The heid chief.
That was the lofty title Callum Davidson gave himself when he punched his number into the mobile phone of a friend.
That friendship would land his pal in the witness box at the High Court in Edinburgh, explaining how Davidson had rung, looking for someone to “do a turn for him”, on the night of Steven Donaldson’s death.
“When it came up as ‘heid chief’ I knew it was Callum,” he told the jury.
The call was made around the time farmhand Davidson stopped off at his uncle’s house in Kirriemuir to pick up a baseball bat. The makeshift weapon was later snapped across Mr Donaldson’s skull and came to be a critical piece of forensic evidence in the murder case.
Davidson’s fingerprint was detected in the victim’s blood which covered the broken shaft. The same blood also found its way onto the handlebars of a bike which Davidson was seen riding through Kirrie at 2am on June 7, on his way back from Kinnordy Loch, where Mr Donaldson’s brutalised body lay beside his burned out BMW.
Callum Davidson had a reputation as a bully in Kirriemuir, forged through intimidation and a fondness for settling disputes with fists and weapons.
His criminal record already listed assault and offensive weapon convictions by the time he took his place alongside Steven Dickie and Tasmin Glass in the middle of the Court Three dock.
Brooding Davidson was a contradiction to his co-accused; the cocksure, flash lad and well brought up budding singer.
In Saturday’s Courier: The full story of a murder that shocked a community
While Glass dabbed her eyes from time to time and waistcoated Dickie glanced around the court, acknowledging supporters in the public benches, Davidson sat emotionless in his black and white pullover, staring out from under his deep set brow and stifling the rage which had spilled over and snuffed out the life of a stranger at Kinnordy Loch.
From time to time, he furiously scribbled notes to pass to his legal team, presumably in some vain attempt to outwit the minds gathered around the High Court table as the case stacked up against him.
The problem for Callum Davidson was that the QCs and advocates, along with the ladies and gentlemen of the jury, spoke a different language from that of a heid chief.
A language founded on decency, humanity and justice; rather than bullying, brutality and evil.
