by Val McDermid
Karen swung round in her chair and stared out at the turbulent sea. At moments like this, Phil’s absence was a physical pain in her chest. A clench of misery and rage that wiped out everything else. She’d heard people talk of being heartsore and had always thought it was a metaphor. Now she knew otherwise. She hung her head, ran a rough hand across her mouth and turned back to the screen where Richard Spencer’s face smiled out at her with the measured care of a man who knows he’s trying to win your vote. Loaded with gravitas but leavened with approachability. He reminded her of the actor who played Inspector Lestrade in Sherlock. If he’d lived, she wondered if that would have played to his advantage.
Spencer’s political career had the most extensive coverage, combed through to establish why he, in particular, might have been a target for the IRA or one of the other Republican splinter groups. The prevailing view seemed to be that he’d been chosen not for his specific achievements in office but because his hobby of flying presented an easy target, compared with the activities of his colleagues.
He had of course been elevated by his martyrdom to a saintly figure. A first-class constituency MP, a stalwart of the progressive wing of the party, a loving husband and a devoted father. Karen wondered how much of that was wishful thinking. She wouldn’t mind betting she’d have formed a very different picture if she’d interviewed people the week before Spencer’s death.
Ellie MacKinnon’s career as a popular TV presenter had earned her a fair share of column inches too. She’d started out as one of a bubbly young quartet fronting a Saturday-morning kids’ cookery programme, but her star quality had shone out and she’d soon been poached to join the nation’s favourite kid’s show, the teatime programme All Aboard! Ellie had quickly become the anchor and had been with the show for twelve years at the time of the crash. She was coltish and full of bounce, her wide grin as much a trademark as Ant’s Dec.
She’d carved out a secondary career writing children’s adventure stories, featuring a trio of cousins who lived in a small town on the south coast that was preternaturally prone to the presence of spy rings, armed robbers, drug smugglers and kidnappers. The books had been notable for their brio, their off-the-wall sense of humour and the vividness of their illustrations. Karen remembered buying the series for her niece. They were, as she recalled, a cheerier, English version of Lemony Snicket. The obits said she’d brought a new zest to the traditional children’s story; again, Karen wondered if there would have been a different verdict had she lived.
There wasn’t much about Ellie MacKinnon’s private life. She’d lived alone in North London. A detail that cropped up in only one story was that she and Caroline Abbott lived in the same building – a large detached house in Belsize Park that had been divided into two flats. The same article reported that Ellie was godmother to Caroline’s younger son, Gabriel. Given Caroline’s work in the theatre, it might have been handy to have a potential babysitter so close at hand. Which must have made things even worse for Gabriel. In one terrible afternoon, the boy had lost both his mother and the person he might have expected to be her surrogate. A double whammy.
Caroline Abbott came third in the coverage stakes. She’d grown up in Edinburgh, studied Drama and English at Bristol and landed a job working front of house at a West End theatre. She’d raced up the theatre management ladder, helped by a couple of lucky breaks. By the time she was thirty, she was managing one of the smaller suburban theatres in the capital. Two years later, she’d set up her own production company and was moving shows into the West End within eighteen months. ‘Caroline had her finger on the public pulse,’ one of her rivals had said. ‘We envied her grasp of what would put bums on seats.’
She’d married Tom Abbott, a marine engineer, in 1975. Their first son, William, was born in 1976. Gabriel followed ten years later. Tom’s job took him all over the world on long trips. According to another friend, ‘Tom eventually just stopped coming home. Caroline said he’d died out in Thailand not long after Gabriel was born. She didn’t make a fuss about it, though. She was a very private person.’
So Gabriel Abbott had already been fatherless when his mother and his godmother had been killed. Karen wondered how a small boy dealt with something so overwhelming. She’d been devastated by Phil’s death, but she had other anchors in her life. Her parents, a handful of close friends, an absorbing job. What had Gabriel been left with? A brother ten years older but still too young to take care of him. All his moorings gone. Imagining his bewilderment, his pain, his grief made her heart contract. And he wasn’t the only child to have been orphaned by the crash. The Spencer children had lost both parents simultaneously.
The fourth victim, Mary Spencer, barely registered on the media radar. Karen couldn’t help thinking of ‘Three Craws Sat Upon a Wa’’, a song they’d sung as kids. The last verse had always made her laugh – ‘The fourth craw / wisnae there at a’ . . . ’ That was Mary Spencer. Notable only for being the wife and secretary of Richard and the mother of Chloe and Guy. Pretty in that kind of way you forget half an hour later. But doubtless a huge presence in the lives of her two bereft offspring.
Karen yawned. Absorbing the details of someone else’s misfortune had finally tired her brain enough to stop it fizzing and fretting. At last, she’d be able to fall into bed and sleep. And tomorrow, she’d find a way to move closer to Tina McDonald’s killer.
14
A sprawling modern bungalow on the Ayrshire coast wouldn’t have been Karen’s first choice for her retirement, but she could see its attractions. Her parents would like it, she imagined. Her mum would love the sea views across to Arran and the small-town life on offer. Her dad would turn those manicured lawns and neat rose beds into a vegetable plot that would feed a family of ten. But even though retirement loomed for him in a year or two, he wouldn’t be walking out the door of the bus depot with the cash to fund a place like this. You’d need a Chief Superintendent’s pension pot to come close.
Jason had made the appointment. As they headed west along the perpetually busy M8, he told Karen about Andrew Diuguid’s response. ‘He said this was a call he’d been hoping for ever since we started looking at cold cases.’ He sounded both surprised and relieved. Often people were less than thrilled to hear from the HCU. They didn’t want to revisit dark events they’d had a tangential connection to. Their lives had moved on and they didn’t necessarily want new lovers, families or workmates to know their connection to a murder or a serious sexual offence, however tangential. Police officers often saw the re-opening of cold cases as a slight on their professionalism, a black mark on their record. And sometimes the people they wanted to interview had the most to fear from the encounter – the loss of their liberty and reputation as the finger finally pointed incontrovertibly at their guilt.
Now, standing on the doorstep, Karen hoped Jason had for once got the right end of the stick. The doorbell played an electronic version of the ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. Why, she wondered, would anyone choose a doorbell theme that most people associated with Apocalypse Now and the smell of napalm in the morning?
A figure loomed behind the frosted glass of the inner door, which opened to reveal a burly man who must barely have made the height requirement for the force. His jeans and Scotland rugby shirt fitted closely, revealing muscle rather than fat. He still had a generous amount of salt-and-pepper hair but it was shaved to a number two all over. His battered features creased into a crooked smile as he reached for the outer porch door. He looked more like a nightclub bouncer than a senior police officer, albeit retired.
‘You’ll be DCI Pirie,’ he said, opening the outside door. ‘And DC Murray. Come away in. Sorry about the doorbell, the wife’s a big opera fan.’ He thrust a hand out and shook with each of them as they crowded into the porch. ‘I’m Andrew Diuguid. Call me Andrew.’ Even in those few words, it was clear he was a Glaswegian who had not let time or rank knock any of the edges off his accent.
He
ushered them into a wide hallway whose walls gleamed a white that was almost luminous. Laminate wood floor, bright rugs from, Karen guessed, IKEA. ‘In to your right there,’ he said.
Karen and Jason obeyed, walking into a living room with a picture window that ran the length of one wall. A spectacular vista of sea and sky and the distant island of Arran dominated the room. It was a few seconds before Karen took in anything else – furniture chosen for comfort rather than elegance; a couple of bookcases, one packed with biographies and military history, the other with historical fiction; a big flat-screen TV dwarfed to insignificance by the view; the faint vanilla smell of air freshener.
‘Sit down, make yourselves at home. My wife’s just putting the kettle on. Tea or coffee?’
He took the drinks orders and retreated briefly. When he returned, Karen and Jason were arranged so that he couldn’t keep them both in his eyeline at once. It was a way of keeping the interviewee off balance she’d learned over the years. And off balance meant less guarded. She had no idea whether Andrew Diuguid had anything to hide, but it was safer to work on the assumption that everybody did.
He settled himself in a generous armchair and placed his hands palm down on his thighs. He looked comfortable and in control. Karen wondered how hard it would be to put him off balance. ‘So, Tina McDonald. They’re always the ones that stay with you,’ he said. ‘The ones that got away. The ones where we never got the answer.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Karen said. ‘They drift through your dreams when you least expect it.’
‘Aye, but you’re lucky. You get to be the one that closes the cases we couldn’t manage. You get to tell folk what really happened to the ones they love.’ His mouth gave a rueful twist. ‘So, how can I help you, Chief Inspector?’
Karen was about to respond when the door swung open, propelled by a generous denim-clad hip. Mrs Diuguid’s hands were occupied by a large tray containing three oversized pottery mugs and a plate piled with scones, butter and jam oozing out at the sides. Karen eyed the scones with desire, but she wasn’t about to give any hostages to fortune. Jason jumped up to help Mrs Duiguid but she tutted him aside and put the plate on a side table. She handed round the drinks with a cheery smile, as if the presence of two strange detectives in her living room was a treat. ‘Help yourselves to scones,’ she said, heading for the door. ‘I’ll get out of your way.’
‘Delia made those mugs herself,’ Diuguid said proudly, raising the clumsy terracotta object in a toast. And her lumpy jumper too, Karen would have bet.
‘It’s good to have a hobby,’ Jason said, reaching for a scone.
Already wearying of small talk, Karen weighed in with, ‘So, I’ve taken a pass through the investigation reports and, on the face of it, your team dotted all the i’s and crossed all the t’s.’
‘Thank you. I like to think I ran a tight ship. But before we get into the nitty-gritty, are you in a position to tell me what your new evidence is? DC Murray here said you were conducting a cold case review on Tina. But I know how these things go. It takes a pretty solid piece of new evidence to get you to dust off a twenty-year-old murder.’
Clearly Diuguid hadn’t lost his edge in retirement. ‘We’ve got a familial DNA hit,’ she said. ‘But it’s not entirely straightforward. I can’t tell you more than that, I’m sorry.’
‘I thought it must be something like that. Either that or a death-bed confession. Well, you’ve been through the paperwork, so now you know as much as I do.’ He spread his hands in a gesture of openness and smiled. He seemed entirely without guile, but Karen wasn’t convinced.
‘In my experience, sir, there are two kinds of unsolved murders. There’s the ones where the whole team have no doubt who the killer is – but they can’t prove it. Lack of evidence, maybe, or somebody screws up something crucial so it never gets as far as a charge. Then there’s the ones where you follow all the leads, you chase down everything that looks like a clue, you interview everybody with the remotest connection to the case, and still you can’t come up with a viable suspect.’
‘I’ve no expertise in cold cases, Chief Inspector, but as far as live cases are concerned, I can’t argue with that.’
Karen inclined her head in acknowledgement and carried on. ‘The thing is, you can’t always tell from the paperwork which category any given case falls into. Because we’ve all learned to be very careful about what we commit to the files. With the level of disclosure the defence demands, nobody puts anything on paper or into the system about a suspect that might end up undermining the case when it comes to court. So which kind was Tina McDonald?’
Diuguid gave her a shrewd look from under his brows. ‘We never had a single suspect worth a damn,’ he said. ‘We tracked down guys she’d danced with that night, guys she’d stood next to at the bar. We spoke to ex-boyfriends. Everybody checked out. The ones that didn’t have an alibi fell down on the DNA.’
‘And that was it? No nod and a wink? Nobody with a grudge? Nobody she’d made a fool of? No history with some guy with a temper?’
Diuguid shook his head, glum. ‘Believe me, I’d be the first to tell you if there was anybody we looked at that was still in the picture when we scaled down the inquiry. It was a genuine mystery. And as far as I know, he never did it again.’
‘Or if he did, he was more careful with his DNA.’
Diuguid nodded. ‘Right enough. But folk watch crime shows on the telly and they think guys that commit sex murders like this can’t stop at one. They’re convinced they’ll strike again and again till they’re caught or they get terminal cancer or they top themselves. But we know that’s not always the way it goes. We know there’s guys that lose control and do one terrible thing completely out of character. And they’re horrified at themselves. They’re appalled by what they’ve done. But they manage to get past it and they never do anything like it again. How many cold cases have you worked where the perpetrator has kept his nose clean for ten, twenty years or more?’
Karen sighed. He was right. ‘A few,’ she said. ‘Sometimes they’re almost relieved when we turn up with a warrant.’
‘Other times they’re really pissed off,’ Jason mumbled through a mouthful of scone.
Diuguid raised his eyebrows. ‘I can imagine. But the point is, if this is the first time his DNA has produced any kind of hit, you’re obviously looking for someone who has kept his nose clean for the past twenty years. Either that or a dead man.’
‘Or both,’ Karen pointed out. ‘And you’re certain there was nobody your team looked at and had their doubts about?’
Diuguid shook his head. ‘I’d have known. There were no secrets on my squad.’
Karen doubted that very much. In her experience, every cop shop was like a safety deposit vault for secrets. And every now and again, robbers broke in and scattered the secrets round the locker room floor. Andrew Diuguid was, she thought, a man who needed to believe his own propaganda. She didn’t think he knew anything, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to know. ‘Would you mind if we approached some of your junior officers to see whether there was anything they came across that they didn’t think was worth pursuing at the time?’
For a moment she thought he was going to take offence. His shoulders tensed and his hands gripped his knees. Then he relaxed. ‘Be my guest. I doubt any of them are still in the job, mind you. I’ve been to more retirement do’s in the past five years than I can count. That and funerals. I’ve said cheerio to half a dozen men this past few years that were younger than me. Kevin Sinclair, he was exhibits officer on Tina McDonald, he had bowel cancer. Jim Brown, he ran the actions desk on nearly all my murders, he died out hill walking in the Cairngorms. Heart attack. Tam Smart, the statement collator, his liver packed up. Kenny MacGregor, the dog handler. All of them, gone to the great bar in the sky.’ His eyes hardened, he heaved a sigh and rubbed his hands over the side of his head. Karen imagined it must feel
like teddy bear plush.
‘The job takes its toll, right enough. We lost a colleague not so long ago,’ Jason said. Karen gave him a look of disbelief. ‘It’s hard. It’s like you lose wee bits of yourself. The conversations you had that nobody else shared. The gags you laughed at together. Now it’s like they’re wee splinters of your history lost in space.’
‘Exactly,’ Diuguid said, favouring him with a smile, the wintry edge to his stare gone again. ‘But anybody else that’s still kicking about – ask HR, they’ll have contact details, if it’s only where to pay the pension.’
There was nothing more to be had here, she could tell. Karen made polite noises of thanks and disengaged from the interview. She got to her feet, taking Jason by surprise. He’d only just started on his third scone. He scrambled to the door behind her, scattering crumbs and mumbled farewells as he trailed in her wake. Karen stomped ahead of him, head down, saying nothing till they were in the car. Then she rounded on him.
‘What was that about?’ she snapped.
Jason’s expression was a mixture of wariness and uncertainty. ‘What?’ he grunted through the home baking.
‘All that about Phil? What did you think you were doing, talking about him like that?’
Jason swallowed. ‘What he said, all those dead guys. It made me think about Phil. I knew he’d get it.’
In the grip of strong emotion, Karen struggled to express what she needed to say. ‘We don’t talk about Phil to outsiders. It’s nothing to do with them.’ She wanted to howl at him that Phil was hers and nobody else’s, but she knew that would make her sound deranged so she held back. ‘We don’t talk about him to strangers,’ she said instead, forcing her voice level.
