Broken Ground (Karen Pirie Book 5)

by Val McDermid

  ‘Very little. The eye colour was an educated guess. He lightened the skin tone because of the peat staining. But what you see is more or less how the man looks. Would you say that’s your brother?’

  ‘I would say that’s what my brother looked like when I last saw him twenty-three years ago. Does that fit? Has this body been there that long?’

  ‘We think so.’ Karen produced another photograph, this time showing the dead man’s belt buckle. ‘Do you recognise this?’

  Donna’s shoulders slumped. ‘That’s Joey’s. He won it the first year he took part in the Isle of Skye games. He always wore it with his kilt when he was competing. And on his jeans when he wasn’t.’ She wrapped her arms around herself as if she’d suddenly grown cold. ‘There’s no doubt about it, is there?’

  Karen shook her head. ‘We will do DNA testing to confirm it, but yes, I think there’s no room for doubt.’

  ‘What happened? Was it some sort of accident?’ Her eyes were anguished. Donna had had more than twenty years to get used to the idea of her brother not being around; that didn’t mean her distress was any less intense.

  ‘I’m afraid not. We’re treating your brother’s death as suspicious.’

  ‘You mean he was killed? I’m not a child, Karen. You don’t have to resort to euphemisms with me.’

  ‘I’ve not had the post-mortem results yet. But preliminary examination suggests he was shot with a small-calibre gun. In the chest and in the neck. I’d say it was probably a quick death.’ Really, she had no idea whether that was true. But nobody was going to contradict her and it was, she supposed, a kind of comfort.

  ‘Shot?’ Donna was incredulous. ‘How? Why? Joey wasn’t a criminal. He didn’t mix with people who have handguns. I mean, of course he knew plenty of people who have shotguns or even rifles for hunting. But that’s normal in the Highlands. Guns for game. Not for shooting people. That’s what happens in the city. Gangsters. Drug dealers. People smugglers.’

  ‘We think this probably happened before Dunblane. Before the gun laws changed. There were a lot more handguns around back then.’

  Donna’s mouth twisted in a grimace. ‘Of course. I’d forgotten how things used to be. But even so, Joey didn’t mix with the kind of people who resolved things by shooting each other.’ Her expression changed as something else occurred to her. ‘And what was he doing in Wester Ross?’

  ‘We don’t know. We think it was connected to a pair of motorbikes that were buried there at the end of the war.’

  Donna shook her head, as if trying to clear a fog. ‘Motorbikes? Buried motorbikes? The war? This is surreal.’

  Karen explained how the bikes had come to be interred in the peat. ‘I’m thinking maybe Joey was hired to help excavate them. And then something went very wrong.’

  ‘Hard to think how much more wrong it could have gone.’ She licked her lips and took a deep breath. ‘Somebody did this to my brother. Shot him like a dog and presumably buried him to cover their tracks. What are you doing to find this person?’ There was a new edge in her voice now the shock had subsided enough to let anger creep in.

  ‘Everything I can. I work in Historic Cases because I believe people deserve answers. There are few things harder to live with than not knowing the fate of people we love. I understand that.’

  Donna acknowledged Karen’s sincerity with a dip of the head. ‘Fair enough. So what do you need from me that will help you?’

  ‘I need to know a lot more about your brother.’

  She glanced at her watch. ‘I’m sorry, I have a meeting in five minutes. I need to cancel it.’ Abruptly she stood up and walked out, stiff as a drunk trying to fool the room.

  Donna returned almost immediately. ‘I’ve ordered coffee. Probably too early for a proper drink.’ She sat down on the edge of the chair, elbows on her knees, arms folded across her body. ‘Ask away.’

  ‘Were you close?’

  ‘There were four years between us, which is quite a lot when you’re wee. He was a very protective big brother, though. He made sure I was never picked on or bullied. By the time he was eighteen, he was off on the road, competing in the heavy events. He did well. He got invited to games all over the place. By the time he was twenty, he was travelling around Europe and North America. We hardly saw him. Whenever he did come home, there were always rows. My dad thought he should still be helping out on the land, or putting his hand in his pocket to support the farm.’ She gave a short sharp sigh. ‘Joey argued that he’d earned it by his own hard work. That nobody else had any right to his time or his money. It did not make for harmonious visits.’

  ‘I can imagine. You said he went off without a word. Can you tell me about that?’

  Donna raised her head and studied the ceiling for a moment, blinking hard. ‘It was round about when I started at university. He’d dropped by one Sunday at the end of August. He’d been doing a Highland games near at hand and he came over to show off his swanky new camper van. It was a beauty. Complete with a shower and a microwave. I have to admit I envied him a wee bit. He had the usual argument with Dad then drove off before it got dark. That was the last time I saw him. By the time I went to Edinburgh, we’d heard nothing from him for at least a month. I remember because Dad was really bitter about me going. “You’ll be like that brother of yours: as soon as you get a sniff of the big city lights, we’ll no’ be good enough for you any more.”’ A wry little laugh. ‘Which was funny, because there’s generally not many big city lights on the games circuit.’ Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat.

  ‘Did you try to get in touch with him?’ It was a gentle probe.

  ‘I didn’t know how, to begin with. There wasn’t social media back in the late 1990s, remember. And I was too busy with student life to waste my weekends chasing round the Highland Games circuit. Why would I be bothered about a big brother who couldn’t be bothered with me?’ Donna’s face crumpled, the pain showing through the bravado. ‘And then it was too late. By the time I’d finished my degree and my training, I was moving in a different world. People like me didn’t hang about watching grown men chucking lumps of metal around a field.’

  ‘Once you lose touch, it’s easy for it to stay lost.’

  Donna gave Karen a sharp look. ‘When my parents gave up the croft and moved to the city, I did make a bit of an effort. I didn’t like to think of him maybe coming home and there being no home to come back to. I’d taken to googling him every few months. I thought if he’d settled abroad, he might show up in some local paper article. But he never did. There were Joseph Sutherlands and Joe Sutherlands but, as far as I could make out, none of them was our Joey.’

  A knock at the door and a nervous-looking skinny young man in shirtsleeves came in with a tray. A coffee pot, two mugs, a milk jug, a bowl with paper sticks of sugar. ‘Your coffee, Donna,’ he said, crossing between them and putting it on the low table. He backed out of the room, an anxious approximation of a smile on his mouth. The women treated the intrusion as if it had never been.

  ‘I don’t suppose you took a photo of Joey with his camper van, that day?’

  No such thing as a casual question where a lawyer was concerned. Donna was seeking significance everywhere. ‘No. Why? Is there some issue with the van? Has it been involved in something else?’

  ‘Not at all. Quite the opposite. We’re simply trying to find out what happened to it.’

  ‘In case it leads you to his killer?’ She shook her head. ‘You’d either have to be very stupid or very sure of yourself to hang on to such a conspicuous connection to somebody you’d murdered.’

  ‘He hadn’t had it for long at that point. I don’t think there were necessarily that many people who’d automatically connect it to him. And you’d be amazed at the things some people think they can get away with, Donna.’

  Donna winced. ‘You’re forgetting what I do for a living. Trust me, I’ve had my breath taken away by some of the nonsense my clients and their partners try to pull.’

&
nbsp; A wry smile. ‘At least it makes our job a wee bit easier sometimes. Now, we think the last time Joey competed in this country was at the Invercharron Games in September 1995. One of my officers has been checking with the Highland Games Association and that’s the last entry record they have for him. We know he won the weight-for-height there. But I’ve got a witness who says Joey was talking to an American woman that afternoon. Or possibly Canadian. Does that mean anything to you?’

  Donna shook her head with a sigh of frustration. ‘Nothing. If she was anything more than a casual fling, we certainly didn’t know. The last girlfriend I knew about was when he was still at school. A local lass from Rosemarkie. But they split up not long after he started on the circuit and I don’t think either of them lost any sleep over it. He never said anything about a woman from America.’

  She hunched her shoulders protectively, wrapping her arms around herself. ‘All these years, I wanted to believe he’d found someone to love, somewhere far away. I imagined him remaking himself with a wife and a family of his own. Teaching kids to play American football or running a gym or something. I couldn’t let myself think he was dead.’ She gave Karen a frank look. ‘You must think I’m an idiot. Not to work out he was long gone.’

  Karen thought nothing of the sort. If there had been any way for her to convince herself that there had been a terrible mistake and that Phil was still alive, she’d have clasped it to her heart and never let it go. ‘Hope is our default when it comes to people we love who’ve disappeared. Until you have evidence to the contrary, it’s the natural state to be in.’

  ‘No hope now, though.’ She shuddered and sat up straight. ‘You’ll be needing a formal ID,’ she said wearily. ‘Give me ten minutes to sort out my diary for the rest of the day and I’ll be with you. I take it he’s still up in the Highlands?’

  ‘No, he’s in Dundee. That’s where the lab is.’

  ‘I suppose that’s a blessing.’ Donna made an ironic shape with her mouth, ‘Not a phrase one hears very often in relation to Dundee.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Donna shook her head. ‘Somewhere in my head, I’ve known this was coming. I’ve been expecting you, DCI Pirie. You or someone very like you.’

  31

  1944 – Wester Ross

  Arnie leaned on the taffrail of the ship, watching the naval ratings loading the last of the cargo. He was flanked by a couple of other GIs on their way back home like him. He’d stowed his kitbag in a cabin shared with three others and now he was making sure everything went to plan. It was as well he’d removed his loot; the MP who had searched his kitbag had noticed the broken stitches and had thoroughly probed the lining of the bag’s bottom.

  The other two soldiers at the rail were joshing each other about what they’d do first when they got back on American soil. Arnie thought their talk of girls and bars revealed a depressing lack of ambition. He had higher goals. He was going to set the town on fire in a different way altogether. He was short on the details, it was true, but he’d put himself in a position where he was poised to answer when opportunity knocked.

  The ratings were working fast. Now only a couple of dozen items remained on the quayside. And then, without warning, they stopped. A sailor in a heavy jersey walked out from the hold and seemed to be telling them something. And then he went back on board and before Arnie could process what he was seeing, the gangplanks were being drawn on board and the cargo hold closed up. ‘What’s happening?’ he demanded loudly. ‘Why are they leaving the rest of the kit behind?’

  One of his companions gave him a curious look. ‘I guess they reached their limit,’ he said. ‘What’s it to you, bud?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Arnie gasped. He genuinely felt his heart contract. His head swam and he wondered whether this was a heart attack. The impulse to weep swept through him and he had to turn away as the ship’s engines grew louder and matelots cast off the mighty mooring ropes.

  Two days passed before he managed to get a grip on himself. When asked what was up, he’d claimed he was upset at having to leave his girl. They laughed at him for being so soft-hearted, but better that than having them guess the true reason for his grief. He spent the next couple of days working out who would be able to answer his questions about the fate of the bikes and his future.

  The cargo master, he discovered, liked to play poker. There was a perpetual low-stakes game in a storage locker near the engine room. Arnie snagged himself a seat and joined the game. He’d played in poker nights where the fierce competition and concentration imposed virtual silence round the table. But thankfully, this wasn’t one of those. The men talked and laughed, cracking lewd jokes and telling filthy stories. On his third session in the game, he’d casually asked why they hadn’t loaded all the cargo.

  ‘No space,’ the cargo master said. ‘I fucken told them half a dozen fucken times they were being way too optimistic.’

  ‘So what happens to that stuff now? Will it come on another boat?’

  ‘I don’t think so. It’s too much fucken trouble to go all the way up there for a few bits and pieces. They’ll tell the Brits to get rid of it.’

  ‘Get rid of it?’

  ‘Yeah. Burn it or bury it, that’s what they’ll be told to do.’

  Arnie played one more hand then excused himself. He felt physically sick. All his plans, literally going up in flames. He couldn’t bear it. What he’d done to get his hands on a bag of diamonds … And now it was all for nothing.

  32

  2018 – Dundee

  In spite of Karen’s insistence on driving her back to Edinburgh, Donna had caught a train. ‘I need to be by myself,’ she’d said, as assertive as the detective herself. ‘I’m going to have to break the news to my parents and I need time to prep myself.’

  As she opened the door of the taxi River had called to take her to the station, Donna paused. ‘Thank you, DCI Pirie. You’ve been very considerate. This wasn’t the outcome I wanted for my brother, but it’s better to know the truth.’ Then she was gone, off to perform a duty nobody would choose.

  Donna had spoken freely about her brother on the drive up to Dundee but none of it had felt useful to Karen. It hadn’t been current enough. She’d learned more about life on the Highland games circuit, but nothing that gave her a clue to who might have wanted Joey Sutherland dead. As Ruari Macaulay had indicated, he seemed to have been a man without enemies. She went back inside and found River in her office off the main dissecting lab.

  ‘I’m beginning to think Joey Sutherland’s a red herring,’ Karen said, slumping into the visitor’s chair.

  When Karen wanted to work things out aloud, there was no point in trying to ignore her. River saved what she was working on and gave her full attention to her friend. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s early days yet, but if this is all about what was in the bike pannier, Joey’s an irrelevance. It could have been anybody. Well, anybody big and strong enough to dig a hole and shift a bike. Because they’d have to believe in their ability to lift that bike, otherwise they wouldn’t have taken on the job.’

  Half of River’s mind was still occupied with what she’d been working on. ‘Sorry if I sound like Jason, but you’ve kind of lost me.’

  Karen grinned. ‘My fault, thinking out loud. Say you know there’s something valuable buried in the pannier of one of those Indians. But you also know you’re not strong enough to dig down through the peat or to shift the bikes if they’re lying in a way that you can’t get at the panniers. What do you do?’

  River smiled as light dawned. ‘You hire somebody who can.’

  ‘Exactly. And you hire somebody who’s strong enough to lift five hundred and fifty pounds. Not that many of them kicking around. The good thing is, guys that strong are accustomed to being paid for what their bodies are capable of. Tailor-made for Joey.’

  ‘But why kill him? Why not just collect what you came for and pay him off?’

  ‘I don’t know. But I’d guess that whatever yo
u came for wasn’t yours in the first place. And you didn’t want some Highland strongman telling all his pals about the weird wee job he’d done for you. Some American lassie, maybe … ’ Her voice tailed off as she remembered what Ruari Macaulay had told her.

  ‘Now you’ve definitely lost me.’

  ‘The last competition Joey was seen at was the Invercharron Games. And according to his best pal, he was hanging about with an American woman. Or possibly Canadian. Back in ’95, either one would have been pretty exotic in a wee place like Invercharron. It’s not likely they’d be able to tell the difference.’

  ‘And you think this mysterious stranger hired Joey to recover whatever was in the bike pannier?’

  ‘Makes more sense than luring Joey into digging his own grave so you could shoot him. If that’s what the killer wanted, there’s plenty of places in the Highlands to dump a body without going to those lengths. If it was me—’ Her phone interrupted Karen. ‘Jason? What is it?’ she demanded.

  ‘I thought I’d better tell you,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me what?’

  ‘There’s an interview with the Somervilles in the Mail Online. And they’re not very nice about you,’ he gabbled.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell,’ Karen muttered. ‘OK, I’ll take a look.’

  ‘Sorry, boss.’

  ‘No, not your fault, thanks for letting me know.’ Karen ended the call and grumbled.

  ‘Problems?’

  ‘Can you bring up the Mail Online? Jason says the Somervilles have been shooting their mouths off.’ She moved behind the desk so she could see River’s screen. Moments later she was confronted by an unflattering photograph of herself several kilos heavier and still raging with grief soon after Phil’s death. ‘For fuck’s sake. I look like a madwoman.’

  ‘Of course you do. That’s what they’re aiming for.’ River scrolled down. HIGH-HANDED COP TREATS HERO WITNESSES LIKE CRIMINALS the headline screamed.