by Val McDermid
Lucky Ruth. Karen poked the last couple of mouthfuls of scrambled egg with her fork and decided it had gone too far in the direction of rubber. At some point today, Tamsin would have data from James Auld’s laptop. With a bit of luck, the pathologist’s report would soon make its way to her and formally confirm that Auld’s injuries were consistent with murder rather than accident. There was nothing more she could do for Jason, not now that his mother, his girlfriend and his feckless brother were on their way.
Karen pushed her plate away and gave in to her impatience. It was time they were on the road. She texted Daisy. See you in the foyer in 15 minutes. Plenty of time to walk back from the café and liberate the car from the multi-storey. The news of Amanda McAndrew’s arrest had reinvigorated her. The Dog Biscuit was in for a surprise in the morning.
The drive back to Edinburgh seemed to go on for ever. The constant drizzle and the poor visibility didn’t help. Nor did Karen’s refusal to go up the M6 like a bat out of hell with the blue lights flashing. ‘Abuse of privilege,’ she muttered when Daisy asked why they were studiously sticking to the speed limit.
Bringing Daisy up to date with the McAndrew case occupied the first part of the journey. Daisy was clearly fascinated by the step-by-step pursuit of the case, from the garage in Perth to the artist colony in Glenisla and down to the church hall in Stockport. ‘But what a bizarre beginning to a case,’ she said. ‘I mean, if Susan Leitch hadn’t had that accident on her bike, it could have been years – decades, even – before Dani’s remains turned up. Susan might even have got her nerve up and got rid of her. She could have buried her in the garden, or – I don’t know, burned the bones and ground them up. Or taken a hammer to them and driven down to the coast and dumped them in the sea.’
‘Or just carried on ignoring them.’
‘Could you do that? Could you live in a house knowing there was a dead body in the garage? It’s not like she never went in there. It’s where she kept her bikes and all her tools and stuff.’ Daisy shuddered. ‘I don’t think I could.’
‘You’d be surprised how people manage to block things out,’ Karen said. ‘I remember one case where a guy was in total denial for twenty-odd years about having shot his own daughter. He waged a campaign to find her killer even though at some level he had to have known he was responsible.’
‘That is so weird. You get really interesting stuff in cold cases, don’t you?’
‘The passage of time turns straightforward murders into convoluted journeys. But sometimes all the undergrowth that obscures the path withers away and you can see things clearly.’ Karen scoffed. ‘Listen to me, I sound like one of those pretentious tossers on the radio.’
‘No, what you said makes sense. You think one day I could maybe get a transfer into the HCU and work with you and Jason?’
Karen flashed her a quick look to check whether she was at the wind-up. ‘Seriously?’
‘Why not?’
‘Most front-line polis think we’re a backwater. That the cases we investigate don’t matter the way the live cases do.’
Daisy harrumphed. ‘That’s all swagger. What you do is much harder and much more useful. You put right the mistakes, the inefficiencies, the prejudices that stopped cases being solved in the first place. I think it’s cool.’
‘That’s one way of looking at it. Or you can take the Dog Biscuit’s view that we’re a thorn in the flesh of Police Scotland precisely because every success we have is also a reminder that the front-line heroes fucked it up. If she had her way, we’d be disbanded. We have to keep succeeding very publicly to survive. Fuck up once, and we’re dead in the water.’
‘Sounds like you need all the help you can get.’ Daisy gave her a cheeky glance. ‘We’re nearly at the services. Can we stop? I need a pee and they do great home baking here.’
Karen couldn’t deny she liked Daisy’s gallus attitude. And her understanding of the importance of coffee and cake to the proper running of a case. She pulled off the motorway and parked at a distance from the entrance to the café and shop. ‘Could you bring me a flat white,’ she said. ‘I need to make a call.’
Daisy hurried off and Karen called the hospital again. This time she dropped lucky and Shirley the nurse answered. The good news cycle carried on. Jason was out of surgery and there had been no complications. Karen explained that his family were on their way and wished the nurse good luck.
While she was waiting for Daisy, she checked her email. To her delight, Professor Jenny Carmichael’s report had landed in her inbox. Everybody seemed to be working weekends these days. It confirmed the verbal report she’d made to Charlie Todd in the mortuary. The medical evidence pointed to deliberate homicide. And another message from Charlie himself was the clincher. One of the team of officers who’d been making inquiries on the scene had taken it into his head to clamber down the tumble of rocks beneath the tower and he’d found a metal crowbar wedged in a cleft. In spite of the rain and salt spray that had landed on it over the days since the murder, the underside had been protected. The crime scene tech who had recovered it had preserved the surface and there were traces of blood and hair that matched James Auld. Charlie Todd’s plods had come up trumps. They’re still testing to see whether they can find any other DNA or any prints. Hope this helps. And hope Daisy’s doing the business for you, Charlie had finished. She suspected he’d be less than thrilled if Daisy ever got her way and joined the HCU.
Daisy came back with coffees and the biggest sausage roll Karen had ever seen for herself. ‘I didn’t have breakfast,’ she mumbled through a mouthful of meat and flaky pastry.
‘No, you had sleep.’
Karen gave Daisy the latest news while she ate, scattering fragments of pastry down her jacket and into the footwell. ‘That’s all great,’ she said. ‘Sorry about the mess, I’ll vac it when we get back, promise.’
‘You’ll be the first,’ Karen snarked.
Another twenty miles up the road and Daisy was asleep, head lolling, a thin line of drool sliding from the corner of her mouth. Karen vaguely remembered she’d once had that gift. Felt like a past-life experience. To cover the miles, she turned on her driving playlist. Daisy stirred and groaned in her sleep but didn’t wake. For the first time in days, Karen felt the tension easing from her shoulders and something approaching peace invade her mind.
Which was odd, given that soon she’d be held to account.
Karen dropped Daisy at Haymarket and cut across the city to her flat. She’d been gone less than thirty-six hours but it felt much longer. The first thing she did was strip off yesterday’s clothes and stand under the shower for as long as it took to sluice the travel stains from her brain. She wrapped herself in a thick bath towel and stretched out on the sofa with a tumbler full of ice, Martin Miller’s gin, Fever-Tree tonic and three slim slices of cucumber. Simple but effective, she thought.
She made a call to Sandra Murray. Filleted down to the essentials, the news was that Jason was sitting up and talking, complaining about the hospital food and the uncomfortable stookie on his leg. The doctors wanted to keep him in for another night, not least because of the blow he’d taken to the head. Then his mother and his brother could bring him home. Eilidh was already on a train back to Edinburgh, unwilling to lose a day’s pay over something as minor as a broken leg. ‘The lassie’s got clients that depend on her,’ Mrs Murray had pointed out, Karen admired Eilidh for her sense of priorities. She’d have been pissed off if her hairdresser had cancelled on her at the last minute.
She’d barely finished the call when a phone alert told her she had an email from Ruth Wardlaw. Groaning, she got off the sofa and booted up her laptop.
Hi Karen. I thought this would interest you. I don’t think she’s had legal advice, because, as I explained, the Dutch aren’t interested in trying the case; what matters to them is that due process has been observed, which in this case it clearly has. If she’d
spoken to a lawyer, they would have warned her against making a statement to the prosecuting authorities that might be capable of being disproved.
There was an attachment. Karen opened it and read
To whom it may concern. I am protesting against the unreasonable demands of the Scottish courts to have me extradited to Scotland. Not only did I not commit the crime on the arrest warrant, that crime wasn’t actually committed at all. My name is Amanda McAndrew and I’ve been accused of murdering my former partner, Daniella Gilmartin. For the record, I did not lay a hand on her. All I am guilty of is panicking after she died in an accident.
We had been living in an artist community at Tullyfolda in Glenisla, in Scotland. Dani wasn’t happy there and she insisted that we should move away and find somewhere on our own. This wasn’t difficult to do because we were living in my Volkswagen camper van. We left Tullyfolda in May 2017 and spent a few weeks driving around in the Scottish Highlands looking for the right place where we could make a home. One night we were driving down a single-track road near Glencoe when a deer jumped out in front of me. I slammed on the brakes but we skidded off the road and I had to wrestle with the steering to get back on it again. Dani had been in the main cabin of the van fetching a drink of water, but when I turned to check she was OK, she was lying slumped on the floor. I ran round to the side door and climbed in beside her. She wasn’t breathing and then I noticed there was blood on the edge of the sink. I turned her over and her head was caved in. She was dead. I couldn’t believe it.
I panicked, I admit it. I knew there was nothing I could do for Dani. But the people we’d lived among at Tullyfolda knew Dani could be volatile and argumentative. I’d had to calm her down very publicly more than once. I thought nobody would believe my version of events. There was at least one person there who would have wanted to blame me for anything that happened to Dani.’
Declan. Karen thought he’d have been happy to rush to judgement.
I didn’t know what to do. So I contacted my ex-partner, Susan Leitch. I knew Susan still loved me and I knew she would help me. I begged her for help and she told me to come to her house. I drove to Perth and parked the van in her garage. It was a terrible journey. All I could think of was Dani dead in the van behind me. I couldn’t take it in, that someone I had loved was dead from such a stupid accident.
Susan was always very calm in a crisis. She suggested I leave the van where it was. She didn’t have a car and she could cover the van with a tarpaulin away from prying eyes. We agreed that I would come back at some point and we would work out what to do. I left the next day and I am ashamed to say I never went back. I covered my tracks because I didn’t know what to do to make things right. I’m sorry I was a coward. But I’m not a killer and I don’t deserve to be sent back where people can give false evidence against me. I won’t get a fair trial. Please believe me, because I am telling the truth.
It was a clever massaging of the story, Karen thought. If not for River’s assertion that the force required to cause the injury was more than could be accounted for by an accident, it might have given her pause. But there were too many aspects that McAndrew had wallpapered over. And trying to lay the decision for hiding the body at Susan Leitch’s door was a low trick. It was far more plausible to Karen that McAndrew had played on Susan’s continued love for her to persuade her to help in the crisis. And then she’d run out on Susan, leaving her in possession of a corpse and a vain hope that her ex would return to sort out the mess. Let McAndrew come back and argue her case in front of a properly constituted court. That way the dead might get the justice they deserved. The things we do for love.
And then her phone rang. ‘Tamsin,’ Karen said wearily. ‘I’d forgotten you were due me a call.’
‘You got bumped down the to-do list by a raid on a shonky vitamin supplement company with a court hearing in the morning. Sorry about that.’
‘Believe me, I’m not complaining. I know you go the extra mile for me.’
‘So what’s this I hear about the Ginger Ninja ending up in a hospital bed?’
‘Nothing runs faster or hotter than Police Scotland office gossip,’ Karen sighed. ‘You know the Mint. A wee bit too trusting. He got pushed down a flight of stairs by Amanda McAndrew. Who promptly went on the run on the night ferry to Rotterdam.’
‘Busy weekend for the HCU, then. Did she get away?’
‘No, we got her on a European Arrest Warrant. She’s tucked up in a cell in Holland. And Jason should get out the hospital today or tomorrow, complete with a stookie. But that’s tomorrow’s chip papers. Did you manage to get anywhere with James Auld’s laptop?’
‘Did I manage? Are you forgetting who you’re talking to, girl? Thanks to your John Surman tip, I was through the door inside ten minutes. Surman plus Auld’s Legion service number in reverse, in case you need to know.’
‘That’s great news.’
‘Well, kind of. Turns out your Mr Auld – or Allard, depending on which email account you’re looking at – wasn’t what you’d call a Chatty Cathy. He kept pretty tidy inboxes and didn’t download a whole shitload of stuff. This guy was to netsurfing what Boris Johnson is to truth. Anyway, I’ve loaded up a mirror of all his data on the cloud storage, I’ll email you the link to get in and you can see for yourself. Oh, and I ran his email exchanges with the girlfriend through the translation software. Enjoy.’
‘Your biscuits are in the post.’
Karen abandoned the sofa and fired up the laptop. The link Tamsin had sent took her straight to the contents of James Auld’s laptop and she dived into his email program. As Tamsin had explained, he had two accounts. On the principle of leaving the best till last, she looked first at the Paul Allard one. There were ticket receipts for train and plane tickets, confirming what she already knew or suspected of his movements. London, Dublin, Edinburgh, regular trips to and from Caen. There were a handful of messages about gigs but she reckoned the band probably used WhatsApp for their communications. It made more sense. Most of the other emails were exchanges with Pascale. They dropped each other notes every few days, updates on where they’d been, who they’d seen, what they’d been doing, when they’d meet next. No torrid outpourings, just day-to-day stuff in a tone of affection.
The only other email was one to Francis Flaxner Geary, dated four days before his death:
Dear Mr Geary, I’m sorry you were unable to furnish me with details of the vendor of the David Greig portraits your gallery has sold in recent years. But I do appreciate your duty of confidentiality to your clients. I wonder if I could prevail upon you to pass this email on to the client in question and ask him if he would be good enough to contact me? We have a mutual friend in James Auld. I will be travelling in Scotland over the next few days, but I will be contactable by email. Thank you in advance. Yours sincerely, Paul Allard
Karen drew in a sharp breath. There was no trace of a reply from Geary, but if the dealer had forwarded James’ message, and what she suspected was right, it could have led directly to that fatal confrontation on the rocky promontory in Fife. The trail she had to follow had suddenly become a lot clearer.
The James Auld account offered no further revelations. The only people he swapped messages with were his sister-in-law and Verity Foggo. In both accounts, messages only went back a couple of months; as Tamsin had indicated, he obviously cleared out his old mail regularly. Karen worked her way through his messages and found nothing new. The exchange with Verity Foggo confirmed what the actress had told him. All it added to her knowledge was that Verity Foggo’s relationship with punctuation was tangential.
His internet history confirmed that he had been in pursuit of David Greig’s art and his legacy. There was a long list of sites featuring reports of the Brighton fire, articles about Greig dating from before and after his reported suicide, and many of the same sites about art sales and prices that Karen herself had visited. She’d have loved to have found
a set of notes about his conjectures and deductions but there was nothing.
Karen checked the time. Hamish would be there soon, and she still hadn’t formulated a battle plan for her meeting with ACC Markie in the morning. There would have to be time enough to work out a strategy in the morning. For now, what she craved was sleep.
45
Wednesday, 26 February 2020
Karen made a second cup of coffee and a slice of toast and thought about the gaps in the edifice she was building. A cold case was a story, constructed piece by piece. Sometimes the pieces arrived in the wrong order, so it made no sense at first. But some stories were like that. They began at the end or in the middle and you had to stay vigilant, making sure you didn’t miss the clue that would shape the fragments into a narrative. And at the end, if you found all the pieces, you had a coherent tale.
Sometimes, though, you ended up with a stack of ill-assorted bits that didn’t quite fit, no matter how hard you tried. Then it was like one of those novels that won literary prizes, the ones where you got to the end, closed the book and asked yourself, ‘What just happened there?’ Karen had never enjoyed that sort of novel. She liked ones where the ending made sense of the beginning and all the elements in between.
She wasn’t there yet with the story of David Greig, Iain Auld and his poor dead brother James.
And in the meantime she had to compose something to placate the Dog Biscuit. As she considered the cast of characters who still needed to be fleshed out, she realised there was one she could do something about. It was too early to phone Nora, but not too early to text. She was the kind of woman who’d turn her phone to silent when she went to bed, lest it disturb her comfort.
Nora, I need your help again. Francis Flaxner Geary, the gallery owner in Dublin who sells David Greig’s uncatalogued work – what can you find out about him? What’s his reputation? Gossip? Unsubstantiated rumours? All grist to my mill. Can you see what the grapevine has to say about him?
