by Val McDermid
‘Unsolved cases are never closed, Liz. You don’t mind me calling you Liz?’
‘No, it’s my name.’ She managed a weak smile.
‘So the case was never closed. Periodically we review all unsolved murders.’
‘It’s just routine, then?’ Liz was crestfallen. Nothing would bring Tina back, but she would have truly enjoyed seeing someone lose their freedom for what they’d done to her.
‘None of our cases are routine to us. We’re as keen to get a result as the original team of detectives. It gives me heartburn to think of murderers walking around scot-free.’
Liz was taken aback by the depth of feeling in Karen’s voice. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to suggest . . . ’
‘It’s all right. We’re at the early stages of our inquiry, though. I’d like you to go through what you remember from that night.’
‘I gave statements at the time. Do you not have copies of them?’
‘We do. And chances are, Jason here will be going through those statements line by line with you. But first, I want to hear what comes to your mind when you think back to that night.’
Liz forgot all about body language and hugged herself. ‘I’ve gone over this in my head a million times. We should have stuck together. We should have been keeping tabs on each other. But by the time we got to the club, Bluebeard’s, we’d had a few bevvies and we were up for a good laugh. We started out all dancing together, but you know how it is?’ She looked away.
‘So, you all started dancing with other people? With guys?’
‘Aye. Marie peeled off first. She was always quick off the mark, you know what I mean? Then Jan ran into a guy she knew from where she used to work, and she went off to the bar for a drink with him. Then it was just me and Tina, and these two guys started dancing with us. Only a couple of numbers, then I went to the loo. When I came back, I couldn’t see Tina.’ She shivered, took a deep breath and collected herself.
‘It wasn’t like she’d disappeared or anything. I spotted her a few times over the next couple of hours, but, I’ll be honest, I was quite interested in this guy that was chatting me up, so I wasn’t looking out for her.’ Liz hung her head, a familiar guilt churning her stomach. ‘I should have been.’
Karen shifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. ‘You weren’t her keeper. We’ve all gone out with our pals and stopped paying attention because someone we fancy has taken an interest in us. That’s the way of the world, not something to beat yourself up about.’ She smiled, reassuring. ‘When you did catch sight of her, was she with one person in particular?’
‘I didn’t really notice. I’m sorry.’
‘Then when it came time to go home, she was nowhere to be seen?’ Karen’s gaze was unrelenting. It reminded Liz of the way her maths teacher used to look at her, challenging her to do better. And she had done better. Better than any of the other lassies in her class.
‘We looked for her, but we couldn’t find her.’ Her hand went to her mouth and she chewed the skin round her thumbnail. ‘We told ourselves she’d clicked and gone home with some guy. It was the easiest thing to think, plus we were all pretty pissed by then. It was only later, the next morning when I was coming round with a cup of coffee, I thought to myself it wasn’t really Tina’s style, picking a guy up in a club. But I never thought . . . ’
‘Why would you?’ Karen reached across the small space and patted her knee. ‘This was not your fault, Liz. None of it. Nothing you did or didn’t do made this happen.’
Liz wished she still smoked, longing for the luxury of something to cling to and hide behind. ‘I know that with my head, but inside, I blame myself. I blame the other two as well.’ Her face screwed up in pain. ‘We never see each other these days. Marie and Jan, they were both out the door within weeks. New jobs, clean slates. We never said anything, but I think seeing each other every day reminded us of what happened to Tina.’ She squeezed out a distorted smile. ‘She was lovely, Tina. Always had a smile for everybody. Always put herself out for folk. The customers loved her.’ She blinked hard.
‘When you met up in the Starburst Bar, did you notice anybody paying particular attention to you?’
Liz shook her head. ‘It was my birthday. Somebody stalking us was the last thing on our minds.’
‘Tina arrived last, right? She walked up from the underground? And you didn’t see anybody coming in behind her?’
Liz was taken aback. ‘The underground?’
‘That’s right. That’s how she got there that night.’
Liz looked puzzled. ‘I don’t know where that’s come from. Tina never took the underground. She was claustrophobic. She broke out in a sweat in a lift.’ She saw the eyes opposite her narrow. ‘I don’t remember anybody asking about that at the time,’ Liz said, shaking her head. ‘They seemed to question me forever, but it was all about the pub and later on the club. We were all in a state, right enough, but I honestly don’t remember being asked about how Tina got to the Starburst. Is that in my statement? About the underground?’
The ginger lad looked confused. ‘I’m not sure. I don’t think so.’
‘It’s probably not important,’ Karen said. ‘So how would she have got there? A cab, maybe?’
Liz looked doubtful. ‘She wouldn’t have wasted her money on a cab, not when there were buses. She’d likely have got the number 16 to Queen Street station, that would drop her round the corner from the Starburst. Does that make a difference?’
The detective frowned. ‘I don’t know why it would. But it’s the first thing we’ve come across that contradicts the files. And that’s always a place to start.’
17
Another clear, cold night, delicate skeins of cloud drifting across the thin sickle of the new moon. A surprising number of stars were visible above the Firth of Forth in spite of the light pollution from the city. Karen pulled on her thermal-lined gloves and gave a little shiver as she emerged from the warmth of her apartment block and the cold air hit her.
She hesitated for a moment, debating which direction to choose for her late-night expedition. She’d been promising herself a mooch through the Old Town to Holyrood, but the scene she’d witnessed on the railway path a couple of nights before had intrigued her. She wondered whether it had been a one-off or if it was a regular gathering place.
There was one obvious way to find out.
With a destination in mind, Karen moved more quickly than usual through the side streets of Leith. It wasn’t the Wild West town of Trainspotting these days; too many people had splashed their cash on flash modern apartments like hers, too many upwardly mobile young professionals had colonised tenement closes. But after midnight, the few people she saw on the street seemed to come from the older Leith of chancers and drinkers, hookers and druggies, and the poor-but-respectable who’d failed to reach escape velocity. An old woman in a pink Puffa jacket, jogging pants and filthy trainers crossed Constitution Street to avoid Karen as she made for the heavy-handed neoclassical edifice of Pillars House and the cut-through to Leith Links. Sometimes she felt like she had a neon sign above her head that flashed ‘Polis’ in big blue letters.
As she walked through the dark grassy expanse of the Links and on to Restalrig Road, she thought about their interview with Liz Dunleavy. They’d arranged for Jason to go back to Glasgow on Liz’s next day off, to go through her statements in detail. But on the face of it, the only problematic element in her evidence was the curious business of how Tina had travelled from her flat to the Starburst Bar. The police files said she’d been on the underground. But Liz had been unshakeable on that point. Tina would rather have walked than climbed aboard the Clockwork Orange, the local nickname for the lurid orange carriages that whizzed under the city like toy trains. It was a tiny discrepancy, but until she could make sense of it, she knew it would nag at her like a hangnail that keeps on snagging.
So after they’d driven
back to Edinburgh, Karen had gone to the office to see whether she could uncover the reason why the previous investigation had got that wrong. It had taken her over an hour, but eventually she’d found the crucial detail on a list of crime scene evidence that hadn’t been submitted to the lab for testing. Not everything went to the lab; testing was expensive and unless there was a good reason to believe a particular exhibit might give up some relevant physical evidence, they didn’t bother. There, among the assorted litter on the list, was an underground ticket dated the day of Tina’s murder.
She checked the notes that accompanied the evidence list. The underground ticket had been on the ground, among the contents of Tina’s handbag, which had burst open during her final struggle. The assumption had been that the ticket had belonged to Tina. And nobody had ever checked that assumption because it had never seemed important to know how Tina had travelled into town. She’d said nothing to any of her friends to indicate there had been anything unusual about her journey, so no attention had ever been paid to it. The focus had all been on later in the evening, when she’d come into direct contact with her killer.
Karen had no idea whether there was any significance in the mistaken assumption. She suspected that a Crime Watch appeal asking for witnesses to a bus journey on a Friday night twenty years before would be pointless, even if she could persuade them to run one. Sometimes pulling on the loose thread in a cold case started an unravelling that led to the truth; sometimes it made an existing knot even more intractable. She had a feeling this was one that wasn’t going to lead to a straightforward solution. Everything about this case had the smell of trouble.
Nothing she could do about it now, though. Maybe it wouldn’t matter anyway, not if she got the right result in court tomorrow. Karen had lined up an advocate who was an expert in adoption law and they’d managed to persuade the sheriff’s clerk to squeeze them in. Maybe they’d have the whole thing tied up by the end of the week. Maybe they’d finally have an answer for the McDonalds. Though she suspected that, for them, the damage done was irreparable.
Karen turned on to a flight of stone steps that led from street level to the path below and turned right towards the bend leading to the bridge where the men had been gathered. As she rounded the curve, she could see the glow of flames licking unevenly against the graffiti on the opposite wall. She drew closer and there they were again: half a dozen of them wrapped up against the night, hats and beards giving their shadows strange elongated shapes. Again their conversation stilled as she approached. Again she found a gap in the circle and held her hands out to the flames. ‘It’s a cold night,’ she said.
For a long moment, nobody spoke. Looks were exchanged then one of the men said, ‘Every night in Scotland is cold.’ His English was clear, the accent rendering the language more musical than usual.
‘Sometimes in summer it’s not bad.’
He shrugged. ‘If we are still here in summer, maybe we will find out.’ In the flickering light, he looked quite young. Mid to late twenties, maybe. Middle Eastern, certainly. Dark eyes, full lips, neat beard.
‘Where are you guys from, then?’
One of the others said something sharply to the man who had spoken, but he shook his head. He gave Karen a quick tentative smile. His chin came up. ‘We are from Syria.’ It was almost a challenge.
She’d wondered. Syrian refugees had been arriving in Scotland for a while, finding a welcome in unlikely places. Like Rothesay, an unfashionable seaside resort populated by retirees and transplanted Glaswegian junkies, some recovering and some defiantly not. And this lot, cast adrift in a city that couldn’t be less like the Middle East. ‘I’m sorry for what’s happened to your home,’ she said.
‘Thank you. We are grateful to be here.’
A short while passed in silence. The older men, who had unconsciously moved closer together when she’d spoken, relaxed again. ‘So why are you down here in the middle of the night?’ Karen tried to make her question sound as conversational as possible.
‘We have nowhere else to meet,’ the young man said simply.
One of the others leaned into the conversation. He was older, his beard streaked with wiry grey hair, his eyes nested in lines and pouches. His English was more halting, but still clear. ‘Where we are living, we are not having space to meet. To talk. We are many to each apartment. Families fill everywhere.’ He shrugged with one shoulder. ‘We are full of thanks for being here. But it is not easy.’
The younger man spoke again. ‘We have no money, we are not allowed to work, we have nowhere else to be.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Karen said.
‘We need to be with each other,’ the older man said. ‘We need to share our sorrow. We have all lost friends and family in the war. Bombs and bullets and torture.’
‘I understand that. My man was murdered. I know what it’s like to carry that pain inside.’ The words were out before Karen could stop herself. What had possessed her? She couldn’t talk to Jason, but apparently she could open up to a bunch of Syrian strangers round an illicit night fire. But then, these people had endured so much; they were linked by their suffering in a way that wasn’t accessible to outsiders, no matter how much they wanted to empathise.
‘I am sorry for your loss,’ the young man said. ‘I am Miran. What is your name?’
‘I’m Karen.’
The older man nodded and repeated her name. ‘I am Tarek.’ Then he went round the others, introducing them. Two inclined their heads towards her, but another pair glowered at the fire, refusing to make eye contact. She didn’t take it personally. She understood there were cultural reasons why some of them might not be entirely comfortable with a strange woman wandering around in the middle of the night on her own.
‘Is there no community centre or anywhere like that for you to meet?’ she asked.
‘In the daytime, when the centres are open, we are doing all the things that we have to do. We stand in line to fill in papers, then we have to wait for an interpreter.’ Miran sighed. ‘We have to tell our story again and again. We have to help our wives and our mothers. We need to spend time with the children. And then it’s late and everywhere we can go is not open. And we have no money to go to the places that are open.’
Karen knew she didn’t know enough to make a helpful suggestion. But she wondered all the same. There were churches with halls and coffee shops. Surely Christian charity might extend that far? ‘Do you get left alone down here? Nobody bothers you?’
Again, that exchange of looks. Tarek said, ‘Sometimes drunk men shout at us. But they are not so many as us. So they shout and then go away.’
‘One time, two police came.’ A third man frowned. ‘They check our papers. They tell us to stop fire. They are not happy.’
Karen seized on this. ‘I can stop that happening again,’ she said. ‘I am a police officer. A detective. I can tell them to leave you alone.’
Their looks of alarm confused her momentarily. Then she understood that even though she had neither done nor said anything threatening, the very idea of police was deeply worrying for them. ‘You are police?’ Miran’s voice had a rougher edge now.
‘Yes, but that’s nothing to do with why I’m here. I told you, my man was killed. I don’t sleep well since he died. I expect you know all about not sleeping, and bad dreams. That’s why I come out walking. I understand why you are afraid of the police. But I can maybe help you by making sure the night patrols leave you in peace.’
Tarek looked sceptical. ‘Why do you help us? We have nothing to pay you.’
‘You don’t have to pay me. I want to help.’
Miran said something in their language, fast and lengthy. Then he bowed his head towards her. ‘Thank you. We are not used to police we can trust.’
‘You can trust me.’ Karen moved closer to the fire, keeping the night at bay. ‘So, where did you live in Syria, Miran?’
&n
bsp; ‘We are all from Homs, except for Tarek. He is from a small village near Aleppo.’
‘No more village,’ Tarek said, his face scrunched in pain.
‘What did you do there? What was your job?’ Karen asked Miran.
‘I worked in my father’s café. But he died in the bombing. We tried to keep going, but then the café was destroyed by tanks. There was nowhere to work, nowhere to live. We escaped to Lebanon, to a camp. We had money but it didn’t last long. And then we were chosen to come here because my mother is sick and she needs me and my wife to care for her. My wife is expecting our first child and I think my child may never see our Syria.’ His voice cracked and he looked away. Tarek patted his shoulder and another man thrust a cigarette at him.
‘If we have café, Miran knows how to run it,’ another cut in. ‘But we are not allowed to work, not allowed to do things for our people.’
‘All around in Leith, we see shops with boards on the windows and doors. Why can we not make café?’ Tarek grumbled.
He had a point, Karen thought. She made an indeterminate noise of sympathy. ‘I need to be on my way,’ she said. ‘Maybe I’ll see you again.’
The men nodded glumly. It was clearly a matter of indifference to them. But their plight had awakened Karen’s compassion, and as she walked away, she was already testing ideas for how she might help these men who had somehow breached her defences and made it possible for her to articulate her suffering. Strangers they might be, but she was determined to show them that her country was a place they might be able to call home.
18
Karen always felt vaguely intimidated by Edinburgh Sheriff Court. Even the approach seemed calculated to make people feel insignificant. The entrance was set back from Chambers Street itself, but it was of a piece with the other buildings that stood around it. They were all massive, oversized Victorian monsters. Even the new additions, like the modern extension to the National Museum of Scotland, were larger than life, designed to dwarf passers-by. Then there was the court itself. Those elegant but imposing wrought-iron gates; the nameplate mounted on that strange dumpy phallic pillar that always made her think of a mortar primed to shower bombs on the city; the imposing façade that was in itself a trick – only four storeys tall, disguising the fact that there were another four levels below the street. All seemingly intended to remind the visitor that the law was a daunting institution. If she felt like that, a woman who was part of the process, how must it feel for the accused, never mind the witnesses?
