A Darker Domain

by Val McDermid

  Like Elvis, he’d piled on the beef since his days of strutting his stuff on the streets of the Wemyss villages. The buttons of his immaculate white shirt strained over a substantial belly but his legs were incongruously slim and his feet surprisingly dainty. His face had the florid tones and fleshiness of a man heading for a cardiovascular disaster. When he smiled, his cheeks became tight pink balls, as if someone had stuffed them with cotton wool. ‘DI Pirie?’ he enquired cheerfully.

  ‘Karen,’ she said. ‘And you must be Brian? Thanks for coming out to meet me.’ It was like shaking hands with the Pillsbury Dough Boy, all soft, engulfing warmth.

  ‘It’s better than dottering about in the garden,’ he said, his thick Fife accent untempered. ‘I’m always happy to help. I walked the beat in these villages for thirty years and, if I’m honest, I miss that sense of knowing every pavement and every house. Back then, you could make a career out of being a beat bobby. There was no pressure to go for promotion or the CID.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘There I go. I promised my wife I wasn’t going to do my Dixon of Dock Green impersonation, but I can’t help myself.’

  Karen laughed. She liked this cheery little man already, even though she was well aware that working alongside him back in the day would have been a different matter. ‘I bet you remember the Catriona Maclennan Grant case,’ she said.

  Suddenly sombre, he nodded. ‘I’ll never forget that one. I was there that night - of course, you know that, it’s why I’m here. But I still dream about it sometimes. The gunshots, the smell of the cordite on the sea air, the screams and cries. All these years later, and what have we got to show for it? Lady Grant in her grave alongside her daughter. Jimmy Lawson in the jail for the rest of his life. And Brodie Grant, master of the bloody universe. New wife, new heir. Funny how things turn out, eh?’

  ‘You can never tell,’ Karen said, happy to buy into the clichés for the time being. ‘So, can you talk me through it as we walk down to the Lady’s Rock?’

  They set off past a row of houses similar to Jenny Prentice’s street in Newton of Wemyss, stranded and solitary now the reason for their existence was gone. Soon they entered the woods and the path began to descend, a waist-high stone wall on one side, thick undergrowth flanking it. In the distance, she could see the sparkle of the sea, the sun shining for once as they descended to shore level. ‘We had teams stationed up at the top here, and the same along at West Wemyss,’ Beveridge said. ‘Back then, you couldn’t get along the shore towards East Wemyss for the pit bing. But when they made the coastal path, they got money from the EU and trucked all the pit red off the foreshore. You look at it now and you’d never know.’

  He was right. As they reached the level of the shore, Karen could see right along past East Wemyss to Buckhaven on its high promontory. In 1985, the view would not have existed. She turned towards West Wemyss, surprised that she couldn’t actually see the Lady’s Rock from where she stood.

  Karen followed Beveridge along the path, trying to imagine what it must have been like that night. The file said it had been a new moon. She pictured the sickle sliver in the sky, the pinprick stars in the freezing night. The Plough like a big saucepan. Orion’s belt and dagger, and all the other ones whose names she didn’t know. The cops hidden in the woods, breathing with their mouths open so their breath would be chilled before it came out in puffs. She took in the high sycamores, wondering how much smaller they’d been then. Ropes hung from thick branches where kids would swing as they’d done when she was little. To Karen in her heightened state of imagination, they resembled hangman’s nooses, motionless in the mild morning air, waiting for tenants. She shivered slightly and hurried to catch up with Beveridge.

  He pointed up to the high cliffs where the treetops ended. ‘Up there, that’s the Newton. You can see how sheer the cliffs are. Nobody was coming down there without us knowing. The guys in charge figured the kidnappers had to come along the path one way or the other, so they put most of the team here in the trees.’ He turned and pointed to what looked like a huge boulder by the side of the path. ‘And a guy with a rifle up there on top of the Lady’s Rock.’ He gave a derisive snort of laughter. ‘Facing the wrong way, like.’

  ‘It’s much smaller than I remember from when I was wee.’ Looking at it now, Karen found it hard to believe that anybody had bothered to name so insignificant a chunk of sandstone. The side next to the path was a straight cliff about twenty-five feet high, pitted with holes and striated with cracks. Small boy paradise. On the other side, it fell away in a forty-five-degree slope, dotted with tussocks of coarse grass and small shrubs. It had loomed much larger in her imagination.

  ‘It’s not just your memory playing tricks on you. I know it doesn’t look much now, but twenty years ago, the shore was a lot lower, and the rock was a lot bigger. Come on, I’ll show you what I mean.’

  Beveridge led the way down the side of the rock. The path was little more than grass bent by the passage of feet; a far cry from the EU’s well-dressed track. They walked a dozen paces past the rock on to what seemed to be a narrow road made of coarse concrete. A few feet along, a rusted metal ring was set into the concrete. Karen frowned, trying to make sense of it. She let her eye follow the road, which bent at an angle before eventually meeting the sea. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said.

  ‘It was a quay,’ Beveridge said. ‘That’s a mooring ring. Twenty years ago, you could bring a decent-sized boat along here. The shore was somewhere between eight and fifteen feet lower than it is now, depending on where you stand. This is how they did it.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Karen said, taking it all in; the sea, the rock, the quay, the splay of the woodland behind them. ‘Surely we must have heard them coming in?’

  Beveridge smiled at her, like a teacher with a favourite pupil. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But if they were using a small open boat, you could bring it in on the rising tide with just oars. With a good boatman, you wouldn’t hear a thing. Besides, when you’re up on the path, the rock itself acts as a baffle. You can hardly hear the sea itself. When it came to the getaway, you could give it full throttle, of course. You could be at Dysart or Buckhaven by the time they got the helicopter scrambled.’

  Karen studied the lie of the land again. ‘Hard to believe nobody thought about the sea.’

  ‘They did.’ Beveridge spoke abruptly.

  ‘You mean, you did?’

  ‘I did. So did my sergeant.’ He turned away and stared out to sea.

  ‘Why did nobody listen to you?’

  He shrugged. ‘They listened, I’ll give them that. We had a briefing with DI Lawson and Brodie Grant. The two of them just didn’t believe it could be done. A big boat would be too obvious, too easy to identify and chase down. A wee boat would be impossible because you couldn’t subdue an adult hostage in an open boat. They said the kidnappers had shown forward planning and intelligence and they wouldn’t take stupid risks like that.’ He turned back to her and sighed. ‘Maybe we should have pushed harder. Maybe if we had, there would have been a different outcome.’

  ‘Maybe,’ Karen said thoughtfully. So far, everyone had looked at the botched ransom operation from the point of view of the police and Brodie Grant. But there was another angle that deserved consideration. ‘They did have a point, though, didn’t they? How did they manage it in a wee boat? They’ve got an adult hostage. They’ve got a baby hostage. They’ve got to handle the boat and keep the hostages under control, and there can’t have been that many of them in a boat small enough to have avoided detection coming in. I wouldn’t like to have been running that operation.’

  ‘Me neither,’ Beveridge said. ‘It would be hard enough getting that lot ashore if everybody was on the same side, never mind at odds with each other.’

  ‘Unless they were there a good long while before the actual handover. It would have been dark by four, and the quay itself would hide a wee boat from most lines of sight…’ She pondered. ‘When did you guys set up?’

  ‘We’d supposed
ly had the whole area under surveillance from two. The advance teams were in place by six.’

  ‘So theoretically, they could have sneaked in after it got dark and before your boys were on station,’ she said thoughtfully.

  ‘It’s possible,’ Beveridge said, sounding unconvinced. ‘But how could they be sure we didn’t have the quay staked out? And how could you be sure of keeping a six-month-old kid quiet in the freezing cold for three or four hours?’

  Karen walked out along the old quay, marvelling at the movement of the shoreline. The more she found out about the mechanics of this case, the less sense it made. She didn’t think she was stupid. But she couldn’t get things to add up. There had never been a single verified sighting of Cat or Adam after they’d been snatched. Nobody had witnessed anyone staking out her cottage, or the snatch itself. Nobody had seen them arrive at the ransom handover site. Nobody had seen them escape. If it hadn’t been for the very real corpse of Cat Grant, she could almost believe it had never happened. But it had.

  Rotheswell Castle

  Brodie Grant handed Bel’s report to his wife and started fiddling with the espresso machine in his office. ‘She’s doing surprisingly well,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t sure about this arrangement of Susan’s, but it seems to be paying off. I thought we should use a private investigator, but the journalist seems to be doing just as well.’

  ‘She has more at stake than a private eye would, Brodie. I think she’s almost as desperate for a result as we are,’ Susan Charleson said, helping herself to a glass of water and sitting down on the window seat. ‘With her unparalleled access to you, I suspect she sees a bestseller in this.’

  ‘If she helps us get some answers after all this time, she deserves it,’ Judith said. ‘You’re right, this is an impressive start. What does DI Pirie think?’

  Grant and Susan exchanged a quick glance of complicity. ‘We’ve not passed it on to her yet,’ Grant said.

  ‘Why ever not? I imagine she’d find it useful.’ Judith looked from one to the other, puzzled.

  ‘I think we’ll just keep it to ourselves for now,’ Grant said, pressing the button that forced pressurized hot water through the coffee to produce an espresso as perfect as any Italian barista. ‘My experience with the police last time wasn’t exactly a happy one. They cocked things up and my daughter ended up dead. This time, I’d rather leave as little up to them as possible.’

  ‘But this is a police matter,’ Judith protested. ‘You brought them in. You can’t ignore them now.’

  ‘Can’t I?’ His head came up. ‘Maybe if I’d ignored them last time and done things my way, Cat would still be alive. And it would be Adam…’ He stopped abruptly, realizing that nothing he said could get him out of the hole he’d just dug.

  ‘Quite,’ Judith said, her voice sharp as a splinter. She tossed the papers on his desk and walked out.

  Grant pulled a face. ‘Drum ice,’ he said as the door closed behind his wife. ‘I didn’t handle that as well as I might have. Tricky things, words.’

  ‘She’ll get over it,’ Susan said dismissively. ‘I agree. We should keep this to ourselves for now. The police are notoriously incapable of keeping a lid on information.’

  ‘It’s not that I’m bothered about. I’m more worried about them cocking it up again. This could be the last chance we have of finding out what happened to my daughter and my grandson, and I don’t want to risk it going sour. It matters too much. I should have taken more control last time. I won’t make that mistake again.’

  ‘We will have to tell the police eventually, if Bel Richmond comes up with a serious suspect,’ Susan pointed out.

  Grant raised his eyebrows. ‘Not necessarily. Not if he’s dead.’

  ‘They’ll want to clear up the case.’

  ‘That’s not my problem. Whoever destroyed my family deserves to be dead. Bringing the police into it won’t make that happen. If they’re already dead, well and good. If they’re not - well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.’

  Little shocked Susan Charleson after three decades of working for Brodie Grant. But for once, she felt a tremor pass through her calm certainties. ‘I’m going to pretend I never heard that,’ she said.

  ‘That’s probably a good idea,’ he said, finishing his espresso. ‘A very good idea.’

  Glenrothes

  Phil was on the phone when Karen got back to the office, handset tucked into his neck, scribbling in his notebook. ‘And you’re sure about that?’ she heard him say as she tossed her bag on the desk and headed for the fridge. By the time she returned with a Diet Coke, he was staring glumly at his notes. ‘That was Dr Wilde,’ he said. ‘She got someone to do a quick and dirty on the DNA. There’s no linkage between Misha Gibson and the body in the cave.’

  ‘Shit,’ Karen said. ‘So that means the body isn’t Mick Prentice.’

  ‘Or else Mick Prentice wasn’t Misha’s father.’

  Karen leaned back in her chair. ‘It’s a good thought, but, if I’m honest, I don’t really think that Jenny Prentice was playing away when Mick was still on the scene. We’d have heard about it by now. A place like the Newton, it’s a gossip factory. There’s always somebody ready to shop their neighbour. I think the chances are that body’s not Mick’s.’

  ‘Plus you said the neighbour was adamant that Jenny was in love with him. That Tom Campbell was a poor second.’

  ‘So if we’re right about him being Misha’s dad, maybe Mick was the one that put the body there. He knew the caves, he probably could have got his hands on explosives. We need to find out if he had any experience of shot-firing. But burying a body in the Thane’s Cave would be a pretty good reason for disappearing. And we know somebody else went on the missing list around the same time…’ Karen reached for her notebook and flicked back the pages till she found what she was looking for. She glanced at her watch. ‘You think it’s too late to ring somebody at half past eleven?’

  Phil looked baffled. ‘Too late how? It’s not even dinner time.’

  ‘I mean at night. In New Zealand.’ She reached for the phone and keyed in Angie Mackenzie’s number. ‘Mind you, it’s a murder inquiry now. That always comes ahead of beauty sleep.’

  A grumpy male voice answered. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘I’m sorry to bother you, this is Fife Police. I need a word with Angie,’ Karen said, trying to sound ingratiating.

  ‘Jesus. Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘Yes, I’m sorry. But I do need to talk to her.’

  ‘Hang on, I’ll get her.’ Off the phone, she could hear him calling his wife’s name.

  A full minute passed, then Angie came on the line. ‘I was in the shower,’ she said. ‘Is this DI Pirie?’

  ‘That’s right.’ Karen softened her voice. ‘I’m really sorry to bother you, but I wanted to let you know we’ve found human remains behind a rock fall in one of the Wemyss caves.’

  ‘And you think it might be Andy?’

  ‘It’s possible. The timescale looks like it might fit.’

  ‘But what would he have been doing in the caves? He was an outdoor kind of guy. One of the things he liked about being a union official was never having to go underground again.’

  ‘We don’t know yet that it is your brother,’ Karen said. ‘Those are questions for later, Angie. We still have to identify the remains. Do you happen to know who your brother’s dentist was?’

  ‘How did he die?’

  ‘We’re not sure yet,’ Karen said. ‘As you’ll appreciate, it’s been a long time. It’s a bit of a forensic challenge. I’ll keep you informed, of course. But in the meantime, we have to treat it as an unexplained death. So, Andy’s dentist?’

  ‘He went to Mr Torrance in Buckhaven. But he died a couple of years before I left Scotland. I don’t even know if there’s still a practice there.’ She sounded slightly panicked. Shock kicking in, Karen thought.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll check it out,’ she said.

  ‘DNA,’ Angie blu
rted out. ‘Can you get DNA from…what you found?’

  ‘Yes, we can. Can we arrange for your local police to take a sample from you?’

  ‘You don’t need to. Before I left for New Zealand, I arranged with my lawyer to hold a certified copy of my DNA analysis.’ There was a crack in her voice. ‘I thought he’d gone off a mountain. Or maybe walked into a loch with his pockets full of stones. I didn’t want him lying unclaimed. My lawyer has instructions to provide my DNA analysis to the police where there’s an unidentified body the right age.’ Karen heard a sob from the other side of the world. ‘I always hoped…’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Karen said. ‘I’ll get in touch with your lawyer.’

  ‘Alexander Gibb,’ Angie said. ‘In Kirkcaldy. I’m sorry, I need to go now.’ The line went dead abruptly.

  ‘Not too late, then,’ Phil said.

  Karen sighed. Shook her head. ‘Depends what you mean by “too late”.’

  Hoxton, London

  Jonathan speed-dialled Bel’s mobile. When she answered, he spoke quickly. ‘I can’t chat, I’ve got a meeting with my tutor. I’ve got some stuff to email you, I’ll get to it in an hour or so. But here’s the headline news - Daniel Porteous is dead.’

  ‘I know that,’ Bel said impatiently.

  ‘What you don’t know is that he died in 1959, aged four.’

  ‘Oh, shit,’ said Bel.

  ‘I couldn’t have put it better myself. But here’s the kicker. In November 1984, Daniel Porteous registered the birth of his son.’

  Bel felt light-headed, realized she was holding her breath and released it in a sigh. ‘No way.’

  ‘Trust me, this is the business. Our Daniel Porteous somehow managed to have a son twenty-five years after he died.’

  ‘Wild. And who was the mother?’

  Jonathan chuckled. ‘This just gets better, I’m afraid. I’m going to spell it out to you. F-R-E-D-A C-A-L-L-O-W is the name on the birth certificate. Say it out loud, Bel.’