Still Life

by Val McDermid

  STILL

  LIFE

  By Val McDermid

  A Place of Execution

  Killing the Shadows

  The Grave Tattoo

  Trick of the Dark

  The Vanishing Point

  TONY HILL/CAROL JORDAN NOVELS

  The Mermaids Singing

  The Wire in the Blood

  The Last Temptation

  The Torment of Others

  Beneath the Bleeding

  Fever of the Bone

  The Retribution

  Cross and Burn

  Splinter the Silence

  Insidious Intent

  How the Dead Speak

  KAREN PIRIE NOVELS

  The Distant Echo

  A Darker Domain

  The Skeleton Road

  Out of Bounds

  Broken Ground

  LINDSAY GORDON NOVELS

  Report for Murder

  Common Murder

  Final Edition

  Union Jack

  Booked for Murder

  Hostage to Murder

  KATE BRANNIGAN NOVELS

  Dead Beat

  Kick Back

  Crack Down

  Clean Break

  Blue Genes

  Star Struck

  SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS

  The Writing on the Wall

  Stranded

  Christmas is Murder (ebook only)

  Gunpowder Plots (ebook only)

  NON-FICTION

  A Suitable Job for a Woman

  Forensics

  My Scotland

  Val

  McDermid

  STILL

  LIFE

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2020 by Val McDermid

  Jacket design by Gretchen Mergenthaler

  Jacket photograph: Lobster pots and fishing net

  © David Attenborough/Alamy Stock Photo;

  Bridge © plainpicture/AWL/Alan Copson

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or permissions@groveatlantic.com.

  Quote from Artful by Ali Smith reproduced with the author’s kind permission.

  First published in Great Britain in 2020 by Little, Brown

  Printed in Canada

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: October 2020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-5744-7

  eISBN 978-0-8021-5746-1

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  To friends and colleagues in New Zealand, including – but not exclusively – the Raith Rovers FC Kiwi Supporters Club, all the Lesleys/Leslies and their sidekicks, and the baristas at the Dispensary. We miss you and I’ll be baaack.

  Art is always an exchange, like love, whose giving and taking can be a complex and wounding matter, according to Michelangelo.

  Ali Smith, Artful

  Prologue

  Saturday, 15 February 2020

  Billy Watson cast off from the quay without the faintest flicker of a premonition. He nosed the 23-foot creel boat out into the east harbour’s main channel with casual familiarity. The morning was no different from countless others: bitterly cold, a sharp northerly wind slicing through flesh and making his cheekbones ache. But at least it was fair, and the eggshell-blue February sky held no promise of rain to come. On the far shore, the outlines of Berwick Law and the Bass Rock were crisp as a painting. The chill waters of the Firth of Forth parted before the scarlet bows of the Bonnie Pearl, a thin line of white foam marking her passage.

  Billy reached for his thermos mug of coffee and took a short nip; it was still too hot for a full swallow. He always liked to give it a wee blast in the microwave after he’d added the milk to make sure it stayed piping hot for as long as possible. A man needed all the help he could get to stay warm on a winter morning in the Forth estuary.

  His cousin Jackie opened the wheelhouse door a crack and squeezed in, trying not to let the heat out. ‘Braw day for it,’ he said. It was one of Jackie’s limited and predictable conversational gambits. ‘Bit rough the day,’ was another. ‘Gey wet,’ his invariable response to rain.

  ‘Aye,’ Billy said, giving the engine some throttle. They left the shelter of the harbour for the choppier waters beyond the zig-zag pier that stretched into the sea and protected the harbour walls from the tideline surges that swept along the coast. A touch on the wheel and their course shifted till they were heading east, the Isle of May breasting the horizon like a humpback whale. As they drew level with the old windmill and the hollows and hillocks of the former salt pans, Billy slipped the engine into neutral and in a practised manoeuvre brought the Bonnie Pearl alongside the first marker buoy.

  Jackie’s son Andy swaggered into view, his rolling gait compensating for the low swell. With the ease of experience, he reached over the side with a boat hook to snag the buoy that marked the end of the fleet of D-shaped creels containing the day’s first catch. Just like every other morning, he led the rope to the creel hauler and started the winch.

  Even from the wheelhouse, Billy could see there was a problem. The rope was taut but no creel had emerged from the water. Andy was struggling, leaning over the gunwale, trying to manoeuvre the boathook. ‘Better give the boy a hand,’ Billy said to Jackie, who sighed and made his way down to the deck. The two men wrestled with the rope. Something seemed to be tangled in it, something that was a drag on the winch. Billy could see Jackie swearing eloquently, his words whipped away by the wind.

  A rogue wave caught the bow and swung the boat through ninety degrees. Enough to make the men’s job easier. They staggered back a couple of feet, giving Billy a clear view of what was in the water.

  For a moment, it made no sense. Billy’s brain translated the strange sight into a battered white creel marker buoy with slash marks. Then he recalibrated. No buoy ever came with a neck and shoulders.

  Their first catch of the day was a drowned man.

  1

  Sunday, 16 February 2020

  Detective Sergeant Daisy Mortimer wasn’t easily put off her food. But for once, she stared at the bacon and egg roll she’d made for breakfast with a distinctly jaundiced air. In that crucial moment between sliding the egg on to the crispy bacon and squirting it with tomato ketchup, her boss had rung. ‘Morning, Daisy,’ DCI Charlie Todd had greeted her cheerily. She could hear his two kids bickering in the background.

  ‘Morning, sir.’ Daisy matched his cheer with perkiness. She liked her job and she liked Charlie Todd, after all.

  ‘A lobster boat out of St Monans
pulled a body out of the Forth early on. Unexplained death, so we need to attend the PM. Meet me at the mortuary in Kirkcaldy at ten o’clock. Sorry to mess up your Sunday.’ He chuckled. ‘At least you’ll have time for a second cup of tea.’

  Daisy ended the call and stared at her phone, a hollow ache in her stomach. Her first post-mortem. Did the boss actually know that? Did he assume she’d stood at the side of an autopsy table often enough to take it in her stride? It was less than six months since her transfer to the Fife-based crime squad and they’d not had a murder in all that time. There had been one suspicious death, but she’d been on a long weekend and, by the time she got back, it had been filed away as an accident.

  Before that, she’d been in a general CID office in Falkirk. There had been plenty of crime but nothing that had ended on a pathologist’s slab. She prodded her roll with a neatly manicured finger, her lip curling in distaste. The thought of what she might be confronted with – the smells, the sounds, the sights – had killed all appetite. Given how squeamish she was about visits to the dentist, she anticipated she’d be one of the ones everybody took the mince out of, throwing up in the sink or, even worse, dropping to the floor in a dead faint.

  In a different case, she could have weaselled out of it by volunteering to supervise the crime scene. But with a corpse fished out of the sea there was no crime scene to be preserved. There was no way out of this. She was going to have to face it some time. It might as well be today.

  She stared out of the kitchen window of her rented flat. It looked across a busy dual carriageway to fields and woodland beyond. It had been the only aspect of the former council flat that had appealed to her, apart from the fact that she could afford it. Even so, most mornings, she looked out into the slowly brightening sky and felt good about her life. Not today, she didn’t.

  Daisy binned her roll and headed for the poky bedroom, deliberately refusing to think about what lay ahead. She shrugged out of her dressing gown and put on what she thought of as her uniform – straight-leg black jeans with enough Lycra to make a chase possible, a close-fitting fine merino layer in dark grey and a deep plum sweater that made her actual shape a subject of speculation in the squad room. A skim of make-up, mascara to emphasise the bright blue of her eyes, then she tucked her thick curly hair into a scrunchy and she was ready to roll.

  She was first to arrive. Professor Jenny Carmichael was checking her instrument tray before she began. Daisy introduced herself to the pathologist, who was swathed in full surgical greens, her fine silver hair reduced to narrow triangles in front of her ears. The professor raked her with a hawkish glance and said, ‘First time?’ Daisy nodded. ‘Thought so. Away and stand over there against the wall, far as you can get from the sharp end. That way you can suss out whether you’re a fainter or not without getting in the way.’

  Daisy did as she was told and Professor Carmichael busied herself with preparations Daisy didn’t want to think about. The pathologist looked up when Charlie walked in and gave the barest nod of acknowledgement. ‘White male, in decent physical shape for his age,’ she said.

  ‘I’ve told you before, flattery’ll get you nowhere.’ That was Charlie all over, Daisy thought. Always a quip, whether it was the right moment or not.

  Carmichael snorted. ‘You’re the one doing the flattering.’

  ‘And what sort of age would today’s customer be?’ Charlie peered across at the pale white body, bloated by its immersion in the sea.

  ‘Forty-nine,’ she replied with a quick sidelong glance.

  Daisy thought she could see a twinkle and noticed Charlie decide to rise to it. ‘You’re not usually so precise.’

  ‘We don’t usually find a passport and a driver’s licence in the back pocket of our victims’ jeans.’ That seemed odd to Daisy till she remembered the body had turned up in the East Neuk of Fife, a popular tourist destination. Nobody wanted to leave their ID lying around in an Airbnb.

  ‘Victim?’ Charlie picked up on the key word.

  The pathologist tutted and took a sideways step so she could turn the corpse’s head. ‘A sufficient insult to the back of his skull to prove fatal. And an absence of sufficient water in his lungs for him to have drowned. He’ll have been close to death when he went into the water.’

  ‘He couldn’t have fallen and hit his head on the way in? There’s plenty of rocks along that part of the Fife coast.’

  ‘The injury’s too regular for that. If you pressed me, I’d incline towards a baseball bat or a steel pipe.’

  ‘So, homicide.’

  The professor gave a sharp sigh. ‘You know it’s not my job to make that judgement.’

  ‘I wasn’t asking, Jenny.’ He softened his words with a bashful smile, then turned to DS Mortimer. ‘The passport?’

  She spotted the evidence bags on the side counter and picked up the two relevant ones. ‘It’s a French passport. Issued just over two years ago to a Paul Allard. Like the prof said, he’s forty-nine. His driving licence was issued in Paris at the same time—’

  ‘What? Exactly the same time?’

  ‘Same date. That’s weird, isn’t it? I mean, nobody has a passport and a driving licence issued on the same date, do they?’

  ‘Is there an address on the driving licence?’

  She shook her head. ‘Nope. Only where it was issued, his name and date of birth.’

  ‘Well, that’s your first job, Daisy. Talk to somebody at the French consulate. Tell them we need to know all they can tell us about Paul Allard. What about next of kin? Who to contact in the case of an emergency?’ Charlie turned back to Professor Carmichael as he spoke.

  ‘Nothing. He left that part blank.’

  ‘So it’s down to you, Prof. Fingerprints? DNA?’

  She looked up. ‘We should be able to get prints, he’s not been in the water more than twenty-four hours, I’d say. I need to talk to someone with more expertise in this area, though. DNA is no problem.’

  ‘Really?’

  A swift eye-roll. ‘Charlie, it’s been nearly twenty years since we managed to extract DNA from a corpse that had been submerged in the Holy Loch for thirty-five years. Trust me, you’ll have a DNA result in a couple of days. Though whether that’ll help you, I don’t know. Can you still get the French to run things through their databases for you?’

  Charlie groaned. ‘Nobody wants to do us any favours after Brexit.’

  ‘Maybe we’ll get a hit on our database,’ Daisy said brightly. ‘I mean, people who end up murdered are usually a bit dodgy, sir.’

  ‘We should be so lucky,’ Charlie said gloomily. ‘Have you got anything else for me, Jenny?’

  ‘He’s got a tattoo on his left shoulder blade. We photographed it; I’ll ping it across to you. It’s like a torch with seven flames and a ring below it.’

  ‘No handy inscription, I suppose?’

  ‘That would be too easy.’

  He turned back to Daisy. ‘There you go, Daisy. A proper mystery. We don’t often get one of them, do we?’

  The professor raised her eyebrows. ‘Surely the only interesting question is whether you can solve it?’

  2

  Lazy Sunday mornings in bed with coffee and the Sunday papers on her tablet were a relatively recent experience for Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie. In the past, she’d have been up early, out for a walk, planning the week ahead, working out her strategies. But she’d been seeing Hamish Mackenzie for the best part of six months now and he’d persuaded her that it wasn’t a sin to take time off from her job running Police Scotland’s Historic Cases Unit. ‘You don’t get paid overtime,’ he’d reminded her. ‘It’s not good for you to work all the hours in the week. And if you genuinely care that much about your job, you’d recognise that you perform better with refreshed mind and body.’

  Karen didn’t relish being told what to do by anyone, but in showing concern for how
she could best do her job, Hamish had hit the right note. He hit the right note in so many ways. He was the first man she’d even contemplated any kind of relationship with since her lover Phil had been killed in the line of duty, the fate dreaded by anyone who loves a police officer. Somehow, Hamish had eased his way past her defences and here she was on a Sunday morning, in his bed, in his flat.

  And why not? He was smart and funny, easy on the eye, kind and thoughtful. She looked forward to spending time with him. She enjoyed his company, whether they were out having fun or staying in doing nothing much. She liked those of his friends that she’d met. She loved his croft in Wester Ross. But she had reservations about waking up in this lavish New Town flat with its secret roof terrace. Like a lot of things about Hamish, it all felt a bit too much.

  If she was honest, the sex was more exciting, more adventurous than it had been with Phil. But afterwards, she never felt completed the way she had with Phil. She’d never had a moment’s doubt about the love between them. But with Hamish . . . Karen hadn’t been able to say, ‘I love you.’ She’d sensed it on the tip of his tongue, hoped he wouldn’t give in to temptation.

  Karen realised Hamish had said something she’d missed completely. ‘What?’

  He was frowning at his screen. ‘I said, I think I can get us a table tonight at that place in Newport we’ve been wanting to try. They do rooms as well, I could see if we can stay over?’

  ‘Not tonight,’ Karen said in a tone whose finality she hoped he’d recognise.

  ‘Why not? If we take both cars, you can shoot off in the morning in plenty of time to get to work. And I can head north from there.’ From Monday morning to Wednesday night, Hamish worked on his croft in Wester Ross. The rest of the time he spent in Edinburgh, where he ran a small chain of coffee shops.

  ‘Not tonight. I have to be a place first thing in the morning.’

  ‘OK. How about we go for dinner and drive back afterwards?’

  She wished he wouldn’t push it. ‘I need to be by myself this evening, Hamish.’