Still Life

by Val McDermid

  ‘Are they still in Selkirk, do you know?’

  She shook her head. ‘They sold the business ahead of the 2016 referendum. They were planning to buy an olive grove and a villa so they could qualify for residency in Greece. I’ve no idea whether they went through with that.’

  ‘Do you know their first names?’

  Stella stared out of the window, eyebrows furrowed in thought. ‘I only met them once. He was Barry, I’m pretty sure about that. I want to say she was called Freda but I think I’m getting confused with that Victoria Wood song. You know?’ She sang a few bars. ‘“I can’t do it tonight.” Wait a minute, I’ve got it – Nita,’ she announced triumphantly.

  It shouldn’t be impossible to track down the McAndrew parents, but it would doubtless take time. Even though this was clearly a cold case, Karen did not subscribe to the notion that this meant she could drag her heels. ‘Do you know if there’s anything in Susan’s house that might provide us with Amanda’s DNA?’

  Stella pulled her hair back from her face and refastened the clasp while she thought. ‘Surely there will be DNA all over the things in the van?’

  ‘It might not be Amanda’s DNA. We can’t be certain it’s her van.’

  ‘Amanda took all her stuff with her when she left.’ Stella stared out of the window, frowning in concentration. ‘The only thing I can think of, and I don’t know whether you’d get DNA from them . . . There’s three framed watercolours in the hall. Glencoe in three different lights. Amanda painted them and framed them herself for Susan’s thirtieth birthday. Is that any use?’

  ‘To be honest, I’m not sure. But I’ll pass that on to our forensic technicians. Did Susan ever mention Amanda coming back? For a visit? Or for good?’

  ‘No, nothing like that. Susan was insistent that Amanda was a closed chapter.’ She paused, thoughtful. Karen waited. Then she continued, ‘Though I always had a sneaking suspicion that, if Amanda had come back with her tail between her legs, my sister would have opened her heart to her again.’

  ‘Would that have extended to letting her abandon a camper van with a body in it in her garage?’

  Stella shrugged. ‘I’d like to think not. But when it comes to love even the most sensible of us do stuff we look back at with total bewilderment.’

  Karen let that sink in, then, aware she was setting off a small bomb, said, ‘Is it possible that Susan and Amanda got into a fight that ended badly?’

  Stella looked astonished. She shook her head, bemused. ‘You didn’t know Susan.’ She scoffed. ‘Obviously, you couldn’t have. She was . . . No, I can’t imagine her in a physical fight. Even when we were kids, she just didn’t. She’d walk away. It was like she only had the flight half of the adrenaline response.’

  It was hard to argue with such vehemence. But they’d have to check it against someone else who knew Susan. ‘And since Amanda? There’s been nobody else in Susan’s life?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of. And believe me, Chief Inspector, I’d be aware. We didn’t keep secrets from each other.’

  Back in the car, Karen stared moodily at the silvery Tay as they headed down the hill. ‘“We didn’t keep secrets from each other.” Apart from the camper van with the dead body in it. In my book, that’s a pretty big secret.’

  8

  The paperwork from the French Ministry of the Interior wasn’t much of a starting point for Daisy to worm her way into the past of James Auld. But her online research into the Foreign Legion had revealed that they only checked for serious crimes in the background of their applicants. Murder, rape, or armed robbery would all disqualify a recruit. But not a string of minor offences. So it was worth checking UK criminal records to see whether he had any form.

  She drew a blank.

  Her next port of call was DVLA. Did he have a current driving licence or was there a vehicle registered to him?

  Blank again.

  Twitter threw up a dozen James, Jim or Jimmy Aulds. Facebook was worse. There were dozens. But at least Daisy had a passport photograph and a date of birth to work with. Patiently, she worked her way through the social media profiles, swiftly discarding almost all of them in seconds. A few took longer. But ultimately they led to profile photographs that were clearly not the dead man, or else they had an extensively documented photographic history going back five years. You could do a lot with Photoshop, she knew. But who could be bothered to doctor that many terrible photos in bars, restaurants, clubs and parties? Not even MI5 would take things that far.

  She was ploughing through the last few names that Instagram had thrown up – and really, throwing up was what she felt like after the seemingly endless stream of bad photographs of unappetising food – when Charlie Todd paused behind her chair. ‘Very thorough,’ he said. ‘I take it you drew a blank on James Auld with mispers?’

  Daisy felt her stomach plummet. It was so obvious. How could she be that stupid? If a man had walked away from his life ten years before, the chances were that somebody had probably reported them missing. A mother, a lover, a sibling. ‘I was just coming to that, guv,’ she said, fervently wishing her treacherous ears were not bright scarlet.

  Two desks away, DC Pete Gordon cleared his throat with a smoker’s rattle. Gordon was weeks away from retirement after a solid thirty years of reliable but uninspired police work. When Daisy had joined the team, she’d hoped she could learn from his experience. Fat chance, she’d soon realised, unless she wanted to discover all the places you could sneak a fag in the vicinity of the office. ‘Did you say James Auld?’ he inquired now. ‘You sure you don’t mean Iain Auld?’

  Daisy tried not to show her irritation at Gordon’s presumption of stupidity. ‘His name was James Auld. No middle name.’

  Undaunted, Gordon heaved himself to his feet and sauntered across to look over her shoulder. Even without his bulk, his presence was unmissable. The bitter reek of stale tobacco and pungent aftershave hung around him in a permanent miasma. ‘You remember Iain Auld, boss?’

  Charlie slowly shook his head. ‘Doesn’t ring any bells, Pete. When was this?’

  ‘Ten years, or thereabouts. You must remember? It was a big thing at the time.’

  ‘I must have missed it. Ten years ago I was on attachment in Sri Lanka, training their detective branch in homicide investigation,’ Charlie said. ‘I was out of the country from May to September. So who was Iain Auld?’

  Gordon pulled up a chair and settled into it, folding his hands across his paunch. ‘Iain Auld was a senior civil ser­vant with the Scottish government. He worked in Edinburgh for a long time, but more recently he’d been mostly based down in London at the Scotland Office. One morning, he didnae turn up at his work. Disappeared into thin air.’ Gordon frowned and scratched his chin. ‘Wait a minute, though. There was something else. I don’t recall the details, but there was something suspicious about it. He’d had a row with somebody . . . ’ He stared up at the ceiling, leaving them hanging. Then he dropped his head. ‘Nope, it’s gone. You should google him, maybe there’s a connection.’ He stood up with an air of satisfied finality and headed for the door. Aiming for a smoke after his exertions, Daisy assumed.

  ‘Ten years ago,’ Charlie mused. ‘About the same time your James Auld joined the Foreign Legion. A bit of a coincidence, that. Could be that Pete’s got a point. Maybe James and Iain Auld are one and the same.’

  ‘I’ll check it out,’ Daisy said, feeling mutinous and cross with herself. Charlie left her to it, briskly summoning a DC from another case to answer another pointed inquiry. Bloody Pete Gordon. ‘Maybe there’s a connection?’ My arse. She typed ‘Iain Auld Scotland Office’ into her search engine. Sits on his useless fat backside all morning watching me getting nowhere then waits till the boss appears to produce a dead rabbit from a hat. She hit return.

  Her screen filled with a blizzard of responses. The most recent was a two-year-old report of a judgement of the
Court of Sessions, declaring Iain Auld dead. The action had been brought by his wife Mary. She hadn’t lingered much longer than she had to, Daisy thought. Not that she could find it in her heart to blame the woman. More than seven years of juggling the practicalities of an absent but not officially deceased spouse must have been a nightmare, never mind the emotional trauma.

  The court report was naturally an opportunity for journalists to rehash the story of Iain Auld’s disappearance. According to the recap, he stayed in a subsidised Scotland Office studio flat in Victoria when work brought him to London. He’d left the office on Thursday, 20 May 2010 as usual, around 7 p.m. None of his colleagues noticed anything unusual in his behaviour. The last confirmed sighting of Iain Auld had been on the CCTV camera covering the door of Dover House, the Scotland Office building on Whitehall.

  But that wasn’t the last anyone had heard of him. According to neighbours, he’d been involved in a loud altercation with another man in his flat. Raised voices, furniture knocked over, the slam of a door. And a threat, heard by more than one of the nosy neighbours. ‘Give it up, Jamie, or you’ll be sorry. I’ll make bloody sure you’re bloody sorry.’

  And then Daisy hit the motherlode. ‘Neighbour Janine Kitson said, “I recognised the man Iain was arguing with. I’d met him with Iain and Mary once before. It was Iain’s brother James.”’

  Now she had a chance to shine.

  9

  The one skill Karen hadn’t had to coach Jason in was driving. Although he was reticent about the circumstances, she knew he’d been behind the wheel since his early teens. ‘I’m presuming that was off-road, Jason,’ she’d said repressively when he’d let slip that he’d celebrated his sixteenth birthday driving a Mercedes.

  He’d flushed an unattractive scarlet and mumbled something about forest roads. Karen hadn’t pursued it; they had an unspoken agreement that they’d both ignore Jason’s brother’s involvement with the less straightforward end of the motor trade, provided Ronan kept Jason well out of it. And to be fair to Ronan, he’d made sure his brother was a safe pair of hands on the wheel. Once he’d got past his early trepidation of driving a boss who liked to be in control.

  So Karen used the drive back to Edinburgh to make sure all she wanted had been taken care of. The van itself would be picked up in the morning on a low-loader and taken to a police garage. Since the van’s registration plates had been removed, the forensic mechanics would have to find its unique Vehicle Identification Number. In the event the VIN plate had also been removed, Karen doubted whether whoever was responsible for the skeleton in the van would have had the nous to get rid of the chassis ID. If they’d tried, they’d probably have failed. Even filing the numbers off or erasing them with acid left traces that could be interrogated. With a little luck, Karen would know the registered owner of the VW by the following evening.

  The CSI team messaged her to report that they had lifted the three paintings from the hall and sent them with all the other samples to the lab. They’d taken Susan Leitch’s toothbrush, hairbrush and underwear from her dirty laundry hamper to make sure they could distinguish hers from any other DNA they found. They’d checked the van for fingermarks and DNA. All they’d collected was on its way to the forensic labs in the Scottish Crime Campus at Gartcosh.

  So far, so good. But Karen had discovered early in her cold case career, back before the eight regional forces had been amalgamated into Police Scotland, that many of her fellow detectives thought what she did wasn’t nearly as important as their cases. That live cases should always take precedence over dusty historic files. But Karen knew different. She’d seen enough grief close up to understand that time did not diminish the pain of not having answers to the questions that sudden violent death left in its wake. Finding those answers was just as urgent to Karen as a murder that had happened yesterday. It was the driving force in her professional life and so she’d built her own support system to make sure her cases weren’t constantly pushed to the back of the queue.

  River Wilde was a key part of that, but her reach didn’t extend inside Gartcosh. When the police labs opened there, Karen had sent out delicate feelers every time her paths had crossed any of the technicians’. She’d had to stifle her natural impatience for months before she discovered Tamsin Martinu. Tamsin was an Australian who looked like a throwback to the punk era, her hair an ever-changing kaleidoscope of spikes, her piercings notorious for setting off metal detectors. She was a digital forensics specialist, but she’d established bridgeheads to every discipline in the lab, making friends and allies across the board. Her currency, as far as Karen could make out, was IT expertise and chocolate biscuits.

  And like Karen, Tamsin cared about cold cases. She regarded their unsolved status as a personal affront, a medal of failure hung round all of their necks. So when Karen came calling, Tamsin would chivvy, persuade and sweetly bully her colleagues not only into going the extra mile but also travelling that distance at a sprint. Karen had her on speed dial, and she used that now. Tamsin answered with, ‘Hey, girl, how’s it going?’

  ‘Like a three-legged greyhound.’

  Tamsin snorted. ‘That’ll be where I come in, then. Leg transplants our speciality. What have you got for me?’

  Karen ran through the details. ‘You’ll be getting Susan Leitch’s laptop. I’ve no idea where her phone is. Probably in an evidence locker somewhere. They’ll be hanging on to it till the fiscal decides charges to lay against the driver who ploughed into her bike.’

  ‘I’ll chase it down,’ Tamsin said. ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘The ex, Amanda McAndrew. They split up about three years ago. Anything between them after the split. Right now, all I’ve got are question marks. Did they stay in touch? Where was Amanda living? Was she looking for a reconciliation? You know the drill, any recent history between them. Facebook, Twitter, emails, Insta, the usual.’

  ‘And the other stuff?’

  ‘It’d be really helpful to ID the remains. River reckons she can extract DNA from the skeleton and probably the hair. But we need to match that. We’ve sent three framed paintings from Susan’s house. They were painted and framed by Amanda McAndrew. If we can get DNA from them and it’s a match, then we can make an assumptive ID.’

  ‘I’ll take a wander down there and see what I can do. It’s a bit out of the ordinary, getting DNA from a painting, but a challenge like that always pulls them out of their shells.’

  ‘I owe you,’ Karen said.

  ‘Chocolate ginger crunch every time for the DNA boys. Catch you later.’

  ‘You think they’ll get a DNA match, boss?’ Jason risked a quick glance at Karen.

  ‘It’s the most obvious answer. If it’s Amanda McAndrew, it’s a reconciliation gone wrong. Susan Leitch is dead too now, so it’s probably the fastest “case closed” in the history of the HCU.’

  ‘What if it’s not her?’

  Karen sighed. ‘Then we struggle.’

  Silence while the traffic flowed around them. Then Jason said, ‘What I keep coming back to is, what kind of person keeps a skeleton in their garage?’

  Judging by the frown screwing up his face, Karen reckoned the answer to that was a leap of imagination too far for Jason. ‘My impression is that Susan Leitch was a pretty conventional woman.’

  ‘She was a lesbian. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, boss,’ he added hastily. ‘Just, it’s not exactly by the book.’

  ‘The book’s changing, Jason. That neat wee bungalow, that wardrobe with everything colour-coded, hung up or folded neatly? That’s my idea of somebody sitting right in the middle of the mainstream.’

  ‘But she had a skeleton in her garage, boss. There’s nothing mainstream about that.’

  Karen paused for a moment. ‘That’s kind of my point, Jason. She wasn’t expecting to have to deal with a corpse. She was a smart, organised woman. I suspect if she’d set out to com
mit a murder, she’d have thought it through. A body under the patio, maybe. Or a lovely new rockery at the bottom of the garden.’

  ‘So was it a spur-of-the-moment thing? They had a row, it got out of hand, and the next thing she knew the girlfriend wasn’t breathing? I mean, we don’t even know if Amanda ever left in the first place. Stella only had Susan’s word for it. What if Susan thinks she’s persuaded Amanda to stick around? “You can do your painting here, doll, we’ll build you a wee studio in the garden,” kind of thing. Then she comes home from the office one day and bingo! There’s a camper van in the garage and Amanda’s loading up her kit. That would piss on your chips.’ He gave her an eager grin.

  ‘Maybe.’ Karen drew the word out as she considered the options. ‘It could have played out like that. And I can’t give you a logical reason why that doesn’t sit right.’

  ‘Well, what else could it be?’

  Karen took a deep breath. ‘Maybe she didn’t have any choice. Maybe it was foisted on her. And she just didn’t know what to do about it.’

  10

  Daisy was good at digging. Four years of a French and Legal Studies degree at Aberdeen hadn’t exactly been vocational but it had taught her a reliable range of basic research techniques. She knew how to use the police databases, but she wasn’t afraid to spread the web of her search more widely. By the time the evening briefing rolled around, she was confident she had something solid to report.

  More than that, she was pretty sure nobody else would have come close to uncovering what she’d found out.

  The team trickled into the incident room, clutching coffees and teas and a cardboard box filled with fragrant offerings from the nearby Greggs. Daisy helped herself to a cheese-and-onion pasty while Charlie Todd called them to order and outlined the morning’s events. ‘According to the coastguard, he likely went in on the east side of Elie. Probably somewhere around the ruin of Lady Janet Anstruther’s Tower. And probably about ten to twelve hours before the Bonnie Pearl fished him out. So, round about now, yesterday evening. It would have been getting on for dark, but he’d have had to walk out there. There’s not even a Land Rover track, only a network of footpaths linked to the Fife Coastal Path. I organised three uniforms to get over there this afternoon. Talk to dog walkers and the like, see if anybody saw anything.