by Val McDermid
‘It’s pretty extreme, though. I mean, how old was he at the time?’
‘He was eighteen. He was about to start a degree at Imperial College in London. But what he wanted was to set up a computer gaming company. According to Jumpin’ Jack Ash, he had a killer game idea that he was developing but Caroline wanted him to get his degree first.’
‘You think that’s a motive?’
Karen pulled a face. ‘I don’t know. It’s a difficult age. Teenagers notoriously get things out of proportion. All they can see is what they want. Most of us hate our parents at some point in our teens. It’s like, all they want is to thwart us. If it wasn’t for them, the world would fall into line and everything would be fine. Did you never feel like that?’
He shrugged and poured himself another drink. ‘A bit, I suppose. But the only thing I wanted to be was a polis and they thought that was a pretty good idea so it could have been a lot worse. I know what you mean, though. I had pals who maybe would have blown up their parents if they’d known how to. But how sure are you that the two things are connected? The plane crash and Gabriel Abbott’s murder?’
‘I don’t like coincidence, Jimmy. Gabriel was doing fine. A bother to nobody. Taking his meds and behaving himself. Then he decides to draw up a family tree and a couple of weeks after discovering that the man he thought was his real dad was pushing up daisies two years before he was even born, Gabriel ends up dead. You don’t think that’s too much of a twist of fate?’
‘I’m not saying you’re wrong, Karen. All I’m saying is you’ve got nothing in the way of evidence. A coincidence and a funny feeling isn’t enough, you know that. And you also know how hard it is to get evidence at this distance. If you really think Gabriel’s murder is a consequence of what happened in the past, you’d have more chance of success. Maybe you should sweet-talk Alan Noble into letting you lend a hand.’
She snorted. ‘Not going to happen. I’ve already been warned off by the Macaroon and Alan is at full gallop on his high horse. I need to do some more research, Jimmy. Find something a wee bit more solid. I’ve not been through all the files yet. Maybe there will be something there that will ring a bell for me.’
‘Maybe,’ Jimmy agreed. He knocked back the last of his drink and stood up. ‘I need to get down the road. I’ve got an early start in the morning. Evil men to charge with silly wee crimes till they get the message that they need to change their ways.’
‘Good luck with that. And thanks for coming over. It always helps to talk things through.’ She walked him to the door.
‘It cuts both ways, Karen. You’ve listened to me often enough. At our level, we need to be able to talk to people outside our own team who understand the job. Now don’t you be staying up too late. I can see you’re suffering with that shoulder.’ He patted her undamaged shoulder on the doorstep and walked away. Then he suddenly stopped and swung round.
He had a quizzical expression on his face. ‘Something just popped into my head. I don’t know when exactly this was, and it might be long after the plane crash and all that, but was there not a big stooshie when Sinclair was running the Examiner about them paying an Irish terrorist for serialising his book? Does that ring any bells with you?’
Karen frowned. ‘Not really. It doesn’t sound like his kind of story. I don’t see him giving the IRA the oxygen of publicity,’ she said, ironically referring to Margaret Thatcher’s famous dictum.
Jimmy rubbed a hand over the nine o’clock shadow on the side of his head. ‘That’s the thing, it wasn’t a Republican terrorist. It was on the Unionist side, so Sinclair’s rag could paint him as a man defending Queen and country. Only the Press Complaints Commission didn’t see it that way.’
As he spoke, she realised that was what had been lurking in the dim recesses of her brain earlier, nagging at her memory. Karen smiled. ‘I’ll check it out.’
Jimmy grinned and tipped his head towards her. ‘Don’t stay up too late.’
Karen thought about taking his advice, but she knew she wasn’t tired enough to guarantee falling down the rabbit hole into sleep. She might as well go back to her laptop. There might be answers in the stack of boxes in her office, but there might also be threads to follow in cyberspace.
At first, she struggled. Her search terms were too broad, resulting in a tsunami of results, impossible to mine for anything useful. But gradually she began to refine what she was looking for to the point where she was finally able to click on a link that took her to the website of a political journalist who’d specialised in writing sympathetically but not uncritically about the wilder shores of Ulster unionism.
And there, buried in the backwater of a blog post from half a dozen years before, was what she was looking for. The journo had written a short and pithy account that gave her all the keywords she needed to flesh out her account.
Peter Boyd had, by his own admission, started off as a boy soldier with one of the militant protestant militias that had waded into the Troubles with gusto and the conviction that God was on their side. His devotion was coupled with a sharp intelligence and a knack of staying out of trouble with the law. His career of escalating violence had culminated in a series of pretty primitive bombs that had been responsible for blowing up cars and taxis belonging to IRA men. Then one of his bombs had caught his target’s family, killing the man’s wife and four children.
Boyd had walked away from his fanatical friends, some of whom decreed that walking away was not an option. He’d had to go on the run, spending half a dozen years in Canada. Then his daughter had a baby and the pull of seeing his granddaughter was more than he could resist. To finance it, he’d written a warts-and-all account of his years waging war. Some reviewers cast doubt on whether he’d actually had a finger in all the pies he’d claimed, but it made for a decent read.
Frank Sinclair had been editor of the Examiner in 1992 when Peter Boyd’s book had been published and he personally did the deal to buy the serial rights. The Examiner took Boyd at his own estimation, painting him in heroic colours, making much of the fact he could never take a drink in a London pub with his back to the door, never mind go home again.
There was, predictably, outrage. The toothless Press Complaints Commission got on its high horse. Sinclair – with the support of some of John Major’s government colleagues – told them to go fuck themselves in barely coded terms, and six months later everyone had forgotten about the story.
It was no kind of evidence, Karen knew that. But it did put Frank Sinclair in the same room as a man who had made bombs that worked. A man who presumably felt some cordiality towards an editor who had stuffed a wedge of money into his bank account.
She leaned back in her chair. She’d thought Frank Sinclair wasn’t much more than window dressing when Felicity Frye’s revelations had forced her to include him as a suspect. But now he was starting to look disturbingly credible. She knew better than to keep worrying at the idea, though. The best thing she could do was to set it to one side and let her subconscious have its wicked way with it while she concentrated on something else.
Which might as well be Will Abbott. She started with Wikipedia. It wasn’t evidence she would necessarily choose to rely on, but it would give her pointers as to where she might more profitably search.
The basic information seemed accurate enough. Date and place of birth, parents, early years. His first school had been Glencorsie House, where Gabriel had been a student from six to eighteen. But Will had left Glencorsie at sixteen to move to the Ada Lovelace School in London, a private academy that specialised in science and computing. From there, he’d gone on to Imperial.
Out of curiosity, Karen checked out the Ada Lovelace School website. It trumpeted the school’s credentials in the teaching of chemistry, physics, biology and every aspect of IT, claiming to focus both on the theoretical aspects and the practical applications of its subjects. ‘Nothing like a bit of practical chem
istry,’ Karen said, thinking back to what Sunny had told her about easy ways to blow up planes.
Poking about the sitemap took her to a page dedicated to Prizegiving Day. Scrolling through the assorted awards, she found a button that took her to archived lists of the awards. She clicked on 1994 and discovered Will Abbott was no stranger to the podium. He’d won the Geoffrey Challoner Hanley Prize for Best Designed Chemistry Experiment and the Ludwig Horner Award for Programming. The best-designed chemistry experiment. It was probably too much to hope there was anyone still around at the Ada Lovelace School who might remember what that was. But it might be worth a try.
What was clear was that Will Abbott had studied chemistry and knew how to apply his knowledge. It was circumstantial at best, but it did take her one step closer to the point where she could justify questioning him.
She was about to call it a night when her phone buzzed with a message from River.
Speak to the traffic camera guys about the SUV. I know you haven’t done it yet, so do it now! Xxx
‘Bloody woman,’ Karen muttered. Life had been simpler when she’d kept the world at arm’s length. She found the number for the Automatic Number Plate Recognition analysts in Hendon. There would be someone there. They operated in real time so they had to be staffed up to deal with emergencies. Eight thousand cameras round the UK, twenty-seven million reads per day. Karen couldn’t do the maths but she knew it was a number well beyond the capacity of the human brain. Then she brought up the map that showed Kinross and the immediate area around it.
The phone was answered on the third ring. ‘ANPR authorisation.’ A woman’s voice on the other end.
‘This is Detective Chief Inspector Karen Pirie of Police Scotland. I need access to cameras around Kinross last night between eleven and midnight.’ She rattled off a list of roads to the accompaniment of keystrokes from the other end.
‘How far do you want to go on the M90? We’ve got eyes all the way up and down.’
‘Ten miles either side of Kinross should do it.’
‘OK . . . I’ve got product from eight cameras showing on my list. And you’re coming up on my system as an authorised officer. So that’s all fine. I’ll email you authorisation and access codes.’
It was that simple. Except that it wasn’t. There was only so much the technology could do. Without a registration plate, there was no shortcut. She’d have to go through the footage camera by camera, minute by minute. Normally, Karen would have handed over a task of such routine tedium to Jason. But she was still working in that grey area between legitimate inquiry and complete flyer. If anyone was going to end up neck-deep in shit over this, it really shouldn’t be Jason.
‘The sooner I get started,’ she muttered, opening the newly arrived email and logging herself on to the system. It took less than two minutes for her to be up and running. She compared the camera positions to the road maps. A local who knew what he was doing could have left the scene on lanes and back roads without being picked up. She’d have to hope her attacker wasn’t from round there. In that case, the SUV would definitely show up.
Karen opted to go for the minor roads first. If she’d been making a getaway, knowing what everybody seemed to know these days about roadside cameras, that’s what she’d have done. Balanced against that was the possibility that her assailant didn’t know the territory and had headed back the way he or she had come. But there would be less traffic on the back roads at that time of night, so she could exclude them more easily.
She ran the camera films on fast forward, only slowing when a vehicle came into shot and speeding up again as soon as she saw it wasn’t a boxy dark SUV. She zipped through more quickly than she’d expected. It took less than an hour to cover the four minor road cameras. Now for the motorway. There would be more traffic there, but at that time on a weeknight, it wouldn’t be hard to check it out.
The whole search was over in a little more than two hours. She had identified three dark-coloured SUVs at the approximate time of the attack. Now she had to run the number plates through the database to see who owned them. Karen took a deep breath. She almost wished she was religious so she could say a wee prayer. Please, God, let one of these belong to Will Abbott or Frank Sinclair.
She was out of luck. A Perthshire farm, a village in the hills behind Dundee and a company in Newcastle. No obvious connection to anyone involved with the case. Of course, if Gabriel’s death was completely unconnected to his past, if she’d been building castles in the air, his killer could have come from anywhere. Dispirited, Karen closed down her computer, popped a final dose of painkillers and dragged her weary body to bed.
Sometimes Scarlett O’Hara’s final line felt more like a curse than a promise.
51
Linlithgow town centre always struck Karen as a random act of violence by town planners. It was hard not to be charmed by the striking romantic ruin of the late medieval palace, or the clutch of interesting and attractive buildings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries lining one side of the main street. Then, slapped down right in the heart of the main street, was one of the ugliest brutalist blocks of flats she’d ever seen. It overlooked the marketplace, with its statue of St Michael, promising to be kinde to straingers. Somebody had been very unkind indeed to the citizens of Linlithgow.
Darren Foreman’s mother lived in an enclave on the fringes of the town centre that had been provided by the council for the elderly. Short terraces of single-storey cottages alternated with small blocks of four flats. The uniform grey harling gave the whole cul-de-sac a depressed air. A tiny square of scrubby grass sat at its centre with a redundant sign prohibiting ball games. It would have been a struggle to play anything more territorially adventurous than marbles, Karen thought.
They left the car in the residents’ parking area and walked up the pavement to number 39, one of a pair of ground-floor flats. The woman who opened the door was bent almost double. She had to crane her head back to let them see anything more than a thin frizz of unnaturally brown hair. She couldn’t have been much more than her mid-sixties, but she seemed to have the fragility of a much older person. She peered through smudged and greasy glasses at them. ‘You’ll be the polis,’ she said, her West Coast accent obvious even in those few words. She gave a sigh of resignation. ‘Darren said you’d be coming. I suppose you’d better come inside. I don’t want the whole street knowing my business.’
They followed her into a living room that barely had room for a pair of armchairs and a massive TV set. Two dining chairs sat in either corner, their cushions still covered in plastic. The room was stiflingly hot; Karen could feel sweat springing out the length of her spine as she walked in. The smell of air freshener rasped in her throat, its overwhelming purpose to kill the odour from the ashtray that sat on a table by one armchair.
‘You’d better sit down,’ Cathy Foreman said grudgingly. She collapsed into her own chair with obvious relief. ‘Now, what’s this nonsense about my Gary? Darren says you think he had something to do with some lassie’s murder? You’re barking right up the wrong tree, hen.’ Already she was on the defensive.
‘We’re from the Historic Cases Unit,’ Karen said. ‘When we’re revisiting old cases, all sorts of names come up in the course of our inquiries. Part of our job is to eliminate people from our inquiries. That’s why we were talking to Darren, who was very helpful. We were able to discount him completely—’
‘Of course you were,’ Mrs Foreman said, the sarcasm obvious. ‘Nothing was ever Darren’s fault. Total Teflon boy. Nothing ever stuck to him. Whatever went wrong, it was always Gary got the blame, never Darren.’ She shook her head and fished a packet of cheap cigarettes out of the pocket of her ratty cardigan.
‘So why we’re here today is to do our best to take Gary out of the picture so we can focus on the guilty party in this case.’ Karen hoped Jason’s face wasn’t giving away any surprise at her blatant lies. Although,
judging by the way Mrs Foreman was peering at the end of her cigarette, trying to bring the lighter flame to the right place, her eyesight probably wasn’t up to spotting the nuances of facial expression across a room, even one this small.
‘So you say,’ the old woman grumbled. ‘Gary was always getting the blame for things he never did. Darren was always on about Gary having a drink problem, but that wasn’t true. He had awful bother with his stomach. Some days he could hardly get out of bed with the pain. And sometimes he was driven daft with it. It’s not surprising he sometimes lost the place with folk and got into all kind of rows over nothing.’
‘That must have been hard for you to see.’
‘It was. But I’d happily have it all again if I could have my boy back.’ She shook her head, her mouth twisted in bitterness. ‘It’s always the same. It’s the poor working folk that get the blame. That accident on the building site, if we had the money, we could have sued them into the middle of next week. Health and safety, my backside. And they had the nerve to say it was Gary’s fault. As if he’d take stupid risks.’
‘Had he always worked on building sites?’
‘No, hen. He had a good job on the buses.’
‘Here in Linlithgow?’ Karen hoped she knew the answer.
‘No, that was back in Glasgow. I was still living in Castlemilk then, before I moved out here to the sticks to be near my sister and her family. Gary was driving buses for years.’
‘Can you remember when he started?’
Mrs Foreman sucked on her cigarette and tilted her head back. ‘It must have been 1993. His father walked out on us in 1992 and he was on the buses within the year.’
‘You must have been proud of him.’
‘I was. He looked that handsome in his uniform.’
‘Did you get on his bus often?’ Jason with a supremely helpful question for once, sounding like he was interested.
