Socks, underwear, t-shirts, sweatshirts. I diligently unfolded and replaced each item in turn, checking every corner of the drawers. Nothing. A framed photograph of a smiling Kaj, flanked by his brothers, stood on top of the dresser, reproaching my failure to find anything. He’d had more family photos in the living room, backing up the impression we’d got from his social media and phone logs. They’d been close, the three brothers, and he’d kept in regular touch with both of them. Weekly video calls, regular chats, holiday visits. Kaj had spent a lot more call time with them than he had with his parents, but he hadn’t neglected mum and dad either. Shay closed the wardrobe and turned to see why I’d stopped before starting on the laundry basket.
“At least nobody expects us to talk to the family this time,” he said. “But if Visser was keeping any secrets, he’d be more likely to trust his brothers with them than anyone else. Maybe we should reach out to them? See if they can tell us anything?”
“Maybe. I’ll certainly consider it if we run out of other options.” Siblings might frequently conspire to keep their parents in the dark about what they’d been up to, but that didn’t mean they told each other everything. Far from it, in my experience.
“I’ve already checked that picture frame,” he told me. “Did you open up the ones in the living room?” I hadn’t, but I should have. You’d be surprised how many people liked to hide things between a framed photograph and the backing board.
“I’ll do that now.” I left him to finish searching the bedroom and went to correct my oversight. I found the little coin envelope taped into the fifth one I checked. The others were all clean. That sort of discovery never failed to provoke a little anticipatory thrill. Whatever was in there, Visser hadn’t wanted anyone to simply stumble across it. You didn’t go to the trouble of hiding things so carefully without a good reason.
Shay came to see it as soon as he’d finished in the bedroom. He snapped a photo of the envelope, still in place, before removing it with a pair of tweezers and laying it on an evidence bag to spray it before running his light over it.
“Only Visser’s prints on it.” He confirmed after checking them before applying the tweezers again to open it up and reveal the little memory card concealed within. Another shot of that, and then he carefully moved the envelope into the bag. “I know we’re both itching to see what might be on there, but we should finish what we were doing before we look at it.”
He was right. No getting side-tracked until we’d finished searching the flat.
“I’ll take the spare room, and you take the bathroom?” I suggested.
“Yeah. I’d like to see what hair samples I can pull from the shower drain. I might even manage to collect a few with some undegraded DNA left on the roots. That might come in useful later. You never know. I should check the vacuum cleaner too if he had one.”
“He did. That tall cupboard to the right of the kitchen sink is a closet. There’s a broom too.”
I found him bagging a few hairs from that latter item after I’d finished in the spare room.
“Nothing in there,” I told him. “It was mainly all items from the inventory list in the tenancy agreement that he didn’t want cluttering the place up. Any luck in the bathroom?”
He shook his head. “Only the usual, expected toiletries and things. No prescription meds in the cabinet, just some over-the-counter painkillers and a basic first aid kit. No third party fingerprints either. I got my hair samples, though.” He put the broom back and labelled his new bags of samples. “That’s pretty much it for a non-destructive search of the place. Unless you want to be more thorough?”
“I’m not planning to start moving furniture around and tearing things apart today,” I told him. We might yet need to come back and do that, but there was no reason to go that far just yet. “Did you find any cash hidden away anywhere?”
“Just a couple of hundred quid tucked away in the bedside unit.” Ready money then and not a significant amount, apart from the fact that we didn’t know where it had come from.
“That third key belongs to a nearby garage that came with this flat, but I’d like to look at that memory card before we go down there,” I told him.
“Right. Me too.” He fetched his laptop and the bag with the card in and set them down on the kitchen counter. “Hang on a sec. It looks like we might have found one of the pair from Harpers.” He clicked on the flashing tab, and the image of a driving licence came up. “Monica Jamieson. The given address is in Wick too.”
A local girl then, not a visitor. That was good news. It shouldn’t be too hard to find someone who could identify her from the photo we had. He minimised the licence and slotted the memory card into an adapter before plugging it in.
“Nothing on here but a few image files from the camera roll on his phone, by the looks of it.” He clicked the first one, and the photo popped up.
“That looks like a shot of his laptop screen.”
“It is. You can’t screenshot Secret Chats, but there’s nothing to stop you from snapping them with a camera on a different device.” He blew it up. “Not without a sensor, anyway. And there’s your legitimately obtained link between Visser and Mrs Soames. Looks like they were arranging a meeting for the twenty-second of March.”
They’d been careful what they wrote, but that was the gist of it. At thirty-seven, Melissa Soames was a bit older than his usual hook-ups, but that didn’t rule out the possibility that the meeting was for personal reasons.
“And like he wanted to keep evidence of it as proof for some reason. What else is on there?”
There were another dozen images. Photographs all showing the same strikingly attractive woman. Getting out of a car, walking into a house, sleeping. Visser had managed to get himself into one of the pictures, propped up on an elbow at her side. He was topless in that one, and so was she, although bedding modestly covered their lower bodies. Shay checked the dates on them all. They’d all been taken on the twenty-second.
“Doesn’t look like she realised he was taking pictures,” he commented. “I can’t say I approve.”
“Useful for us, though. Is that Melissa Soames?”
“It is,” he confirmed before saving the folder to his drive, ejecting the card, and returning it to its envelope and bag. “So we now have two people with a possible motive there. I don’t think Charlie would have taken kindly to being cheated on, and Melissa might have had a good reason to be very unhappy with her lover if she’d found out about these photos.”
A blackmail attempt, perhaps? It didn’t fit what we’d learned about our victim’s character so far, but Visser had taken the trouble to hide that card. We couldn’t dismiss the possibility.
I checked the time. We’d been pretty quick here. Less than an hour and a half from start to finish. If the garage didn’t take up much time, we could easily be back at the station well before four. I still wanted to see the two girls I’d meant to call once we were done here, but they’d dropped a couple of places lower on my priorities list now. That could wait until I’d got Shay safely installed and busily ferreting around. I could leave him to it and take one of the others instead.
A dark blue 1996 Ford Fiesta occupied the garage. I ran the licence plate and found it was registered to one of the VOW staff, an office worker, not someone we’d interviewed. I added her name to my growing list of people to check on. It seemed odd that she hadn’t come forward to mention that Kaj Visser had been working on her car. Apart from the Ford, there was nothing else in there but a well-stocked tool bench.
“Looks like we might have found where the cash in hand payments was coming from,” Shay said as he examined a discarded oil filter and a set of old spark plugs lying on the bench. “If Kaj was doing the odd bit of maintenance work on friends’ cars, that might explain the extra money I couldn’t account for.”
“Or some of it, at least. Wouldn’t buying replacement parts have left a trail, though?”
“Not if he told the owners what was needed
, and they bought the parts themselves. Seen enough here?”
I had, for now. Shay opened up the door and flicked the light off, and I locked up behind us. We both had more than enough to look into now to keep us busy for the rest of the day.
Fourteen
We were the first ones to get back to the station, but the last update texts I’d got from Caitlin and Collins had informed me that both pairs were on their way to their last scheduled stops. They’d probably all turn up in the next half hour. While Shay started looking into Monica Jamieson, I made use of the time to catch up on the information he’d sent me earlier.
Charlie Soames had been pulled in after the assault on Will McLaren back in the winter of ’99, but, as Shay had said, the case hadn’t gone to court. With the victim later stating that he couldn’t positively identify his attacker, combined with the failure of the local boys to collect physical evidence in the immediate aftermath of the incident, there had been no case to present to the Procurator Fiscal’s office. The accepted story was that Charlie and his two friends had been on their way home from the pub that night when they’d seen a man kicking McLaren’s ribs in. Charlie had explained the blood spatter on his own skin and clothing by claiming he’d first tried to intervene, chasing the unknown attacker off, and then done what he could to help the victim. His pals had backed his story up. McLaren had later insisted that he’d been in shock, concussed and under the influence of strong painkillers when he’d given his initial statement at the hospital, and the attending medical staff had confirmed all of those things to be true. The victim had been confused and traumatised and the police officers investigating the incident hadn’t been left with a leg to stand on once he’d changed his story.
Reading between the lines, I couldn’t say they’d made much of an effort to give themselves one. There was no photographic evidence in the old case file to show what condition Soames’ hands had been in when he’d been pulled in, or of the pattern of the blood on his clothing either. Shay had refrained from mentioning the numerous oversights that had been made, but he’d known I wouldn’t fail to notice them. As for those two helpful pals of Charlie’s, it certainly hadn’t hurt Soames’s statement that one of those two had been an off-duty young constable at the time. PC Bruce Malcolm, now Sergeant Malcolm, the officer who’d been manning the front desk when we arrived yesterday morning.
There was more. Shay’s background check on Charlie Soames informed me that the family had moved up to Caithness when he was ten after his father had been released from prison. Brendan Soames, a minor property baron, had served a two year stretch for carrying out illegal evictions at two of his houses in Manchester. That was the maximum custodial sentence allowed for the offence under the Protection from Eviction Act 1977. He’d also been fined quite heavily, so it had probably been a particularly unpleasant example of a slum landlord behaving very badly. The tenants in question, who could easily have sued for damages and compensation, had failed to pursue a civil case against their former landlord. Perhaps they’d been reluctant to risk it for financial reasons, not prepared to shoulder the costs of a failed suit, or perhaps someone had strongly advised them against trying it if they valued their health. If Brendan Soames had been anything like some of the Glasgow landlords I’d come across during my time there, I wouldn’t have been surprised.
The two later investigations into Brendan’s son Charlie made me think he’d probably picked up some of his father’s rough-and-ready business habits. Those had been opened because of complaints of harassment from a couple of Charlie’s tenants here in Wick. One in 2010 and another in 2014. Charlie had been a lot more careful about how he conducted his business dealings than his dad had been, but he wasn’t in any danger of winning a landlord of the year award. The fact that no link could be proven between him and the unidentified men who had threatened his tenants didn’t mean that one didn’t exist.
When someone fell behind on their rent, private landlords often found themselves in an unenviable position, legally speaking. It could take months before a formal eviction notice could be obtained and enforced. Scrupulous, law-abiding property owners often suffered serious financial losses when stuck with troublesome tenants, especially if they caused property damage that they had neither the means nor the intention of paying for. Less ethical landlords found cheaper, faster ways to encourage people to move out without causing trouble.
Illegal or not, playing dirty certainly had its financial advantages. Charlie and Melissa Soames were a well-to-do couple. Charlie had an extensive portfolio of commercial and private properties in Caithness and Sutherland. The man had more than doubled his inheritance over the years since his father’s death, selling off the last of the Manchester properties at a very good time and reinvesting the proceeds to snap up a few bargains here instead. The couple’s own five-bedroom villa, a mile north of town, came with over an acre of landscaped gardens and even had an indoor pool. Alright, property prices in the area weren’t high, but the house was mortgage-free and worth a considerable sum.
“What did you make of Bruce Malcolm’s statement from ‘99?” I asked Shay once I’d finished reading his initial findings.
“About the same as you, I’d imagine. I think he covered for his buddy and lied through his teeth.”
Sadly, I found I had to agree with him. Being a ‘good pal’ didn’t necessarily make sergeant Malcolm a habitually dishonest police officer, but it wasn’t a good sign. I’d have felt better about it if Soames’ assault on McLaren had been in any way justified, but the available information said otherwise. All we knew was that Will McLaren had asked a girl he liked out on a date. The fact that she’d gone out with Charlie Soames a couple of times, a month before that, may or may not be significant. When questioned, she’d made it very clear that Soames was not and never had been her boyfriend. Even if he had been, that certainly didn’t give him the right to assault McLaren.
“Any luck with Monica Jamieson yet?” I asked.
“I’ve started digging, but I’m not that fast, Con. If you’re in a hurry to talk to her, your best bet would be to take a printout of that photo to Harpers. One of the staff there, Carl Scott, was in her school year, so he should be able to supply you with her name, even if none of the others can.” And once we’d been given that, I could check the DVLA and local directories for her myself. Shay glanced over at me questioningly. “I thought you’d want to wait a bit before you went knocking on her door, though.”
“I do,” I agreed. “If you could identify the man, and maybe the girl in the red top too first, that would be better. Can you focus on trying to find those two for now?” We could only see Visser’s selected target that night from behind in the picture, but that gave us hair colour, height and build. Both Sandy Morris and Lenny Buchanan had said the three girls were sitting together when Kaj had gone over to try his luck with them, so they, at least, had definitely known each other. Whether they’d also known the two lads who joined them remained to be seen.
Giving Shay the time to cross-check Monica’s regular contacts and all their uploaded photos might lead us straight to the girl, and I wanted at least two of the five before we started asking any of them anything about last Friday. We had far more chance of encountering gaping discrepancies in their stories if we didn’t make the mistake of approaching the Jamieson girl too soon and giving her the chance to warn the others that we wanted to talk to them all.
“What else are you planning to look at?” I asked him.
“Monica’s work history, who she might be living with, if anyone, and the usual check on her phone and bank accounts. I’m also pulling more CCTV footage to check through overnight. You never know, one of the cameras might have caught her in interesting company sometime in the last couple of weeks. Weren’t you going to call VOW about the owner of that Fiesta?”
“I was. I’ll do that now.”
The reason the woman who owned our Ford hadn’t sought us out was soon made clear. Clara Sutton and her family were away
, halfway through a two-week holiday in the Bahamas.
Shay had already bounced the contents of the memory card across to me, but I held off on adding them to the case folder. I wanted to write up my report on the day’s activities first. I had almost finished with that task when I heard voices in the outer office. A couple of minutes later, Caitlin came to tap on our door.
“I hope you two have had a more profitable afternoon than Mills and I have,” she said, pulling a face as she stuck her head in.
“No luck?” I indicated the free chair, and she came in and sat down.
“You’ll see when you read the notes, but no, none of the women who took Kaj home with them had anything interesting to say. The overall impression I got was that they all wished there were more men like him around to choose from: Generous, good looking, attentive and not bad in the sack either.” She sniffed. “They all said there had been no hint of offensive expectations from his side of things. Flattering interest, yes, but no attempt to imply any obligation just because he was paying for their drinks.” She sat up a little and pulled her feet in. “I think a lot of the fellas they meet aren’t quite so nice about things. The only complaint they had was Visser’s total lack of interest in seeing any of them again after their respective one-night stands. Not very flattering, right? I can’t see any of them being mad enough about that to kill him, though.”
“Maybe if they’d insisted on paying their own way, he might not have been so quick to brush them off?” Shay suggested. “Most people prefer to think they’re wanted for themselves, without any transactional ambiguity casting doubts on the issue.”
Castle Killings: A DCI Keane Scottish Crime Thriller (Deadly Highlands Book 4) Page 12
