Cold Grave

by Craig Robertson

  They had only been settled back in the bar a matter of minutes when the sound of shoes scraping on the doormat signalled Dick Johnson’s arrival. He pulled off his hat and nodded to the barman, a tall, angular and balding man in his late fifties, who didn’t seem at all surprised to see him, before pulling up a chair beside Rachel and Tony. The malt was already on the table and Dick surveyed it for an age before he even picked it up. He then embarked on a seemingly well-practised routine of holding the glass to the light and drawing in a deep breath of the cratur, smiling at the smell of it.

  It reminded Winter of his favourite Gaelic word, sgriob, the tingle of anticipation on the lips before tasting whisky. Winter had his own form of sgriob but it was for something different entirely. His mind drifted briefly back to the streets of the city he’d left behind that morning and the dark possibilities it offered for fulfilling his particular itch: stabbings, beatings, high flat jumpers, drug overdoses, murders, all waiting to be photographed. Hell mend him but he missed it.

  Rachel’s words snapped him out of his obsessive wonderings and brought him racing back into the hotel bar.

  ‘Tony, could you go and get my jumper from the room? The green one. I’m still chilly from being outside.’

  Winter sighed, wondering how she could still be cold given the heat from the fire but glad enough not to have to sit out the agonising wait to see if Johnson was ever going to get round to drinking his expensive whisky.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Ta. It’s in my white bag.’

  Tony left Rachel with the gardener, a raise of his eyebrows receiving an ironically sweet smile from her in return. However, the jumper wasn’t in the white bag, nor was it in the black one. It still wasn’t in the white one when he looked a second time and it was a good five minutes before he found it put away in a drawer. Rachel had a mind like a vice and it was very unlike her to have forgotten where she had put something such a short time before. He was more inclined to believe she hadn’t forgotten at all. Back in the corridor that ran the length of the restaurant and passed the bar, he could see Rachel and the old boy were still deep in conversation. As he got nearer, he saw Johnson get to his feet.

  ‘My dad worked here at that time,’ he heard Rachel saying. ‘He told me about her. Long time ago now though. Won’t you stay a bit longer?’

  ‘No, sorry, it’s time I was going,’ Johnson sounded irritated. ‘Ella doesn’t mind me taking the long way home but she gets annoyed if I go round the lake twice, if you know what I mean.’

  The old man put his hat back onto his head and began pulling his coat around him.

  ‘Thanks for the drink. I don’t mean to be rude but . . . but I really do need to go.’

  Johnson waved a curt goodbye to the balding barman, who seemed to be listening in on their conversation, and opened the door to leave, pausing reluctantly on the mat.

  ‘What was your dad’s name? I might remember him.’

  Rachel hesitated.

  ‘Narey. Alan Narey.’

  Johnson looked hard at her before exchanging a curious glance with the man behind the bar. ‘No. I guess my memory’s not what it was. Thanks again.’

  Winter waited until the door had closed behind Johnson, a blast of cold air sweeping across the table, before he began his own interrogation.

  ‘Right, answers. First, your dad used to work here?’

  ‘No, just around here. For a while.’

  ‘What did . . .’

  ‘I’ve got an idea,’ she said interrupting him. ‘We’ve got an hour before dinner, why don’t we head back to the room until then?’

  ‘What did you mean by . . .’

  ‘Tony, maybe you didn’t understand me. I meant back to the room.’

  The penny dropped.

  ‘Ah. Back to the room. Why didn’t you say so?’

  Tony led the way back to Osprey and its large, comfortable bed, not seeing the pensive look on Rachel’s face as she glanced back at the door through which the old man had departed.

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘Have you seen it?’

  ‘Of course I’ve seen it.’

  ‘That’s all you have to say about it?’

  ‘What do you expect me to say? You think I’m going to fall to pieces, don’t you? Think I’m not going to be able to handle it.’

  ‘Are you?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t bloody know. Who is doing this?’

  ‘Who do you think it is?’

  ‘Christ, I don’t know. How the hell am I expected to know? It could be anyone. But why now? Who would do something like that now?’

  ‘Are you going to be okay?’

  ‘No. Probably not. I’ve not been doing too well as it is. And now this.’

  ‘You have to stay calm.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say. I couldn’t believe it when I saw it. My nerves . . . they’re not good. I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘Do nothing.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t think I can do that.’

  CHAPTER 6

  Sunday morning broke cold but bright, the sun streaming through the windows as soon as Rachel pulled back the curtains. She stood and stared across the calm, glassy surface of Scotland’s only lake – though even if it was a lake by name, it was as much a loch as any other – at the island that now stood clear and green in the middle distance. The mist that had formerly framed it had disappeared but the place was no less foreboding, to her at least. It seemed bigger than before, almost as if it were nearer. The island had certainly come to her in the darkness of her dreams and now it looked as if it had sneaked closer while the curtains were drawn.

  ‘You’ll see it better with these’ came Tony’s voice from behind her. She turned to see him standing a couple of feet away with a pair of binoculars in his hand.

  ‘Where did you get those?’ she asked him, aware of the note of envy in her voice. ‘You didn’t bring them with you, did you?’

  ‘No. I got them from reception.’

  ‘Oh. Can I have a go with them?’

  ‘Sure, in a minute. I want to . . .’

  He got no further, as Rachel took the binoculars from him and turned back to the window, fiddling with the focus until the island was clearly in view.

  ‘Yeah, go ahead. Help yourself,’ she heard him saying. ‘Don’t mind me.’

  At length, she grudgingly lowered the binoculars and handed them over, ignoring the look of consternation on his face.

  ‘It’s time to go for breakfast anyway,’ she said.

  ‘Hold your horses,’ he told her. ‘Breakfast’s going nowhere and I want a look as well. You can just make out the abbey on the island. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?’

  ‘Priory,’ she corrected him. ‘It’s a priory not an abbey.’

  ‘Whatever. I’m going to try to get some photos of that later. How do you get across to it?’

  ‘You can’t, not in the winter,’ she told him. ‘There’s a ferry that takes you across during the summer season but the only way to get across in winter is if the lake freezes and you can walk there. But that’s happened only three or four times in the last seventy years.’

  ‘You wouldn’t catch me walking over there on the ice. No chance. How come you know so much about this?’

  ‘Listen, I’m starving. And I can smell bacon.’

  Winter could feel an impatience growing in him at her evasiveness and wondered what the hell she was up to. He decided that, for one last time, he would let it go.

  ‘Rach, you are avoiding far too many questions for my liking but okay. I’m hungry too.’

  After filling themselves with sausage, bacon, black pudding, eggs and toast washed down with mugs of tea, they returned exhausted to the bedroom and collapsed on the sofa overlooking the bay window and the lake beyond.

  Rachel got her Martina Cole novel from the bag and sat with her knees pulled up to her chin, her eyes occasionally stealing flee
ting glances above the pages to the view through the window. Tony opened the Sunday newspapers and they both fell into a silence that was contented on his part, uneasy on hers.

  They sat like that for half an hour without a word passing between them, their pact of relaxation being broken only when Winter lowered his paper and looked at her. Rachel ignored him and Tony raised the pages of the newspaper again. A couple of minutes later, however, he placed it down open on the table in front of them.

  ‘Tell me what this is all about.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘Enough. Don’t take me for an idiot, Rachel. This—’

  He turned the pages of the newspaper towards her until she saw a large advert headed in block capitals ‘INCHMAHOME MURDER’.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he persisted. ‘According to this ad, someone is seeking information about a girl found murdered on that island out there. They think she was murdered nineteen years ago this weekend.’

  ‘And your point is?’

  ‘And my point is that you are a fucking detective and you’ve been acting strangely from the minute we left Glasgow.’

  Rachel gave a resigned shake of the head. She put her book down on top of Tony’s paper and, taking his hand in hers, led him to the bay window.

  ‘The media called her Lily,’ she explained, looking out towards the island, ‘as in Lily of the Lake, a typically glib sound bite. Her body was found in late March 1994, four months after the probable date when she was murdered on that island out there. It had been the worst winter in thirty years and the police were sure she was killed on the last of the days when the lake was frozen. If it had been any earlier, her body would have been found because there were so many people walking across to the island. Some bastard caved her head in.’

  ‘Okay. I vaguely remember the case,’ he admitted. ‘I was at secondary school and staying with my Uncle Danny and Auntie Janette. I remember Danny being really angry about it and Janette was upset. Who was she?’

  ‘She was never identified,’ Rachel replied. ‘Various families came forward thinking she might be their missing daughter but it wasn’t any of them. Her body was so badly decomposed and eaten away that dental records were all they had to go on but they proved nothing. The four months in between the murder and the body being discovered meant no one locally remembered a girl who could barely be described.’

  Winter shook his head, recognising anger building that she had conned him into being there. He should have known her sudden urge for them to be away as a couple was too good to be true.

  ‘So that’s why we’re here? That’s the reason for this sudden urge for a weekend away? Nothing to do with you and me?’

  ‘Partly,’ she admitted.

  ‘Great. Rachel, I don’t remember much about this case because I’d have only been about 16, in which case you’d have been 17. How come you remember this so well?’

  ‘It’s personal.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The man in charge of the investigation was my dad. Police Inspector Alan Narey. This was his last case and he couldn’t even find out who the girl was, never mind who’d killed her. It’s haunted him ever since.’

  Tony bit on his lower lip and thought about what she was saying.

  ‘Unfinished family business?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes.

  ‘And this ad in the paper – what’s that all about? Who put it there?’

  ‘I did. And I placed one in every other Sunday paper in Scotland as well. I wanted to make sure that it was seen by as many people as possible.’

  He sighed, pissed off that she had dragged him along on false pretences but more because she had chosen to shut him out of whatever it was she was up to. Yet his dark itch was also working overtime at the prospect of learning more about what had happened on the island so tantalisingly close across the water.

  ‘Tell me everything.’

  So she did.

  CHAPTER 7

  The body had been found half-hidden in undergrowth in the grounds of Inchmahome Priory by two men who had gone over to the island to do maintenance work in time for the spring opening. The little that was left of her had been half-eaten by animals and insects, a bag of bones wrapped up in a red anorak. Her head had been repeatedly struck with a blunt object until the skull shattered, then her face had been smashed until it was unrecognisable. Decay, the freezing winter and the local wildlife did the rest.

  It was thought that the girl was in her late teens. No one local had gone missing; no one local had any idea who she was. Rachel’s father had cops knock on every door in the area but all to no avail. He’d dispatched them wider afield, setting up incident centres everywhere from Callander to Aberfoyle, from Lochearnhead to Stronachlachar. Nothing.

  Vague sketches went nationwide and they’d even bagged a spot on Crimewatch but, other than scaring up the usual nest of nutters, it had earned them nothing. Distinguishing the genuine sightings from the wild-goose chases was a thankless task. Identifying her proved impossible.

  ‘The real problem was the damage to the girl’s skull. According to my dad, it was horrendous: the worst he’d ever seen, and he’d seen plenty in his thirty years. It was smashed to bits. Most of the blows were to the back and side of the head and that was the principal area of attack. But there were also blows to the face, breaking the nose and teeth. In all, they estimated that she was hit twenty-two times in the head and face.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. Twenty-two?’

  ‘That many blows isn’t a lashing-out. It isn’t a flash of anger. It’s deep-seated rage. It’s sadistic. She would have been dead after less than a dozen hits. The rest was either to make recognition even harder or else it was borne out of pure evil.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t believe in evil?’ he asked her, immediately aware it wasn’t the wisest thing to do.

  It was an argument they’d had many times before and one they’d never resolved. Winter was sure true evil existed and he had the photographs to prove it: fatal stabbings, shootings, torture and mutilation. Rachel, however, believed only in the evil that men – and women – did. Her job was to catch them, not psychoanalyse them.

  ‘I don’t,’ she fired back at him. ‘But whatever it is that resides in people that can make them carry out evil things, this was pretty damn near to it. It was a real jigsaw job for the pathologist – fragments all over the scene.’

  ‘So what were they able to establish, evidence-wise?’

  ‘Not much. There was no sign of a murder weapon. There were various tree branches and bits of brick that could have done the job but none with any remnants of her on it. Even after a few months of Scottish winter, they’d still have carried traces. The best guess was he’d thrown it across the ice on the far side of the island, knowing it would soon melt into the lake.’

  ‘You said “he”. Definitely a man then?’

  ‘Not definitely. It was always assumed it was a man from the sheer ferocity of the attack but nothing was ruled in or out.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘The snow had conserved some lividity, enough to suggest she’d died where she was found. That made sense anyway; it was stretching things to suggest she’d been carried over the ice to the island after she was killed. She’d walked there.’

  ‘So she knew him?’

  ‘Probably. Or else she didn’t walk there with him but walked on her own and he met her there.’

  ‘You buy that?’ he asked doubtfully.

  ‘No. The extent of the violence, the number of blows – that wasn’t an attack on a stranger. I’m sure they walked there together and he murdered her, left her there to rot, then walked back across the ice on his own, knowing full well that any trace of him would soon melt away.’

  The investigation had gone on for months but it petered out in the end. Like all unsolved murders, the case was never officially closed but practicalities took over and people got moved on to something that became more pressing. They pulled
out the stops again a year after the murder, got TV and newspapers down to the lake and tried to push every button they could but nothing. Well, almost.

  ‘My dad’s main suspect – in fact, his only suspect – was a guy called Laurence Paton. He was twenty-three, a student teacher at Jordanhill in Glasgow. There was no evidence against him, nothing concrete to go on, just my dad’s well-practised copper’s nose.’

  ‘Why this guy?’

  ‘He was at the lake for the reconstruction on the anniversary. My dad spotted him and something set off his spider sense. He says there was something overly nervous about the guy. Paton said he was just there out of curiosity because he’d read about the killing and thought it was terrible. Plenty of other people were there on the same basis, right enough.’

  ‘But your old man didn’t believe him?’

  ‘He’s not an old man,’ Rachel snapped. ‘But no, he didn’t. He hauled Paton in for a chat but got nowhere. Paton said he’d been in Glasgow the weekend of the murder and had been in various pubs. No way anyone was going to be able to confirm or deny that after so long though. My dad couldn’t budge him but was sure Paton was hiding something. He could smell it.’

  Winter looked out of the window, Inchmahome popping in and out of the mist like a ghost winking at him, and now realised why she had stared so fixedly at the view, why she had been so desperate to grab the binoculars and study it.

  ‘What did the other cops think?’

  Rachel shook her head.

  ‘They didn’t make Paton for it. Said they had absolutely nothing tying him to the girl and they should look elsewhere. My dad was sure though. He never stopped thinking of Paton as his number one guy. He never stopped thinking of the case full stop . . .’

  Rachel let her voice trail off.

  ‘And he still hasn’t?’ Winter guessed.

  She shook her head sadly.

  ‘It was his last case – the last one of any significance anyway. He had done his thirty years and was due to retire. It wasn’t the way he wanted to go out though. He felt he’d let the girl down. He couldn’t even find out who she was. He had . . .’