Murder – you’d go to any lengths to conceal that. The victim certainly couldn’t strike back, but a son? A daughter? Anna herself had used the word ‘revenge’.
Drug-dealing? With her own son dead of an overdose, evidence of that would certainly ruin her relationship with her daughter and kill her career. The motive for a dealer was usually money but with Anna’s success she would hardly need that. Then it struck him – she hadn’t always been wealthy, had she? The struggling author, trying to buy time to write her masterpiece? And living in Italy, he seemed to remember. It would be more than far-fetched to link Anna with the Mafia, but that was another reason to root about in her early life.
Those were the obvious ones, but human sins take many different forms. Fruitless, really, to speculate, but somehow he felt he’d made progress and had new avenues he could explore.
It was getting late and he wanted to make an early start tomorrow. The band was taking a break and the TV above the bar was switched back on in time for an item about the storm they’d all been talking about so he paused on his way out to watch it. As the doom-laden prophecies were churned out he gave a mental punch in the air. Yes! Here was his excuse for booking in at that peaceful pub he’d wistfully imagined.
The light was still on in the sitting room, so Finella hadn’t gone to bed and when he reached the door he could hear voices. There was another woman with her, a member of the support group that Fin had joined: Michelle, an angular divorcee with light brown eyes like a hawk’s, who always made Kelso feel like a vole being assessed for nutritional value.
‘Goodness, you’re late!’ Fin said. ‘I thought you’d be home to have supper with us.’
‘Oh, poor soul! They do work you hard, don’t they?’ Michelle said, oozing sympathy.
‘No sympathy needed. I just fancied the jazz night at the pub so that’s where I was. Did you have a nice evening?’
He hadn’t said sorry. Both women looked put out, and Michelle said pointedly, ‘Yes, what a shame you missed it. Fin made us a lovely supper. We put some in the fridge for you.’
He refused to let them make him feel like an errant husband. Fin hadn’t told him her plans – largely, he suspected, because he’d told her before that he didn’t want any more threesomes with her chums – and if he wanted to justify himself, he could point that out. On the other hand, he could just say, ‘Thanks very much, but I’m good.’
He did, adding, ‘If you’ll excuse me, I’m just going to get my head down. I’m making an early start for work tomorrow. And Fin, given the forecast I’ll be staying down there for the next few days until it’s blown through. All right?’
‘Of course,’ Fin said, a little stiffly. ‘See you in the morning.’
As Kelso closed his bedroom door he heard a, ‘Well!’ from Michelle and Fin saying, ‘I’m sorry about that.’ And now he was feeling guilty again, dammit!
But as he checked the bag he always kept packed in case he had a sudden call to head off, he felt a reprehensible lifting of the heart at the thought of getting away.
DC Livvy Murray too had been watching the news, but the thought of being trapped in Halliburgh wasn’t nearly as appealing to her. Police Scotland wasn’t famous for the generosity of its provision for officers’ accommodation and she could see herself stuck in some dismal B&B, which was probably grudging with its heating.
The meeting with Strang had given her plenty of food for thought. She’d told him about Danny and he’d filled her in on the information that had come his way. A bit to her surprise, he’d seemed to her to be a lot more open to believing there was something to Marta Morelli’s claims than she’d been herself, but then he’d spoken to Anna Harper and she hadn’t. He’d wanted to hear what she was thinking, though, which gave her a little kick of pride.
She had paused for a moment to collect her thoughts, then said carefully, ‘OK. I want to kill Cassie Trentham, right? Never mind why – I just do. Maybe knocking her off her bike won’t kill her, but then it could, and it’d look like an accident. Fine. But how’d I find out she’d be cycling or what time? I could get spotted if I hung around waiting for her to appear and, anyway, she could decide not to.
‘And Felix Trentham – I wouldn’t be able to stand over him to get him to take the stuff – I’d be out in the open then and he might talk. If I was just being hopeful and arranged for it to be offered to him, he might really be clean and not take it. So …’
Strang had sighed. ‘Yes, I don’t disagree. That’s a very fair summary. But there’s something very wrong here, more than just that and Jackson’s silly attempt. Those two women are terrified and I’d bet my next month’s pay that someone has directly threatened them. Could this be opportunistic rather than accidental?’
Murray had been struck by that. ‘Better just hope another chance doesn’t come his way, then,’ she’d said and Strang had agreed, with some feeling.
The next morning as she drove down from Edinburgh she was thinking again about how much she’d enjoyed their discussion. She knew she tended to be prickly and far too ready to resent any hint of a slight on her abilities, but she couldn’t fault him yesterday. She was starting to get the message that clubbing him round the head with what he’d once described as one of her ‘Ta-da!’ moments wasn’t the way to earn professional respect. Lesson learnt?
The sky was heavy today, with purplish clouds and a light rain falling. The radio was full of dire warnings about what was to come and she’d reluctantly packed spare knickers and T-shirts and her toothbrush. She certainly didn’t want to find herself in Edinburgh and cut off from what was going on in Halliburgh; a dismal B&B was a price worth paying.
However, PC Kate Graham appeared as she walked into the police station. ‘Livvy! I’ve been looking out for you. Are you still planning to commute to Edinburgh? The forecast’s bad.’
‘I’ll have to check with the boss, but I think I’ll be staying here. It’s probably all exaggerated but it’s daft to ignore the sort of warnings they’re giving.’
‘I was going to say, why don’t you stay with me? We’ve got plenty of room and my dad always enjoys visitors. I did a big shop yesterday so the freezer’s full – and I got another battery for the camping light in case there’s a power cut. Oh, and I got candles in Asda too – the last packet, actually.’
Murray brightened. ‘That’s really kind! I bet you have a proper fire too, right? Perfect! If there was a cut in Edinburgh I’d just have to die of hypothermia in the dark.’
‘That’s fine. I’ll take you along when you’re clocking out. Are you coming to the briefing? Hammond’s going to be spelling out the action plan.’
Murray hesitated. ‘I’ll go and see what the boss wants first. Thanks again, Kate.’
Cassie Trentham’s meeting with the organisers of a charity convention wanting to use the Hub for their programme of talks in July had been cancelled, which made sense.
‘They were going to be driving over from Glasgow,’ she said to Gil Paton. ‘Given the forecast it would be asking for trouble. Even if the weather doesn’t actually hit until tomorrow, the traffic will be crazy by this afternoon, with everybody getting back home to sit it out. Anyway, I can use the time.’
Gil, though, wasn’t pleased. ‘It seems a bit panicky, if you ask me. And cancelling at the last moment like this – well, it’s frankly disrespectful. And if you were short of time, I could easily have handled it myself.’
Cassie choked back a tart reply. She knew he loved it when he was able to take centre stage and explain, in what Cassie usually felt was unnecessary detail, how everything worked and what would and wouldn’t be provided. Usually she’d just have handed it over to him, but this charity was looking for sponsorship as well, which was her business.
Gil resented that. In fact, Gil seemed to resent everything these days. He was getting more and more openly hostile and she was starting to feel it couldn’t go on much longer. Once the Writers’ Week was over they would need to have a long, serious t
alk – not that she imagined that was likely to change anything. He was really working his ticket and, in the end, she thought, there would have to be a showdown. She’d pay whatever it took to make him go.
She was just getting back to trying to clear her emails when there was a knock on the door and Richard Sansom appeared.
‘Hope I’m not interrupting you? I bumped into Gil downstairs and he said you’d had a meeting cancelled so I thought I’d pop up and see if you could spare me five minutes.’
He was looking a bit agitated. ‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Any excuse for a break. Coffee?’
As she went across to the machine in the corner of the office, Sansom said as he sat down, ‘Gil seemed a bit out of sorts. Muttering away quite nastily – you know?’
She pulled a face. ‘Oh yes, I know. He’s not happy, but then he does make things difficult for himself. So – what can I do for you?’
‘It’s the situation at Highfield. Is Marta keeping Anna prisoner?’
‘Prisoner?’ Cassie was so startled that she slopped the coffee she was pouring out. ‘Why on earth should you think that?’
‘It’s just that every time I phone to speak to her, Marta says she’s unavailable. I even went to the house this morning and some girl answered the buzzer and said no one was available. Do you know what’s going on?’
Cassie handed him a mug and sat down. ‘If they’re saying Anna’s unavailable it’ll be because she doesn’t want to see anyone. I can assure you that she makes all the decisions.’
‘Fine, fine. Then I need to see her, OK? I need to know if she’s going to appear for the masterclass, and you know she agreed to a brief interview with a carefully vetted journalist. If she’s changed her mind and is going to pull up the drawbridge because some moron broke into the house, I have to know, so I can do the damage limitation bit. There’s a lot involved here, Cassie, with this being the springboard for the new book.’
He was getting very worked up and she could understand it: this was going to be his first launch and if it was messed up it wasn’t Anna who’d get the blame. She said soothingly, ‘Look, Anna’s an old hand. She has a good understanding of the bottom line and I’m sure it will work out all right. I do believe they were shaken by the housebreaking on top of everything else and she just needs a day or two to recover—’
‘But don’t you understand! I can’t leave it – I need to get to her now! Look, can you take me in? You need to see to it that I can speak to Anna directly.’
Cassie stiffened. He sounded angry and she didn’t appreciate being given orders.
‘Sorry, Richard. If my mother wants peace and quiet at the moment, I’m not going to barge in. Why don’t you discuss it with Marta when she answers the phone? She’ll know the best way to deal with it.’
Sansom put his mug down on the table with a bang and got up. He was scowling and his mouth was compressed with temper. ‘Fine!’ he said. ‘I won’t waste your time or mine. Thanks for the coffee.’
Cassie stared after him. She’d rather liked Richard, but they always said you couldn’t judge a man until you’d seen what he was like when he lost his temper. What a shame! She went back to her emails, wondering what she’d done to have two disgruntled men inflicted on her in one morning.
When DC Livvy Murray arrived, the emergency briefing had started. She found a seat in one corner as DI Hammond took to the stage while Strang stood at the back.
They were preparing for considerable disruption. There was a report from the traffic police on the likely trouble spots, which, by the time they were finished, more or less covered the whole area. Gritters might be out already but they were expecting to fight a losing battle in the next thirty-six hours. Provision had to be made for vulnerable adults and they were advising that schools should close. Commercial helicopters were on stand-by to take out food for farm animals if the situation got worse … And on, and on.
Murray had to admit that Hammond was good at this sort of stuff. He was crisp and efficient and he’d got together a crisis team, each with an area of responsibility so that everyone knew who to contact when things, inevitably, went wrong. When he had finished, she saw Strang go forward and say something to him that must be a compliment because Hammond looked gratified.
They were obviously going to be on hand if needed but she had her own commission to work at today. Strang had told her his idea about playing the woman instead of the ball and he was going to retreat to his office after this to talk to JB about whether she felt they should move on Hammond. Her own first job was to find out more about Anna Harper – where did she come from, what did she do before she became famous? Then she had to liaise with Glasgow to check the bookies who had issued the betting slip.
And on her own initiative she decided to try chatting up DS Wilson. She’d been watching him, standing well away from Hammond – noticed, too, that as the meeting broke up and Hammond came across towards him he looked awkward, then made to go.
Murray moved forward as unobtrusively as she could and heard Hammond say, ‘Hang on, Grant. Maybe we should have a chat in my office?’
‘Oh, sure. A bit later? I’ve said to DCI Strang that I’ll get him organised for somewhere to stay.’ He scuttled off.
Hammond reacted as if he’d been struck in the face without warning. For a fleeting moment, Murray saw a look of alarm cross his face, then as someone came up to ask him a question, he gave his head a little shake and the professional mask slipped back into place.
That briefing had proved Hammond wasn’t a stupid man. Had he figured out the threat? And what was he going to do about it? Whatever it was, he’d better make it quick. Strang was at this moment making the case for action right now.
DCI Strang had been marshalling his arguments before he called DCS Jane Borthwick. He wasn’t sure she’d be happy about the idea of digging up Anna Harper’s past, and he wasn’t at all sure that she’d favour taking visible action right away.
He’d great respect for JB but being an intelligent and effective officer didn’t get you to the top of the ladder if you weren’t political as well. She would balance up the pros and cons of immediate action: would it look as if they were on top of a problem or would it merely highlight a problem that at the moment no one knew you had?
She listened – she was good at that – and then she said she had reservations. He sighed quietly.
‘You think this – Wilson? – could be persuaded to give us solid evidence if we did him a deal?’
‘I’m getting that impression, boss. He’ll be reluctant, of course, but he’s running round me in circles wagging his tail. It’ll be quite easy to talk to him on his own and hint that trouble is on the way and I’ll be surprised if the pressure doesn’t get to him.’
‘Then I think that’s what we do. Come back to me when you’ve got what we need from him and I’ll authorise a raid. Are you going to lean on Hammond?’
‘I don’t want to spook him. And frankly I’d prefer to move sooner. We’re here officially to look into the Anna Harper case but there isn’t much more we can investigate directly there. If he realises we’re actually focusing on the drugs situation there won’t be anything for a raid to find.’
Borthwick hesitated, then said, ‘Anyway, tell me about Harper.’
‘Difficult. The housebreaking’s neither here nor there. The son’s death and the daughter’s accident – could be nothing, but Harper and her friend are both terrified and she’s concealing something she’s determined not to disclose, despite what’s happened. So it could be blackmail, but it’s certainly not over something trivial.’
She was intrigued, but wary. ‘Where do you start with that? For goodness’ sake, don’t get out the thumbscrews. She’s the complainant, after all. The Hammond situation is bad enough but “Police Bully Anna Harper” would be worse.’
‘I know, I know. I could only work on her anxiety about their own safety and she brushed that aside. We can sniff around but I can’t see there’s anything more we
can do on the spot.’ And he repeated, ‘So unless we’re going to move quickly on Hammond we can’t stay down here.’
There was a long pause and he knew what she was going to say before she said it. She was always risk-averse and this was going to have serious repercussions for the reputation of Police Scotland.
‘I hear what you say. Just give it a day or so, then I’ll agree if you think you’ve enough to go on. With the weather that’s blowing in, Hammond will have too much to do to think about his own problems.’
He agreed, of course, but he could only hope she was right.
DC Murray settled down with her laptop in the corner of the CID room. There was a lot of coming and going; when DS Wilson came in, she looked up at him with an encouraging smile, but he looked through her as if she wasn’t there and went out again. Bummer.
Liaising with Glasgow only took minutes, but when DCI Strang called her to his office, she had little progress to report on Anna Harper.
‘There’s no trace of her before 1987 when her first book was published but I suppose all that means is she wasn’t in the public eye before that. There wasn’t Twitter and Facebook in those days – you really could live under the radar.’
Strang considered that. ‘Or I suppose that could just be a pen name. Plenty of authors do that. And officially changing your name is just a civil matter with no official record so it’d need a lot of digging to find out what the real name was.
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