Deadline for Murder

by Val McDermid

  “She was like a drug,” Lindsay said, caught in the memory of her own affair. “I couldn’t get enough of her. It was as if the act fueled the appetite.”

  “That’s it, that’s exactly it. Sex with Alison was like living your fantasies. In a funny kind of way, I was almost glad when Claire found out. I thought that her knowing would break the spell, that I’d be able to escape Alison. But it didn’t work, did it? Even though she’s dead, I’m still her prisoner.”

  “What actually happened that last afternoon?”

  Jackie sighed. “I told Claire I was going to end it, and I went round there all fired up with determination. Alison opened the door to me stark naked, and it took all my strength not to dive straight into bed with her then and there. But I made myself go through with it. I told her what I had decided, that I wanted Claire, not her.

  “First, she tried to be seductive and talk me out of it. But I managed to stay firm. Then she lost her cool. Or at least, she seemed to. She burst into loud sobs and told me how much I meant to her and how she couldn’t let me go. I was shaken to the core. I had to keep reminding myself that it was Claire I loved. It wasn’t easy to hang on to that, faced with Alison in floods of tears.

  “Then, when she saw that wasn’t going to work, she started to threaten me. She told me she’d tell Claire all sorts of lies—that we’d had a threesome with a man, that I’d gone out with her to a club and we’d picked up two men and had sex with them, that we’d been using cocaine to improve our sex life. Oh God, you wouldn’t believe the filth she was coming out with! And she said she’d spread all this poison round the city, make sure that no one gave me any work.” Jackie’s voice cracked, and she lit another cigarette.

  Lindsay nodded sympathetically. “I know exactly what you mean. She tried the same routine on me. But I just laughed at her. I didn’t have a lover to lose at the time, and I knew she couldn’t destroy me professionally without damaging herself. The gamble paid off for me. But if she’d tried that on when I’d actually been with someone I loved, I doubt if I’d have been able to be clear-headed about it. You mustn’t put yourself down for falling for it.”

  Jackie shook her head. “I can’t help it. I mean, if I’d just stopped to think about it for a minute, I would have realized that there was no reason on earth why Claire or anyone else should fall for her lies. But I didn’t stop to think. I should have been stronger, Lindsay. Then I’d have been out of there an hour or more before she was killed. I’d have had an alibi. Instead, I caved in and went to bed with her. You know what disgusts me most about myself? I actually enjoyed it. After all she’d said and done, I still loved every minute of it. Isn’t that sickening?”

  Lindsay could think of nothing to say that would ease Jackie’s self-disgust. “It’s human,” was all she managed. “What happened then?”

  “Alison started shooing me out. She said her mother was coming to see her and she didn’t want me wandering round with a just-fucked look on my face. So I got up and dressed in a hurry. I suppose that’s how I came to leave my scarf behind. Then I got out of there. I stood on the landing waiting for the lift, feeling like a complete shit. I didn’t want to go home. I couldn’t face telling Claire I’d been so weak. So I left the landing and started walking down the stairs, just to give myself a kind of breathing space. But my legs felt shaky, so I sat down and had a cigarette. Then I carried on downstairs, got into my car, and drove home. Mrs. Maxwell says she saw me, but I didn’t notice her. I was in too much of a state, I guess. The rest you know.”

  Lindsay had listened to Jackie’s account with a growing sense of helplessness. There wasn’t even a loose strand anywhere she could start picking at to unravel this mess. “Didn’t you see anybody else at all?” she asked.

  Jackie shook her head. “Not a soul. But to be honest, if a rugby scrum dressed in tutus had been dancing the cancan on the landing, I doubt if I’d have noticed,” she added with a touch of fire. “I was out of it, Lindsay, completely out of it.”

  “Do you know who else Alison was sleeping with while she was seeing you?”

  “I’ve no idea. Christ, Lindsay, you know how clever she was at keeping her secrets. She could have been screwing half of Glasgow and I’d never have known,” Jackie said with a swift, flash of her old liveliness.

  Lindsay sighed and helped herself to a cigarette. It wasn’t just Jackie’s body that had been coarsened by prison life. Lindsay remembered her as a precise user of language, unusual in the rough and tumble world of newspapers in that she seldom swore. Now she’d fit in comfortably on any ship’s bridge, never mind a newsdesk. Lindsay gave a mental shrug and carried on with her fruitless questions. “Was there any evidence at all that didn’t fit the picture?”

  “Not really. But Jim will show you all there is to see. It’s hopeless, isn’t it? I don’t know why I was pinning my hopes on you. There’s nothing anyone can do, is there?” Jackie said despondently, the animation that had briefly illuminated her face departing as swiftly as it had come.

  “It’s not hopeless,” Lindsay lied. “I’ve hardly started. I’ve got one or two ideas of my own to pursue. I know most of the lads on the Clarion. There must have been some gossip kicking around at the time. And looking at the evidence might give me a few ideas. It’s amazing what a fresh eye can come up with. Don’t give up, Jackie. Alison Maxwell screwed up too many lives when she was alive. I’m damned if I’m going to stand by and do nothing while she screws up yours from beyond the grave.”

  “Big words, Gordon,” Lindsay muttered to herself as she drove away from the prison, leaving Jackie behind her. “And how the hell are you going to deliver this time?” In spite of her sympathy for Jackie, Lindsay had been only too glad to get away from the depressing encounter, especially after it became clear to her that Jackie knew nothing of Claire’s affair with Cordelia. That would be a pleasant surprise for her to come out to, Lindsay thought angrily. No home, no job, no lover.

  Lindsay thrust the thought of Claire and Cordelia away and reviewed what Jackie had told her as she drove back to Glasgow. No leads there, she mused. But she still had one or two cards up her sleeve. And maybe Jim Carstairs could give her some pointers that would be worth chasing up.

  Less than an hour after she had left the prison, Lindsay was ensconced in the lawyer’s secretary’s office, plowing through a thick file of all the case papers relating to Alison’s murder. The police statements were interesting, as much for what they did not contain. They had been led straight to Jackie because of a name tape stitched into her scarf. In Jackie’s statement, she’d revealed that it was a scarf she’d had since schooldays, hence the presence of the faded tape. Once they had Jackie in custody, she’d been picked out of an identification parade with no hesitation by Alison’s mother, who had passed out cold as soon as she saw the woman she believed to be her daughter’s killer.

  Because they were certain they had the murderer, and because they were convinced it was an open-and-shut case, the police had not pursued any other lines of inquiry with much vigor. Judging by the statements from Alison’s friends and colleagues, the questioning had been superficial in the extreme. By the time the papers had been passed on to the Procurator Fiscal for his decision as to whether there was enough for a successful prosecution, the case against Jackie looked overwhelming. And there were no other obvious suspects.

  There was only one tiny piece of evidence which did not actually confirm Jackie’s guilt. On the bedside table there had been a high-ball glass containing the remains of a whisky and water. There was a smudged lip-print on the glass, and faint traces of fingerprints. Only one was clear enough for the forensic scientists to lift a usable print. But it did not match Jackie’s prints in any respect. Nor did it belong to Alison. They had half of a thumbprint from the glass, and the owner of that print was still unknown. Three hours later, that was still the only discrepancy that Lindsay could find in the case against Jackie. With a deep sigh, she closed the file and asked to see Jim Carstairs.
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br />   Lindsay was shown into a comfortable office, whose size was disguised by the piles of books, files, and loose papers stacked everywhere. “Come in, come in,” Carstairs greeted her. He was a tall, thin man in his early thirties, with narrow shoulders and bony wrists that stuck out of his fashionable double-breasted suit. “Sit down, sit down,” he added. “Sorry about the mess. The joiners have been promising to put my shelves up for months now, but they never appear. Now, how did you get on with the case papers?”

  “They were heavy going,” Lindsay admitted. “And I have to say there’s not much there to lend support to the theory of Jackie’s innocence. Apart from one thing.”

  Carstairs nodded encouragingly. He reminded Lindsay of her Latin teacher, another ugly, skinny man who’d been nicknamed Plug because of his lack of physical charms. But he’d been a kind teacher, who had always managed to draw out even those most lacking in confidence. Feeling reassured, Lindsay went on. “The glass,” she said. “It doesn’t fit.”

  “Well spotted,” Carstairs said with an air of genuine delight at her perspicacity.

  “And the police don’t seem to have bent over backward to try to find out who the mysterious thumbprint belongs to,” she went on.

  “Good. Of course, I needn’t tell you that pursuing that course of inquiry was virtually impossible for us. After all, I have no authority to go round fingerprinting people. With the whole population of Glasgow to go at, and no real suspects other than Jackie, we couldn’t begin to unearth the owner of the print. If there had been someone else who had been an obvious suspect, we could have got their prints by some subterfuge, I suppose. But neither Claire nor I had the foggiest idea where to begin,” he apologized. “However, from what I’m told, which squares with what I understand about fingerprinting techniques, it’s likely that the print had been made that day. They certainly weren’t the sort of residual prints that might have been left after the glass had been washed,” he continued enthusiastically.

  “Who did the police fingerprint?” Lindsay asked, mildly irritated by Carstairs’ failure to pursue the one lead that he and Claire had to the real culprit. God preserve me from falling into the hands of lawyers, she thought to herself.

  “No one, really. They had no evidence apart from the glass that anyone else had been there. No one else had been seen or heard. Mrs. Makaronas from the flat upstairs heard Jackie and Alison quarreling, but that was all she admitted to having heard.”

  “Would that be Ruth Menzies? The gallery owner?” Lindsay interrupted.

  “That’s right. A friend of the dead woman. Retains her maiden name professionally. Not a very helpful witness from our point of view. Now, as I was saying, the only direct evidence was the glass, and they didn’t fingerprint all her friends and associates. In fact, they didn’t even look too hard for her friends and etceteras, as you’ll probably have picked up from the case file.”

  Lindsay shook her head doubtfully. “It’s not much to go at. But at least it’s a start. I was beginning to wonder if we were all wrong, and that maybe Jackie had actually done it, in spite of everything my instincts tell me about her and about this crime.”

  Carstairs nodded. “I know what you mean. I think we’ve all felt that momentary doubt. Including Jackie. I think there have been moments when she’s wondered if she suffered some kind of brainstorm. The only one who’s never doubted her innocence is Claire. She really has kept the faith.”

  Pity she couldn’t have managed faithful as well, thought Lindsay sourly. But she kept her thoughts to herself and got to her feet. “Right,” she said. “I’m off in pursuit of the missing thumb. I can’t promise that I’ll be able to get to the bottom of this, you do realize that? The trail I’m trying to pick up is very stale. Getting people to remember what happened four months ago is a tall order. Especially if one of them has something to hide.”

  “I appreciate that,” Carstairs said, showing her to the door. “But we owe it to Jackie to try, don’t we?”

  “I’ll be in touch if I need anything,” she said on her way out.

  Lindsay kept her word to the lawyer sooner than she expected. For when she returned to Sophie’s flat, she found two men waiting for her.

  “Miss Gordon?” Inspector Ainslie of the Special Branch asked as he and his colleague fell into step beside her. “We’d like you to accompany us to the station. We’ve got one or two questions for you about Miss Campbell’s burglary.”

  7

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t know anything about it!” Lindsay protested. She was sick of repeating herself. Ainslie ignored her denial and continued to put the same question, like a record with the needle stuck in the groove.

  “What have you done with the draft report?” he asked her yet again.

  Lindsay was bemused. When the two policemen had stopped her in the street, she had demanded to know what they wanted and why they thought she could help them. Ainslie had refused to answer any of her questions and had brought her to Maryhill Police Station, where she had been hustled into a small interview room, furnished with a table and two chairs. The room was hot and stuffy, and her head had begun to throb. It was all frighteningly reminiscent of another interview room she’d been interrogated in once before. The memory made Lindsay’s palms sweat and the blood pound in her ears.

  Neither police officer had attempted to explain what was going on. Ainslie had simply repeated his question over and over again. She had asked to call her lawyer, but her request had been ignored as completely as if she had never spoken. An hour had passed in this inconclusive but, for Lindsay, deeply unsettling pattern. Then, without warning, Ainslie got abruptly to his feet and walked out, slamming the door behind him. His junior sidekick followed him moments later, after fixing Lindsay with a long, hard stare.

  She got to her feet and stretched her legs. It never crossed her mind to try leaving. She felt sure there would be someone outside the door. Lindsay rotated her shoulders and shook her wrists vigorously to loosen up her muscles. For some reason, they had decided she knew more about Ros’s burglary than an innocent bystander should do. But she was determined to give nothing away. Something told her she was in for a long session.

  A few minutes later, the door opened and a stranger walked into the room. His face looked as though he’d spent too much of his youth in a boxing ring. “Miss Gordon?” he inquired mildly.

  “That’s right. Who are you?”

  “Chief Inspector Fraser. Mr. Ainslie tells me you’re not being very cooperative,” he replied, lowering his bulky frame on to a plastic chair that didn’t look equal to the task.

  “Mr. Ainslie might have earned my cooperation if he’d given me a clue as to why you’ve brought me here,” Lindsay said.

  Fraser pulled a copy of the Scottish Daily Clarion from the inside pocket of his rumpled gray suit. “Come on, Miss Gordon,” he said with an air of weariness. “Don’t tell me you haven’t worked it out. We’re not all daft in the force, you know. Your reputation has gone before you. So when we get a burglary involving politically sensitive information, followed by a press leak, and you’re on the spot, you can’t really be surprised if our fingers get round to pointing at you.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about a press leak. I haven’t even seen today’s papers. I left the house early this morning and I’ve been running around all day. I’ve not had a chance even to look at the front pages,” Lindsay explained.

  Fraser shook his head sorrowfully. “I’d hoped you could do a wee bit better than that. You must think I came up the Clyde on a biscuit. After my twenty-two years on the force d’you really expect me to believe that?”

  “Whether you believe it or not, it’s the truth,” Lindsay said stubbornly. “Look, Chief Inspector. I’ll happily answer any questions you want to put to me if you’ll only do me the courtesy of either telling me what this is all about or letting me speak to my lawyer. I have rights, and I intend to exercise th
em.”

  The Special Branch officer tossed the paper down on the table. The headlines screamed off the page at her. “TOP TORY TO CASH IN ON PRISON PLAN,” the main banner said. Underneath, a smaller headline read, “Jail sell-off means fat profits for Jedburgh.” Lindsay’s heart sank. Whoever had stolen Rosalind’s report hadn’t hung around. The byline on the story read “By Bill Grace, Clarion Chief Reporter.” She knew Bill, and knew he was one of the best journalists in Scotland. He’d obviously used his extensive and varied contacts to turn a run-of-the-mill leak story into a major political scandal.

  Appalled, she read on.

  A top-secret plan to privatize Scotland’s prisons will make the minister responsible a rich man.

  Mark Jedburgh, the Scottish Office minister in charge of prisons, has an extensive shareholding in a security firm that has been gearing up to meet the challenge of running a top-security prison on the taxpayers’ behalf.

  According to a secret government report, revealed exclusively to the Scottish Daily Clarion, plans are well advanced to sell off Scotland’s jails to the highest bidder.

  The plans include armed guards, strict punishment regimes, increased security, drastic cuts in social and educational opportunities for prisoners, and an end to all rehabilitation programs for long-term violent offenders.

  Vigilando Security Group are hotly tipped to win the first contract to run a private prison.

  One of VSG’s major shareholders is Mark Jedburgh, Tory M.P. for Central Borders. He owns 15 per cent of VSG. His wife Christina owns another 7 per cent.

  Former prisoner Davey Anderson, who served three life sentences for murder and now works for a charity which helps to resettle ex-prisoners, said last night, “This is diabolical. Jedburgh should resign at once. This plan is a recipe for riot.” (Continued p.3)