by Helen Fields
‘I know the name. He’s the poor soul whose funeral Gilroy was supposed to attend. I never met him, but I understand he was in a bad state even before what happened to him.’
‘He was, I’m afraid. Who told you?’
‘Gilroy mentioned it. Said Mr Jenson was probably better off dead given the dementia. That’s no way to go, is it, unable to recognise your own family? I’d rather be put out of my misery.’ She looked up at Graham, reddening slightly.
‘That’s okay,’ he reassured her. ‘I’m sure lots of people would agree with you. We did find an item in Mr Western’s car – a pair of diamond earrings, gift-wrapped but not labelled – do you know anything about them?’
A slow smile spread across Maisy’s face. ‘They’d have been for me,’ she said. ‘He always brings me jewellery, and diamonds are my favourite. I wondered what he was bringing me this time. He promised it would be something wonderful.’
‘I see. So what sort of gifts has he brought you in the past?’ Graham asked casually.
‘Last time he took me out clothes shopping. It was mainly lingerie – I prefer real silk – but also some shoes, a handbag and a couple of dresses. I told him I was expecting something shinier this time. Sounds as if he obliged.’
‘Did he ever give you cash?’
She gave a slight cough. ‘He’s helped me out with my rent in the past and car payments, things like that. Like friends do. I’m no good at managing money. It just flows through my hands!’
Maisy gave brittle laugh and Lively realised she was still trying to pretend she was something other than a prostitute. Fair enough, he thought. When he looked in the mirror he still tried to pretend he had the body of a stunt double and wasn’t the wrong side of middle age. Everyone lied to themselves about something.
‘Miss Gunnach, we need to establish where all parties who were closely attached to Mr Western were the night before he died. I don’t suppose you’d be able to recall what you were doing from 6 p.m. the night before he was due to see you. I know it’s difficult to account for such a lengthy period of time, but …’
‘Actually, it’s not,’ Maisy said quietly. ‘I know exactly where I was.’
‘That was easy,’ Lively interrupted. ‘Are you sure about this, because we’ll need to check out whatever you tell us. Just to give fair warning.’
Maisy gave him the same look that his wife had just before she’d packed her bags for the final time. That look said, ‘You are nothing to me.’ It was an interesting shift from the sweetness and charm with which she’d answered Pax Graham.
‘I can’t give you his name,’ she said, acid apparent below the superficial sugar of her voice. ‘My friends don’t like it when I give out information about the time I spend with them.’
Pax Graham sat back in his chair, giving Lively the smallest of nods. He could take it from there. Enough beating around the bush.
‘Any friend of mine would be happy to help me out when I needed it, so I’m not sure what the problem would be. If, on the other hand, we’re talking about clients who might not like their name taken in connection with yours because of the nature of your relationship, I could understand the reticence. Who were you with?’
‘Really, I’m not doing this. You said I was under no obligation to answer questions. I think in the circumstances, when I’m grieving, you might be more sensitive,’ she said, turning on a little sadness to water down the obvious irritability.
‘We need the name, I’m afraid,’ Graham confirmed. ‘It would avoid having to make this a more formal interview.’
‘Or what?’ Maisy asked. ‘I have an awful lot of friends, you know, and some of them wouldn’t like you asking me questions at all. Maybe I should make some calls.’
‘Maybe you should,’ Graham said. ‘Only then you’d have to explain the context and it would only be fair to explain that the person who killed Gilroy Western was a woman. We’ve also had confirmation in the last hour that a member of staff saw a female running away from Bruce Jenson’s care home room at about the same time he was killed.’
Maisy looked from Graham to Lively and back to Graham again.
‘Well, it wasn’t me. If you must know, I was tied up for half the fucking night. I had bruises on my wrists the next day to prove it. I hate that. Puts my other friends right off.’
‘So you won’t mind giving a DNA sample to exclude you from the investigation,’ Lively said. ‘But we still need the name of the man you were with. We’ll be discreet, provided we get information without a fight. Of course, if you don’t provide us with what we need, we might remember that all the gifts you receive are reportable in your tax returns. I’m guessing you don’t have a job and you’re not claiming benefits, so the taxman might have a few question about the income you use to pay your rent. They can go back an awful lot of years. It would be unfortunate …’
‘Motherfucker,’ Maisy hissed at him, looking all her forty-two years and then some, boob job or not.
‘The name,’ Lively said.
‘Dennis Mulanney.’
‘Dennis Mulanney, the politician?’ Graham qualified.
‘Exactly,’ Maisy replied smugly. ‘We were at his flat near Holyrood. We had dinner in, watched a movie – his tastes run to some fairly extreme woman-on-woman action – then he got out the handcuffs. He indulges in some imaginative role play. Good luck asking him for confirmation.’
‘He’ll cooperate,’ Lively said lazily. ‘Most people do when they have the option to answer difficult questions quickly and without publicity, or at home when their wife is present. The other option is someone leaking the details to the press.’
‘You really are scum, aren’t you?’ she said, standing. ‘I’m done here.’
‘We’ll need that DNA sample first,’ Graham reminded her.
‘I’ll need those diamond earrings,’ she replied. ‘They were mine – you’d already figured that out – and the receipt for them, if it was still in his wallet.’
‘Those are all exhibits. They won’t be released until the investigation has been concluded, even longer if they’re needed for a trial,’ Graham explained.
‘They belong to me,’ she snarled, leaning over the table. ‘Do you have any idea what I go through to get paid?’
‘Some idea, I think,’ Graham smiled. ‘But those earrings belong to the person named in Mr Western’s will. They hadn’t been handed to you at the time when he died, so you hadn’t legally taken possession of them. Mrs Western is the rightful owner, and I suspect she’ll be returning them and asking for the money back.’
‘You bastards,’ Maisy replied. ‘Gilroy Western hated his wife. She has no right to them.’
‘Then it was Mr Western’s responsibility to change his will. Nothing we can do about it,’ Graham said coolly, going up a couple of notches in Lively’s estimation.
‘Yeah, well, whoever killed Gilroy Western, good luck to her. He was a deviant little shite, so there you go. Whoever finished him off probably did the world a favour.’
Maisy Gunnach walked out, followed by the uniformed officer who’d been standing outside the interview room door, ready to take a cheek cell swab from her.
‘I guess that’s where the phrase high maintenance comes from,’ Graham said to Lively when he was sure Maisy was out of earshot. ‘What did the witness from the care home say? I didn’t get a chance to read the statement before coming in here.’
‘It was a male orderly. He was stood outside smoking while on duty, under the cover of a couple of trees in the garden. Smoking on the grounds is banned and during a shift it’s a sackable offence. It took a while for him to decide it would be better to get sacked than to withhold information from us, not that it’s very detailed. A female figure emerged through Bruce Jenson’s patio door and ran through the gardens to the road. No hair or eye colour as it was so dark. No description of clothing other than tight-fitting trousers and a coat, not bulky. Tallish, slim, her figure gave the gender away.’
Graha
m sighed. ‘Fits with the female DNA found in Western’s car. Can you get hold of Dennis Mulanney tonight and confirm the alibi?’
‘That would be my pleasure,’ Lively said drily. ‘What’re your next steps?’
‘Updating the DCI,’ Graham said. ‘Tomorrow, I’d like to talk to Gilroy Western’s daughter. I know we’ve established that his wife was in Spain when he died, but that doesn’t mean his daughter was.’
‘Strikes me you’re getting the better end of this deal,’ Lively said. ‘Privileges of bloody rank.’
Chapter Thirty
16 March
Lance Proudfoot had arrived at the scene of Janet Monroe’s dramatic non-suicide later than the other attending press vultures – he was under no illusion as to how they were thought of in the collective – after the story online sent multiple alerts pinging to his phone. In truth, he hadn’t wanted to go. The prospect of potentially seeing a body fall from so great a height was grisly, but it was news and that was what he did.
The most impressive aspect of it would inevitably prove to be how the woman in question got access to the roof space in the first place. In an area that no tourist was ever going to visit, not willingly anyway, where poverty was the norm, and where it was easier to get drugs than an appointment with a doctor, the roof of one of Edinburgh’s tallest buildings had long since been carefully secured.
Careful to keep his distance from the remaining press pack, Lance took up position further away from the base of the building between two rows of parked cars, assessing the scene from a distance. Much as he hated the thought of taking photos under such distressing circumstances, the professional in him inevitably won over. He focused on the tiny people at the top of the tower block, his high-powered lens offering a view of a distressed woman he very much hoped he wouldn’t see descending at speed past the faces peering at the crowd through the windows.
That was enough. He put his camera away and took out his mobile. Speaking quietly into his phone’s dictation app, he’d described the scene: the pack mentality of the crowd, reacting to one another as much as to the tragedy of the human condition taking place above them. The apparent calm of the emergency services as they constructed perimeters and prepared for the worst while maintaining an impressive air of assuming that nothing bad was actually going to happen. And the occasional chilling wail from the poor woman suffering so terribly above.
Then a man had pushed through the crowd, laughing. Lance didn’t catch his face, but the body language was all arrogance and youth. In his twenties, swaggering with the lack of realisation that he, too, would die someday. And that before that – if he was lucky – he’d live through the steady decline of his body, the weakening bladder, clicking knees and eyes that only focused on the small print with your arms held out straight in front of you, as if you were driving some imaginary cartoon car.
The laughing male pulled his hoodie up as Lance turned round to share some advice about common decency with him that would inevitably fall on deaf ears, but sometimes in life the attempt to do the right thing was worth more than the realistic prospects of success. Laughing Boy was a little over six foot but thin and his clothes were a brand currently worn by every social media-obsessed youth. In his hand he clutched his mobile, the picture on the screen changing as he walked, and Lance realised the man’s camera was on.
So that was the game. Attend at a possible suicide. Make sure you’re ready to catch all the action. Then presumably post it on some site with no responsible policing at all and wait to see the hits roll in. Other Internet stars had sought to get followers under similar dubious circumstances and ended up in trouble for it, but not before their fame had reached what for them must have seemed dizzying heights. Not too difficult to comprehend how you could be tempted to the dark side by the thought of all that adulation. The problem was natural justice. At some point, you had to grow up, and the idea of spending the remainder of your days knowing you’d livestreamed a suicide would get more painful with each passing year.
As the male disappeared and Lance also decided he’d had enough – some stories you paid too high a price to report on – a woman thrust her way through the sea of bodies, staring after the would-be Internet star. It was her body language that caught Lance’s attention first, a coiled spring, all tension and energy. Then he’d seen her face. Ava Turner, dressed to blend in, not a hint of police officer about her, was in pursuit. Not overtly, though. She didn’t want to be recognised.
Lance slipped his phone into his pocket and followed his instinct that the real story was slipping away behind him. He knew better than to call out to her. If a detective chief inspector was on the ground and working a scene in person, it was serious. Making contact with her now would inevitably blow her cover and, given what he knew about the amount of work stress she was under – not to mention her personal life – that would end badly.
He wondered where Callanach was as he trailed Ava at a distance. They’d had dinner together two nights earlier and Luc had opened up more than ever before. He’d explained about the disastrous evening with the woman ahead of him in the crowd and the traumatic events that had led him to make the mistake that might well cost him the woman he so obviously loved.
Lance had been able to see both sides and privately thought there might be something at work on more of a subconscious level. He’d been there himself. Whenever he’d stood at the threshold of something he’d really wanted in life, he’d been struck with a certainty that it was never destined to work out. A sort of pre-emptive destruction that avoided no end of disappointment.
Callanach, for all the damage he’d taken, had hit his all time low a couple of years ago and had been ready for his happily ever after. Ava Turner was more of an enigma. Finding the prayer slate Callanach had taken from her was, in the grand scheme of things and after a cooling-off period, a transgression that might have been forgiven, but only if you weren’t already waiting for things to go wrong. Or thinking you didn’t deserve happiness. Or that perhaps it was easier to deny yourself happiness at the outset than to have it for a while, only to lose it later on. That revelation was what Lance had taken away from Callanach’s disaster story. A woman who was protecting herself, by denying herself anything that might hurt her. She would be neither the first nor the last.
At the edge of the crowd, Ava Turner had halted, studying the various people who were walking away. He considered approaching her gently to see if he could help, then decided against it. Ava knew what she was doing and she wouldn’t be there without backup. He left her alone, returning to his car within view of the building’s main exit, from where the roof was only partially visible and was thus crowd-free.
Sitting in his car, on the street, he took the time to contemplate life. He’d be lying if he denied having moments when life had seemed to be made almost entirely of pain. When his son had a concussion that left him unconscious for long enough to be concerned about the state he’d be in when he woke up. When his wife had left him. Having to watch his mother – the least complaining, most jovial woman he’d ever met – die slowly of a cancer that had no purpose, nothing to gain from her, but which took her just because it could. But he’d never been close to suicide. The thought of it left him bereft. Unless you’d been there, it was inconceivable.
He hadn’t really thought about the scale of the problem until he’d helped Callanach to find Fenella Hawksmith’s daughter. That poor woman had a history of suicide attempts, too. Then there was the lad who’d tried to jump from the Queensferry Crossing only a month earlier.
Lance’s head began to ache. He opened the car window to let in some fresh air. Luc had said that Fenella Hawksmith’s body had been in her flat for about three weeks. Then Stephen Berry had died out at Tantallon Castle. Not long after that the poor Japanese lad had been murdered. Only hadn’t his wife, that piece of work with the boyfriend affectionately named after a form of protein, said something about him being suicidal, too? Osaki Shozo, that was it. The old grey matter wa
s still just about functioning.
A man wearing jeans made smarter by the addition of a striped shirt and an official-looking lanyard walked out of the building, accompanied by paramedics, police officers, and a dark-haired woman in leggings and a tatty coat. The latter looked absolutely exhausted. No doubt he was seeing the thankfully uninjured person whose pain had been so publicly aired. The more professionally attired male gave the potential jumper a brief hug, then paramedics walked her slowly to the back of a waiting ambulance.
Berry, Hawksmith, Shozo, he thought. All with a history of suicidal thoughts if not actual attempts. All now dead. Now Ava Turner was roaming the crowd at another potential suicide, watching not the actual events but the onlookers themselves. Waiting for someone to reveal themselves? Lance wanted to be wrong. To go home, write up his story – one with a happy ending – for his news blog. But he knew he wasn’t. Coincidences happened when you were holidaying on a different continent and you bumped into your best friend from junior school on an otherwise deserted beach. Coincidences and dead bodies, though, rarely – if ever – had anything to do with one another.
He started his engine and followed the ambulance at a respectful distance, making sure he wasn’t spotted. The police would no doubt be doing the same. He’d have to be careful not to make himself a suspect, but it was pretty obvious that the police thought they might catch a serial killer in the crowd. It was a story he couldn’t have walked away from if he’d wanted to.
Toying with the idea of calling Callanach for confirmation, he decided against it. His friend was supposed to be removing himself from active duty and the last thing Callanach needed was to have someone take advantage of his insider knowledge when he couldn’t be a part of the action. That was all right. Lance could wait and watch. A lifetime of journalism had made him patient.
The ambulance failed to head for the nearest hospital as Lance had expected, instead, after taking a circuitous route, opening its doors in Kimmerghame Drive. Janet Vargas – the name had popped up online in spite of the fact that Lance would have considered it improper to give identifying information – was escorted indoors by the two paramedics.
