racism and sexism, strong on
human rights and human relations, in the second decade of the Faith Wars he'd sent Muslims to the filtration camps without hatred and tortured terrorist suspects without cruelty: securing the vacated house and shop against looting, sterilising the needle before inserting it under the fingernail. Under the Sozis he'd hammered the Right; under the restoration he'd persecuted the Left. As a fresh-faced PC on the God Squads, Ferguson had seen McAuley handle a Catholic demonstration on Princes Street with a like dispassion. The tanks of the Italian Republic had the previous day rolled into St. Peter's Square, and the auditors were swarming through the Vatican, opening the books for the African AIDS class-action lawsuit that was to bankrupt the Church within a year. Thousands of Catholics had turned out to protest. McAuley had strolled into the forest of croziers and crosses at the front, chatted to the bishops, and emerged to coolly order the riot squads into action against the taunting crowds of Orangemen, feminists, pagans and gays lining the sidewalks and jeering from the Mound. The sweep was so sharp, so sudden and unexpected that resistance was minimal, the counter-demonstrators doing more damage to each other in the vans than the cops had done making the arrests. The Catholic protest proceeded to Holyrood without further incident and, of course, without effect.

Now he was going through a little routine of looking down at his desk slate and occasionally glancing up, giving Ferguson the lidded-eyes-under-lowered-brows treatment, then resuming reading. McAuley looked as if he lived on salads and ran ten kilometres daily, which was more or less the case.

“Oh, Adam,” he said after a minute or so of this mind trick, “I'm just about up to speed on today's developments, and—between ourselves—I'm beginning to wonder if we aren't a little out of our depth here. It's more than just a local matter now, with this dreadful development in Fife. Who knows what the next outrage will be? Should Glasgow be on high alert? Isn't it time to turn this over to the specialists? Fettes is certainly asking the same questions. Run some possible answers past me, if you don't mind.”

“I don't agree that we're out of our depth, sir. I've no idea what's next, and I would certainly say that Glasgow should be on alert. Now, as for the specialists—if you mean the anti-terrorism specialists, they've had less and less to do for the past fifteen years or so. You, me and DCI Mukhtar have between us more recent and relevant experience than Fettes is likely to scrape together in a week. I'm very confident in my officers on the ground. Certainly, we should draw on any specialist expertise on offer, but I don't think it's time to let the spooks take charge.”

“I wasn't actually thinking about the spooks,” said McAuley. “Just the Scottish Anti-Terrorism Unit. You're right, of course, it's a bit creaky, but if some mass-casualty event were to take place and we'd failed to stop it…”

“With respect, sir, that's thinking more in terms of protecting ourselves if things go wrong than in terms of stopping things going wrong in the first place.”

“I'm not talking about covering my ass. Nor,” McAuley added pointedly, “of protecting our own patch.”

Ferguson made a wiping gesture parallel with the desk. “OK, sir, point taken. Let's say I think the Unit should be involved, not in charge. Not yet.”

“Can you give me a strong argument for that?”

“For one thing,” Ferguson said, “we have as yet no evidence that this isn't all the work of one person.”

“Really? Even with the leaflets?”

“The leaflets could be the work of the same person. That's assuming they're connected with the two crimes at all. There's been absolutely no chatter, no online material, no groundswell of opinion even among the small groups of bigots and fanatics that Mukhtar monitors routinely.”

McAuley drummed a finger on a non-responsive area of his desk.

“Speaking of which,” he said after a moment, “another suggestion I might have to field is to remobilise the God Squads.”

Ferguson had difficulty taking this seriously. “Boots in the pews? Sir?”

“Boots in the pews, ab-so-fucking-lutely, old chap. Put the boom down on them, remind them who's boss. All in the name of protecting the congregations from terrorist attack, of course.”

“I can't think of a bigger waste of resources,” said Ferguson. “We need to get every man, woman and leki we can spare onto finding this killer, or killers, before they strike again. Besides, if there's any real religious fanaticism behind this—whether an individual or a group—nobody's more likely to rat them out than someone in the same congregation. Boots in the pews would just make that harder.”

“Ah yes,” said McAuley. “The old ‘isolate the extremists from the moderates’ tack. Didn't work out too well for us, back in the day, now did it?”

“Oh, come on, Frank!” said Ferguson, irritated into dropping protocol, if not quite yet politeness. “That bolt had been well and truly shot long before either of us had any say in the matter.”

“Aye, there's that,” said McAuley, with a regretful tone in his voice and a wintry reminiscence in his eyes. “There's that, all right.”

He leaned back for a few moments.

“All right, Adam. But if there's one more of these attacks, anywhere in Scotland, or if we don't catch anyone in the next few days, the Anti-Terrorism Unit will have to take over—and they'll be run closely by the spooks. And if that happens, believe me, the only thing left for us to do will be to put the boots in the pews, whether we think that'll do any good or not.”

“If that happens,” said Ferguson, “we'll just have to go back to sorting out the goons on Leith Water.”

“That would be nice,” said McAuley, as if missing the kinder, gentler world of two days ago. “But we won't get to decide. And it's not just the spooks who'll be on our case. Holyrood is already belching and farting about it. There's a lot riding on the outcome of this bloody business. This is the first incident of religious terrorism in Europe for fifteen years. If we can't crack it, or if it escalates, it'll look like we didn't solve the religion problem after all. There'll be voices raised claiming that the whole Second Enlightenment policy of radical secularism was misconceived, that we have to let the mainstream religious groups have some political clout again, that marginalising the faith discourse hasn't worked.”

“These voices might have a case,” said Ferguson, purposely provoking.

“I'll treat that as if we were brainstorming,” said McAuley. “But we're not. And let me remind you, Adam, that if the line of thinking I've just mentioned starts to get a hearing, there are plenty of people who would take great delight in raking over what coppers like you and I did, when we did what had to be done. Nobody's questioned it since, because it worked. If it turns out not to have worked, we'll get the heat. Not the politicians who made the laws, but we who applied them with what will come to be called excessive zeal. So don't even consider if ‘they'd have a case’—go out and crack
this
case.”