by Val McDermid
Jason’s face was wounded. ‘We don’t talk about him to each other,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘You won’t talk about him to me and I don’t have anybody else to talk to about him. It was just the three of us on the old team and you won’t share. It’s really hard, boss.’ His lower lip trembled.
She didn’t want to hear this. He was right, she wouldn’t share. She shouldn’t have to. Phil had been hers, the only one who had ever been hers. Talking to Jimmy Hutton was one thing. He had a degree of emotional intelligence the Mint didn’t even know he should aspire to.
She wanted to punch Jason for his presumption, his daring to think he was entitled to a part of her grief. She wanted to punch him hard and keep on punching him till he promised never to speak of Phil again.
Instead, she said nothing. She got out of the car, slammed the door and marched off towards the town centre, angry tears stinging her eyes.
Sod Jason, sod Diuguid and sod the lot of them.
15
Karen made it about half a mile along the road before she had her emotions back on the leash. She cast a quick look over her shoulder and spotted Jason in the car about a hundred yards back, creeping along like a punter in search of a working girl. The pair of them must look absurd, she thought. Like something out of a Coen brothers film.
She stopped and turned to face him, beckoning with a small jerk of her head. The car rolled forward and stopped beside her. Karen climbed in, fastened her seat belt and said, ‘You’ve got a perfect right to talk about Phil with me. We were a team once. I’ll try to be better about it.’ It was the nearest she could manage to an apology. It wasn’t Jason’s fault that he was so limited. She made up her mind to think of it as talking to a favourite pet, the way she knew some people did all the time. Share her feelings without any expectation of a helpful response. But some other time. Not right now.
‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled. He had a smear of jam across his cheek.
‘Aye. Wipe your face, you look like a five-year-old.’
Jason’s eyes widened and he scrubbed at his mouth like the small child she’d likened him to. ‘Where to now then, boss?’
‘Glasgow. First we’re going to pay a courtesy call to Tina McDonald’s parents. Then we’re going to see Liz Dunleavy. She’s still running Hair Apparent in the West End. I googled her. She’s got three other salons now, but she’s still based in the Byres Road one. Let’s see if we can catch her on the back foot.’
‘Should we not phone her first?’
‘No.’ It was accepted practice in cold case reviews to give witnesses advance notice of interview requests so they could prepare themselves. But Karen had never felt constrained by received wisdom. Liz Dunleavy was one of a group of women who formed the core witnesses in the original inquiry and she didn’t want the hairdresser conferring with her pals to come up with an agreed version of events. With the passage of time, people’s memories always edited the past. A lot of details slipped from their grasp, while others that had seemed trivial at the time took on greater weight. Karen believed it was the brain’s subconscious way of sorting the wheat from the chaff. Time also changed what people were willing to say about the dead. She wanted to cut straight to the chase of what surfaced spontaneously from Tina McDonald’s best friend and boss rather than what collective memory decreed was the case.
‘How not?’ Jason asked, turning on to the main Glasgow road.
‘No conferring, like your starter for ten on University Challenge. I don’t want them putting their heads together to decide what we should and shouldn’t be told.’
Jason chuckled. ‘I have to watch that University Challenge these days. My flatmates take bets on who can get the most answers right. Me, I never know any of them.’
Karen wasn’t surprised. Somehow Jason had found himself a flat-share with a trio of Edinburgh University students. She hoped they didn’t patronise him too much. The Mint might be stupid, but he had a good heart. ‘Aye, but I bet they’d be rubbish at securing a crime scene.’
‘No kidding. See, if you saw inside their bedrooms, you’d think we’d had a visit from extreme burglars. Totally shan. My mum would give me a skelp if I left my room like that.’
Karen had met Mrs Murray. She believed him. She tipped her head back, leaning on the headrest, eyes closed. He knew better than to interrupt her when she was thinking. Bricks without straw, that’s what she was doing right now. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t figure out an angle of approach.
The McDonalds had moved since Tina’s murder. At the time, they’d been living in a tenement in Govan within spitting distance of the shipyards where her father had worked in the drawing office. Now they were in Mount Florida, a stone’s throw from the national football stadium. Karen imagined that on match days the roar from Hampden Park would drown out conversation and TV programmes equally.
Eric and Patsy McDonald occupied a first-floor flat in a red sandstone tenement. The close was spotless and smelled of synthetic pine. Karen felt they were out of order just for dragging the dirt from the street into the pristine stairway. She’d phoned ahead to arrange this meeting. There was no benefit to be had from the element of surprise when it came to the families of victims, especially those who had been dead for as long as Tina McDonald.
The door was opened by a silver-haired man in shirt sleeves and the sort of neutral-coloured trousers her father would have called slacks. His face was scored with deep lines and his eyes had the heavy look of someone who hasn’t slept well for a very long time. He had a neatly trimmed moustache that reminded her of the captain in Dad’s Army. She hadn’t seen one quite like it since her parents had dragged her along to the bowling club opening day. She knew from the files he was sixty-three, but he looked a dozen years older. Behind him she could see a small blonde woman hopping from foot to foot, trying to get a better view of the visitors.
‘You’ll be the polis, then?’ Eric McDonald’s voice was resigned, expecting nothing.
Karen introduced herself and Jason. ‘Could we come in?’
‘Let them in, Eric, they’ll be thinking we’ve no manners. Come away in, hen. You too, son.’ Patsy McDonald had the artificial brightness and dead eyes that go hand in hand with prescription antidepressants.
They all trooped into a living room that was stuffed with furniture and ornaments. Apparently Patsy McDonald collected Toby jugs and every surface that wasn’t occupied by framed photographs of Tina held a selection of some of the ugliest pottery Karen had ever seen. She sat down next to Jason on the sofa and the McDonalds angled their armchairs towards her.
‘I suppose this is another one of your routine visits. Where you tell us the case is never closed,’ Eric said drily, reaching for the cigarette packet on the side table next to him.
‘Actually, no,’ Karen said. ‘We’re here because we’ve had a breakthrough.’ Eric paused with the lighter flame inches from his cigarette, eyes wide.
Patsy literally jumped in her seat, ending up perched on the edge. ‘Really?’ she exclaimed. ‘Have you got him? Have you got the bastard who took our Tina?’ Then she flushed. ‘Excuse my French.’
‘No need to apologise. We’ve not got him yet, but we’re very close.’
‘You know who he is, though?’ Excited, Patsy was bouncing up and down.
‘Not exactly. If I could explain?’ The McDonalds looked at each other, nodding in unison. ‘There was a car accident at the weekend in Dundee and the driver is in a coma. But a blood sample was taken at the hospital and when it was run against the national database—’
‘You got a match?’ Patsy was on her feet, her hands clawing at her neck. ‘Oh my God, Eric, they got a match.’
‘Please, Mrs McDonald. If you’d let me finish?’
‘Sit down, Patsy. Let the woman speak,’ Eric said, puffing as he lit up.
Patsy subsided and looked at Karen with damp eyes. ‘I don’
t understand.’
‘It wasn’t an exact match. But it was enough of a fit for the lab team to tell us that whoever attacked Tina was a close male relative of the young man in the coma. He wasn’t even born when Tina died, by the way.’
‘She didn’t “die”,’ Eric said angrily. ‘She was murdered.’
Sometimes you couldn’t win, Karen thought. When you called a spade a spade, some relatives flinched and wept to be reminded of the horror. When you attempted delicacy, others, like Eric McDonald, took offence at what they saw as a failure to acknowledge the enormity of what had been done to their loved ones. ‘And we never forget that, Mr McDonald. And we are closer to the man who killed her than we have ever been.’
‘So have you arrested him? This “close male relative”?’ Eric demanded.
‘Not yet. There’s a complication. The young man in question was adopted, so we need to trace his birth parents.’
‘Does he not know who they are? Has he no curiosity?’ Eric’s voice was heavy with contempt.
‘He doesn’t actually know he was adopted,’ Jason said. ‘If he comes round, it’s going to come as a bit of a shock to him.’
‘I don’t care about him. All I care about is finding who killed our lassie,’ Patsy said. ‘You’re going to get him, right? Like Mr Diuguid said when it happened.’
‘Diuguid.’ Eric snorted. ‘Do nothing, more like. So what’s stopping you?’
‘The law, Mr McDonald. We have to go to court to ask the sheriff to allow us access to this young man’s birth records.’
‘What’s holding you back?’
‘We’re moving as quickly as we can, I promise you. We’ll be taking this to court as soon as we can get it on the list. Then our lawyer will try to persuade the sheriff to let us see the original birth certificate.’
‘But he will let you, right?’ Patsy again. ‘I mean, he’ll understand we need to know what happened to Tina.’
‘Of course he will,’ Eric said. ‘It stands to reason. There can’t be anything more important than putting a murderer away.’
‘It may not be entirely straightforward,’ Karen said mildly. ‘There are human rights issues at stake.’
Eric’s face darkened. He looked like a man on the edge of a stroke. ‘Human rights? Human bloody rights? What about our human rights? We’ve got a right to know what happened to our daughter. Twenty years we’ve lived with what that man did to her. Twenty bloody years. He wasn’t thinking about Tina’s human rights when he—’ He abruptly ran out of steam.
‘What my man’s saying is you need to go away and do whatever it is you need to do to put this bastard away.’ No apology this time. Patsy’s dander was well and truly up.
‘And that’s exactly what we are doing.’ Karen got to her feet. ‘Before we go – is there anything new that’s come up about what happened to Tina? Any wee details you might have overlooked? Anything somebody’s said?’
‘We’d have been straight on the phone if there was,’ Patsy said. ‘You think you want answers? You should walk a mile in our shoes.’
16
Liz Dunleavy always felt a sense of homecoming when she walked through the door of the original Hair Apparent. It hadn’t always been like that. At first, she’d felt like a bit of a chancer. The inhabitants of the red sandstone tenement streets of the West End of Glasgow who weren’t still students were mostly academics or media professionals. Liz often said to her clients that you could open a bookshop stocked only with the publications of the people who lived in the G12 postcode. By contrast, Liz had grown up in the East End of the city, in a tenement that had dodged slum clearance by the skin of its rotten teeth. Neither parent had any expectations of their six children except that they would likely be more trouble than they were worth. What Liz had lacked in advantages, she’d more than made up for in ambition, and her own transformation had been her greatest work of the stylist’s art.
When she’d opened up her first salon, the location had been at the unfashionable end of Byres Road, but the world had changed to her advantage. Now Hair Apparent was surrounded by the kind of cafés where you could get any beverage except a straightforward cup of coffee; an artisan bakery; a handful of reasonable places to eat; estate agents staffed by tense and rapacious young people; and pubs that had been stripped to the bone and reconstructed in the image that attracted students and young professionals trying to stay in contact with their misspent youth.
Liz had spent the morning in the most recent of her acquisitions, a mile away on the main drag in the part of Maryhill that estate agents optimistically and mendaciously referred to as North Kelvinside. The salon hadn’t quite found its feet yet. Even though it had been gutted and reinvented as a flagship for leading-edge style, baffled pensioners kept on making appointments, complaining about the music, demanding endless cups of coffee then whingeing about the prices. She needed to reach out to the young professionals who were colonising the area. She was going to have to spend some money. Leaflets with a voucher, that was the way to go. It was over the budget, but something had to be done.
When she got back, she’d had to drive round the block three times before she found a parking space. Tomorrow, she promised herself as she walked into the salon. Tomorrow she’d bite the bullet and sort out some flyers. A fiver off a cut, another fiver off a colour.
The familiar smell of the salon was enough to relax her shoulders. Coconut and lime, the signature fragrance of the products they used, and the faint underlying tang of chemicals; those were the odours that spelled comfort to Liz. That and the music, a perpetual Spotify loop of her personal favourites from the past thirty years. The three stylists working their chairs looked up as she walked in. They nodded, smiled, muttered greetings then went back to their clients. Liz swept through, stopping for a moment to touch base with Callum’s customer, a middle-aged woman who was something senior in the university admin and had been coming to the salon for more than a dozen years. ‘You’re looking great, Margaret, have you lost weight?’ Liz asked, meeting her eyes in the mirror. One thing was certain. She was wearing better than Margaret Somerville.
At the desk she double-checked the appointments screen. Twenty minutes till her next appointment. ‘I’m going through the back for a cup of coffee, Jeannie,’ she said to the junior running the diary. As she spoke, the door opened and what she characterised as a very odd couple walked in. A woman in her thirties in quite a good suit – from Whistles, Liz thought – that didn’t fit properly, a good head of thick brown hair in need of an emergency cut, and a ginger in his twenties who looked mortified in his cheap suit, scuffed shoes and cookie-cutter style cut to template rather than the shape of his head. Not her usual clientele. They made straight for the desk.
Jeannie turned on her sweet smile. ‘Hello. Can I help you? Have you got an appointment?’
‘I’m looking for Liz Dunleavy,’ the woman said.
Cautious, Liz said, ‘You’ve found her. Do you have an appointment?’
The woman shook her head, a twitch of amusement lifting one corner of her mouth. ‘No, I don’t. All I need is a wee bit of your time.’
Liz raised one eyebrow, casting a practised eye over the woman’s hair. ‘It’ll take more than a wee bit of my time to give your hair the treatment it deserves,’ she said drily.
‘I’m not here for a cut and blow.’ She produced a card from her pocket. ‘I’m Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie from the Historic Cases Unit. And this is Detective Constable Jason Murray.’
Liz felt her face stiffen. Her mouth dried. ‘Tina,’ she croaked. Not dead and buried, then. She’d wondered if it would come to this one day. Every time the words ‘cold case’ caught her ear on the news, she’d freeze, half-expecting Tina’s name.
‘That’s right,’ Karen said. ‘Is there somewhere we can go?’
Liz raised one finger. This wasn’t an encounter she wanted to rush. ‘On
e minute.’ She turned to the screen, ran her finger down the next time slot. ‘Callum?’
He stopped snipping and gave her an enquiring look. ‘Wassup?’
‘Do you mind doing my two o’clock?’ She extended a perfectly manicured hand towards Karen. ‘This is going to take more than quarter of an hour.’
Callum rolled his eyes. ‘I was going over to Kember and Jones for some of that lovely fig and fennel bread.’
‘Jeannie’ll go for you when she’s got a minute.’ What had happened to Scottish men, Liz wondered in passing.
Callum sighed. ‘Oh, all right. But you owe me.’
Liz’s smile was an object lesson in insincerity. ‘Jeannie, take the money for Callum’s bread out of the petty cash. I’ll be in the back and I don’t want any interruptions.’ Finally, she gave Karen her full attention. ‘Come with me, Inspector. We’ll get some peace and quiet and a cup of coffee.’ Though a large vodka and coke would have been more welcome.
She led the way into the back shop, a small, awkwardly shaped room with a scatter of unmatching upright chairs, every other surface scattered with the detritus of the trade. Boxes of product were stacked in the corners and a shiny coffee machine hogged a narrow counter next to the door. For the first time, Liz saw it through a stranger’s eyes and felt mildly embarrassed about the chaos. ‘Have a seat. Sorry about the mess. All the energy goes into the front shop.’
Karen smiled again. ‘You could say the same about a lot of the people we arrest.’
‘Coffee? Tea?’ Liz moved towards the machine. She wanted to keep control of the conversation – no, it wasn’t a conversation, it was an interview, no matter how friendly this woman was trying to appear.
‘We’re fine,’ Karen said. ‘But don’t let us stop you. Shall we sit down?’
She’d lost already, Liz realised, perching on the edge of a wooden chair with a seat covered in padded vinyl. She crossed her legs and cupped her left elbow in her right hand. Then she folded her hands in her lap, remembering all she’d read about body language. ‘Have you got new evidence to open up the case, then?’
