by Val McDermid
‘The rules are clear.’ Giorsal’s voice was filled with regret. ‘They’re not allowed to work while their claims are being adjudicated and processed.’
‘I realise that. But does it also cover volunteering?’
‘It’s a grey area. They can be volunteers, but they can’t do voluntary work.’
Karen froze, a forkful of food halfway to her open mouth. She lowered her fork, baffled. ‘You’re going to have to explain that bit of doublethink to me, Gus. I’m just a simple polis.’
‘OK. A volunteer is somebody who gives their time to a charity. What they do wouldn’t qualify as a job eligible for minimum wage. Voluntary workers do something that would be entitled to minimum wage if they hadn’t waived their right to it as a donation to the charity. As distinctions go, it’s about as easy to unpick as one of those mad Escher drawings. But that’s how it’s defined. Why, what were you thinking?’
‘As far as I can make out, the main hardship these guys and their families are facing is that they’ve got nowhere to go where they can sit around and have a cup of tea and a blether. When you’ve got no work to go to, that turns into a big deal. So what I was thinking is, there’s all these empty boarded-up premises down that end of town – shops, cafés, pubs – that nobody’s interested in doing anything with. Could one of them not be turned into a meeting place for these guys? A café, maybe. Like that great wee social enterprise place at the bottom of Leith Walk, Punjabi Junction. I’m always sending Jason down there for one of their curry lunches. It doesn’t have to be anything special, just somewhere that’s theirs. They could run it themselves as a social enterprise. One of the guys I’ve been talking to actually managed a café back in Homs. What do you think?’
Giorsal looked startled. She hadn’t been expecting that, Karen thought drily. ‘That sounds like an amazing idea, Karen.’
‘So how would you go about it?’
She considered, her eyes on a corner of the ceiling as she worked it out. ‘First thing, you’d need to get a charity on board to sponsor the whole thing. That shouldn’t be hard, there are a lot of small local charities that might be willing to take it on. The premises might be a bit harder . . . If I was trying to get this off the ground on my patch, I’d find a sympathetic councillor or, even better, an MSP to make that end of it happen. But you’re not seriously thinking about taking this on?’
‘No, but I wanted to check out the idea. I’ll get the guys on it themselves. It’ll give them something to aim for. I’ll grease the wheels if need be, but they strike me as having enough gumption to make it happen. I think they need someone to point them in the right direction, wind them up and let them go.’
‘Wow,’ Giorsal said. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘Aye, well, we’re not only the enforcers of the evil capitalist system,’ Karen said tartly.
‘You, maybe. I’m not so sure about all of your colleagues.’ There was a heaviness to Giorsal’s words that made Karen think it wasn’t just a glib generalisation.
She swallowed another mouthful of food and washed it down with a swig of her third beer. ‘Somebody been pissing on your chips?’
Giorsal shrugged. ‘That DI you met in my office the other day.’
‘Alan Noble? Milk Tray Man?’
She snorted in amused contempt. ‘I always thought there was something creepy about a guy who would break into a woman’s bedroom to leave a box of chocolates.’
‘You think?’ Karen was teasing now. ‘I wouldn’t say no. Mind, I’d rather have something a bit more classy than Milk Tray. What about Noble? What’s he done to upset you, Gus?’
‘It’s that whole business of Gabriel Abbott’s death. I think Noble’s being lazy. It’s like he’s desperate to write it off as a suicide without digging any further. You remember I told him to speak to Ian Lesley, Gabriel’s social worker? Well, Ian was in the office today so I thought I’d follow up myself. See what he’d said to Noble. And it turns out Noble hasn’t bothered to speak to him at all.’
It sounded to Karen as if Giorsal wasn’t wrong to feel annoyed by Noble’s failure to follow through. ‘It does sound like he’s not covering all the bases. But if there’s no reason to suspect foul play, he’s maybe been told to move on by his boss.’
‘Whoever made the decision, it’s a rush to judgement. If Noble’s not interviewed Ian, what else has he not followed up? I’ve got no confidence that he’s looked into the rest of the circumstances surrounding Gabriel’s death. What if there were other witnesses he hasn’t bothered to check out?’
Given that she’d already been intrigued by the case, Karen couldn’t help agreeing with her friend. ‘Maybe you should talk to Noble again, give him a wee push to talk to this Ian Lesley at least?’
‘You saw what he’s like, Karen. He’s not going to take me seriously. He’ll smarm his way out of it and move on. Can you not act like you’re taking an interest? Lean on him a bit?’
Karen shook her head. ‘It’s not my case. It’s not even my division. I’ve got no official standing here. Sticking my nose in somebody else’s investigation without anything more solid than a hunch would cause a major stooshie. I’d get seven kinds of shit kicked out of me and it would only make Noble dig his heels in further.’
‘So there’s nothing I can do? I just have to swallow it?’
Karen dispatched the last couple of mouthfuls of her dinner, her mind running through the possibilities. ‘He’s got a brother, right?’
‘Will. He’s a few years older than him. He lives in London. I don’t think they’re close, though. He spoke to Ian on Monday about coming up to make the funeral arrangements. Ian told him to hold fire until there was a clearer picture of what had happened and when the body would be released.’
‘That’s the way I’d tackle it. Give the brother a ring and ask if he’s happy with the way the police are handling things. When he asks why you’re asking, mention that you’re not entirely sure they’ve explored all the possibilities. Then, hopefully, you can sit back and watch him set the cat among the pigeons.’
‘What if he goes to the media?’
Karen wiped her mouth with her napkin. ‘Then you get a proper investigation plus Noble gets a thorough bollocking. Result all round.’
Giorsal’s face cleared. ‘Thanks, Karen. I’ll give it some thought. I don’t want to create bad feeling with your colleagues. We rely on good relations with them in so much of the work we do. If Noble thinks he can make a convincing case for suicide, there’s probably nothing more to be found. But I’d be unhappy if Gabriel Abbott is just written off as another nutter who couldn’t cope with life. I want the right answer, not the easy one.’
‘Don’t we all,’ Karen said absently, her mind already somewhere else. Somewhere another right answer might be hiding.
25
The two women walked down the back steps into Waverley station, laughing at one of Karen’s stories of criminal absurdity. Giorsal’s train was due to leave shortly, and they hugged farewell at the barrier. Karen watched her newly rediscovered friend hustle down the platform to the front. Still the same tight little steps, her body angled forward. At the door, she turned and waved, then she was gone. Karen half-turned to go but stopped, her eye caught by the departure board. The Caledonian Sleeper was due to leave for London in less than half an hour.
If she truly wanted fresh answers to the questions raised by the 1994 crash, she wasn’t going to find them in Edinburgh. The people she needed to talk to weren’t here. The one lead she had, apart from Will Abbott – and she didn’t want to approach him because that would surely lead to endless aggravation from the Macaroon and Alan Noble, and besides, there were few things crueller than holding out false hope to victims’ families – was the names of friends of Caroline and Ellie who had been interviewed in the newspaper articles she’d managed to track down. Karen had recognised one in particular. And she was pretty
sure where to find him on a Saturday morning.
On an impulse, Karen made for the ticket office. Yes, there were still a few berths available. Did she want first or second class?
Ten minutes later and she was aboard, the sole occupant of a narrow cabin with a berth, a sink, a mirror and a bottle of mineral water. Hers for the next eight hours or so. She hung up her jacket and set off to find the lounge car. There was a small crowd of people there already, looking like they might be planning to make a night of it. Karen wasn’t in the mood, but she was happy to see Caorunn gin on the menu. With a mental nod to Jimmy Hutton, she bought two miniatures and two cans of tonic, then squeezed her way back to her compartment.
She mixed herself a drink and perched cross-legged on the surprisingly comfortable bed. For the first time since the madcap idea had occurred to her, she asked herself what the hell she was playing at. What had possessed her to jump on a night train and run away from the hassle that had been dogging her all week? She didn’t do things like this. She was steady and reasonable, not a creature of ridiculous spur-of-the-moment impulses. Especially when the impulse had nothing to do with her proper concerns. If DI Alan Noble wasn’t doing his job properly, that was for his immediate boss – or, if worst came to worst, Professional Standards – to deal with.
But then, what she was interested in wasn’t so much Gabriel Abbott’s death as his mother’s. Because somewhere in the past twenty-four hours, the tumblers inside her brain had rearranged themselves into a different configuration. She took herself through it again, step by step. There were two ways of making sense of what Sunny had told her. One was that the simple incendiary bomb in the plane had indeed been made by someone from the Irish Republican movement. Somebody outside the mainstream desperate to make a point, to get themselves taken seriously. Perhaps a young bomb-maker with ambitions, leaving a calling card.
It was a possible interpretation, but it didn’t feel likely to Karen. So big a splash would have attracted a lot of attention among the paramilitaries if it had truly been a beginner, an outsider determined to make his mark. It was bound to have leaked to the British intelligence community. And from there, into some corner of the media. Private Eye if not the mainstream. And certainly from there on to one of the conspiracy sites online. But there had been nothing, Not a trace.
There was another explanation, and while she still had nothing concrete to support it, Karen’s gut instinct was drawn to it. If it wasn’t the IRA targeting Richard Spencer, then it was somebody else aiming at somebody on that plane for some other reason.
On balance, if not terrorists then the intended victim probably wasn’t Richard Spencer. After the crash, his life would have been dissected, both by the security services and by the hunting dogs of the media. If there had been anything approaching a skeleton in his cupboard, it would have been dragged into the daylight in a cacophony of cascading bones.
His wife might have been their goal but it was hard to imagine Mary Spencer provoking that sort of fascination or fury. Everything written about her at the time attested to a life of bland conformity. She might have had a secret life, but the same argument applied to her as to her husband. The spotlight had been turned on them after the crash. If she’d been up to her neck in underhand financial dealings or having a clandestine love affair or covering up dark deeds in her past, it was hard to imagine them escaping such penetrating scrutiny.
Which left Ellie MacKinnon and Caroline Abbott. Best friends who lived in neighbouring flats in the same house. There was no way of telling which of them might have been the target of the person who blew up the Cessna Skylane. Except that now, twenty-two years on, Caroline Abbott’s son had also died in mysterious circumstances after shadowy references to some sort of conspiracy. It was easy to dismiss Gabriel Abbott’s veiled allegations as the product of his mental illness. But what if they weren’t?
The train jerked into motion, making the gin and tonic slosh in the plastic tumbler and bringing Karen back into the moment. Here she was in that most romantic of places, a sleeping compartment on a night train. She and Phil had talked about making this journey together, but they never had. Now instead of romance, she was stuck with solitude, chasing shadows cast by someone else’s investigation. On the run from her own life. Was this how it was going to be from now on?
She knocked back the rest of her drink and mixed another. She hated it when she let self-pity slip under her guard. ‘You’d be disgusted with me,’ she said softly. ‘You believed in me. You’d remind me that everybody knows Alan Noble is a lazy fucker. That what I have is not women’s intuition but a finely honed copper’s instinct for when things aren’t right.’ She could hear his voice in her head, pushing her forward. He’d always reminded her that the way to find out the truth was to run towards the gunfire.
And that’s what she was doing. She wasn’t running away from Ross Garvie and Tina McDonald. She was running towards four unsolved murders that demanded attention. And if nobody else was giving them that, then she bloody well ought to. She was, she reminded herself, a detective chief inspector in the Historic Cases Unit.
Karen straightened her shoulders and raised her glass in a toast to her absent lover. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I can do this. Nobody else wants to, but I can.’
Euston in the early morning reminded her of a cat waking up; stretching and licking its paws, yawning and arching its tongue. Karen had slept better than she’d expected but she felt grubby. She paid for a shower, which solved that problem and also eased the stiffness in her limbs that the narrow bunk had dealt her. She climbed the stairs to the mezzanine and bought a coffee and a cardboard carton with two poached eggs, smoked salmon and avocado from Leon. While she worked her way through her breakfast, she tapped away at her laptop.
She’d woken with the Stones’ ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’ earworming her. The name she’d recognised from the interviews had been radio presenter Jack Ash. Back then, he’d been a Radio One DJ known as Jumpin’ Jack Ash. A few years later, he’d graduated to Radio Two, where he’d lost the nickname and reverted to simple Jack Ash. Now, according to Google, he’d moved to Six Music, where he hosted a Saturday morning show that dissected a classic album every week.
This week, it was Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief. Reading the programme preview, Karen could put her hand on her heart and swear she’d never listened to a single track, nor did she want to start now. The only good thing about it was that she knew exactly where Jack Ash was going to be between nine and eleven that morning.
The sun was shining and she had time to kill, so she decided to walk. Even in the fumid London air it was still good to be on the move. She headed along Euston Road then cut up into Regent’s Park. As she strode round the lake, she refused to listen to the voice in her head telling her she’d taken leave of her senses and instead tried to formulate an approach that might make Jack Ash open up to her.
At twenty to eleven, Karen emerged from the revolving door into the airy atrium of New Broadcasting House. Ahead of her, beyond the security barriers, she could see several floors of desks and meeting areas, splashes of bright colours apparently scattered at random throughout. It shouted at her, like children’s artwork eager to impress. Out of the corner of her eye, down the hallway, she caught sight of a Dalek. And why not, she thought. If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
Time for the charm offensive. She walked confidently across to the long curve of the reception desk and produced her ID. ‘Hi,’ she said, smiling to help inject warmth into her voice. ‘I wonder if you can help me? I’m here to see Jack Ash. After his show, obviously. Can you get somebody to take me up?’
The sleepy-eyed young man behind the desk gave her a cool look. ‘What programme is that?’
The woman next to him glanced across and tutted. ‘Both Sides Then,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Six Music.’ She shared a conspiratorial look with Karen. ‘Too young.’
The young man,
whose badge said Aron, pursed his lips and tapped his keyboard. ‘Hold on,’ he said, picking up a phone and keying in a number. He looked everywhere except at Karen, then said, ‘I got a detective here says she’s here to see Jack Ash.’ Pause. ‘Yeah. What I said. A detective . . . Yeah, OK.’ He replaced the phone. ‘Somebody will be down.’ He pushed a pad of visitor pass forms at her. ‘You need to fill one of these in.’
Karen did as she was told, waited for him to put her pass in a plastic case and clipped it to her jacket. He waved her towards a trio of curved benches covered in muted shades of plum and green. Seven minutes later a skinny lad with a hipster beard and a topknot headed in her direction, his walk hobbled by the crotch on his jeans that reached halfway down his thighs. ‘Hi, I’m Julian.’ Of course you are, she thought. ‘Are you the detective?’ He looked dubious.
Karen smiled again. ‘That’s right.’ She stood up and produced her ID again. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie.’
‘Police Scotland?’ More dubious.
‘That’s right.’
‘And you want to see Jack?’
‘I do.’
‘Is he expecting you?’
Karen spread her hands. ‘I was in London anyway and I need to speak to him. He’s not in any trouble, don’t worry.’ She gave a merry little chuckle, as if the idea of Jack Ash being in trouble was completely absurd. ‘I’ve just got a few questions about a cold case I’m working. I’m sure he’ll be happy to help.’ As she spoke, she took a couple of steps towards the security gates. Keep them wrong-footed, that was the way to do it.
Julian clearly didn’t have a career as a gatekeeper ahead of him. He conceded the pass right away and scuttled round her to lead the way inside the citadel of British broadcasting. They stepped into a glass lift. Karen was too fascinated by this glimpse into the programming hive to notice what floor they arrived at, and meekly followed Julian down a corridor, past an arrangement of sofas and into a small side room with a conference table and half a dozen chairs. ‘If you wouldn’t mind waiting here? Jack’s off air in—’ He glanced at a clock on the wall. ‘Three minutes. He’ll have a quick wash-up with the producer then I’ll bring him through. Can I get you a coffee? A water?’
