A Darker Domain

by Val McDermid

  Alerted by the sound of her car, Phil had the door open before Karen was out of the driver’s seat. Silhouetted against the light, he looked bigger. His pose contained the casual threat of the doorkeeper; one arm raised to lean on the door jamb, one leg crossed over the other, head cocked. But there was nothing threatening in his expression. His round, dark eyes twinkled in the light, and his smile crinkled his cheeks into creases. ‘Come away in,’ he greeted her, stepping back and gesturing for her to enter.

  She stepped on to a perfect replica of a traditional Victorian tiled hallway, terracotta squares broken up with lozenges of white, blue and claret. ‘Very nice,’ she said, noting the dado rail and the Lincrusta beneath it.

  ‘My brother’s girlfriend’s an architectural historian. She’s been through the place like a dose of salts. It’s going to look like a bloody National Trust property before she’s finished,’ he grumbled good-naturedly. ‘Turn right at the end of the hall.’

  Karen burst out laughing as she entered the room. ‘Christ, Phil,’ she giggled. ‘It was Colonel Mustard, in the Library, with the Lead Piping. You should be wearing a smoking jacket, not a Raith Rovers shirt.’

  He gave a rueful shrug. ‘You’ve got to see the funny side. Me, a cop, with the perfect body-in-the-library scenario.’ He waved a hand at the dark wooden bookshelves, the leather-topped desk and the club chairs that flanked the elaborate fireplace. The room clearly hadn’t been big to start with, but now it felt positively overstuffed. ‘She says this is what the master of the house would have had.’

  ‘In a house this size?’ Karen said. ‘I think she’s got delusions of grandeur. And somehow, I don’t think he’d have gone for the tartan carpet.’

  The pink of embarrassment flushed his ears. ‘Apparently that’s post-modern irony.’ He raised his eyebrows sceptically. ‘It’s not all it seems, though,’ he said, brightening as he fiddled with one of the books. A section of shelving swung open to reveal a plasma screen TV.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ Karen said. ‘I was beginning to wonder. Not much like the old place, is it?’

  ‘I think I’ve outgrown the boy racer style of living.’ Phil said.

  ‘Time to settle down?’

  He shrugged, not meeting her eyes. ‘Maybe.’ He pointed to a chair and dropped into the one opposite. ‘So how was Lawson?’

  ‘A changed man. And not in a good way. I’ve been thinking about it, driving back. He was always a tough bastard, but right up until we found out what he’d really been up to, I felt his motives were the right ones, you know? But the stuff he told me today…I don’t know. It almost felt as if he was taking his chance to get his own back.’

  ‘What do you mean? What did he tell you?’

  Karen held a hand up. ‘I’ll get to that in a minute. I just want to let off steam, I suppose. I felt like he said what he did out of malice. Because he knew it would damage the reputation of the force, not because he wants to help us solve what happened to Cat and Adam Grant.’

  As she spoke, Phil reached for his pack of cigarillos and lit up. He hardly smoked in her company these days, she realized. There were so few places it was permissible. The familiar bittersweet aroma filled Karen’s nostrils, strangely comforting after the day she’d had. ‘Does it matter what his motives are?’ he said. ‘As long as what he’s telling us is true?’

  ‘Maybe not. And as it turns out, he did have something very interesting to tell us. Something that sheds a whole new light on what happened the night Cat Grant died. Apparently it wasn’t just the cops and the kidnappers who were armed that night. Our pillar of society, Sir Broderick Maclennan Grant had a gun with him. And he used it.’

  Phil’s mouth hung open, smoke leaking into the air. ‘Grant had a shooter? You’re kidding. How come we’re only hearing about this now?’

  ‘Lawson says the cover-up came from on high. Grant was a victim, nothing would be served by charging him. Bad PR, all that shit. But I think that decision completely altered the outcome.’ Karen pulled a file folder from her bag. She took out the drawing of the crime scene made by the forensic team at the time and spread it out between them. She pointed out where everyone had been standing. ‘Got that?’ she asked.

  Phil nodded.

  ‘So what happened?’ Karen said.

  ‘The light went out, our guy fired high and wide, then there was another shot from behind Cat. The shot that killed her.’

  Karen shook her head. ‘Not according to Lawson. What he’s saying now is that Cat and her mother were wrestling with the bag of money. Cat managed to get the bag and started to turn. Then Grant drew his firearm and demanded to see Adam. The light went out, Grant fired. There was a second shot, from beyond Cat. Then PC Armstrong fired wide.’

  Phil frowned, digesting what she’d said. ‘OK’ he said slowly. ‘I don’t quite see how that changes things.’

  ‘The bullet that killed Cat hit her in the back and exited through her chest. Into the sand. They never found the bullet. The wound wasn’t consistent with Armstrong’s weapon, so, given that Grant’s gun was never mentioned, there was only one possible public explanation. The kidnappers killed Cat. Which made it a murder hunt.’

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ Phil groaned. ‘And of course, that’s what totally puts the kybosh on any possibility of getting Adam back. These guys know they’re going down for life, no question now that Cat’s dead. They’ve got a bag of money and the kid. No way are they going to put themselves up for another confrontation with Grant. They’re going to melt away into the night. And Adam’s just a liability now. He’s worthless to them, alive or dead.’

  ‘Exactly. And we both know which side of the scales the weight comes down on. But there’s more. The argument’s always been that the nature of the wound plus the fact that Cat was shot in the back pointed inevitably to the kidnappers. But according to Lawson, Grant’s gun could have inflicted the fatal wound. He says Cat had started to turn back towards the kidnappers when the light went out.’ She looked bleakly at Phil. ‘The chances are Grant killed his own daughter.’

  ‘And the cover-up cost him his grandson.’ Phil took a long drag on his cigarillo. ‘You going to talk to Brodie Grant about this?’

  Karen sighed. ‘I don’t see how I can avoid it.’

  ‘Maybe you should let the Macaroon deal with it?’

  Karen laughed with genuine delight. ‘What a joy that would be. But we both know he’d throw himself off a tall building to dodge that bullet. No, I’m going to have to front him up myself. I’m just not sure of the best way to handle it. Maybe I’ll wait till I see what the Italians have got for me. See if there’s anything to sugar the pill.’ Before Phil could reply, Karen’s phone rang. ‘Bloody thing,’ she muttered as she took it out. Then she read the screen and smiled. ‘Hello, River,’ she said. ‘How are you doing?’

  ‘Never better,’ River’s voice crackled and spat in her ear. ‘Listen, I think you need to get down here.’

  ‘What? Have you found something?’

  ‘This is a crap connection, Karen. Better if you just come straight down.’

  ‘OK. Twenty minutes.’ She ended the call. ‘Get your slippers off, Sherlock. Bugger Brodie Grant. The good doctor has something for us.’

  Boscolata

  Bel had to admit that Grazia knew how to create the perfect ambience for loosening tongues. As the sun slowly sank behind the distant hills and the lights of medieval hilltowns scattered their dark slopes like handfuls of glitter, the inhabitants of Boscolata gorged on moist suckling pig accompanied by mounds of slow-roasted potatoes redolent with garlic and rosemary, and bowls of tomato salad pungent with basil and tarragon. Boscolata provided flagons of wine from their own vines and Maurizio had added bottles of his home-made vin santo to the feast.

  The knowledge that this unexpected celebration was in honour of Bel inclined them favourably towards her. She moved among them, chatting easily about all manner of things. But always, the conversation moved back to the puppeteers who had squatted
Paolo Totti’s villa. Gradually, she was able to conjure up a mental dossier of the people who had lived there. Rado and Sylvia, a Kosovan Serb and a Slovenian who had a gift for making puppets. Matthias, who had set up the company in the first place and now designed and built the sets. His woman, Ursula, responsible for organizing their schedule and greasing the wheels to make it possible. Maria and Peter from Austria, the principal puppeteers, and the three-year-old daughter they were determined to keep out of the formal school system. Dieter, a Swiss who was responsible for lighting and sound. Luka and Max, the second-string puppeteers who put up the posters, did most of the donkey work and got to run their own show when a special presentation clashed with one of their regular pitches.

  And then there were the visitors. Apparently, there had been plenty of those. Gabriel and his father hadn’t stood out particularly, except that the father was clearly a friend of Matthias rather than a friend of the house. He kept himself to himself. Always polite but never actually open. Opinions varied as to his name. One thought it was David, another Daniel, a third Darren.

  As the evening wore on, Bel began to wonder if there was any substance to her gut reaction to the photograph Renata had shown her. Everything else seemed so very insubstantial. Then, as she helped herself to a glass of vin santo and a handful of cantuccini, a teenage boy sidled up to her.

  ‘You’re the one who wants to know about BurEst, right?’ he mumbled.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘And that lad, Gabe?’

  ‘What do you know?’ Bel said, moving closer to him, letting him feel they were in a conspiracy of two.

  ‘He was there, the night they legged it.’

  ‘Gabriel, you mean?’

  ‘That’s right. I didn’t say anything before, because I was supposed to be at school, only I wasn’t, you know?’

  Bel patted his arm. ‘Believe me, I know all about it. I didn’t really get on with school either. Much more interesting things to be doing.’

  ‘Yeah, well. Anyway, I was in Siena, and I saw Matthias walking up from the station with Gabe. Matthias had been away for a couple of days. I didn’t have anything better to do, so I followed them. They walked across town to the car park by the Porta Romana, and they came out in Matthias’s van.’

  ‘Were they talking? Did they seem to be friendly?’

  ‘They looked pretty fed up. They had their heads down, they weren’t saying much. Not unfriendly, as such. Just like they were both pissed off about something.’

  ‘Did you see them again? Back here?’

  The boy gave a jerky half-shrug. ‘I never saw them. But when I got back, Matthias’s van was there. The others had gone off all the way to Grossetto to do a special performance. That’s a good couple of hours drive, so they’d gone by the time I got back. I just assumed Matthias and Gabe were in the villa.’ He gave a lairy grin. ‘Doing who knows what.’

  Judging by the blood on the floor, Bel thought, it wasn’t anything like as much fun as this unimaginative young man was picturing. The real question was whose the blood was. Had BurEst fled because they’d come back to find their leader dead in a pool of his own blood? Or had they scattered because their leader had Gabriel’s blood on his hands? ‘Thanks,’ she said, turning away and refilling a glass that had somehow become empty. She drifted away from the chattering crowd and walked along the fringe of the vineyard. Her informant had given her plenty to think about. Matthias had been gone for a few days. He came back with Gabriel. The two had been alone in the villa. By the middle of the following morning, the whole troupe had cleared out in a hurry, leaving the same posters once used by the Anarchist Covenant of Scotland and a large bloodstain on the floor.

  You didn’t have to be much of a detective to figure out that something had gone horribly wrong. But to whom? And maybe more importantly, why?

  East Wemyss

  Summer in Scotland, Karen thought bitterly as she scrambled down the path to the Thane’s Cave. Still daylight at nine o’clock, a thin drizzle soaking her and the midges biting like there was no tomorrow. She could see them in a cloud round Phil’s head as she followed him down to the beach. She was sure they were worse now than when she was a kid. Bloody global warming. The wee beasties got more vicious and the weather got worse.

  As the path levelled out, she could see a couple of River’s students huddled under an overhang, enjoying a fly fag. Maybe if she stood upwind, their smoke would see the midges off. Beyond them, River herself was pacing, phone to her ear, head down, long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail that stuck through the back of her baseball cap. What chilled Karen more than the rain was the gleam of the white paper overall River was wearing. The anthropologist turned, caught sight of them and brought her call to an abrupt end. ‘Just telling Ewan not to expect me home for a few days,’ she said ruefully.

  ‘So what have you got?’ Karen asked, urgency stripping courtesy to the bone.

  ‘Come on in and I’ll show you.’

  They followed her into the cave, the working lights creating an abstract pattern of darkness and light that took a moment to adjust to. The clearing crew had stopped work and were sitting around eating sandwiches and drinking cans of soft drinks. Karen and Phil were magnets for their interest, and their eyes never left the cops.

  River led the way to where the rock fall had blocked the passage leading back into the rock. Almost all of the boulders and small stones had been shifted, leaving a narrow opening. She played a powerful torch over the remaining rubble, showing that the actual fall was only about four feet deep. ‘We were surprised to find how shallow this fall was. We would have expected it to go back twenty feet or more. That made me suspicious right from the word go.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Phil asked.

  ‘I’m not a geologist. But as I understand it from my colleagues in Earth Sciences, it takes a lot of pressure for a natural cave-in to happen. When they were mining underground around here, it produced a lot of stress in the rocks above, so you would get big fractures and falls. It’s that scale of geological pressure that causes roof falls in old caves like this. They’ve been here for eight thousand years. They don’t just collapse for no reason at all. But when they do go, it’s like pulling the keystone out of a bridge. And you get a big fall.’ As she spoke, River kept moving the torch beam around, showing that the roof was surprisingly sound on either side of the fall. ‘On the other hand, if you know what you’re doing, a small explosive charge will create a controlled fall that only affects a relatively small area.’ She raised her eyebrows at Karen. ‘The kind of thing that’s done down mines all the time.’

  ‘You’re saying this fall was created deliberately?’ Karen said.

  ‘You’d need an expert to give you a definitive yes or no, but based on what little I do know, I would say it looks that way to me.’ She swung round and shone the torch at a section of the cave wall about five feet above the ground. There was a roughly conical hole in the rock, black streaks staining the red sandstone. ‘That looks like a shot hole to me,’ River said.

  ‘Shit,’ Karen said. ‘What now?’

  ‘Well, when I saw this, I thought we needed to step very carefully once we’d cleared a path through. So I put on the J-suit and went through by myself. There’s maybe three metres of passageway, then it opens out into quite a big chamber. Maybe five metres by four metres.’ River sighed. ‘It’s going to be a bastard to process.’

  ‘And there’s a reason to process it?’ Phil asked.

  ‘Oh yes. There’s a reason.’ She shone the torch at their feet. ‘You can see the floor’s just packed earth. Just inside the chamber, on the left, the earth is loose. It had been tramped down, but I could see it was different in texture from the rest of the floor. I set up some lights and a camera and started moving soil.’ River’s voice had become cool and distant. ‘I didn’t have to go far. About six inches down, I found a skull. I haven’t moved it. I wanted you to see it in situ before we do anything further.’ She waved them back fr
om the fall. ‘You’ll need suits,’ she said, turning to the students. ‘Jackie, could you bring me over suits and bootees for DI Pirie and DS Parhatka?’

  As they suited up, River ran through their options. It boiled down to either letting the students work on under River’s close supervision or bringing in the force’s own CSI team. ‘It’s your decision,’ River said. ‘All I would say is that we’re not only the budget option, we’re the recently trained specialist option. I don’t know what your level of expertise is in archaeology and anthropology, but I’m betting a small force like Fife is not going to have a team of leading-edge specialists on the payroll.’

  Karen gave her the look that reduced her DCs to childhood. ‘We’ve not had a case like this while I’ve been serving. Anything out of the usual run of things, we use outside experts all the time. The main issue is making sure the evidence will hold up in court. I know you’re a qualified expert witness, but your students are not. I’m going to have to run this past the Macaroon, but I think we should continue with your crew. There have to be two video cameras running at all times, though, and you have to be on site whenever they’re working.’ She fastened her suit, glad that Jackie had given her one big enough to accommodate her generous proportions. CSIs weren’t always so considerate. She thought they sometimes did it on purpose, to make her feel uncomfortable in what they regarded as their domain. ‘Let’s have a look at it, then.’